The Will Read online

Page 10


  Heads nodded, but no one spoke. He wanted to hear their voices. “Do you got that?” he shrieked.

  Several “Yes, sir”s filtered out, but in general the row of employees stared back at him blankly. He could see the fear in their eyes, but also the indecision. Having the lawyer with the Birdman had given the visit credibility. The big hand pushed. “This is my store, you hear me?” he yelled, and his voice trembled. He hated the big hand. It pushed again. “This here is my store, damn you, and you ain’t gonna forget it! If you work with the bird freak, you’re finished!”

  Roger whirled around, the booze upsetting his sense of balance. He attempted to walk rapidly toward the door, but listed to the right just enough to bump into one of the cash registers. To his utter, hateful surprise, he heard a small chuckle; the stony silence enforced on his employees for so long had at last been broken, and by a laugh. He wanted to be out of there, someplace far away. He despised the store, despised everyone in it. He reached for the door and yanked on it. It banged against the lock. Another chuckle drifted up from behind him. “Open this door, Payne!” he yelled, and Billy lurched forward and fumbled with the keys. It took several seconds to select the right one, and Roger trembled with anger while he waited. When the key turned, he didn’t wait for Billy to take his hand off it. He yanked the door open, and flew out the door. The lawyer boy just ran out of time, he thought to himself as he sped off in the big Cadillac. The big hand pushed and pushed. If he don’t come up with something soon, I’ll solve this problem myself.

  Amanda Ashton kicked off her black pumps and swung her legs out of the agency pickup, letting her stockinged feet dangle over the side. She dropped a pair of dirty hip waders onto the ground before her and gingerly stretched a foot down into the cold rubber. This was her third stop, and the insides of the boots were no longer entirely dry; she grimaced, paused a moment, and pushed her feet down into them. They weren’t a great fit; the boots were made to wear shoes in, and her small feet slid around uncertainly in the unsupported rubber. She pulled the waders up over her slacks and slipped her arms under the suspenders. Stepping out of the truck carefully, she tested her weight on the muddy surface. The ground was unstable, but with a little care she could manage.

  An all-night rain had left the conditions far from ideal for the tramping she needed to do. The agency truck had suddenly become available, however, and she didn’t quibble. The garage had called with a miraculous, last-minute cancellation and given her exactly ten minutes to claim the vehicle before they went to the next name on the list. She was already walking toward the door before she hung up. Her clothes were another matter, however; had she known, she would have brought scrubs and boots. But she wasn’t going to lose her morning driving in the opposite direction across Topeka to change clothes. She gazed down at herself ruefully; tailored blue business pantsuit, white blouse, silver brooch and earrings, Oriental scarf, nicely finished off with black rubber hip waders. She smiled, pushing a wisp of short auburn hair behind her ears. She liked incongruity, and government work gave her a never-ending supply of it.

  Amanda fastened the waders and lifted a foot, the mud giving way with a sucking sound. Reaching into the truck bed, she pulled out a large canvas backpack and tossed it over her shoulder. This was followed by another, bulkier bundle bound together by more canvas and a rope. The thought crossed her mind that she could be in a corporate office somewhere making real money, and as always, it amused her. Money had never driven her. Unlike most of her friends in graduate school at Georgetown, she actually believed a government job could make a difference. Or at least some government jobs, and this was one of them. Grabbing the awkward bundle, she marched off into an unusually sodden bog just south of Matfield Green in the heart of the Flinthills.

  The nasty weather was penance for the lucky stroke with the truck, and she accepted it good-naturedly. She trudged across a large easement off the highway, and twenty yards farther on came to a barbed-wire fence. The fence surrounded a wide, expansive field. Somewhere inside the Triple Z Ranch, she knew, there was a gate. It was useless to try to use it. Rory Zachariah owned the Triple Z, and he was as close to an honorary member of the Posse Comitatus as you could get. He hated government, government agents, government programs, and income tax all about equally, which is to say passionately, militantly, and dangerously. She had called him weeks earlier to explain that, pursuant to the Federal Land Stabilization Act of 1994, she had the authority to inspect his wells and to set up a time for that inspection. Zachariah’s response had been utter simplicity, consisting of the words “You stay the hell off my land,” followed by a dial tone. She looked sadly down the fence, connecting the horizon north and south. The wire was rusty, dangerous-looking, and five strands high. But in the absence of an enforcing militia, her legal authority to enter was purely academic; to get on the Triple Z, she would have to climb.

