$200 and a Cadillac

XVII



Tom thought the whole idea was silly.

He was walking along the loading dock, fanning the ground with the Geiger counter, trying to learn to use it without losing his balance. It wasn’t like a metal detector because it had the box that had to be carried along with it and the box was just heavy enough to throw him off if he tried to walk and wave the thick wand around at the same time. It took practice to get it right, so Tom was out in the intake yard giving it a whirl. He would eventually be looking for hot spots in the desert along with a team from the lab, so he figured he’d better look like he knew what he was doing. The last thing Tom wanted was to look like a fool.

The intake yard is basically a giant parking lot with stalls like a gas station, except that oil is pumped out of the trucks as opposed to into them. About twenty trucks at a time could be offloading. Trucks pulled in, got hooked up, and sat for forty-five minutes while the oil got sucked out of them. The drivers hung around in a room off the end of the loading dock they jokingly referred to as the lounge, which held a television, a few ratty couches, and an endless supply of coffee. Tom Crossly stood near the entrance to the Lounge, turning the dials on the box and avoiding the curious looks of the drivers as they came and went.

“Some kind of tester or something?” one of them asked.

Tom just smiled and nodded. “Something like that,” he replied, as the single bits of static clicked in his ears. With the headphones on, he figured he wasn’t obligated to engage in conversation and he kept his head down to indicate that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He felt silly, but the yard was the best place to get away from the office where at least the people he normally worked with wouldn’t see him.

He picked up the unit and started down the stairs off the dock and onto the asphalt lot. He paused at the top, letting another guy come up first. The young man with the shaggy hair and stained clothes smiled at Tom and bounded up the stairs and passed him. Just as he did, the headphones exploded with a loud burst of static. Tom jumped and tore the headphones off. He looked down at the meter on the box. It was normal. He listened in the headphones again. Normal. Just a few isolated clicks in the silence. Tom tapped the side of the box and looked around, as though someone was playing a joke on him.

He put the headphones back on and was about to dismiss it when the same young man passed him going down the stairs. The Geiger counter erupted again. But this time Tom glanced down at the meter in time to see the needle spike upward. Tom watched the kid bound over to a dilapidated tanker truck and retrieve something from the cab. Then the kid came trotting over again. Now Tom was ready.

This time he busied himself with the box, looking like he was distracted but holding the wand out to get a good reading when the kid went by. As the kid approached, Tom heard the clicking grow rapid and then rush into a static roar as he went by. Then it dropped off and quickly returned to normal.

Tom watched the kid go into the lounge, get a cup of coffee, rub the sleep from his eyes, and take a seat in front of an old television running an episode of Oprah. When he figured the kid was distracted enough, Tom picked up the box and walked swiftly to the old truck. He ducked around behind, so the truck was between himself and the lounge, and could already hear the static roaring in the headphones, even before he got them all the way on his head and tried to take a measurement.

“Well I’ll be goddamned.” Tom waved the wand along the side of the truck’s tank and listened to the static raging in the headphones like a radio between stations with the volume cranked. When he took the wand away and walked off a few steps, the static faded away. Then he turned back, walked toward the truck, and the roar returned. He repeated this a few times and then stood there, dumbfounded, slack-jawed, watching the side of the tank as though it might do something mysterious. Then, when he realized he might be attracting attention, Tom was overcome with panic and rushed off to find Victor.

Victor wasn’t hard to find. He sat lethargic in his office with his back to the door, staring out the window at the pipeline dropping over the hill toward the ocean. He could hear Tom running down the hallway and turned to face the door as Tom burst in, ruddy faced and sucking wind.

“Where’s the fire?”

Tom sagged forward, hands on his knees, catching his breath and trying to speak. “I was out in the lot,” he gasped. “With the Geiger counter.” More deep breaths. “This guy came in to offload and he walks by me and sets the damned thing off. Then he walked by me again and set the damned thing off a second time. So I go over by his truck, and sure enough, either he’s packing plutonium or he’s got a load of this tainted oil. I tell you, I couldn’t believe it. That counter just went crazy.”

Five minutes later they were out in the yard, talking to the shift boss, watching the scraggly kid mill around the lounge, waiting for the oil to finish pumping. They got the information for the account the kid was representing: The Headbanger Oil Company. Cute name, given the looks of the guy driving the truck. The address was a P.O. Box in Barstow, but the funds were wired to a Wells Fargo outpost in Nickelback. They knew the kid had to be from Nickelback anyway because that was the only place Ted Ross had made it to in time for the kid to pick up a load and drive it down to Long Beach.

