Below Zero (37 page)

Joe threw a leg over the saddle and tried to balance himself without having to hold on to Nate.

Joe said, “I was hoping you’d have a car or a truck.”

“Nope. I’m actually starting to like this thing.”

“Are Stenko and Robert still here?”

Nate nodded. “They were when I left them.”

“And my phone?”

Nate turned and grinned. “I found a bread truck at the truck stop gassing up. I opened the back and tossed it inside amongst the buns. The last I saw of it, the truck was headed south on I-Twenty-five toward Cheyenne.”

Joe nodded. He figured he and Nate would have no more than fifteen minutes before Portenson realized what had happened and turned back around.

 

 

STENKO WATCHED THROUGH PAIN-SLITTED EYES AS HIS SON emerged from the bar with a grin on his face. Robert twirled something on a string or chain. He’d been gone a long time, it seemed. Stenko had taken the rest of the morphine, and the spent plastic pill bottles lay open on the floor of the car near his feet.

Robert threw the door open and jumped in. He was ebullient. He said, “So are you ready for one great and glorious last act?” His smile was maniacal.

Stenko grunted. It hurt to talk.

“Hey,” Robert said, suddenly alarmed. “Where’s that rancher?”

“Got away.”

“You let him get away? You old fool. What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry,” Stenko moaned. But he wasn’t. Ten minutes before, he’d turned to Walter and told him to get the hell out of there. The rancher had asked about his truck. Stenko had said, “Run, you idiot, before my son comes back and puts a bullet in your head.”

Reluctantly, Walter had gotten out and done a stiff-legged jog in the general direction of the interstate highway.

“He’s going to talk,” Robert said. “I was going to make sure he kept quiet.”

“He overpowered me,” Stenko lied. “He’s a strong old fart.”

“Christ, is there
anything
you can do right?”

Stenko thought:
The role reversal is now complete.

He said, “Guess not.”

 

 

 

“SO THE TOUGH THING for me,” Robert said, starting the motor and backing out of the gravel parking lot, “has been to reconcile myself to the fact that once again you’re not going to come through for me. I have to wrap my mind around the fact that all the money is out of reach and we can’t use it to save the planet your generation trashed and left us with. You’d think after thirty years of living around you, I’d be used to crushing disappointment, right? But damn if I still don’t keep coming. This time, you really had me for a while. But in the end, well, in the end it’s like it always has been. A big fat zero.”

“You’ve got some cash,” Stenko said, his voice thin. “And we did some things.”

Robert swung out on the dark road. A passing streetlight reflected blue on his bare teeth. “Yeah, we did some things. But in the end, Dad, it was just jerking off. There were no bold strokes. No real blows were struck. Christ, you ended up with a bigger footprint than when we
started.
”

“That’s because you were keeping track. You saw it as a way to get all my money,” Stenko said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth.

“That’s right,” Robert said. “Blame me. Blame your son. Just like always. Blame your kids while you make the world a worse place to live.”

Stenko reached over and put his hand on Robert’s shoulder. He said, “I don’t want to argue anymore, son. I don’t. You can say whatever you want. I’ll take it. I don’t have the strength to fight.”

Robert shook his hand off and it dropped to the seat. He drove silently, pouting. Robert was always the angriest when Stenko said something true about him. But now was not the time to remind Robert of that.

Stenko said, “The fight went out of me when April died in that crash back there. That poor girl. I had my chance with her, to do something good. And look what happened.”

Robert snorted, said, “Her again. You’re just like you were about Carmen. Have you ever thought about maybe using some of those feelings toward the kid you have who’s still alive? The
real
son? Not the dead daughter or
fake
daughter?”

“Really, son. I don’t want to fight.”

More pouting.

Changing the subject, Stenko said, “What was that thing you were twirling when you came out of the bar?”

“Oh this?” Robert said, handing it over, his smile returning. “This little old thing?”

Stenko took it. It was a large laminated card strung from a lanyard. He pulled it close to his eyes. There was a photo on it, a magnetic strip on the back, and a name: LUCY ANNETTE TUREK.