  The day was hot, and whatever part of her that could feel feminine in hip waders recoiled at the task before her. She put on a pair of heavy canvas work gloves and reached out, pulling gently on the top strand of the wire; it snapped back with a taut twang, vibrating like a menacing guitar string. Zachariah maintained his place like a boot camp, and the fence was a perfect stretch of razor-sharp points. She hesitated a moment, casting out of her mind several ignoble scenarios resulting from a failed attempt to cross. At last, in an effort to force herself to act, she gently dropped her backpack over the side of the fence. It fell over and rolled two feet away from a post. The bundle followed. There was no going back; she would have to climb now.

  The gloves protected her hands and she grabbed the top wire, stepping between barbs on the bottom strand as close as possible to the fence post. The wire sagged precipitously and began oscillating back and forth; for a moment she hung there, committed but afraid to continue. At last she stepped up two strands; she reached an arm over the wire, but her sleeve caught on a barb point, forcing her to stop. Carefully, she extricated it, continuing up. The top was the worst; her weight made the taut wire wiggle even faster, and she perched precariously, clinging to the post itself. Quickly she realized that waiting only increased her danger, so she slung a heavy rubber leg as high as possible over the fence. The other followed, and her bottom half was over, bending back over the fence at the waist. With some careful maneuvering she was able to finish the climb, hopping off the last two strands with a thud. Catching her breath, she grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. She peered out into a vast, wet expanse of tall bluestem grass. The first well was off to the east about three hundred yards.

  Amanda picked up the other bundle and headed off toward the dead well, a rusting monument of black iron to the fading oil reserves of the central plains. To the north she could see two more wells, still clinging to life, slowly rocking. They dipped down, plunging spikes deep into the earth; tipping up, they extracted black blood like enormous, mechanical mosquitoes.

  In spite of her federal authority, she didn’t want to have to explain her current actions to a judge. In a cold legal light she supposed that what she was doing was nothing but trespassing. If the landowner denied access to the well, certain channels were prescribed to gain that access. One didn’t just walk on. There was a protocol, and she was ignoring it. She readjusted her backpack and picked up her pace. It was done now. The sun beat down, and she mechanically pushed her hair away from the sweat gathering on her forehead. Getting on the Triple Z without owner approval would require a mountain of paperwork, not to mention the cooperation of at least three government departments who didn’t speak much: Justice, EPA, and the local sheriff. She could imagine folders of forms, all meticulously filled out in the jargon of each separate agency. If everything went well, it could take six months. If feet were dragged, she could double that. In that year a hideous blend of acids and iron-rusted brine could enter the groundwater system of northeastern Kansas, flowing into irrigation systems, municipal water plants, artesian wells on private land.

  The Triple Z w
as her best guess for a massive breakdown of drilling casings. It was closest to the pickup points that had showed elevated salt levels, and two of the wells were over sixty years old, long played out. In addition, they had been drilled by a small, private company, now defunct, wildcatting on low funds and quick scores. Companies like that worked quick and dirty, in and out. If her theory that shoddy wells were crumbling within themselves was true, the rusting hulk before her was a prime candidate to prove it.

  She was making good time, and the well grew before her as she advanced. Fifty yards from the site she got a nasty suspicion, however; squinting at the base of the well, she thought she spied glints of more brown wire, obscured by bluestem stalks four feet high running and splitting in the breeze. She peered into the distance, focusing her eyes. Soon there could be no doubt: the well itself was surrounded by another fence, this one dilapidated and evil-looking. Climbing it would be truly dangerous; it could well collapse under her weight, casting her down onto the barbs. Disgusted, Amanda approached the well slowly. The posts leaned perilously out at lazy angles; the wire itself was covered in rust.

