Darkness Falls (2 page)

Erin splashed some more water on his neck and grabbed a dustpan from beneath the counter. The broken glass would at least force him to pick up a bit. By necessity, he didn't have many possessions, but somehow they always seemed to scatter themselves across the floor when he wasn't looking.

The ring of the cell phone startled him --not only because of the self-imposed silence around him but because no one really ever called him. Sometimes he wondered why he even had it.

The sound was slightly muffled, suggesting his phone had worked its way between his sofa cushions again, and he dug around until he came up with it.

"Hello?"

"Erin?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Ah, I see you haven't changed. It's Rick Castelli. How you doin', man?"

Erin flopped down on the couch and propped his feet on a table he'd artistically welded together out of pieces of an old pickup.

"Rick? It's been a long time. Since that oil spill off the coast of California, right?"

"Yeah, we appreciated all your hard work on that cleanup, Erin. If I hadn't put you in charge of that thing we'd still be out there scrubbing rocks."

"So you're still at Exxon?"

"Nah. I hung out my own shingle a while ago. Mostly doing government consulting work now."

"Cushy," Erin said.

"Yeah, it's not bad . . ." His voice trailed off.

"So what do you want, Rick? I assume you're not calling to catch up."

"Not entirely. See, it's like this. The Saudis are having some production problems and I think it's something you'd be interested in."

Erin crossed his eyes and watched a bead of sweat slide down his nose. "I can guarantee you that I won't be."

"I haven't even told you anything yet." "I'm retired."

"You're fucking thirty-seven years old."

"So?"

"Are you telling me you've got something better to do?"

"Than go to Saudi Arabia? Are you kidding me? Shit's blowing up over there and I hear they get double points for Americans."

"That's just media hype."

"Media hype," Erin repeated skeptically. "What, five bombs in the last two weeks? And how many people dead? From what I hear, the royals are working on an exit strategy."

"You know the fucking towel-heads," Castelli said. "All we ask them to do is stand there while we pump cold, hard cash down their throats, and they can't even handle that."

"You're still full of shit, aren't you, Rick?" "What are you talking about?"

"Could it be that while we jump up and down squealing about democracy we're supporting a bunch of kleptomaniacal monarchs who use all that money to buy Rolls-Royces while their citizens starve?"

"Jesus Christ, I forgot what a self-righteous prick you --"

"So do we have anything else to talk about?" Erin said, cutting him off.

"Come on, man. Quit breaking my balls. I've got a guy here who's supposed to be an expert, but he's not you, you know? Besides, since when did you become a nervous Nellie?"

"Why don't you --"

"I'll send a plane, okay? Hell, I'll send a jet with a vibrating bed, a hot stewardess, and some hundred-year-old scotch. Then we'll stick Uncle Sam for the entire bill, plus our fee. It'll be fun."

"No."

"Goddamnit, Erin! Quit being such a jackass. Do it for an old friend."

"I never liked you."

That wasn't really true. In his own obnoxious way, Rick was an okay guy. But there were so many reasons not to get involved in the oil business again that he'd need a calculator to count them. Those years didn't even seem real to him anymore. Just another one of the past lives he was collecting.

"My ass," Castelli said, and then his voice softened. "Hey, I know I should have called. I was real sorry when I heard about your girlfriend. What was her name?"

Erin felt a familiar tightness in his chest. It was hard to breathe for a few seconds, but only a few seconds. That was an improvement wasn't it?

"Jenna."

"Yeah, that's it. Jenna Kalin. I hear she was a nice girl. Kind of a tree hugger, though, wasn't she?"

Erin let out a breath that almost could have passed for a laugh. "I see you're still the picture of sensitivity."

"Jesus, Erin. That was what, two years ago?"

"A year and a half." Actually, nineteen months, four days, and an odd number of hours depending on how you treated the time zones. "It was just a few days after Christmas . . ."

"Well, nothing like a free trip to sunny Saudi Arabia to take your mind off it," Castelli interrupted, obviously not looking to dig too deeply into the subject. "And how 'bout I guarantee you'll get lucky with that stewardess --"

The phone went silent and Erin looked down at it. Dead battery. He stuffed it back into the cushions and reached for a framed photo propped on the table next to his feet.

It had been taken in better times. The beach he and Jenna were standing on was black from a tanker spill and she was holding an oil-soaked bird in her arms. The lines of her body were obscured by heavy overalls and a grimy, oversized sweater, leaving only her tan face and thick brown hair visible. Why had that always been his favorite photo of them? Was it the way she was looking at that stupid bird? Was it the memory of letting himself put his natural cynicism aside and get caught up in her moral certainty?

He remembered how the oil had caused her to break out and how she'd blamed each zit on a specific energy company, as though there was a massive corporate conspiracy focused on nothing but screwing up her complexion.

God, he wanted a beer. Even a warm one.

But he didn't drink anymore, and that was because of Jenna, too. She'd been the only person with the guts to correctly point out that he was a psychotic drunk. So now that she was dead, why hadn't he started again? Sure, booze brought out the worst in him, but sometimes the anger was easier to deal with than everything else.