“Who is Lucy Turek?” Stenko asked.

“She’s my new girlfriend,” Robert said.

“That was quick.”

“Dad, if you haven’t noticed, I’m a pretty good catch.”

Stenko bit his tongue. Then: “What does she have to do with this last act you mentioned?”

Robert cleared town and turned onto a service road that went north. Old cottonwoods laced their branches over the top of the road and formed a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a faint glow of light.

Robert said, “Here’s what I was thinking. That big coal-fired power plant must have a lot of local employees. It turns out they have three hundred workers, and it made sense to me that a few of them would be in the bar closest to the plant. Damned if I wasn’t right.

“So I sit at the bar and start talking to a pretty one next to me. That’s her keycard you hold in your hand: Lucy Turek. I start asking her about what it’s like to work at the power plant, what she does, blah-blah-blah. Like I’m interested in getting a job there myself or something. She answers every question. Finally, when she begins to trust me because she wants me to take her home, I ask her how much access she has to the plant. That really gets her going, because she tells me how she’s got a senior clearance that can get her into the control room and she can even take the security elevators to the top of the boilers, which apparently is some kind of big deal. I get her to explain to me how the power plant works, and she goes on and on and I keep buying her drinks. I don’t really care how it works. I know what it does: it consumes tons of fossil fuel and churns out tons of carbon into the atmosphere that will eventually heat up our planet and kill us all.”

Stenko looked from the key card to Robert and back. The glow at the end of the tree tunnel was getting brighter.

Robert said, “So I ask her, kind of playful, how she’d get back at the company if they fired her for no good reason. Lucy is kind of feisty and I’m sure she’d be a little tiger in the sack, so I knew if they fired her, she wouldn’t take it lying down. So she tells me about these gigantic boilers they have. Five-thousand-ton hanging boilers made up of miles of superheated tubing that rise over three stories tall. That’s where they heat the water to drive the turbines or some kind of shit like that. Anyway, Lucy said the boilers have to run on negative pressure. That didn’t make any sense to me either, but I kept pressing. Finally, she got to the point. If the doors to the hanging boilers are opened and the pressure escapes—the boilers fail. That shuts down the plant in a serious way. Millions of people would lose all their power, and the company would lose millions of dollars while all the repairs were made. It might take down the entire power grid. It could take them days or weeks to get the thing running again. That’s how she said she’d get back at them—in the wallet.”

Stenko nodded.

Robert gestured toward the trees through the windshield. “And for however long it took, the planet would get a break. Carbon wouldn’t be pouring up through the stacks. The offset would be tons and tons of carbon not going into the atmosphere.”

Stenko said, “Lucy told you a lot.”

“As I said, she likes me. She’s my new girlfriend, even though I’ll probably never see her again.”

“And she gave you her key card?” Stenko asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Robert said, not looking over. “I followed her into the restroom and hit her head against the wall and took the lanyard from around her neck.”

“My God,” Stenko said. And as he said it, they cleared the tunnel of trees and the massive power plant filled the northern sky, lights blazing.

“So if you ever meet Lucy Turek,” Robert said, “be sure to thank her. She’s the sweetie who made it possible for you to go out in a great blaze of glory. Because of her, you may just be able to get to below zero after all.”

The headlights lit up a ten-foot chain-link fence that now bordered the road. Ahead, Stenko could see a dark guardhouse. There was a metal lockbox with a slit to slide the keycard in to open the steel-mesh gate.

“She said there wouldn’t be a guard this late,” Robert said. “Cool. Now all you have to do is go inside wearing that lanyard. You can get anywhere you want to by swiping that card through the readers. Find the security elevators and go to the top floor. That’s where the hatches to the hanging boilers are located. If someone tries to stop you, just shove them off the catwalk. The boiler hatch opens by turning a big wheel, according to my sweet Lucy. Open the hatch and jump in. The open door and the presence of your body will shut down the whole system and you’ll leave this planet as a hero.”

