“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.”
Twenty-eight
Entering from the north, I walked more than halfway across the crest of the dam before I leaned against the guardrail and looked down the lighted spillway that sloped to the plunge pool. In a planned outflow, water would collect in the pool before brimming over the sill into the stilling basin, and in controlled volume it would pour from there into the dry riverbed.
I didn’t see anything suspicious. But of course I didn’t know whether the scene before me was as it should be; I had no idea what I was looking for.
Often it seemed to me that my psychic gifts ought to have been bestowed upon someone with a higher IQ than mine.
On the lake side of the road, the regularly spaced lamps built into the guardrail cast some light upon the water that lapped gently at the tainter gates. But only ten or fifteen feet out, the lake went black, an inky immensity in this moonless, starless night.
In certain old movies set in World War II, Navy frogmen would approach a target underwater—bridge supports, ships in harbor—and surface just long enough to plant explosives. I didn’t know how many well-trained scuba divers would be required to attach more than a ton of C-4 to the dam, though probably at least fifty, each of them burdened with forty pounds of the stuff, schooling like fish. No. Impractical.
A boat was more likely than frogmen. Anyone guarding the dam would hear the boat coming, especially in this quiet. But they most likely wouldn’t be able to stop it in time, not just by hoping to pick off the pilot with sniper fire. If the boat had an electric motor, it could approach silently, raising no alarm.
Sonny and Billy hadn’t mentioned an attack from the water, but if they had considered an airplane loaded with C-4, they must have thought of a boat.
When I turned from the lake, I saw movement past the south end of the dam, beyond the last lights, a lesser darkness in the deeper dark. Squinting brought no further clarity, only the same impression of restless motion.
Reaching beneath my sport coat, keeping one hand on the Glock in its holster, I walked south to have a closer look. When I was about twenty feet from the end of the dam, the visitors’ shining eyes turned on me, three pairs mirroring the crest lamps, intently staring. As I came to a halt, they ventured a few steps out of the shadows.
During the past twenty-one months, coyotes had been a recurring presence in my life, beginning on the night before Stormy’s death, when three of them had stalked me outside a rusting Quonset hut on the abandoned grounds of a commune where once had lived people who believed that extraterrestrials had created human beings and that the ETs would soon return. Just four months before I found myself on the crest of the Malo Suerte Dam, I’d been through hard and desperate times in Magic Beach, California, during which I had been threatened by coyotes in packs.
On one such occasion, Annamaria had been with me, walking the wild rim of Hecate’s Canyon in Magic Beach, when a pack approached with such an obvious intention to make dinner of us that they should have been wearing bibs. Usually coyotes fear humans and keep their distance from us. A loud noise will frighten them off, as will a tossed stone that doesn’t even hit them. But the pack that came out of Hecate’s Canyon had exhibited no fear whatsoever.
I’d had no gun that night, because I’d loathed guns then as I did now. And we were on a greensward where I couldn’t find any of the impromptu weapons to which I often resorted: buckets, brooms, garden rakes, Granny Smith apples, cats that when thrown will reliably take out their fury not on the thrower but instead on the person at whom they’re thrown. I didn’t like throwing cats or animals of any kind, as far as that goes, but every once in a while, in a life-and-death situation, there was nothing to be done but grab a cat and throw it, or an angry ferret.
Anyway, as it turned out, I wasn’t without a weapon, after all, because Annamaria proved to be a weapon herself. She had said that the coyotes were not only what they appeared to be, and she’d stepped toward them instead of cowering, unfazed by their threatening demeanor. She spoke to them not as if they were bloodthirsty beasts, but rather as if they were naughty children who had gone astray and needed
to be put on the right path again.
Now, months later, as the lantern-eyed pack crept onto the crest of Malo Suerte Dam, daring to stalk me, I didn’t want to shoot them. I didn’t shout for help from Sonny and Billy, who were beyond the outlet-control building and not in my line of sight, because I didn’t want the coyotes to be shot by anyone. I’d had enough of killing to last me a lifetime. I might have to do it again, maybe more than once, but I didn’t have to do it here and now.
Ears flattened close to their skulls, teeth bared, hackles raised, tails tucked, they tentatively approached me, every muscle in their lean bodies taut. They were bony specimens, in need of a good meal; but it would be a mistake to conclude that they were weak. Were I not to use my pistol, just one coyote would be enough to finish me if it could not be frightened away.
I spoke to them as Annamaria had spoken to the toothy crew on the greensward near Hecate’s Canyon. “You aren’t only what you appear to be. You do not belong here.”
The leader of the pack halted, and the other two drew nearer to it, closing up what had been a three-prong attack pattern. Their pointy ears were no longer back against their heads, but were instead pricked, as though they were interested in what I said.