Con Law (32 page)

‘Hey, Professor.’ Agent Angel Acosta leaned down and rested his arms on the driver’s side window frame. ‘I finished your book. It was brilliant.’

‘Thanks.’

Agent Crum was examining the short radio antenna on Book’s side.

‘Carla, why do you have this
big ol’ potato stuck on your antenna?’

‘Antenna broke off,’ she said. ‘Potato gives the radio better reception. Don’t ask me why.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Well, you folks have a nice day,’ Agent Acosta said.

They returned to their SUV and drove off. Carla watched them away then turned to Book.

‘You must be really famous.’

Nadine Honeywell sat in her hospital bed running high on caffeine and working on the Welch brief on the laptop when the door opened and the professor and the woman named Carla entered the room. She tried not to look surprised. The professor held an open hand out to her. In his palm was her Purell bottle.

‘Where’d you find it?’

‘In the desert. You must’ve dropped it when you went flying off the Harley last night.’

‘I was trying to block out that memory.’

She took the Purell. Ooh, there was still some gel left. She squirted it into her palm and rubbed. She loved the smell of ethyl alcohol.

‘So, Professor—what did we learn today?’

‘A, Nathan Jones was gay.’

‘Told you.’

‘B, he had a relationship with Kenni.’

‘With an “i”?’

The professor nodded. ‘C, Nathan told Kenni about the contamination but never showed him any proof.’

‘The lost proof.’

‘And D, Billy Bob Barnett is a cokehead. Allegedly.’

Nadine felt her mouth fall open.

‘Shut the frack up.’

It took her a moment to recover. She looked from the professor to Carla and back.

‘So, what, you two are
working together now?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘You think what you’re both looking for will lead you to Billy Bob Barnett?’

‘I think so.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Get some proof.’

‘Can you get me some food first? I’m starving.’

‘Let’s get some grub, Jimmy John, before we frack this hole.’

Sonny slapped him on the back. It was after midnight but lunchtime on the well site on the graveyard shift. They both wore red insulated jumpsuits, red
Barnett Oil and Gas
caps, and boots. They walked across the dirt pad toward the mess hall, stepping over pipes and hoses running from the tanker trucks. The pay on the rigs was good; the food not so much. It was like eating at McDonald’s three times a day, every day. Jimmy John had had a blood test a few years back, when they had to run him up to the hospital in Alpine after a length of casing had got loose and hit him in the head. Knocked him out cold. Nurse said his cholesterol was high enough to cause two heart attacks. That’s what eating rig food would do, hamburgers and hot dogs and sausage and eggs. Roughnecks didn’t eat salads.

‘Shit,’ Jimmy John said. ‘I forgot to write down my last pressure reading. I’ll catch up. Save some food for me.’

He turned back and headed to the control center. But not to write down readings. He felt the nosebleed coming on, and he didn’t want Sonny seeing him bleeding like a stuck pig. Word got back to the boss, Jimmy John Dale might find himself unemployed. And that was a place he didn’t want to go. A man without a job ain’t no better than a Mexican. He pulled out the handkerchief and ducked behind a tanker truck carrying the frack fluid.

*   *   *

‘They’re fixin’ to frack.’

After taking a cheeseburger
and fries back to Nadine, they had driven out to a Barnett Oil and Gas Company well site that she had been staking out. Book and Carla sat above a low valley in the foothills northeast of Alpine. The five-acre pad down below where the prairie grass had been taken down to the dirt was lit up like Main Street. They were waiting for the crew to take a meal break.

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘Twenty-four/seven operation.’

‘All I see is a lot of trucks and pipes and hoses.’

‘The rig’s down, and the tanker trucks are here. They’re carrying the frack fluid.’ She pointed. ‘The green tanks surrounding the site, those are the storage tanks. The hoses run to the blender where the proppant is added—those dump trucks carry the sand—then over to the treator manifold and into the pumper trucks—see the red ones?—backed up to the well hole. That equipment next to the trucks, those are compressors to create the pressure they need to crack the rock.’

‘What’s in those tanks?’

‘Diesel fuel to power the equipment. During the day, you can see the black exhaust fumes from the engines, creates ground-level ozone.’ She pointed to the sky. ‘Way up there, ozone is good. Down here, it’s very bad for humans and animals.’