“Are you coming in with me?” Stenko asked.

Robert said, “Are you kidding? This isn’t
my
problem you’re trying to solve.”

Stenko sighed, “Of course not.”

“Think of what you’re doing as a gift to me and the younger generation,” Robert said. “After a lifetime of committing environmental crimes, you’re sacrificing yourself for us. For me. It would make me happy, Dad. It’s the one thing you can do for me to make up for everything else. You can go out a martyr for Mother Earth.”

Stenko’s eyes flooded with tears. They were tears from the pure physical pain that laced his guts, but also because of April and her innocence and how she was gone. But most of all the tears were because of Robert and what he’d turned into.

“Are you really this broken?” Stenko asked. Oh, how it hurt to talk.

Robert glanced over. His eyes were cold. “What are you babbling about, old man?”

“You’re not very sentimental, are you?”

“I learned from the best about selfishness, Dad.”

Robert looked up at the rearview mirror and made a face. “There’s that damned single headlight behind us again. What’s up with
that
?”

Sheridan rolled over and yawned and remembered she was in a hospital and why she was there. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, then looked over at Lucy, who was still sleeping, and her mother, who’d finally dozed off.

There had been a sound that had jarred her awake. She looked down the hall, assuming it was a nurse or staffer who’d passed by, but she couldn’t see anyone. She stood and looked out the window at the night and the still parking lot below.

Then she heard it again: the rapping of knuckles on glass.

She turned and saw him, a cop in a khaki uniform on the landing of the emergency exit that went to the stairs. He gestured at her and pointed at the handle of the door. She thought he looked vaguely familiar, and when she opened the door she recognized him from earlier that day. He’d been one of the deputies who’d arrived at the scene of April/Janie Doe’s crash.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, stepping into the hallway. His hat was clamped under his arm and he carried a plastic grocery sack. “They shut the elevator down to visitors at night, I just found out. Anyway, the sheriff sent me over here to talk to Agent Portenson and Agent Coon, but I don’t see them anywhere.”

“They’re gone,” Sheridan’s mom said from her chair. “Is there anything we can do?”

The deputy shrugged. “Is Joe Pickett here?”

“He’s with them,” her mom said.

The deputy’s face fell. He clearly didn’t know what he should do next. He said, “We found some personal items in the wreckage of that car. The sheriff bagged them up and asked me to deliver them to the FBI, thinking they might help somehow. Now I’m not sure who to give them to.”

“What kind of personal items?” her mom asked cautiously.

The agent flushed. “Just some feminine things, you know. Underwear, tampons, that kind of thing.” When he said the words, he looked away from Sheridan. “Plus, a pocketbook thing. Do either of you know a girl named Vicki?”

Sheridan felt the skin of her scalp pull back. “No,” she said, “but I think I know where she is.”

Her mom asked, “What’s her full name?”

“Damn, I forgot. Let me look it up,” the deputy said, digging into the plastic bag and pulling out a small leather purse with a metal clasp. He opened the clasp and drew out a small stack of papers, photos, and cards. “This here is a library card from Chicago, Illinois. It says it belongs to Vicki Burgess.”

Her mom covered her open mouth with her hand.

Even though it seemed like alarm bells were going off inside her head, Sheridan said to the deputy, “Can we look at what else is in the purse?”

Thinking:
Who is Vicki Burgess?

The deputy straightened the stack of papers to put them back into the purse when he said, “Oh, there’s a photo. Two girls in it. I bet one of them is this Vicki Burgess . . .”

Nate leaned forward on the handlebars of the dirt bike and opened it up. Joe bent with him. The electric steel-mesh gate Stenko and Robert had just passed through was closing. Joe squinted over Nate’s shoulder as the bike sped up, trying to gauge whether they could really get through the opening in time. He didn’t think so.

He hollered,
“Stop—we won’t make it!”
then barely had time to duck his head into Nate’s back as they shot through the gap, the edges of the gate and steel receiver frame less than an inch each from the widest part of the handlebars.