Blood of Paradise (41 page)

That quick, Strock's humor turned. “That some kind of crack?”

“Not at all. It just seemed like you two connected somehow.”

“I liked her,” Strock said. “She had a way with that little girl. That a problem?”

“No, Phil. Look, let's drop it. I didn't mean anything.”

Strock reached out with the cane and rapped the tip against the side of the ladder. “Don't presume you know what's going through my head.”

Oh for fuck's sake, Malvasio thought. “I won't, Phil. I'm sorry. Can we change the subject?”

Strock looked off for a moment, leaning on his cane again as he mulled something over. The whiteness of the sky beyond him looked infinite, empty. “I'm assuming the plan's still the same.”

Malvasio wasn't sure he liked where this was headed any better. “More or less. How do you mean?”

“You want me to pick off your own guys. When they pop out of their van, I take them down before they can so much as cross the street.”

A
zanate
cawed from somewhere in the nearby branches. “Something like that.”

“It's risky.”

“I know. I'm not thrilled with it either, but I'm not the evil genius I used to be.”

Strock grinned. “I doubt that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've got a pretty good idea, the first way you figured this? I'd be the guy to take out the hydrologist. And Jude, well now. He kinda comes out looking like a sucker, don't he?”

Malvasio wanted no part of this. “Phil—”

“I mean, all in all, it's the perfect scheme. Jude never has to step in front of a bullet. He never sees it coming. Boom, his guy's down. Your crew rushes up but they're just for show, they shoot high, whatever, make it look good. Happens real fast, their weapons match mine, no one's the wiser. And the sabot rounds? Impossible to prove where the kill shot comes from. Your guys are safe because Jude's not going to fire back, it's not his job, he'll be focusing on his guy, who won't be getting up.” Strock looked proud, the puzzle solved. “Tell me I'm wrong.”

“That's not—”

“I won't go for it.”

Malvasio took out his handkerchief again, this time wiping his throat. “Yeah. I know.”

“Don't get me wrong. You wanna waste Sleepy and Dumbo—”

“Sleeper and Chucho.”

“—I'll whistle while I work. But I draw the line there.”

“Fine,” Malvasio said. “If it comes to that. I wouldn't ask otherwise.”

Strock laughed. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Look, Phil, think what you want but a lot of this is academic at this point, okay? Like I said, the people I work for have done everything in their power to make it so this doesn't have to happen. The company honcho flies in tomorrow, he's due to meet with the hydrologist sometime early this week, and we've squirreled his work so bad he can't say anything to hurt anybody. That makes my guys happy, no harm no foul, life goes on.”

“But if he kicks up a fuss?”

“If he launches into stuff he's got no business talking about, yeah, absolutely, we may get the good-to-go.” That was the wild card, Malvasio thought. The woman.

Strock lifted his cane and planted the tip against Malvasio's chest. “I won't kill him.”

Malvasio chose to let the cane tip sit. “Even if it saves Ray's kid's life?”

“There's another way.”

“It's not foolproof.”

“We gotta make it foolproof. If it comes to that.”

“Okay. I'm with you.” Get this fucking thing off my chest, Malvasio thought. “Good.”

Strock worked up a satisfied smile, then pulled the cane away. “The guys who hired you, what'll they say when your little troop of cat turds doesn't come home?”

“I don't know. Not sure I care.”

“They'll just slip you the envelope, give you a shrug and a wink. Better luck next time.”

“What can they say? Trust me, the PNC's not gonna waste time on a ballistics trace for a gunfight where all the bad guys go down.”

“Even if the shots come out of nowhere?”

“What difference will it make?”

“Ray's kid'll figure it out. He kinda knows I'm down here.”

“So what? His guy's alive, the shooters are dead—you really think he's gonna open that can of worms? He brought you down here. He's screwed, he brings that up.”

“What about your end? Your target's still standing.”

