“Sam Noop from Keystone Drilling’s PR department,” Harry lied as he flashed his home-made ID badge to the foreman of the hydraulic fracking pod at the site of the old Red Rock Quarry. “I’m the new kid so they thought I should see a site myself. I mean, imagine if I’m at one of those town hall meetings and some irate landowner asks if I have ever seen a fracking pod and I say no.”
Trooper Cirba had phoned Harry that morning and told him to take the morning off while he dealt with departmental stuff. Not being one to lay around, Harry made a quick trip to WilkesBarre where he had breakfast in Starbucks while he downloaded some images from Keystone Drilling’s website. He then made a quick trip to the Wyoming Valley OfficeMax where he bought an X-ACTO knife and a thermal laminator. Total price of the fake ID – $210. There was going to be a lot of lying done this day. He’d have to tell the truth all weekend to make up for it.
The foreman was delighted to see Mr Noop and told him so.
“Call me Sam, please.”
“OK,” the foreman said, pumping Harry’s hand. “My name is John McEntee but everybody calls me Mac. It’s a change to have a visitor that’s not an inspector or a protesting trespasser.”
“Well, I can assure you, Mac, I’m neither of those, and if I do my job right you won’t be getting anymore protestors.”
“That would be dandy,” Mac said in a Texas drawl, “but I’ll believe that when I see it.”
He motioned Harry into his golf cart and sped down the quarter mile access road. Mac was one of those disconcerting drivers that looked at the person he was talking to and not the road. He drove uncomfortably fast and both their voices vibrated with the bumps.
“You get a lot of protesters trying to sneak in?”
“Oh yeah,” Mac said as he drove into a pothole so fast that Harry had to check to see if all of his fillings were intact. “Every hippy do-gooder with a camcorder in the tri-state area has tried to get in here.”
“How do you keep them out?”
“Hell, we’ve got the most sophisticated surveillance system outside of Fort Knox. Video, motion and thermal surveillance of the entire perimeter, and a security team that costs the payroll almost as much as my roughnecks.”
“‘Roughnecks’?”
“Oil well drillers. How green are you, son?”
“My last job was with a video game company,” Harry lied. “I had to prove that violence in games didn’t make violent kids.”
“Oh my, that sounds like a tough sell.”
“Not as tough as fracking, I think.”
“Yeah well, what do they say around here?”
Both men in unison said: “That’s no lie.”
* * *
The first thing that struck Harry was the air. It was a windless day at the site and the air felt like a bus garage with the windows closed and the engines on. The second thing was the noise. Both men’s conversation had cranked up to shouting by the time they reached the foreman’s office.
“I hadn’t expected it to be so loud,” Harry said, still shouting, even though the noise was minimized in the soundproofed trailer.
“This is a serious industrial site, Sam. In each well we’re drilling vertically a mile and a quarter and then horizontally a mile plus. After that we pump 200 million gallons of water, 20,000 tons of sand, and 4 million gallons of fracking fluid all the way down to the shale at 13,000 psi. It’s hard to do that quietly.”
“It’s just that the watercolour picture of a pod on the wall at headquarters looks so… nice. I wasn’t expecting it to be so industrial.”
“That’s what you get for believing your own PR. The truth is, if people saw how heavy duty a fracking site is they’d freak.” Mac handed Harry a hard hat and a high-vis vest. “Come on I’ll give you the twenty-five cent tour.”
They got back into the golf cart and drove to the centre of the site where an orange metal structure stuck 110 feet in the air. “This is our first well,” Mac shouted over the din. “This one has already been fracked and started producing methane about a month ago. Over there,” he said, pointing to a larger tower, “is a well that we are still drilling vertical, and beyond that is our third well, where horizontal drilling is underway.”
“How many wells do you plan to sink?”
“Optimum penetration is eight fracks per square mile, so this site, theoretically, should produce twelve wells, but the old quarry cuttings screws up the geometry a bit.”
They drove around to the north edge of the site where there were at least fifty silos and large industrial water tanks. “This is where we store all of the on-site water, sand, and fracking chemicals.”
“Everyone who hears I am doing this asks me what’s in the chemicals.”
“Ah ha,” Mac said, tapping the side of his nose. “That’s the big secret and, thanks to the EPA, I don’t have to tell you.”
