"Let them know," I said, pressing the cold towel against my eyebrow until the throbbing settled.
I turned and pushed open the diner door, the cold mountain rain hitting my face like a handful of thrown gravel. Cole followed close behind, his boots splashing through the brown puddles that choked the diner lot.
The two state technicians stepped down from the rear vehicle, their yellow rain slickers bright against the leaden sky, carrying two heavy Pelican cases filled with glass vacuum vials and brass sampling rods.
"Put the gear in the back of my truck," I called out over the roar of the downpour, pointing my cane toward the rusted cab of my nineteen-seventy-nine flatbed parked beneath the pines. "If Vance wants to take this ground, he’s going to have to do it while the state seals are still wet on his own pipe."
CHAPTER 3: The Ditch That Trapped Them
The transfer case on the old International shrieked as I slammed the floor lever into four-wheel low, the heavy iron gears biting hard through forty years of road grit.
Cold mud spewed in two brown rooster-tails past the cab mirrors, hammering the rusted steel bed where Marcus Cole and his two field technicians clung to the stake rails. Behind us, the diner lot vanished behind a gray curtain of mountain rain, but out on the county blacktop, two miles south toward town, the high-pitched pulse of a distant siren began to cut through the thunder. Vance had reached his radio desk.
I didn't take the paved road into the valley. I threw the wheel hard left, dropping the flatbed's dual rear wheels over the limestone lip of the abandoned timber trail.
Branches scraped the cracked windshield like dry fingers. My left leg throbbed with every heavy bounce, the deep ache in my surgically pinned hip radiating straight up through my spine. The steering box had four inches of dead play in the center, and every deep water pocket tried to jerk the wheel out of my calloused hands, but the truck held. My father had laid the corduroy cedar logs under this road in nineteen-sixty-two, and no matter how much water poured off the ridge, the timber bed beneath the muck kept six tons of iron from sinking to the axles.
Ten minutes down the spur, the timber trail leveled out along the western bluff overlooking the railroad cut. Below us, separated by fifty yards of scrub oak and blackberry brambles, sat the rear of Sheriff Harlan Vance’s personal maintenance compound.
It was a windowless, red-iron Butler building encircled by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with three strands of rusted barbed wire. Through the rain, I could see what Vance had been hiding behind the county's official vehicles: three flatbed lowboys painted industrial yellow, carrying the black-and-silver stencils of Blue Ridge Drainage Solutions. Beside them, parked under a lean-to sheet of corrugated tin, sat two heavy Caterpillar track excavators, their hydraulic booms caked with dark, oily silt.
"Pull up along the culvert headwall!" Cole shouted through the cab's sliding rear window, his slicker dripping water onto my neck. "Don't cross the fence line! The public easement stops ten feet from the concrete wing!"
I stood on the brake pedal with both feet, bringing the flatbed to an abrupt halt against a cedar stump. The engine shuddered, belching a thick plume of black diesel exhaust before idling down with its familiar, uneven clatter.
The two state technicians didn't wait for the mud to settle. They dropped off the tailgate, carrying their heavy yellow Pelican cases straight into the swollen ditch. Their rubber boots sank calf-deep into the gray slurry running through the ditch line, but they kept their footing, snapping open the case latches while Cole scrambled down the bank behind them.
I grabbed my walnut cane, pushed open the driver's door, and slid down into the mud.
The stench hit me before my boots touched bottom. It wasn't the clean, earthy rot of swamp muck or decaying oak leaves. It was the sharp, chemical burn of industrial degreaser—an eye-watering vapor that smelled of gasoline, burnt machine oil, and chlorinated solvent.
Where the ditch water met the mouth of the four-foot concrete culvert, the surface didn't foam white like rain runoff. It rolled in thick, iridescent swirls of oily yellow and dull purple, clinging to the cattails and choking the water grass in a coating of greasy scum.
"Look at that sheen," Cole muttered, pulling a heavy brass sampling rod from the first case. His face was pale beneath his dripping canvas hat, his jaw tight. "That’s raw trichloroethylene. It’s straight out of an industrial parts washer."
"The junction housing is on the north wing," I said, pointing my cane toward a square steel box bolted directly into the concrete wall.