“Think about how it'll look. He survives, then bad-mouths my people, who are gonna be the ones who crow loudest about the shooters. Trust me, my guys are gonna stomp and fume, demand a crackdown—and that old bird's gonna crap in their faces? Let him. He'll sound like a whiny flake, which is as good as shutting him up. I'm thinking, he reads between the lines, realizes what a lucky schmuck he is, and goes home, never to be heard from again.”

Strock frowned and shook his head. “Sounds like wishful thinking.”

“Yeah? What doesn't.”

A scant breeze rustled the nearby branches. Strock lifted the beer bottle to his lips again, drained it, then tossed the empty onto a growing mess on the sandy ground, scattering a cluster of
zanates
picking through the trash. “Just so you know. Something goes wrong, Jude takes a bullet or I get the feeling the whole thing's sliding sideways and I don't like where I sit, I'm gonna make the call: 9-1-1 works the same here as back home. I know. I tried it.”

Malvasio suffered a sudden flood of wrath so intense he could feel it pricking his skin. “I hear you, Phil.”

37

“I'm not frustrated,” Waxman said. “I'm confused.”

They sat around the dining room table drinking thin, tepid coffee—the reporter, Axel, Jude, Eileen—each of them sagging. The heat of late afternoon turned liquid against the blank white walls. Consuela was upstairs, consoling Oscar's inconsolable mother. “The last time we met,” Axel said, “I was very off-the-cuff in my speculations and probably spoke out of school.” He looked spent, eyes glazed, shoulders rolled forward. He tugged at his shirt and fluttered the fabric to cool his skin. “There are a great many variables and complex calculations that go into analyzing water table variation.”

“On the other hand,” Waxman said, “it could be as simple as this: The bottling plant is depleting the aquifer.”

“I don't know that for a fact.”

“A woman died, trying to get people to notice.”

Axel glanced over his shoulder. Oscar sat perched on the stairs, chin pressed into the fold of his arm, gazing with an otherworldly calm at the strange adults below, yammering in their meaningless language. “I realize that,” Axel said, turning back again. “And it's a terrible turn of events. But many of the wells the villagers use are dug by hand and very shallow, five to ten meters, and they routinely go dry by the middle of April every year.”

“The ones downstream from the bottling plant have been drawing up muck since January.”

“Mr. Waxman, it's easy to assume the worst about these things. But trust me, analyzing water involves a little more than parading around with a dowsing rod. Aquifers are inaccessible. The only way you can venture a guess how vast they might be, or how exhausted, is through tracking very specific data.” He ticked them off on his fingers: “Transmissivity, hydraulic conductivity, porosity, specific capacity, specific yield, specific retention. You have to track head loss versus change of gradient across the well field, then cross-check it against regional water level trends, precipitation, evapotranspiration. Then you have to load all that data into a computer modeling program, and I'm sure I won't shock you by confiding that computer models can be inaccurate. And on top of all that, you have to microscopically analyze the rock samples obtained when you drill your test wells. You have to measure the total dissolved solids in any water you draw, to check for organic and inorganic contaminants. And all those factors have to be logged over lengthy periods.”

“You're saying you haven't had enough time to draw a sound conclusion.”

“I've not completed my work yet. Normally, a full climate cycle should be enough to make reasonable evaluations.”

“But not enough to make a simple, honest statement about whether the bottling plant's water usage is negatively impacting the domestic wells nearby.”

Axel slumped back in his chair. “Mr. Waxman, pardon me if what I'm about to say begins to sound a little like a game of snow-the-reporter—”

“In contrast to everything else you've been saying?”

“—but I'd like to at least briefly sketch a few things it appears you imperfectly understand. Now, as it has been explained to me—”

“Marta Valdez said the water in the well near her village started going bad when the bottling plant was built a few years back, and it's steadily been getting worse. First there's poor draw from the pump, then what water does come up tastes wretched. Like most people down here, poor people in particular, she tried to get along as best she could and not make waves. This year it got so bad she decided she couldn't keep quiet any longer. She meant to be heard. Her courage cost her. But that's a lesson everybody understands down here: You interfere, look what happens.”

