Pyramid Lake (8 page)

She smiled at me. “See you Wednesday.”

T
he half-moon was high in the sky when I pulled my Mustang into the parking lot. Four plumes of steam rose from the geothermal plant’s cooling towers and drifted across the night sky overhead. The dark bulk of the lab building blotted out the stars, cutting off the view of the lake to the south. A few cars were scattered about the lot, but most personnel were home and snug in their beds. I looked at the dashboard clock—1:06 a.m.—turned off the engine, and got out.

Key card in hand, I headed for the lab doors but then stopped and looked east. The Navy buildings were dark for the most part, and the few personnel on guard duty would be focused on the perimeter.

Now was as good a time as any.

Three minutes later, I stood on the porch of the single-story enlisted men’s club. The windows were dark. I took a quick glance around to make sure that no one could see me, and then I grabbed the top of the window frame, placed the toes of my high-tops on the lower edge, and boosted myself onto the sill.

I let go and leaped for the edge of the roof, grabbed it, and pulled myself up. Staying crouched, I crossed the tarred rooftop to crouch where the HVAC ducts, telecom equipment, and air-conditioning unit projected above the flat surface.

I looked west, and raised my gaze to the corner of the distant lab building, silhouetted against the sky’s faint glow. Keeping the corner in sight, I lowered my head until the edge of a duct blocked my view, then raised it an inch or two.

Squatting and keeping my eyes at that height, I shuffled around in a circle, checking sightlines until I was satisfied. But just to be sure, I untied one of my shoes, took off the sock, and put the shoe back on. I tied the white sock around one of the pipes. Tomorrow I would do a visual check from several places around the base, to confirm that it wasn’t visible.

Making sure I was unobserved, I jumped down and headed for the lab.

Time to get some work done.

Nearing the lab building, I glanced into the parking lot again. Something silver, glimmering in the moonlight, had caught my eye: a car near mine that hadn’t been there when I arrived. After four years at Pyramid Lake, I usually recognized all the cars I saw in the lot, and even knew who most of them belonged to.

This one was unfamiliar.

I drew closer. Toyota Prius. My stomach tightened. I knew whose it was, even before the California license plate and the Caltech sticker in the window confirmed it.

Cassie.

I stood next to my car for a long time, arms dangling at my sides, staring at the dark shape of the lab building and thinking. Should I go in and confront her? But she had just as much right to be here as I did.

What if I found her messing with Frankenstein’s code, changing things without consulting me?

It was suddenly hard to breathe.

No. She was just getting a jump start on understanding the codebase so she could sound smarter when we talked Wednesday. To intimidate me with how fast she was coming up to speed. It was what I would have done.

Either way, I wasn’t going to get any coding done tonight.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said aloud.

I thought about it some more. Maybe there was another reason Cassie needed to burn the midnight electrons. The image of a calendar came back to me again, unbidden—a date not far in the future circled in red.

My termination date.

“McNulty,” I said.

I got in my car and drove home.

R
oger held his door open a few inches, blinking at me through the gap. Tufts of hair stuck out from his head, straight up and sideways. He was only wearing boxers, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Fuck, man,” he said. “It’s six twenty in the morning.”

“The early bird gets the best spot at the range,” I said.

He scratched his bare chest. “Go get a latte and come back in an hour.”

I spread my fingers and palmed his face, walking him backward into his house, brushing the door wide as I pushed through. His goatee tickled my palm.

“Get dressed,” I said.

“I hate it when you do shit like that,” he said. “It’s disrespectful.”

“I’ll cook breakfast.”

I could hear him fumbling around in his bathroom while I opened kitchen cupboards. I found eggs in the refrigerator, hiding behind a twelve pack of Big Dogs Leglifter Pale Ale. The eggs were four days past the expiration date but probably still okay. I cracked a half dozen, separated the whites from the yolks, and found a frying pan.

Roger’s house was laid out identically to mine, a few blocks over. The two-bedroom floor plan was one of four models that had been replicated a few hundred times, cookie-cutter style around us, until the surrounding streets gave way to flat dirt.

