The state environmental enforcement cruiser sat angled across the access road, its blue emergency roof lights turning against the wet bark of the trees. Two state troopers in storm coats stood by the tailgate of Ray Harlan’s county sedan, checking the inventory serial numbers on three green steel cylinders of commercial cutting fuel they had hauled out of his trunk. Harlan himself sat in the back of the patrol unit, his plastic poncho gone, his gray town-council suit smeared with orange ditch clay at the elbows. He did not look through the wire partition at the gatehouse. He sat with his hands cuffed behind his waist, his chin pressed against his necktie, staring down at the rubber floor mat.
Inside the cinder-block pump station, the air was warm, smelling of stale hydraulic grease, damp wool, and the hot copper taste of electric motors.
Carl stood by the metal workbench near the door, an unopened thermos of black coffee sitting on the oil-stained timber beside his goose gun. He had wiped down the barrel with a dry paper towel from the dispenser, but he hadn't put the weapon back in its case. He kept his shoulder leaned against the concrete doorframe, watching the two state laboratory technicians who had set up a portable sampling centrifuge on top of the intake housing.
"The test strip isn't clearing," Carl said quietly, his voice raspy from the cold air he'd swallowed during the drive up the mountain. He didn't turn around when I walked past him with a bundle of clean utility towels from the storage locker. "They dipped three vials from the North Fork diversion line. It’s coming up black on the sulfur index."
"That's the settled residue from last month," I told him, keeping my voice down so the state investigators at the folding table wouldn't look up from their logs. "The state attorney from Pine Creek told the trooper sergeant they’re running baseline tests on the whole aquifer. It’s going to take weeks to purge the lower gravel beds."
Carl looked down at the grease under his fingernails. "My daughter called from the hollow before the troopers cut the county repeaters. The school district had the bus garage padlocked by six. The superintendent had the emergency broadcast run on the county radio before the morning news even started." He reached out, his thumb touching the rough corner of my uniform sleeve where the seam had ripped against the culvert pipe. "Your diner’s going to need two front windows and a whole row of counter stools, Nora. Vance Miller tore the swivel mounts right out of the floorboards."
"The diner can wait on the insurance adjuster, Carl," I said.
At the far end of the long valve room, beneath a bank of humming mercury-vapor lamps that buzzed like hornets, Arthur Cole lay propped against a stack of dry calcium-hypochlorite bags.
A young state police paramedic was kneeling in the sawdust beside him, cutting the bloody wool sleeve away from Arthur's left shoulder with heavy surgical shears. The skin underneath was mottled, an angry, weeping purple where the solvent wash had eaten through the epidermis along the collarbone, but the bleeding from the torn flesh had stopped under the heavy pressure dressing the medic had taped across his chest. Arthur's eyes were open, clear and steady, watching the small, square digital audio recorder that sat between two state troopers on the master control desk.
The recorder was plugged into an external speaker, playing the late-night patrol loop Vance Miller had broadcast across the high-band channel four hours earlier.
Miller’s voice came out through the speaker cone, flat, harsh, and loud in the quiet concrete room: "...just clear the line behind the rail spur before the five o'clock telemetry ping. Harlan said the state test van isn't scheduled until Thursday afternoon. If the old man won't sign the transfer manifest, leave him in the valve pit. We'll tell the township board he slipped on the catwalk."
A tall woman in a dark gray state investigator's jacket reached out and hit the stop button on the deck. Her name was Agent Miller—no relation to Vance, though she had spent twenty minutes on the phone establishing that fact for the official transcript—and she had Ray Harlan’s manila folder spread open across a metal clipboard on her knees.
She looked over the top of her reading glasses at Arthur. "Mr. Cole, this cashier's check for eighty-four thousand dollars. It’s drawn on the county road maintenance discretionary fund, signed by Harlan as director. Did Miller ever present this to you as a department disbursement?"
Arthur shifted against the chemical bags, his breath hitching once as the medic tightened the compression wrap around his ribs. "Vance showed me the voucher stub three weeks ago," Arthur said, his gravelly voice filling the room without rising. "He told me it was an equipment grant for new high-pressure scrubbers at the rail siding. But the machinery never came off the flatcars. When I checked the freight bills at the depot, the car numbers didn't match the county road commission. They belonged to a private disposal outfit out of Ohio that lost its state operating license in April."
Agent Miller wrote two lines in her ledger, the steel nib of her pen scratching loud against the heavy paper. "And the shutoff notice? The one for the elementary school intake?"
"Harlan's courier brought that to the gatehouse at noon yesterday," Arthur said. He turned his head slightly, his gaze finding mine where I stood near the centrifugal test bench. "He told me to stamp it received, lock it in the courier drawer, and keep the main pump running on manual override until seven this morning. If I had turned that valve when the order came in, the backup pressure would have blown the seals on the illegal tanker connections at the siding. They needed twelve hours of steady line flow to flush the holding tanks into the creek before the state monitors picked up the drop in volume."
The room went completely quiet except for the deep, rhythmic thrum of the intake pumps drawing mountain water through the clean bypass pipes.
The investigator closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap. She stood up, tucked the metal clipboard under her arm, and looked down at Arthur. "The regional prosecutor has already filed emergency warrants in Pine Creek. Vance Miller is being held at the state barracks in Harrison on felony endangerment and tampering charges. Harlan will be arraigned before the magistrate at noon. You won't have to go back to that rail yard, Mr. Cole."
Arthur didn't smile. He looked down at his rough, oil-stained boots, then reached out with his uninjured right hand and touched the blue state-agency voucher resting on the bench beside him.
"I've lived sixty-one years in this hollow, Agent," Arthur said quietly. "My grandfather helped dig the footing for that concrete dam when the county built the reservoir in thirty-six. I don't need an arraignment to tell me what Vance Miller did to that creek. I need to know when the state’s going to bring the vacuum trucks up the hollow to scrape the lime sludge out of the lower culverts."