Axel blanched. He'd heard all this from Consuela, of course. And Waxman probably guessed that.

“If you'll just permit me—”

“You think it's all just a coincidence, the bottling plant's drawdown and the wells going bad.”

“I'm saying assumptions aren't facts. The problems you're describing can be caused by a great many things. First, all over the country, alluvial aquifers outside the coastal areas are often only thirty meters deep, and shallow aquifers disproportionately suffer from high contamination, especially ones close to populated areas. Second, the villagers here aren't terribly sophisticated when it comes to understanding how underground water moves, and many times you find they've built latrines too close to the wells. It's a surprisingly common problem, and the major reason why so much drinking water is contaminated. Third, a great many smaller wells are poorly constructed and badly maintained. Most last less than five years. They go bad for any number of reasons. Fourth, the well for this village is not terribly far from the alluvial plain for the river leading from the Laguna de San Juan, which feeds off a geothermal spring and is notoriously brackish. The well's drawdown may have been enough to cause hydrothermal intrusion, which would lend a very foul mineral taste to the water, rendering it undrinkable.”

Waxman shook his head. “That's nonsense and you know it. The well's too shallow, the drawdown's nothing. But if you throw in the cone of depression created by an industrial well field, like the bottling plant's, sure, I could see that happening.” Waxman tip-and-tailed his pen against the tabletop and a coldness settled in his eyes, as though he meant to say:
Snow the reporter? Go ahead. Try
.

“But you could still get heavy sediment or mineral intrusion,” Axel countered, “if whoever drilled the well inadvertently struck a perched aquifer. That's a reservoir suspended above the water table—”

“I know what a perched aquifer is.”

“Then you know they're often limited in capacity and tap out quickly.”

Waxman reached up beneath his sweat-streaked glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “You realize that you're speaking almost entirely in hypotheticals.”

“Granted, most of what I'm saying is speculative. By necessity.”

“But what you intend to tell Estrella or your client, Torkland Overby, that won't be speculative, will it?”

“I've not been authorized to discuss that with you.”

Almost desperately, Waxman leaned forward, saying quietly, “This really is beneath you.”

“Suppose we leave considerations of that sort—”

“If you really—”

“Even if the plant were, in fact, causing significant exhaustion of the aquifer, it wouldn't mean the end of the world.”

“Not for you.”

Axel bristled, his blue eyes flared. “Look. First of all, you've got SOUTHCOM and USAID and God knows how many NGOs stumbling all over each other trying to help with this issue. The Salvadoran government has a plan to drill wells throughout the country, with one hand pump well for every five families.”

“A plan. How noble. What's the funding? And what difference will it make if the aquifer's depleted?”

“Second, as you know, water trucks visit these villages—”

“They're unreliable at best, and the farther from San Miguel you get, the less reliable they are.”

“Well, that can hardly be blamed on Estrella, can it?”

Waxman snorted. “Not until the national water system's privatized, and they take over for the region.”

“Well, let's stick to the present, shall we?”

“Sure. In the present the wells are going bad.”

“I've personally drilled test wells along a water-bearing fracture not far from here, and I found a significant amount of untapped groundwater there.”

For the first time, Waxman seemed taken aback. “Enough to make up for the bottling plant?”

“Certainly enough to provide the locals with a healthy supply of fresh water.”

Waxman studied Axel's face. “Estrella would be that magnanimous?”

“I think Torkland would be willing to make that a condition of the capital outlay.”

“And if Estrella takes the money, then doesn't perform?”

Axel waved dismissively. “Let the lawyers slug that one out. Meanwhile, another way to mitigate any drawdown problem would be to install a recirculation system in the sugar processing plant located upstream.”

“You're joking. Judge Regalado owns that plant.”

“I'm aware of this.”

“Why would a man like that go to the trouble, let alone incur the expense, of installing a recirculation system—what's in it for him?”