‘Smog in West Texas.’

‘That trailer, that’s the control center.’

‘What are those trailers?’

‘The man camp. The out-of-town workers live onsite, work twelve hours a day, two-week shifts. They rotate off for a week then back on. It’s a hard life.’

‘What’s that shack over there? Where all the men are heading.’

‘Mess hall. They’re going to eat first then frack. Odd. Most men like to frack first then eat.’

Carla smiled then dug in her knapsack and came
out with beef jerky. She handed him a strip.

‘High in protein.’

‘You do this often?’ Book asked her.

‘Actually, I do.’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘My dad taught me not to be afraid … or at least not to show my fear.’

‘Good advice. Where is he now?’

‘Dead. Well blowout. He went to work one day and didn’t come home.’

‘When?’

‘Six years ago.’

She dug in her knapsack again, but almost as if she were angry this time, and came out with rubber gloves.

‘Put these on. This shit is toxic.’

They ran down the rise and to the drill site. They ducked behind the tanker trucks and dodged roughnecks walking past. Male voices came from all around them; the foul smell of the well site was suffocating.

‘Well hole gases,’ Carla said.

They worked their way to the control center and went inside. She went directly to a large notebook on the desk. She ran her finger down the open page.

‘Yep, they’re fracking tonight.’

They exited and again ducked behind the tanker trucks, but Carla stopped at one. She pulled out a small plastic container and placed the mouth under a valve at the back of the tank. She turned a knob and filled the container with brown fluid.

‘I’m gonna find out what’s in Billy Bob’s recipe. They claim the recipes are proprietary information, trade secrets, like the formula for Coca-Cola, so they can keep them secret from the Feds. Difference is, you can drink Coca-Cola and not die.’

‘You think Billy Bob’s using something bad?’

‘It’s all bad. But legal. Frackers use
carcinogens like naphthalene, formaldehyde, sulfuric acid, thiourea, benzyl chloride, benzene, ethylene oxide, even lead. But they don’t have to tell us what they’re using.’

‘The Halliburton Loophole.’

‘Yep.’

‘Professor!’

They jumped at the voice behind them. They turned and saw Jimmy John Dale holding a handkerchief that was as red as his jumpsuit. He glanced around and came closer. He gestured at Carla.

‘You working with her now? She got you trespassing on private property?’

Carla hid the container behind her back.

‘Jimmy John—’

He pointed toward the desert. ‘Goddamnit, get the hell outta here before someone else sees you, calls the sheriff.’

They ran back up the rise to Carla’s truck.

‘That was a close call,’ Book said.

‘I’ve had closer. But we got a sample.’ She held up the container. ‘People will soon be drinking this toxic brew in their tap water.’

‘I thought the EPA hadn’t found any confirmed incidents of groundwater contamination, here or anywhere else?’

‘Define “confirmed.” Frackers don’t have to disclose the chemicals they put down the hole, so how can those chemicals be traced to their wells if they show up in the tap water? They say there’s no proof that the benzene or methane was from fracking. Fact is, there’s been over a thousand confirmed incidents. The Bureau of Land Management found water wells in Wyoming’s shale fields that contained fifteen hundred times the safe level of benzene. And the EPA’s now supplying drinking water to people living in the frack fields in Pennsylvania. They found arsenic in their tap water. How’d you like to drink a carcinogen with your morning coffee?’

‘Not so much.’

She pointed down at the well site.

‘Eighty tons of toxic chemicals are
going down that hole tonight—and most of it’s going to be left down there to migrate to the aquifer or it’s going to come back up and then be injected down disposal wells and allowed to migrate to aquifers. Does that make any sense? But the industry says, “Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing. It’s all safe.”’

She blew out a breath.

‘They’ll start collecting the flow-back in the morning, if the gas flows. I need a sample of what comes up the hole. It’s usually worse than what goes down the hole. No sense in heading back to town, we’d have to turn right back to get here in time. I’ve got camping gear in the truck. A sleeping bag, gets cold out at night.’

‘Only one sleeping bag?’

‘It’s a double.’

Book woke at dawn wrapped in a double sleeping
bag, but he was a single. Carla was already up and at work, perched below the rise and peering through binoculars down at the well site.

‘Coffee’s made,’ she said.