Erin set the picture aside and sunk a little farther into the sofa, staring at the empty wall across from him. Everything had seemed so clear after he'd gotten his PhD. He was going to be a new kind of environmentalist. Instead of waving signs and trying to convince everyone that the sky was falling, he'd bring sanity to the debate by taking into account that no one was ever going to do anything for the earth unless there was something concrete in it for them. Preferably money.

On the surface, it had been a great idea -- a revolution, he'd told himself. But there had been too many compromises. The truth was that the environment had become more of an emotional problem than a scientific one. No one wanted to look at his equations or listen to his carefully laid-out arguments. They just wanted to believe.

He'd laughed off the initial attacks, deconstructing his detractors' arguments and ramming them back down their throats. And he'd been thoroughly entertained by the occasional death threats, putting up a bulletin board shaped like a tombstone to hang them on. Things had become more difficult when his friends started walking away, but it was bearable. When Jenna had turned her back, though, he'd been completely lost.

Predictably, it hadn't taken long for his confusion and despair to turn to anger, which landed him with a job in the oil industry. He'd show them.

But what had he shown them? That he could become a fabulously wealthy and incredibly lonely thirty-seven-year-old, sitting around a dark house, surrounded by the ghost of a woman who had hated him before she died?

He wondered if that was what made it so hard. If they'd been on better terms when she'd . . .

"Then you'd probably be even more flicked up than you are now," he said aloud, forcing himself off the couch to sweep up the broken glass.

Chapter
2.

Mark Beamon slammed on the brakes too late, causing the subcompact he'd unwisely rented to fishtail along the dirt road before the front wheels dropped into a deep rut. He frowned as the dust caught up with him and billowed through the open windows, wondering if this time he was irretrievably stuck.

The idea of spending government money to replace the rain inundating Washington, D. C., with the blue skies of Tucson had been appealing in theory. A little sun, some Mexican food, maybe a quick round of golf. But this wasn't Tucson. It was a godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere.

It was impossible not to wonder what would prompt a sane person to live in this cactus-strewn dust bowl. No pools, no manicured fairways. Hell, no shade.

He stuck his head out the window to make sure there were no buzzards circling before gunning the car out of the rut and continuing up the narrow scar that passed for a road.

When his phone rang five minutes later, he'd barely made it another mile. The nine holes he had planned for that afternoon were starting to look shaky.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Mark."

"It's about time."

"You said 4:00 p. M. It's exactly 4:00 p. M. Arizona time. In fact, the second hand is hitting the twelve. Now."

Beamon couldn't help smiling. Of all the people who worked for him, Terry Hirst was his favorite. Not only was he incredibly competent and annoyingly punctual, he simply couldn't be intimidated. A rare trait in the skittish, PC world of today's government.

"Fine, you win, Terry. What have you found out?"

"You received the email on his basics, right? Work history, education, and all that?" "Yeah. Moving along . . ."

"Okay, first of all, the one thing everyone agrees on is that Erin Neal is a genius in the true sense of the word. He's the guy in the field of bioremediation."

"What the hell's bioremediation?"

"I asked the same thing. It's essentially the business of using bacteria to clean up toxic spills. So basically he breeds bacteria that eat all kinds of stuff. Mostly we're talking about oil, but he's also come up with bacteria that eat radioactive waste and ones that can work in really harsh environments, like in coal processing."

Beamon crested a hill, but still couldn't see any sign of human habitation. Did the guy live in a cave?

"Neal started a bioremediation firm that did work all over the world and made him a lot of money," Hirst continued. "Most of which he plowed back into research or used for environmental causes . . .

"Christ," Beamon moaned.

"What?"

"He's a hippie, isn't he?"

"Not so much," Hirst said. "In fact, I think it would be fair to say that the hard-core environmentalists can't stand him. He wrote a pretty influential book called Energy and Nature. I ordered you a copy."

"Why don't you just give me the Reader's Digest version?"

"Essentially, it's about the future of energy and the environment, taking into account politics and human nature. He takes a dim view of people -- that if it costs us absolutely nothing, we might do something to protect the environment, but if it comes down to saving a tree or running our A/C, it's going to be no-contest. So he felt like the eco-movement needed to refocus itself on creating technologies and realistic strategies that would get people excited, regardless of any benefit to the earth. So, for instance, he'd say that building an electric car is pointless unless it's really sexy, four-wheel drive, and goes from zero to sixty in under six seconds."

"Let me guess," Beamon said. "He managed to piss off both sides."

"More or less. The environmentalists saw him as a sell-out and the business community wasn't really persuaded to cough up any money. Anyway, about a year after his book came out, he folded his company."

"His company went bankrupt?"

"No, he just shut it down. The guy was printing money as near as I can tell."

"You mean he sold it."

"I'm telling you, Mark, he handed his people big severance checks and closed the doors. Then he went to work consulting for the oil companies -- Exxon, BP, and Saudi Aramco primarily. Then he dropped off the face of the earth."

"So he just walked away from that, too? I gotta think the Saudis pay pretty well."

"No doubt. But other than his address and bank records, we've got nothing current on him. He doesn't have a job, he doesn't do research, and doesn't write anything that gets published."

"So he's some kind of hermit?" Beamon said.

"Seems like."

"You know what a hermit is?"

"No."

"A lonely hippie. Anything else?"