Con Law (35 page)

‘What’s this?’

‘Nathan’s proof.’

‘Proof of what?’ Jimmy John said.

‘We don’t know.’

Nadine thumbed the pages like a card sharp. ‘Numbers. Looks like a job for the geeky intern. All right, Professor, I’m on it. And thanks for the underwear. I love the feel of cotton.’

‘Over-share.’

‘Where’s the nursery?’ Carla said. ‘I want to see the baby.’

‘I’ll show you,’ Jimmy John said.

He led Carla outside. Nadine turned to Book.

‘Carla’s dad, Wayne Kent, fifty-four, died in an oil rig blowout outside Odessa six years ago.’

‘I know that.’

‘He worked for Billy Bob Barnett.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Carla and her mother sued Billy Bob and his company for negligence. They lost. Carla’s been after Billy Bob ever since. He’s gotten restraining orders against her in four Texas counties. She apparently snuck onto his well sites trying to get incriminating evidence. Tom Dunn represented Billy Bob and the company in court, said she had a vendetta. Said she was mentally unstable.’

‘You’re a handsome little boy, aren’t you? Yes, you are.’

Carla Kent made faces and baby talk to Nathan Jones Jr. wrapped up like a papoose in the crib on the other side of the glass. Book stood next to her.

‘So, Professor,
you want to make a baby?’

‘Right now?’

‘One day.’

He had always thought that he would be a father one day. Until he got the test results back. There would never be a John Bookman Jr. It didn’t seem fair. But life was not fair. Not for Nathan Jones Jr. who would never know his father, or for Nathan Jones who would never know his son. Not for Nadine’s sister. Or Book’s father. Or his mother. Not for anyone.

‘Wave to Aunt Carla.’

They stopped by Brenda Jones’s room and told her what they had found and that as soon as they knew what it meant, she would know. She cried.

‘I wish Nathan was here,’ she said.

‘I know you do,’ Book said.

They then drove back to Marfa and had a late lunch at the Food Shark under the shed in downtown. They sat at a long picnic table where artists had gathered like moths to a flame, fitting since the Food Shark proprietor was himself an artist; his medium was old television sets, which he arranged in various patterns with an image on each screen.

‘Kids need a dad,’ Carla said. ‘Especially boys.’

They did.

‘At least he’ll have his grandpa.’

At least.

‘You still here?’

Book looked up to the mayor of Marfa. He wasn’t smiling.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Well, I hope you’re happy.’

‘About what?’

‘I lost a
sale today. A New York couple—two boys—they backed out ’cause they heard about the murder, that we got a murderer running the streets of Marfa, killing homosexuals. Said other artists are worried they might be next, figure the locals are targeting them.’

‘Well, look at the bright side, Mayor. If we find the killer, the
New York Times
might write another story about Marfa.’

His expression brightened.

‘You really think so?’

Carla sat inside one of Donald Judd’s concrete boxes at the old fort and dangled her legs.

‘I love these things,’ she said. ‘My teepee is right over there’—El Cosmico occupied the adjacent tract—‘so I come over here and contemplate life on concrete. You know they’re big enough to see on Google Earth? Like God looking down on us. What was he thinking?’

‘God?’

‘Judd.’

They had driven out to the Chinati Foundation then walked over to the field where Judd had aligned sixty concrete boxes—each exactly 2.5 × 2.5 × 5 meters—into fifteen groupings. Carla climbed through the boxes like a kid on a playscape. A tomboy.

‘If I was a boy, my dad was going to name me Clark. He always called me his Supergirl.’

‘You miss him?’

‘Every day. Hard on my mom. She lives with me.’

‘You take care of her?’

‘More like she takes care of me. She gave me my passion. He made me tough. Taught me to fight boys—not as good as you—and to never back down. And to use guns. He said men respect a woman who carries a gun.’

She pondered her words a moment then pointed past Book.

‘There’s a tough man who carries a gun.’

Book turned and saw the sheriff standing in the parking lot between his cruiser and Carla’s truck. He waved Book over.

‘I’ll wait here,’ Carla said.

Book walked through
the prairie grass and over to the sheriff. A Hispanic woman sat in the back seat of the cruiser.

He shook hands with the sheriff who nodded toward Carla and the concrete boxes.

