Midnight Haul (21 page)

There was just enough space between them and Crane for the truck to work some speed up, and it was just confined enough an area for Crane to wonder where the hell to go; the walls of barrels were everywhere, except in the loading dock, which was just another wall to get rammed against, and the cinder drive, where the truck was.

He didn’t shoot at them. He was too busy running, and then there was nowhere to go and his back was to the wall of barrels and they were coming right at him, and he dove and rolled, rolled out of the way, and the truck smashed into the wall of barrels and the explosion was immediate.

A bright orange fist of fire shot into the sky, and hung there, and shook as if in anger. Crane was blown by the force of it against the far wall of barrels, away from the flames. Behind him, the screams of the truckers were cut short with the second spasm of fire and smoke.

Crane was up and running, gun still in hand, the heat and flames to his back, but he could hear the sound of it, like heavy artillery shells going off, and when he did look back, there were barrels hurtling themselves into the air, hundreds of feet, some tumbling end over end, trailing smoke and fire, others bursting like bombs in a fireworks display of horrifying proportions.

The shape of the truck, at the base of the burning wall of barrels, was only barely discernible, the warehouse a black silhouette with windows of red-orange, its roof on fire; where the guy with the black streak eyebrows had gone, Crane didn’t know—if he ducked back inside when the truck went after Crane, he was gone, period. Flames had spread to the pick-up and were on their way past the loading dock to the adjacent wall of barrels, and Crane ran, barrels dropping behind him like bodies out of high windows; he could hear them, thudding to the ground, when the sound of barrels exploding wasn’t obscuring all else.

The Buick was up ahead, and he wondered if he could make it; if the fire spread to those silver, hovering gas tanks, so very close to the blaze, there could be a firestorm, and a city—a real one, not populated by waste drums—might die.

Then something behind him exploded loudly and the blast drove him face down, onto the cinders, scraping his face, and he suddenly realized his jacket was on fire, and he got out of it somehow, ran out of it, and it fell to the ground behind him, waving its fiery arms. He stood there looking up into a sky full of fire, from which barrels fell as if dropped from a plane, and his legs went out from under him, and darkness came.

AFTERMATH

The first major snowstorm of the winter had been just three days ago, but the roads were clear and so was the afternoon. Even with his tinted glasses, the sun reflecting off the pavement bothered his eyes. But otherwise Hart felt pretty good. Today was kind of special: he’d had some good news for a change.

He was stretching a point, driving down here on company time. The Greenwood situation was out of his hands, now, which was fine with him. He’d gotten some glory out of it, which is to say some nice press notices, and now Greenwood was the combined headache of the state of New Jersey and the U.S. Government, specifically the NJ Health Department and the EPA.

Of course, that crazy kid Crane had been wrong about a lot of things. There was no Kemco conspiracy as such, no cover-up in which employees who “knew too much” were murdered as phonied-up suicides. Like he’d told the kid, that was absurd.

But Crane had been dead right about those landfills. Hart had been haunted by the hysterical kid’s ranting about those damn things, and, even though it wasn’t really his bailiwick, he’d gone ahead and had the soil samples taken and chemical tests made. He’d expected the findings to be routine. They weren’t.

For what had supposedly been used for a household dump, the landfills below Greenwood Elementary School and its playground were a toxic nightmare: seventy dangerous chemical substances,
a dozen of them known carcinogens. Including benzene, harbinger of leukemia. Including dioxin, which made benzene look like health food.

As for the city’s drinking water, it had been tested previously, of course—for bacteria. When tested for chemicals, Greenwood’s tap water turned out to be a cocktail containing high levels of synthetic compounds that were known carcinogens and extremely toxic. The only reason tests for bacteria came up clean was that there was so much pesticide in Greenwood’s water, no bacteria could survive.

The wells supplying the city’s water were sealed off; while a new source was sought, Greenwood citizens were told not to use the water for drinking or cooking. The bottled water business boomed.

The Governor came to Greenwood, after declaring it a state disaster area.

