Free BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers) by Robert Bidinotto

with new horizontal drilling techniques on other wells, their impressive output attracted new investors.
    Adair became a pioneer at combining horizontal drilling with fracking. This proved so lucrative that, had he been able to focus fully on emerging opportunities, he might now be a billionaire. But his momentum stalled for several years while he cared for his wife, who finally succumbed to ovarian cancer. The brutal loss also left him the single parent of a little girl. With his responsibilities and attention divided, Adair lost ground while his competitors forged ahead.
    Now this man found himself in a new battle, this time with foes of a different kind. He hadn’t yet spoken of it, but Adair Energy’s future—and much more—rested on the precarious foothold that he had established here in the Allegheny National Forest.
    From inside the kitchen behind them, Hunter could hear Annie and Adair’s second wife, Nan, laughing and chatting like old friends. In the darkening valley below them, scattered lights appeared in the homes along the river. Its surface had become a flaming ribbon, reflecting clouds ignited by the now-hidden sun.
    “I can see why you love it here,” Hunter said quietly.
    Adair held his gaze on the unfolding spectacle. “Did I say that?”
    “Your eyes betray you.”
    The man chuckled and faced him. “Well, it’s true. I’ve always loved being out in nature. The wilder, the better.”
    “Your environmentalist enemies would be surprised to hear you say that.”
    He took another sip. “That’s what I don’t get. You know, Dylan, until lately—since they’ve been trying to shut me down—I called myself an environmentalist. Hell, I even used to donate to environmental groups. Drillers like me, we love the environment. We do our damnedest to take care of it. Look”—he gestured with his glass at the world beyond the window—“and tell me why I’d want to ruin all that. I hate pollution as much as anybody.”
    “But your critics say you’re, quote, ‘vandalizing natural vistas.’ That you’re ‘plundering the world’s precious resources.’”
    “Which is total bullshit. We don’t ruin the natural landscape. As I told you, we restore it when we’re finished. And we don’t waste resources. Why would we? We can’t afford to. We even purify and reuse our waste water. We use nature responsibly.”
    “I know, Dan,” Hunter said. “But to them, that’s the problem.”
    Adair frowned. “That we use nature responsibly?”
    “That you use nature at all.”
    Adair was about to respond when they heard the sound of the doorbell.
     
    Dawn Ferine stood atop the hill overlooking Queen Creek, where the path down to the camp joined the access road. Her gaze was fixed on the dazzling, shifting color patterns in the sunset sky above the Forest.
    She always experienced her most intense sense of spirituality at the beginning and end of day—with the sun’s first kiss upon the sky in the morning, and with its parting kiss upon Gaea’s lips in the evening. Each day she stopped whatever she was doing at these two sacred moments. She paused to remind herself of the timeless enormity of the Cycles of Life, of the grand Ecosystem in which she and everyone and everything were just insignificant parts. This was her form of prayer: a daily ritual in which she always felt this overwhelming surge of belonging, experiencing her oneness with the Cosmos. Her prayer, at sunset and at dawn …
    Dawn.
    She recalled the day that she chose that name, not long after she met him . She shed the ugly, meaningless name of her birth— Judith Hernstein. It annoyed her that she even remembered it. How she hated the crude, harsh commonness of the name that her parents had hung upon the shy, lost child that she had been. But she was no longer adrift, and no longer that person, not anymore—not since she met her soul mate.
    She shuddered, partly from the icy breeze, partly from the ecstasy of the moment, partly from