‘You figure her out?’

‘I did.’

‘Anything I need to know?’

‘No.’

The sheriff grunted. ‘Well, podna, there’s something you need to know about her.’ He opened the back door of the cruiser. ‘This here’s Lupe. She’s the overnight maid at the Paisano. Lupe, this is the professor.’

Book said hello. She just smiled in response.

‘She’s a little shy around Anglos,’ the sheriff said. ‘Anyway, she remembered something about the truck that sped off the night your window got shot out.’

‘It was maroon?’

‘Uh, no.’

The sheriff turned to the woman.

‘Lupe, tell the professor what you saw.’

‘The truck, it had the bumper sticker with that funny word.’

‘What funny word?’

‘The F-word.’

‘The uh, f-u-c-k word?’

Lupe giggled. ‘No, not that F-word. The other one.’

‘The other F-word …
Fracking?
’

‘
Sí
. That F-word.’

Lupe pointed at the bumper sticker on Carla’s truck that read
No Fracking Way
.

‘That is the bumper sticker. And that is the truck I saw.’

‘And that’s a twelve-gauge shotgun in her window rack,’ the sheriff said.

Book took a moment to process that information. He turned to Carla. She lay stretched out on top of a concrete box, as if sunning herself on a beach.

‘Sorry to
have to break that news to you, Professor. You want to press charges?’

Book slowly shook his head. ‘No. I want to know why.’

The sheriff nodded at Carla in the field. ‘Answer’s right out there.’

The sheriff and Lupe left. Book walked back to Carla.

‘What’d the sheriff have to say?’

‘That you shot out our window at the Paisano.’

Her expression served as a confession.

‘Why, Carla?’

‘I had to keep you in town. So we could learn the truth about Nathan.’

‘So you could have your revenge against Billy Bob.’

‘Professor, you’ve been checking up on me.’

‘I have.’

‘What’s wrong with revenge?’

‘It’s the wrong motive. I’m here for justice.’

‘Billy Bob murdered my dad.’

‘You lost your civil trial. The jury said he didn’t.’

‘In Odessa. Billy Bob cut corners on that rig—on safety, on the environment, on everything and everyone. He doesn’t give a damn about the planet or the people. Only his profits.’

‘So you’re devoting your life to putting him in prison?’

‘Or in a grave.’ She paused. ‘I hate him.’

‘Hate’s a hard thing to hold onto.’

He knew. He had held onto his hate for a decade.

‘It’s all I have left to hold.’

‘You used me, Carla.’

‘No, I didn’t. I helped you. You were wrong, Professor. Nathan’s death wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a coincidence. If you had left town, you would never have learned the truth. And his killer would have gone free. You wouldn’t have had your justice. You should thank me, for keeping you in town.’

‘For shooting out our window? You could’ve hurt someone.’

‘With number-eight birdshot? Please. Nobody likes a whiner, Professor.’

‘You lied
to me.’

‘Not guilty. I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you the whole truth. That doesn’t constitute perjury, they said so on
Law and Order
.’

Book sighed. ‘Everyone’s a lawyer.’

He stared at Cathedral Rock to the east. That was Carla’s connection: she blamed Billy Bob Barnett for her father’s death, and she wanted revenge. Book felt no anger toward her; he had had his revenge. The man who had killed his father had been sentenced to death; Book rode the Harley to Huntsville to witness his execution in the death chamber at the state penitentiary. He had looked into the man’s eyes from the other side of the glass partition and had seen nothing. Only emptiness. Watching that man die, the man who had stuck a gun to his father’s head and pulled the trigger, all desire for revenge had drained from his body. All his hate had dissipated. He found no satisfaction in another human’s death. An eye for an eye could not bring his father back. But he felt for Carla; she did not yet know that revenge would not fill the void.

‘You mad?’

‘I should be.’

‘That means you’re not. Good.’

‘Why?’

She pointed at the teepees on the adjacent El Cosmico tract.

‘Because I’ve
never fucked in a teepee.’

Book woke in a teepee to a ringing phone. He reached down and grabbed his jeans then dug the cell phone out of a pocket.

‘Professor.’

Nadine.

‘Why aren’t you out running?’

She giggled.

‘I was up late.’

‘I bet. Well, wake up Carla and come over.’