The President of the United States came, too, and watched for fifteen minutes as the remedial drainage program was getting under way. He had not declared Greenwood a national emergency, as another President had at Love Canal, and Hart knew why: EPA officials had advised this President that he simply couldn’t go around declaring an emergency every time one of these environmental time bombs went off, not unless he was ready to make a habit of it.

And the President of Kemco had said only that “we do not believe we have any legal liability.”

Dream on, sucker
, Hart smiled to himself.

The current investigation, sparked by that crazy Crane’s efforts, had linked Kemco to Chemical Disposal Works, and it was the disaster at Chemical Disposal that had served to bring the state’s—hell, the nation’s—attention to the waste problem. The death toll had been three; the injured (including workers at close by industrial sites, and fire fighters) totaled nearly forty—with far worse statistics narrowly averted when the entire 250-man fire
department of Elizabeth, New Jersey, fought the flames for ten tiring hours, keeping the fire from reaching tanks of liquid gas nearby.

The toxic smoke from the fire had drifted to New York City, which attracted attention to say the least, and New Jersey was forced, at last, to clean up Chemical Disposal. Men wearing special suits with oxygen masks, looking like something out of
2001
, were even now cleaning up the site, in 12-hour, 7-day-a-week shifts.

Well, at least the pile of drums at Chemical Disposal had finally dwindled, though this was a hell of a way to get that done. It had cost the state, so far, $5 million, not to mention the endangering of thousands of lives. Due to the dangerous nitric and picric acids, pesticides and plasticizers that were among the
known
surprises in the barrels, schools were closed in Elizabeth and Staten Island, and residents were urged to stay home with windows closed, till the toxic clouds blew away. And now on to the 233 other problem sites identified in New Jersey—only 23 of which were funded as “target sites.”

The hospital was just inside Fair View’s city limits. Hart pulled into the lot, parked, went in and asked at the information window where Intensive Care was.

He got in the elevator and pressed “4,” and when the doors opened, he saw Mrs. Alma Price, the attractive, red-haired middle-aged schoolteacher who’d been so helpful to him when he was doing the preliminary investigation of the landfill situation. She was sitting reading a magazine (
Psychology Today
) on one of the couches grouped opposite the elevators.

“Mrs. Price,” he said, sitting next to her. “How are you?”

“Very well,” she smiled, putting the magazine down. “I take it you’re here because you heard the good news?”

“Certainly am. And I take it you’re waiting to get in, yourself?”

She nodded. “Only one visitor at a time. Haven’t seen you around Greenwood in a few weeks.”

“That mess is out of my hands, now, thank God. Where are you holding classes, these days?”

“We’ve set up shop in several church basements. Tell me… why haven’t any homes been evacuated? A number border the playground landfill. With the drainage started, won’t fumes be a problem? Weren’t two or three hundred families relocated, when this occurred at Love Canal?”

“Mrs. Price, this isn’t precisely the same thing as Love Canal. We caught it earlier, thanks to your friend Crane. That’s one difference. But I’d say there’s still a chance some of the homes’ll have to be evacuated.”

She shook her head. “When I think of the suffering… I don’t know. I could weep. I
have
wept.”

“That suffering you’re talking about has already been confirmed by a Health Department official,” Hart said. “His report confirmed Ms. Boone’s research for her book—ailments ranging from as minor as skin rashes to as major as respiratory disease.”

“What about the psychological aspects?”

Hart shrugged. “I don’t think that’s been dealt with yet. But it’s going to have to be. I’m no scientist, but the presence of dioxin makes anything possible. Dioxin is known to create psychological disturbances… which might help explain twelve nervous breakdowns in Greenwood in eighteen months.”

“It would also help explain one other thing,” Mrs. Price said.

“Yes?”

“The suicides.”

Hart nodded. “I believe you may be right. Crane and Boone never thought to connect the disproportionate suicide rate to the similarly high rates of miscarriage and so on. They assumed the suicides were fakes. But there was that one instance of suicide—the guy who killed his wife and kids, and then himself, in front of a witness—that clearly
wasn’t
faked.”

“And neither were the other ones. My husband included.”

He touched her hand. “Your husband, and the others, were people with legitimate reasons to be depressed. But who normally might’ve been able to deal with their depression.”

