“My police chief?”
“Riddick. After your guys ran me off the road. It was just up here …” Hauck was expecting Moss to slow down at the road from the river where he had seen the line of trucks come out the day before, but he didn’t. He kept on going. “Even he brought his name up.”
“Riddick?”
Hauck nodded.
Moss just shrugged. “Well, I don’t know him.” He accelerated past the turnoff.
“What about someone named Watkins?” Hauck decided to ask.
“Watkins. Is he at Alpha, too?”
“He’s a farmer. In Templeton.”
“What’s your beef with him? He try to run you off the road, too?”
“No.” Hauck smiled, meeting Moss’s eyes through his shades. “His son died. It’s why we’re here.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean to be so glib. That’s too bad.”
“Apparently Watkins was interfering in some way against the oil development in town, so I thought his name might have come up. He seems to have made a lot of the local townspeople upset.”
“Sorry, I don’t get the chance to meet many of the local townspeople. But many of them are resistant to what we do at first. It’s natural they feel threatened; they think we’re going to leave their town like some barren landscape out of a Mad Max movie after we suck out whatever we came for. But soon they start to realize that neither is true. Every once in a while there’s an outlier, but they usually all come around. They usually figure out on their own they can make more in a month with us than they can in a decade growing sugar beets. Of course, it’s part of our job to persuade them of that.”
“Field work,” Hauck said. He thought he was getting the picture.
“Anyway, we’re here …” Moss put his turn signal on to make a right. There was a dirt road that cut right through someone’s crop field. Hauck saw a gate about fifty yards up the road, a guard in the security hut. Moss slowed and waved familiarly at the him, the guard waving him through. “Mr. Moss …”
“Sam.”
A white sign read, PRIVATE. RMM OIL AND DEVELOPMENT COMPANY VEHICLES ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. THEN ANOTHER SIGN FARTHER UP THAT READ, LOTS AB-42. ORDINANCE A-6. TOWN OF TEMPLETON, WELD COUNTY. TOM FLACK, COUNTY SUPERVISOR.
Hauck asked, “What’s all that?”
“RMM gobbledygook. ‘Hannah’ sounds a little easier. Nice and natural, right? You wouldn’t even know it’s here.”
“I’ll give you that.”
“Still, you wouldn’t believe what’s going on over a mile under us.”
Ahead, Hauck saw something glint in the sun. His first thought was that maybe it was the well, but as they got closer, he saw that whatever it was was moving.
And coming toward them.
Coming into focus, it turned out to be another convoy of trucks. The same metal tankers he had seen coming out on the road from the river and that had tried to run him off the road the day before. Polished and shiny. Heading toward the main road.
As they approached, Hauck felt a strange tension inside, thinking for a second if this had all been some kind of elaborate scheme by the RMM man to get him out here alone to drive home yesterday’s point. He looked at Moss, who had a vague look of amusement. “Look familiar?”
Hauck nodded. “Yes. They do.”
Moss smiled. “You seem worried, Mr. Hauck.”
“Not at all.” But he was. He was out here alone. Who knew if they were armed.
Moss pulled over to the side.
Six gleaming stainless steel tankers. RMM plastered on the sides.
Moss waved to the first driver as they went by.
Hauck felt a wave of relief inside. He said to Moss, “Looks like Hannah’s doing pretty well.”
“Five hundred barrels a day. Twenty-four/seven. All of which, five years back, would have been completely unobtainable. Wouldn’t have even known it was here. But anyway …” Moss pulled his car back on the dirt road. “Those aren’t for oil …”
“Not for oil …?” Hauck glanced in the side-view mirror and saw the last one rumble away. “What’s in them then?”
Hauck caught his own stare reflected in the RMM man’s sunglasses. “Those are for water, Mr. Hauck.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Water …?” The answer took Hauck by surprise. He looked at the RMM man, confused.
“A well like this uses upwards of a hundred thousand gallons of water a month,” Moss explained, “along with a mixture of sand and a few chemicals we call proppant. It’s part of the hydraulic fragmentation process. What you’re seeing there is the by-product of what has been pumped back out.”
“And where’s it going?” Hauck turned back around. Six tankers. That had to be thousands and thousands of gallons. Of by-product.
Moss shrugged. “It gets recirculated through a treatment plant that’s down by the river.”
So that’s where they were coming from. The trucks were carrying water from the river. Up to the wells. Then they headed back with the contaminated liquid. He and Dani had had it all wrong. “And then what?”
“And then it gets put back.” Moss turned his BMW through another wire gate, this one open. “So here we are …”
He pulled into the fenced-off well pad area, filled with several large prefab-looking structures: military-beige cylinders with tubes running to and from them that looked like they held pumps; a couple of Quonset huts; several large earthmoving tractors; and a built-up platform with a massive trestle rising from it.
There was virtually no sound other than a steady, hissing pumping: Ka-chung. Ka-chung.
Moss parked next to some other cars. They got out. Hauck stared at the impressive setup. Moss took two helmets from a storage bin. “C’mon, I’ll give you the five-dollar tour.”