Victor watched from the window of the shift boss’s office, a snarl on his face. “I can’t believe the dumb son of a bitch just waltzed right in here. Can’t f*cking believe it.”

The shift boss was flipping through a file full of accounts. “New account. Says here they just started delivering a couple weeks ago. Only a few prior shipments it looks like.”

“Well they won’t be making any more, that’s for damned sure.” Victor took a swig of coffee from a Styrofoam cup and grimaced. “But for God’s sake, keep f*cking paying them for their deliveries until we nail them. The last thing we want to do is tip them off that we’re on to them.”

Victor paced around, beside himself with excitement. He wanted to charge out there and lay the guy out, but that would spook him. He knew he needed a better plan to catch them cold and figure out how the hell they were getting the oil from the Monarch plant. It was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. A sting. A chance to do some real work for a change. A reason to get off his ass and do something. Stop staring out the window, throwing pencils at the ceiling.

Finally, when the kid was about done and ready to leave, Victor turned to Tom, who stood quietly, studying a string hanging from a button on his shirt, and said: “We’re gonna nail these f*ckers.” Then he snatched the Geiger counter from Tom as he went out the door and said, “I gotta get a closer look at this kid.”

He crossed the yard in a clumsy but deliberate manner, aiming for the kid and his antique truck. When he was nearly there, he called out to him, trying to act befuddled. “Excuse me. Headbanger?”

The kid looked at him, confused, and then glanced behind him at the next truck over. Victor spoke up again. “You the driver for the Headbanger Oil outfit?”

“Yeah.” The kid just looked nervous. Victor wanted to yell gotcha! at the little f*cker, but he held himself back. He was a professional, after all.

“Sorry to bother you, but this’ll only take a minute.” Victor set the Geiger counter down and fished some papers from his shirt pocket—a grocery list of things to pick up on the way home and an e-mail joke about a guy stuffing his scrotum in a ball washer at a golf course. He studied them for a moment and then glanced back up at the kid. “The records show you’re a new account. Is that right?”

“Uh, yeah. That’s right.” The kid acted like he had to think about it. Practically giving himself away. He was looking really nervous now. Victor smiled.

“Well, we got all these damned environmental regs we gotta follow. And one of them is we have to take an exhaust measurement on all the new trucks that come in on the new accounts. You know, with the air quality problems and all. If you wouldn’t mind starting her up, all I need is about a minute around by the tail pipe.”

“Sure thing. Hate to get you in trouble with the tree huggers.” The kid smiled this time. Trying to be Mr. Laid Back. Trying a little too hard, Victor thought.

“Shit son, you got no idea.” Victor spat on the ground and nodded, laying it on heavy. “I tell you what, if it ain’t one thing it’s another around here. Shit, you’d think we were selling stuffed spotted owls or something. Anyway, just fire it up and I’ll be out of your hair in just a minute.”

The kid hopped into the cab and Victor went around back, taking a wide birth and slipping the headphones on. He fiddled with the knobs and switches on the box until he could hear the bits of static clicking away, slow and steady. As he got close to the truck he heard the individual clicks crescendo into a solid wall of buzzing noise. It was almost too much to listen to. The whole truck was contaminated. He lingered for a minute to make it look good and then walked around to the driver’s side of the cab.

“Thanks, son, that’ll do just fine. I just need a phone number where the state inspector can call you to confirm we did the inspection. I doubt they will. They pull random records now and then and require us to have contact info. You know how it is, always breathing down our got-damned necks.”

“Sure.” The kid nodded again. Smiling. Relaxed as he told Victor his phone number. Then the kid threw it into gear and started pulling away.

He crossed the parking lot slow and steady, like he didn’t have any reason to try to get away, like there was nothing at all to be worried about. Like he hadn’t just given his phone number to the guy who was trying to catch him.

Victor watched him cross the lot, pause at the intersection, and then make a slow turn and disappear down the street. Victor started formulating plans for how to catch them red-handed. He could feel himself slipping back into the old mindset. Special Agent Victor Jones. Playing it cool. Staying one step ahead. Putting things in place for the big take down.

A voice inside his head kept whispering the mantra that he’d stolen from a book by Eric Berne when he was a young psychology student at Rutgers. It was the same confident voice he used to hear in the old days, whenever he knew he’d finally found someone’s weakness and was going to exploit it, to crush the life out of the bad guys and prove he could get it done. The voice repeated, over and over: Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.