“One of the managers that works for the company that makes the fracking fluid drank some at a press conference.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Well, let me say right now – I wouldn’t do that.” Mac slammed on the brakes, making Harry grab on to the sides of the cart to stop himself from being pitched out the front. “Hey, Ducheck,” Mac shouted to a worker who was working a machine that was pouring sand from a silo into a vehicle that looked like a cross between a forklift and a dump truck. He was hardly visible behind the cloud of sand dust. “What you doing working the blender?”
Ducheck shut off the flow and then hollered back: “Carter quit, and I’m too old for this shit, boss.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll look into it.”
“You get much of a staff turnover?”
“With the newbies, yeah. We try to hire all of our non-skilled labour locally but the new generation is allergic to hard work. Half of ’em only last a week – if that. Shame, really; if they were smart they’d learn this trade. Keystone is going to drill ten thousand wells in the next five years.”
“You think that many?” Harry asked.
“If there’s gas down there then oil companies will bring it up. It’s what we do.”
He drove to the far side of the site to a rectangular pool a quarter the size of Ice Lake. It was half filled with greenish water.
“This is the flowback reservoir,” Mac said as he pulled the bandana he had around his neck over his mouth and nose.
“And you’re covering your mouth, why?” Harry said nervously.
“Off the record?”
“Sure.”
“Radioactivity.”
“What?” Harry pulled his T-shirt up over his nose.
“Well, I don’t think the water is actually radioactive, but it could be. There’s radioactive stuff down there, so it might come up with the backflow.”
“Why don’t you test it?”
“You guys at Keystone won’t let us. If people found out we were bringing up radioactive water – well, you guys in PR would have a difficult time of it.”
“So you decide not to know?”
“That’s the directive.”
* * *
As they drove back to the south edge of the site Mac lowered his neckerchief. Harry let go of his T-shirt and straightened up like a turtle popping his head out of his shell.
“I heard that the farmer over there is suing, saying that your casing went bad and contaminated his water,” Harry said.
“There has been no water contamination,” Mac instantly replied. “That is the official word.”
“What’s the unofficial word?”
“You know perfectly well, Mr Noop, that there is no ‘unofficial word’.”
Harry read the manager’s tone well enough not to press the point.
“I gotta go over to the trailers and wake a couple of guys up.”
“Your workers live on site?” Harry asked.
“No, that would be against local zoning but we have a few bunks for the truck drivers. Especially the waste team – they come all the way from the middle of Jersey.”
Mac zoomed around a set of three trailers, then hopped out and banged on one of the doors. There was no answer so he let himself in.
There was a bin in front of the cart. Harry toyed with the idea of having a look around in the garbage – then he came up with a better plan. He put the cart in gear and ran into the bin. Rubbish was projected ten feet out in front of the now-dented bin and Harry quickly began to pick it up. There were lots of beer cans and old McDonald’s packaging but he was looking for something smaller and, just as Mac came out of the trailer, he found it.
“What the hell happened here?”
“Sorry,” Harry said, still trying to clean up his mess. “I dropped my phone and accidentally put the cart into gear.”
Mac chuckled. “Leave it. I’ll get one of the newbies to clean this up.”
Harry found an old newspaper and wiped his hands, then got back into the cart. “I think I’ve seen enough.”
“A quick trip to a pod and you’re hankerin’ to get back to your office, eh?”
“Yeah.” Harry smiled. “Something like that.”
* * *
Back at the road, Harry said: “Hey, don’t mention to the office I was here. I told them I did a tour of the Tobyhanna pod a month ago and I kinda didn’t.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” Mac said as he extended his hand.
Harry pulled back, showing his ketchup-covered fingers but Mac smiled, grabbed his hand and shook.
“It’s a dirty job out here, Harry. A little trash on your mitts ain’ gonna make no difference.”
* * *
It wasn’t until Harry was driving away that his heart began to pound. He didn’t dare stop until he got to the Five Mile Road. He was looking for a place to pull over when he saw the entrance to the Horseshoe. He pulled into the forest and parked his car under the looming oaks – maybe in the same spot Big Bill had parked in his last hour on earth. On the seat next to him he dumped the pile of rubbish from his pocket and sorted through the empty cigarette packs, used butts, old soda lids, and straws until he found what he was looking for. It was a small Ziploc, about the same size as the birch leaf that Harry had picked up along with it. It was clear – the residue of the white powder inside was easily visible. Stencilled on it with a Sharpie were the words, “MOUNTAIN SNOW”.
* * *
Back at the lake, Harry phoned Cirba and told him what he found out during his quasi-illegal activities. Cirba’s hesitation in responding made Harry ask, “Did I do bad, boss?”