  Amanda circled the well, carefully pushing bluestem away from the sagging arcs of wire, looking for a break. At last, she had an idea: if the wire was intact, perhaps the posts themselves would give way. She shook one; the loosely stretched wire offered no support, and the pole moved easily in her hands. As she rocked back and forth, the dirt at the base shifted and crumbled. The fence was literally ready to come down, and ten minutes’ sweaty work pulled the post up and out of its hole entirely. Carefully lowering it to the ground, she stepped over the fence, tiptoeing between the wires. The ground around the well was a muddy, slippery slough, but more inconvenient than truly dangerous. The real hazard lurked in the casings three thousand feet down.

  What looked from a distance like a simple black fulcrum revealed itself to be a maze of fittings, junctions, and valves. Amanda set her bundles down on the base of the well and stared up at the complex mass of pipes. Finding an inactive site was essential; a pumping well is a dangerous place, dangerous even to try to shut down for inspection. Even professionals can be confused by all the pipes, and more than one dead body had been hauled off a site because of a mistake. This well looked almost peaceful, as if it had never punctured the earth. Bird droppings ran down the sides, and an unused nest hung precariously off some upper junctions.

  Amanda pulled a folded chart of thick paper out of her pack and spread it out before her on the wellhead. The paper was covered with colored symbols indicating porous rock formations in the area at depths down to thirteen thousand feet. She ran her finger down the page, every few inches another geological age: Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous. The map revealed an enormous salt dome a half mile wide and down three thousand feet; this was what the drillers in the 1930s must have been looking for. Oil loved to collect in salt domes, prehistoric plants and animals decomposing into millions of thick, black gallons that silently floated half a mile beneath the surface of the earth.

  Amanda glanced at her watch; it was nearly eleven. The sun was growing strong and glared down brightly, heating the iron superstructure above her. She dropped to her knees, moving with some difficulty in the bulky waders. Quickly, she unloaded her pack, pulling out a laptop computer, a drum of cable, and two slender magnesium tubes eighteen inches long. She screwed the tubes together and attached one end of the cable to the base of the tubes. Then she plugged the other end of the cable into a port on her laptop. She powered up the computer and launched a program.

  With the computer now on, she unscrewed the water-return flange on the wellhead. It was hard to move, and she had to kick it several times to get it started. Eventually the seal of rust and grime was broken, and after four or five threads she was able to pull open the flange and expose an eight-inch-wide tube that sank into the darkness of the well. She worked intently for a while, attempting to ignore the heat. After some time she relented, and peering up at the sun with annoyance, negotiated a bit of shade by moving a few feet around the wellhead. Another glance at her watch; nearly twenty minutes had passed at the wellhead. She looked nervously back at the road; she had been lucky so far. An encounter with Rory Zachariah was the last thing she needed. The road was quiet, and she returned to her work. Carefully, she lowered the magnesium tubes down by the cable into the shaft. Two handles flipped out from the sides of the cable drum, and she was able to rest the box securely against a couple of large gauges. Pushing a button, she heard the precision sound of two hundred feet per minute of digital cable spinning gently down into the gaseous darkness of the dead well.

  A readout flickered on her laptop, and she monitored the sensor’s descent: a thousand feet, two thousand, twenty-five hundred, three thousand. At thirty-one hundred feet she pressed another button, and the spinning smoothly slowed. The sensor stabilized at thirty-one hundred and sixty feet; just under two-thirds of a mile. Amanda hovered over the computer, then switched the motorized drum to a slow ascent. She stared at the computer as the cable rewound at seventy-five feet a minute. The readings were not good. Nothing would be definite without disassembling the well, but her concerns rose with every reading. She worked methodically, consulting her chart and rechecking her readings. The sun moved through the sky, heading west and casting shadows from the well across the field.

  By noon the job was complete. Amanda closed the notebook and pressed a button on the cable drum. A whirring began, and the sensor ascended more quickly, and in a few minutes she was able to pull out the tubes by hand.