Six years ago, the ghost town of Flanigan, Nevada, had been resurrected from the desert to serve as a bedroom community for Pyramid Lake staff. Most of us lived here now. The off-reservation alternatives—Gerlach, Spanish Springs, and Fernley—were too far. Even Nixon and Wadsworth—reservation towns at the south end of the lake—were a two-hour drive from the facility, and the Tribal Council didn’t want us living on the rez, anyway.

A disassembled AR-15 rifle lay spread across a towel on the granite countertop that separated the kitchen from the family room. I slid it aside to make room for plates and silverware.

Roger plopped onto a bar stool on the other side of the counter. He had a Glock 34 holstered on his belt.

“I can’t eat this,” he said, looking at the plate in front of him.

“What’s wrong with it?” I took a bite of my eggs, carrying my own plate over.

“Without the yolks, it’ll taste just like snot. I’ll just have coffee.”

I shrugged and sat down to finish my breakfast. Something thunked heavily against the granite nearby. I looked up to stare at the dull-silver coffee mug in front of Roger. He was grinning.

“That’s just all kinds of wrong,” I said, picking it up. It was like lifting a fifteen-pound dumbbell. “How many different types of cancer are you trying to get at once?”

“Don’t believe the lies the United Nations spreads about DU,” he said. “They just don’t want it in the hands of us civilians when they openly declare the One-World Government.”

I shook my head. “Only an idiot would drink out of nuclear waste.”

“It’s
depleted
uranium, Trev. No radioactivity left.” He reached down by his foot and lifted an ammunition box onto the counter. “Alloyed with a little titanium, DU’s harder than a motherfucker, so let’s go put some holes in stuff.”

• • •

The Regional Shooting Facility was an hour and a half south, down State Route 445. Most of the drive was along the lakeshore, with the water sparkling cobalt blue on our left. Roger was driving the Beast, his monster Humvee, and I was riding passenger. The trunk of my Mustang couldn’t have fit all the cases and ammo anyway, because Roger had insisted on bringing six different long guns.

I thought back to Friday night, the last time I’d driven this stretch, and that in turn made me think of Amy. I missed her like crazy. I wondered if she had gotten the present I sent her yet—an iPhone.

Tonight I would call Jen to talk to Amy… but soon I’d be able to call my daughter directly.

Roger kept glancing over at me, like he wanted to ask me something. I could guess what, but I wasn’t interested. Still, I wondered what Cassie was doing right now. In
my
lab. With Frankenstein.

“Your new partner,” Roger finally said. “She’s smokin’ hot.”

I shrugged, and looked out the side window.

“What’re you, blind, man?” Roger cleared his throat. “Because if you aren’t into her—”

“Did you see the guy she was with on Friday?” I said.

“Her brother or whoever?”

“Her
fiancé,
” I said. “She warned me about him. He’s a fucking psycho.”

“Coming from you, that’s pretty funny.”

“He killed a guy,” I said.

“Oh.” Roger was quiet for a while. “Shit.”

• • •

Once we arrived, we set up on a pair of side-by-side shooting benches at the hundred-yard range, under the shade of the corrugated-tin awning. A few steps beyond the row of twenty benches, the concrete pad gave way to dried mud. The dirt stretched flat for three hundred feet before rising in a ten-foot berm behind paper bull’s-eye targets we had stapled to the wooden frames. A sign on one of the steel-tube columns supporting the sunshade read, “Automatic Fire or Burst Fire in Designated Areas Only. See Range Master for Details.”

A few benches to our left, some LEO guys—Sheriff’s Department, according to their badges—were spending more time shooting the breeze than actual bullets. They were all pretty lousy shots, too, judging from the random scattering of holes in their targets. Sad.

I popped the locks on my gun’s hard case and lifted the HK 416’s upper and lower halves out of the gray foam interior. The upper receiver and barrel slid onto the lower receiver and mag-well with perfectly-machined precision, and I pushed the receiver pins into place. With the rifle assembled and ready, I lay it on the bench rest and opened the case containing my EOTech optic. I snapped the scope’s QR mount into place on my rifle’s top rail. Then I turned on the holographic laser sight and looked downrange through it while adjusting the intensity of the floating red circle-and-dot crosshair.