‘Why?’

‘I figured it out.’

‘I did the math. The numbers don’t add up.’

An hour later, they all sat in Nadine’s hospital room in Alpine. Stacks of paper surrounded her in the bed.

‘I talked
to Professor Lawson. He said the fastest way to cut expenses is on disposal costs, said they’ve skyrocketed to about nine dollars per barrel of flow-back. So, if five million barrels of frack fluid go down the hole and fifty percent comes back up, that’s two and a half million gallons of flow-back that’s got to be injected down disposal wells. A barrel—that’s how they measure everything in the business—is forty-two gallons, so two and a half million gallons is roughly sixty thousand barrels. Times nine dollars per barrel, that’s half a million dollars in disposal costs per well. That’s a lot of money, so I started looking at the disposal numbers.’

She held up a piece of paper from her left side.

‘Well number three-twenty-four. Fracked last November seventeenth. The well log says they injected right at three million gallons of frack fluid down the hole.’

She held up another paper, this one from her right side.

‘But the expense worksheets—these are the work papers the accountants generate from the actual receipts, bank statements, that sort of thing—for last year’s tax return shows Barnett paid for six hundred twenty-five tanker trucks to deliver frack fluid to well number three-twenty-four on November seventeenth.’

‘And?’

‘And each tanker carries eight thousand gallons. Do the math, that comes to five million gallons.’

‘So he’s either cheating on his taxes or he’s cheating on the amount of fluid used to frack that well. I understand the taxes, but why the frack fluid?’

‘I’m getting there.’

She held up another piece of paper.

‘After fracking, fifteen to fifty percent of the fluid comes back up the hole—remember, Billy Bob told us that?’

Book nodded.

‘That’s the flow-back. It’s collected in an open pit then pumped into the tanker trucks to haul off to the disposal wells.’

‘Okay.’

Back to the second piece of paper.

‘The expense
worksheet says Barnett paid for three hundred tanker loads to the disposal wells. Do the math, that’s two-point-four million gallons. Which is eighty percent of three million—that’s too much flow-back—but only forty-eight percent of five million. Which fits.’

‘Which leads us to conclude that—’

‘They used five million gallons to frack that well and recovered two-point-four million gallons of flow-back.’

‘I agree.’

Another paper.

‘But, this expense sheet lists all the disposal costs, but by date, not well. On November nineteenth, Barnett paid one hundred seventy thousand dollars to dispose of nineteen thousand barrels of flow-back in the Pecos County disposal well.’

‘Which means?’

‘He’s short.’

‘How?’

‘Like I said, one barrel equals forty-two gallons. So they disposed of only eight hundred thousand gallons of flow-back from that well.’

‘So two-point-four million gallons came back up the hole, but only eight hundred thousand gallons were trucked to the disposal wells?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘What happened to the other one-point-six million gallons?’

‘Never made it to the disposal wells.’

‘Where’d it go?’

‘He dumped it,’ Carla said.

‘Why?’

‘To save money.’

‘About three hundred and forty thousand dollars,’ Nadine said.

‘On one well,’ Carla said. ‘Times a hundred wells a year, that’s—’

‘Thirty-four million dollars,’ Nadine said.

‘That’s real money,’ Carla said, ‘even in Texas.’

‘And especially if you’ve got three ex-wives to support,’ Book said.

‘And
five children,’ Nadine said.

‘And a cocaine habit,’ Carla said.

‘So Nathan was wrong. Billy Bob isn’t contaminating the groundwater; he’s contaminating the land and surface water.’

‘I’ve gone through the numbers on twenty wells so far,’ Nadine said. ‘Same deal.’

‘But for him to dump that much frack fluid,’ Book said, ‘the trucking company would have to be a co-conspirator in a criminal enterprise.’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ Carla said. ‘The trade treaty with Mexico allowed cross-border trucking, so the cartels bought up a bunch of Mexican trucking companies. They know a little something about criminal enterprises.’

‘That’s another piece of the puzzle, Professor,’ Nadine said.

‘What?’

‘Apparently someone at the trucking company had a conscience. Wade Chandler, shipping supervisor. Nathan had several manifests signed by Chandler.’

‘How?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe Nathan figured it out, asked Chandler for the records.’

‘Where’s this Wade Chandler?’