Cirba said he would have to think about that and then filled Harry in on what he had found in Wilkes-Barre.
“Big Bill was indeed enrolled in the real estate license class and was due to take his test this week. His teacher was very fond of him. She took the news of his death hard.”
“Anything else?”
“No,” Cirba said. “Take the night off. I think we both need to think about this thing you probably shouldn’t have done today.”
“You mad at me?”
“Not sure yet. I’ll see you in the morning,” Cirba said and hung up without saying goodbye.
“Oops,” Harry said to himself as he put the kettle on the stove. He was still a bit buzzy from his undercover work and needed a cup of tea. He didn’t bother with his usual teapot ritual – he just popped a bag in a mug and poured in boiling water. While waiting for the tea to brew he took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trouser legs. Then he brought his infusion down to the lakeside, where he plopped his toes into the cool Ice Lake.
Now that he was calming down he mentally kicked himself for his cowboy stunt. When you work outside the legal system it’s usual to pull crap like he did today, but as an ex-cop he should have known better and at least cleared it with Cirba. On the other hand, in case the shit hits the fan, Cirba can honestly say he had no knowledge of what Harry was going to do. But was it worth it? What did finding a baggie of speed in the trash of a long-haul trucker really tell him? Was the trucker supplying stuff or was he just trying to stay awake on the road? Like everything else in this case, the more he knew the more it added up to a whole lot of nothing.
The tiny fish that were nibbling on his toes were scared away by the long shadow that crept up behind him.
“You got gin in that cup?” MK asked.
“No, just tea. I had a rough day.”
“Me too, that’s why I’m drinking.”
Harry turned. MK was standing in her white nurse’s uniform with the sun radiating behind her. In both her hands was a bottle. “Wouldn’t you prefer one of these?”
It only took Harry a second to inspect the contents of his mug before he tipped it into the lake. MK kicked off her shoes and socks, rolled up her trouser legs, sat next to Harry and handed him a beer. “A beer and an Ice Lake sunset – it’s the finest antidote ever found to a tough day.”
“What was tough about your day?”
“Car wreck with kids inside.”
“Shit,” Harry said, “were they hurt bad?”
“The kids’ll be OK but their mother… She didn’t make it.”
“Oh God. How do you deal with that?”
“Hugs,” MK said. Her voice cracked a little.
Harry put his arm around her, and she dropped her head on his shoulder.
They stayed that way for a while as the sky turned orange and dipped beneath the trees.
Harry broke the silence. “Isn’t there a yang to this?”
“Huh?”
“Yin and yang. I’d bet you’ve had just as many days where you saved the kid’s mom.”
MK kept her head on his shoulder and said: “More, actually.” She straightened up. “I know, it’s just you have to tell someone else about it once in a while. Sorry.”
“No probs. Glad I was here to help, ma’am.”
“Me too,” MK said and kissed him on the cheek before she stood up. “But the lake and the sunset are only two ingredients in the bad day cure. There’s one more.”
“Alcohol?”
“Oh, well yeah, but that’s understood. No, the other ingredient is overeating.”
“The Hillside Tavern?”
“Eh, I’m not up for a crowd tonight and I could do without a bar-room brawl.”
“Next time your honour is sullied, I’ll let it slide.”
“Good, but let’s not take any chances and eat here.”
* * *
MK had all the fixings in her fridge and they jumped into action like a couple who had been together for years. Harry cooked the burgers on the grill, while MK boiled up the corn and set the picnic table with proper plates, a tablecloth, and candles.
“To the end of bad days,” MK said as they clinked beer bottles.
“Until the next one.”
MK acquiesced with a shrug, picked up an ear of the all-white corn by the ends and rolled it on top of a whole stick of butter. When she had finished the butter sported a melted trough.
“I can’t believe you just did that.”
“Hey,” MK said, salting her dripping ear of corn. “This corn comes from old man Jeric’s farm. It’s the finest in the state and it deserves all the butter you can put on it. She pushed the butter dish towards him. “The Keller family are a family of rollers. My corn, my butter, my rules – roll.”
Harry did as he was told; then, post-rolling, he too salted. The corn was as sweet and tender as he had ever tasted, and his moans said as much.
Dinner continued with small talk until MK asked: “So what made your day so tough?”
“Compared to yours,” Harry said inaudibly as he was finishing off his burger, “I got nothin’ to complain about. My worry is that I think I succeeded in pissing off Trooper Cirba.”