  She quickly but carefully returned all the components to their containers and gathered her belongings. There was one more stop: the return pool for the brine. That would be a messy job; she would have to plod three or four feet directly into the mess, and a pool like that was pure muck after a rain.

  Amanda crossed over the broken-down fence and headed for the pool. She had been spectacularly lucky so far, and her innate sense that bad luck followed good was worrying her. She once again glanced over at the road; a car speeding down the highway appeared to be slowing near her truck, and she froze. Instantly, she realized that there was nothing more suspicious than the sight of a person standing like a statue in the middle of a field, so she willed herself to resume walking. She headed as confidently as she could toward the pool, forcing herself not to look back at the car. By the time she had reached it she could resist no longer, but when she turned around the car had disappeared.

  Amanda stepped tentatively into the brine pool, grasping a long tool. Immediately, her leg sank a foot into the slough. She would have to be cautious. It wasn’t enough to scrape a sample from the top; the farther down, the better, because it represented the past. Her handheld tools would reach no more than six feet down, but it was better than nothing. If she could get some positive readings, she could force Durand’s hand. What she needed was a smoking gun. She walked tentatively a few steps out into the pool, her footing shifting continuously under her weight. Suddenly, her left foot slid outward, and she lurched forward to keep her balance. She leaned forward, wavering unsteadily. The muck was well above her knees. Far enough, she thought. A reading deep from the center of the pool would have been ideal, but this would have to do.

  Sweat poured from her face now, and she felt her clothes soaking against her skin. No matter, she thought. If I get what I want, I’ll send the dry-cleaning bill to Durand. She held a long spike up with both hands and plunged it as hard as she could into the dark mess beneath her. It came slowly to a halt, as if in glue. Now came the real work; she began rotating the shaft, digging down into the sediment of the pool with every turn.

  She was hard at work, focused completely on the muck when she heard it: a heavy footstep falling behind her, and then another. Instantly, her skin went cold and her breathing became shallow. She stood still for a moment, caught in the brine and her own vibrating nerves. It was quiet behind her now; for a moment, she played a game of deception with herself, letting herself think that i
f she didn’t turn around whoever was behind her didn’t exist. The sound was imagined; she could continue on, finish, and then slip away unseen back to her truck. But in the end she forced herself to turn slowly around, rotating the top half of her body while her legs stayed firmly planted in thick, briny mud. She was momentarily dazzled; the sun had crested bright and in her eyes. She could just make out the shape of a large figure on the edge of the pool. Squinting through the haze, she saw light glinting off the long barrel of a shotgun. The figure’s face was still hidden in the sun’s radiance.

  “I thought I told you to stay the hell off my land,” a voice said.

  The Birdman’s brain hurt. He felt the blood pumping up through the veins in his skull, pump pump. He didn’t like that feeling. Lately he had thought he could feel his organs working, his liver, kidneys, heart. There were times when he was sure he could feel his thoughts moving across the surface of his brain, crawling like little insects. That was the feeling he disliked the most; if the thoughts crawled across his brain, were they his thoughts? Why weren’t they inside his brain, where they belonged? Or were they from somewhere else, sent to scratch a trail along his tissues? Perhaps they were even now burrowing, trying to enter him. In that case, he must keep them out. He must concentrate, make his brain hard and impenetrable. But what if the idea that he must keep his brain hard was one of the thoughts sent to burrow? What if he should just relax, let the thoughts crawl and crawl and fill him like little termites sent from God, little divine bugs that would consume him and then at last let him stop hurting? The Birdman scratched one leg with the other hard until it hurt, focusing on the pain. That seemed to help; the pain was real, the pain wasn’t crawling. He could see his leg, he could make his foot move and scratch and scratch until it hurt. That was not sent from above. That thought was his. He pulled up the pant leg and stared; a black-and-blue splotch pulsed above the ankle where it had been habitually rubbed raw. He had been rubbing a lot lately. He smiled at the purple and red and black. He welcomed himself back to the park, to the grass and trees. He looked up at the sun, squinting, closing his eyes and feeling its heat on his face.