He unzipped the bag and got up then went behind the truck for his restroom duties. He came back and poured coffee into a tin cup. Carla was an experienced camper. He went over and squatted next to her.

‘See the open pit? It’s filling up with the brown water. That’s the flow-back. Frack fluid that comes back up the hole. The frack fluid picks up riders down in the earth, stuff released by the fracking process, like radium, radon, methane. They’ll pump it into those tankers and then haul it to the disposal wells, inject it into the earth like an addict injecting heroin. Nearest disposal wells are north of here, in Pecos County. I need a sample.’

‘How?’

‘I’m thinking.’

*   *   *

She thought most of the morning. When the last
tanker truck left, Carla jumped up.

‘Come on. I’ve got an idea.’

She went to the truck and rummaged through her belongings then pulled out a pair of shorts. She took off her jeans and put on the shorts. They drove the pickup back to the highway and pulled over. Carla got out and lifted the hood. She then rolled the legs of her shorts up until they were short-shorts. She reached inside the pickup and retrieved a jar with a lid.

‘That last tanker truck will be along in a minute. Hide in the brush. When he stops, get a sample from the back of the tank. And wear the gloves.’

‘What if other cars come by?’

She held her arms out to the vacant highway. ‘We got rush hour, Professor.’

‘How do you know he’ll stop?’

‘He’ll stop.’

Book hid in the brush next to the highway and wondered if Carla knew what she was doing. He soon learned that she did. He heard the truck and ducked down. Carla stuck her head under the hood and her butt out toward the highway, her long lean legs serving as a stop sign.

The truck stopped.

The Hispanic driver climbed out and walked over to Carla. Book heard him say, ‘
Señorita
.’ When the driver ducked his head under the hood, Book came out of the brush and ran to the rear of the tanker. He found a drain valve and filled the jar with foul-smelling brown water. He screwed the top on, peeked around the tanker, and ran back into the brush. Carla got into the driver’s seat of the pickup and started the engine. She squealed like a teenage girl and thanked the driver profusely in Spanish.

‘
Gracias, gracias, hombre
.’

The driver returned to the truck packing more than a set of keys in his pocket. He fired up the big tanker and drove
off. Book came out of the brush with the sample.

‘You’re good.’

A black-and-white videotape played on the big screen in Billy Bob’s office. Security cameras had caught Carla and the professor the night before, sneaking onto well site number 356 and collecting a sample of the frack fluid. Billy Bob stuffed a donut into his mouth then said, ‘How many times is this with Carla?’

‘Ten, twelve,’ Willie said.

Willie Freeman was ex-military police turned security director for Barnett Oil and Gas.

‘Now she’s got a partner in crime.’

‘That’s the professor,’ Billy Bob said. ‘He’s from Austin, came out here ’cause Nathan Jones wrote him a letter, said I was contaminating the groundwater.’

‘We ain’t contaminating the groundwater.’

‘Nope.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘Who’s that?’

One of his workers had caught the professor and Carla on the well site behind a tanker truck. The video showed him pointing toward the desert. The professor and Carla ran off the site.

‘Jimmy John Dale,’ Willie said.

‘He working with Carla?’

‘No.’

‘Why’d he let them go?’

‘The professor’s been to Nathan’s house, talking to his wife, couple times. Jimmy John was there each time. He and Nathan grew up here together. Best friends.’

‘Boyfriends?’

‘No. Jimmy John’s a cowboy, straighter than an iron rebar.’

‘Good. ’Cause I don’t want queers on my rigs. Or wets. Or Longhorns. Or Democrats. Or—’

‘I know the list, boss. You want me to do anything with this tape? Take it to the sheriff? Call Tom Dunn, tell him to get another restraining order against her?’

Billy Bob shook his
head. ‘We got nothing to worry about with Carla. She’s chasing shadows. She ain’t gonna find nothing in my slick water.’

‘Standard slick water, Carla,’ the lab tech named Randy said. ‘No arsenic, no diesel fuel, just typical ingredients. It’s all legal.’

‘Shit.’

They had driven to Sul Ross State University on the east side of Alpine. Sul Ross was known for its ranch horse competition team, but the university had a quality chemistry department as well. Randy was an assistant professor and a friend of Carla; he didn’t hesitate when she called and asked him to come in on a Sunday afternoon.