“Jesus Christ, Trevor,” Roger said. “You think the zombies’ll just wait for you while you finish fussing with all that mall-ninja shit?” He hefted his gun, a Colt 6920. “Leave your optic on the rail, and get yourself a soft zipper case.”

Most people would be unable to tell our rifles apart. Both were modern black AR-15 flat-tops with full-length quad-rail hand guards floated over their barrels. But mine was a Heckler and Koch gas-piston model, and Roger’s was more or less the same direct-impingement M4 that our military used.

Roger plunked a few full magazines onto the bench in front of me—banana-curved Magpul thirty-rounders. “Hundred-and-five-grain DU core, man, with the extra powder needed to push it downrange. This’ll punch through an engine block. Go nuts.”

“Will it damage my barrel?” I asked.

He shook his head. I figured he would know. Roger’s expertise with exotic-metal alloys and composites was one-of-a-kind. Cassie and I had run out of time yesterday before visiting his lab, and I hadn’t really wanted to inflict more of Roger on her than was necessary. But the vacuum induction furnaces and ceramic-susceptor microwave melters he used to cast his depleted uranium were interesting to see.

Roger’s research had a broader purview than the other programs at Pyramid Lake, too. A rotating cast of Department-of-Defense sponsors—Navy, Marine Corps, and Army, often several at a time—underwrote his specialized materials for use in projectiles, penetrators, and heavy armor.

“Shooting depleted uranium at paper is stupid,” I said.

He grinned, and glanced over at the Sheriff’s department guys. “I’ve got some metal and other shit we can put out there later, after Five-O leaves.”

We shot for a while. I made some decent ten-round groups—a couple inches in diameter—not bad, considering that my holographic sight was designed not for bench rest but for heads-up tactical shooting.

Roger always shot scary-accurate, and today was no exception. His groups with bare iron sights were tighter than mine with optics. Once he slapped his fiber-optic ACOG 4x scope on the rifle, his groups shrank to a single tight hole in the paper.

Roger being a better shot than I didn’t bother me. But the way the Sheriff’s-department guys kept looking over at my gun did.

I left it at the bench and walked over to the four of them.

“Slow patrol day?” I asked.

I didn’t get an answer, so I just stood there with a neutral expression and watched their eyes. One of them glanced down at my hands, and then another, and it finally clicked for me.

They hadn’t been checking out my gun at all.

“You look familiar,” the youngest one said. “Live around here?” He was a guy about my age, tall, with a sandy mustache. He looked like he was in decent shape.

“Up in Flanigan,” I said.

“You work at Pyramid Lake. On the Navy base.” It wasn’t a question.

I nodded, and all four Sheriff’s guys visibly relaxed.

“Evan Peterson,” the mustache guy said, holding out a hand.

I reached out and shook, but he didn’t let go afterward. Instead, he turned my hand over, knuckles up. “Some nasty bruises you got there.”

“Caught it in a door,” I said.

“Need to watch them doors. A guy down in Spanish Springs caught his face in one Friday night.”

“Hope he’s okay,” I said.

“He’s a jerk-off,” Evan said. “Don’t worry about him.” He let go of my hand. “But try not to catch your hand in any more doors, because then it’ll start looking funny to us.”

They had recognized me from the bartender’s cell-phone photo. I nodded. “Officers. Y’all have a nice day.” I looked at their targets. “Try to squeeze, rather than jerk, the trigger.”

I went back to my bench.

“What was that all about?” Roger muttered out of the corner of his mouth without looking over.

“They were asking about you,” I said. “Wanted to know whether you had anything in your car they should be concerned about.”

Roger paled visibly. “I was just thinking, let’s pack up here and move over to the thousand-yard range.”

• • •

On the way back home, Roger steered the Beast one-handed. With his other hand, he held up a three-quarter-inch-thick plate steel target and looked through the holes he had put in it.

“That’s sick,” he said. “The .308 punched right through.”

“I couldn’t hit anything past six hundred yards,” I said. “Even with the ten-X Leupold on.”

“What did you expect, shooting two-two-three? That’s a varmint caliber.”

“Works just fine for the military,” I said.

“Yeah, for door-to-door spray-and-pray grunts who need lightweight ammo so they can carry a bunch of it,” he said. “Not for designated marksmen. And definitely not for snipers.”