“Ooh, not good. I’ve seen Ed mad – it’s not pretty. Whatja do?”
“Not sure I should tell you, in case they make you testify against me.”
“Oh, I knew it. Deep down you are a bad boy.”
“And you like bad boys?”
“All the girls like bad boys – everybody knows that.”
So Harry related the story of his undercover work.
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”
“I think my mistake was the fake ID. As soon as I did that I entered a grey area.”
“Could Ed get in trouble for what you did?”
“At the worst, maybe. At the least, anything I learned will be inadmissible in court. The real worry is the possibility of this tainting: the fruit of the poisonous tree.”
“Poisonous tree?”
“It means that sometimes one illegal act can nullify the whole investigation.”
“But it sounds to me like you didn’t find anything other than an empty baggie.”
“That’s the point,” Harry said. “It would be a shame if finding that little baggie let a killer go free.”
“I can’t see how that could happen.”
“You never can until it does. I once found a pair of underwear in a trash can outside a rapist’s house. Judge said I didn’t have a warrant to go through his trash, and he walked.”
“You sure he was guilty?”
“He raped a 16-year-old girl two months later.”
“Oh my god,” MK said so quickly that the words seemed to escape from her mouth.
“Yeah. I’ve had bad days too.”
“Well, you know the antidote to that.”
“Let’s see if I remember the formula,” Harry said, throwing off his funk. “The sunset is gone, we have already overeaten and drunk quite a bit.”
“The only thing left…” MK said, as she stood with a wicked little smile on her face and started walking towards the shore, “is a dip.”
There was just enough illumination from next door’s floodlight to see the outline of MK as she pulled off her Eagles sweatshirt and shimmied out of her sweatpants. Harry noted she was wearing nothing underneath as he watched her shallow dive into the lake.
* * *
“Well?” she called when she broke the surface.
It was all the invitation Harry needed. He practically fell down the hill as he tried to simultaneously disrobe and jog towards the lake. Despite MK’s smooth entrance into the water Harry decided to jump, not being familiar with the depth.
The water wasn’t as cold as Harry thought it was going to be. Relative to the air it was hardly a shock at all. Harry looked but MK was gone. As he was spinning around trying to find her she popped up inches in front of him. She kissed him and wrapped her naked wet body around him, forcing them to submerge, still kissing. Underwater it seemed like a game of chicken. Who would be the first to come up for air? MK broke first with a laugh that she started underwater and continued as she pierced the surface.
“This is turning out to be a very good day,” Harry said as he emerged inches from her face.
“Funny, I was just going to say the same thing. One of the annoying things about my day was that all of the bad things interfered with me thinking about an important internal dilemma I’ve been having.”
“What dilemma is that?”
She turned and began to slowly sidestroke back to shore. “I’ve been trying to decide if maybe I should find out whether the bed in your cottage is really as noisy as people say.” She broke into a fast freestyle swim to shore with Harry close behind.
* * *
If the lake felt relatively warm going in, the air was freezing coming out. Both of them hurriedly grabbed their clothes and sprinted to Harry’s cottage. Inside, dripping on the floor, MK darted down the corridor, opened the linen closet, threw Harry a towel and wrapped one around herself. She fell into his arms, half in passion, half rubbing for warmth. They kissed again, and MK walked slowly backwards towards the bedroom. Then a phone rang.
MK stopped and said: “I have to get that.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m on call at the hospital.”
She slipped past him and searched around in the pile that contained both of their clothes. Harry walked behind her feeling the moment slipping away with every step. MK found a phone and answered it. “Meredith Keller… who…” MK looked at the phone and presented it to Harry, “This is yours.”
Harry didn’t want to answer the phone. He wanted to get back to the embracing and the walking slowly to the bedroom but that passion had drained from the house. So why not answer the phone? If only to know who it was so he could murder them later.
“Hello? Yes, this is he. Who? Oh, hello. Are you all right? Of course. Can we do this tomorrow? I see. Where are you? No, I promise. Yes, I’ll be right there.”
“‘I’ll be right there’?” MK said crossing her arms across her chest. “Now? Really?”
“I’m soooo sorry, MK,” Harry said, while picking through the pile of clothes for his underwear, “but I have to go.”
“And what out there is more important than me wearing nothing but a towel in your bedroom?”
Harry almost laughed at that, but MK’s tone was not a jovial one.
“I-I have to meet a stripper.”