Twenty-seven
The service road led through land so parched that you wouldn’t expect to find a dam and a large body of water at the end of it. To both sides, my headlights showed bare earth, scatterings of stones, an occasional bristle of nameless weeds, no mesquite, no cactus.
Far to the south, along the horizon, heat lightning pulsed through the clouds, smooth radiant waves rather than jagged spears. Forty or fifty miles away, perhaps a downpour washed the desert. Rain didn’t always travel as far as heat lightning could be seen, and Pico Mundo might not receive a drop all night.
The breast of the dam didn’t in scale match that engineering wonder Boulder Dam, over in Nevada. Pico Mundians prided themselves on being “the smallest town of forty thousand anywhere in the world.” That slogan, created by the chamber of commerce, meant to convey to tourists that we were big enough to offer a wide range of activities and accommodations, and that nevertheless we remained simple people with homespun wisdom, down-home manners, and a tradition of welcoming strangers as we would our own kin. You could go to Boulder, Nevada, and do your boating on Lake Mead, behind the ostentatiously massive breastworks of their dam, if you didn’t mind the greedy casinos, all owned by humongous corporations, luring you to nearby Vegas, trying every minute of the day to get their hands in your pockets. Or you could come to Pico Mundo and enjoy boating on Malo Suerte Lake, behind a dam that was practical and human in scale, nothing like that Hitlerian structure across the border, only one hundred and two feet across and thirty-eight feet from crest to sill.
Our dam had no hydroelectric powerhouse, because it had been constructed with the modest intention of creating a pristine lake for recreational use and, in times of drought, a lake that could also serve as a source of water for a few major Maravilla County reservoirs downstream from it. There were sluice gates toward the north end of the dam and a squat concrete outlet-control structure about twenty feet square. The building looked like a miniature fortress, with a crenellated parapet around its flat roof and windows hardly larger than arrow loops.
When I braked to a stop at the end of the service road, Sonny Wexler and Billy Mundy were standing by their squad car. One of them held a shotgun. The other had what might have been a fully automatic carbine, like maybe an Uzi, which indicated the seriousness with which they took the threat.
They must have had a way to operate the headlights remotely, because as I approached, the high beams from their black-and-white nearly blinded me. The officers eased behind the squad car—one near the rear, the other at the front—using it as cover, leveling their weapons, as if they thought Dr. Evil had just arrived on the first step of a crusade for world domination.
I switched off my headlights, put down the side window, and leaned my head out, so they could see who had come calling. They knew I was close with the chief. In fact, after the business at Green Moon Mall a couple of years earlier, they were among the officers who had insisted that I be given a citation for bravery, which was now packed away with Stormy’s belongings in a room in Ozzie Boone’s house.
Shotgun at the ready, Sonny Wexler, big and tough and as soft-spoken as a monk, with forearms as thick as a sumo wrestler’s calves, cautiously approached the Explorer. He stayed wide of it, so that Billy could have a clear shot if someone in addition to me came out of the vehicle. “You alone in there, Odd?”
Haunted by the shootings at the park, I worried that my voice or a recurrence of the shakes would give them reason to wonder about me, but when I spoke, I sounded normal, which may not speak well of me.
“Yes, sir, I am. I’m alone.”
“The chief said you were back.”
“Good. ’Cause I am. I’m back.”
“It’s good to have you back,” he said, but he didn’t lower the shotgun.
“It’s good to be back,” I assured him.
“You know what’s happening?”
“I do, sir. I put the chief on to it.”
“Why don’t you get out,” Sonny said, “and walk around your vehicle, open all the doors and the tailgate, so I can see straight through.”
“All right, sir.” I got out of the driver’s door.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Odd.”
“I understand, sir.”
“I trust you like a brother.”
“That’s good to hear, sir.”
“It’s just you might have come here under duress.”
“No problem,” I said, opening the back door on the driver’s side.
“It’s not every night of the week somebody wants to blow up the dam.”
I said, “Boring old Pico Mundo,” as I raised the tailgate.
After I opened all the doors and after Sonny circled the Ford, looking straight through it from every angle, I closed up what I had opened.
Tension reduced, the three of us gathered by the back of their cruiser as they remoted the headlights off. Billy Mundy wasn’t a titan like Sonny Wexler, but he had a few inches and thirty pounds of muscle on me. Standing with them, I felt like Lou the bear with two Ollies.
The lights were on for the length of the single-lane road that crossed the crest of the dam, and a series of spotlights lit the breast from the top. It really looked pathetic compared to Boulder Dam.
More heat lightning throbbed through the clouds far to the south, too far away for the trailing thunder to reach us, and for some reason the sight of it made me shudder.
“You hear about the C-4?” Sonny asked.
“Yeah.”
“That is major wicked stuff, ruinous. Who would want to do this?”
“People who know Bern Eckles.”
That surprised them. They had been on the force with him, and he was an embarrassment to them. Billy said, “Eckles, that sonofabitch, he’s away for life.”
“You could say these people go to the same church.”
Sonny shook his head. “Wackos. The world is full of wackos these days. All these wackos, it’s not going to end well.”
“Nothing like this ever happens with Baptists,” Billy said.
“Or even with Presbyterians,” Sonny said. “What can we do for you, Odd? What brought you all the way out here?”
That was an excellent question. I wished I had an answer. “The chief just asked if I’d come to the dam and, you know, sort of have a look around, you know, maybe walk across the service road there on the crest, just in general kind of see whatever there is to see, if there’s anything at all, which probably there isn’t, but it won’t hurt to give it a try.”
I sounded so lame, rambling toward incoherence, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d wanted to test my blood-alcohol level.
Maybe the only good thing about people thinking you were a hero once long ago is that they treat you seriously no matter how idiotic you might sound. Sonny and Billy nodded solemnly as I babbled, hearing more sense in my speech than I put into it.
“Sure,” Sonny Wexler said. “That’s a good idea. Go on out there and have a look.”
“Fresh eyes,” Billy Mundy said. “Always a good idea to get fresh eyes on a problem.”
“There were some prairie wolves around when we got here,” Sonny said, “bolder than usual. Give us a holler if they bother you.”
Some people in Maravilla County referred to them as prairie wolves, but most just called them coyotes.
“Yes, sir, I’ll keep a lookout,” I said. “But a coyote pack doesn’t worry me half as much as the lunatics who stole the C-4.”
“What we’ve been waiting to hear,” Sonny said, “is an incoming plane.”
Billy said, “If they load the C-4 in a plane and time it just right so it detonates as they crash the plane into the breast of the dam, there isn’t a thing we could do to stop them.”
“If you hear a plane,” Sonny advised me, “best do what we’ll do, which is run like hell.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of a plane,” I said.
Billy nodded. “We wish we hadn’t.”