“And you think it was the effect of the chemically contaminated water, here in Greenwood, that… pushed them over the edge?”

“That’s my opinion, yes. Take for example a guy who’s had a nervous breakdown or two, got a Section Eight out of the service. He’s a trucker for Kemco, now, and knows what kind of dumping’s been going on. Maybe he’s done a little of it himself. Then one day he learns his wife has a tumor in her head the size of a shotgun shell. And that night he kills her, and his kids, and himself.”

“Lord.”

“Look at Crane himself, the direction his behavior took; he’d been here long enough to be affected himself, to exhibit decidedly suicidal behavior. But Boone and Crane had it in their heads that Kemco was going around killing people.”

“Weren’t they? Aren’t they?”

“Well, yes. They’re guilty of criminal negligence, no question. But they’re big. It’s hard to hurt a corporation that size; you’d be surprised the sort of lawsuits they can absorb with minimum pain. It helps that both the Chemical Disposal fiasco and the scandal of the schoolyard landfills broke at the same time. Doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of Kemco yesterday or today. Still, Kemco will survive.”

“I don’t understand you, Mr. Hart. You have so little bitterness when you speak of Kemco. Perhaps Kemco wasn’t having people murdered, in the sense of hiring it done, like the Mafia or some such thing. But in a way, what they’ve done is worse… it’s invisible… intangible… and those responsible are so removed from it all. So protected.”

Hart shrugged again. “They’re just businessmen trying to make a dollar, and I got nothing against that. I don’t approve of how they’re going about it, but did you ever consider this? The
Kemcos of this world are only here because we want them. Okay, we found some landfills that were contaminating Greenwood’s water supply, putting sickness, physical and mental, into every glass of water every citizen and visitor to the city drank for God knows how long. We found those landfills and are doing something about it. But there are thousands, tens of thousands more Greenwoods and Love Canals out there. And maybe we can find them, and do something about them. But they’re all yesterday’s waste. What about today’s? I remember telling Crane that I couldn’t be too concerned about yesterday because I was watching out for today, and do you know what we’re doing today, this year? Dumping 77 million pounds of waste into the environment. Know what we’ll be doing next year? Dumping 77 million more. There’s suicide for you. Maybe instead of putting all the blame on the Kemcos, foul as some of them are, we should look for ways to improve or curb or even stop the type of manufacturing that creates such waste. Maybe a whole new life-style is called for, who knows? I don’t. I like my car. I like all the great American luxuries. But you know what else I like? I like a glass of water that doesn’t give me cancer, or send me into the bathroom to slash my wrists if I have an off day.”

Mrs. Price sat and looked at him with a quiet smile. She said, “Would you be embarrassed if I said I misjudged you?”

Embarrassed, Hart stood. “Where’s that room, anyway? I’m going to peek in. Rules be damned.”

Mrs. Price pointed down the hall to the right. “Room 417.”

“Thanks. See you in a few minutes.”

He passed several doctors and three or four nurses, but no one stopped him; and at room 417, he opened the door, went in and there was Boone, sitting up in her bed, an I. V. hooked up to her, looking thin, pale, beautiful.

Crane was sitting next to her. Holding her hand. He was in street clothes; he’d been released from the hospital, for treatment
of minor but extensive burns, yesterday. They both looked very happy, if battle-scarred.

“Hello, you two,” Hart said. “I just wanted to welcome Ms. Boone back among the living.”

Boone said, in an amazingly strong voice, “It’s nice to be back.”

“I need to talk to both of you. I’m going to need to get a deposition from you, Ms. Boone. I already have Crane’s—and considering some of the things he pulled, he’s lucky no charges are being brought against him.”

Crane said, “Don’t do me any favors.”

“Why not? You’ve done us a few. Anyway, Ms. Boone, it can wait. What are your immediate plans, now that you’re uh… with us again?”

“Well,” she began.

Crane interrupted. “We have a book to write.”

“Yes,” Boone said. “I guess we do at that.”

Hart smiled, said, “Happy royalty checks,” and went out.

He walked down the hospital hall, thinking about how much he liked happy endings.