Free Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) by Toni Dwiggins Page B

the transponder will not show anything odd. And there he waits. Can you deliver the talc cask to him?”
    “Sure I can.” Ballinger’s chest roostered out. “I mean, Roy can. Telehandler holds the cask like a baby. Drives like a dream. Go right out that tunnel down to the highway. Set the talc cask on the flatbed, pick up the resin cask.” Ballinger warmed to it. “I’d do it remote for the hot load—telly’s remote-operable. Then drive it back up here and set the resin cask in that trailer. Trailer’ll handle it.”
    Soliano was nodding. “And then what?”
    “Then the twerp takes the dummy cask with the shipment to the dump, and the knothead takes the resin cask wherever he friggin takes it.”
    “The depot , we will call it. Where would you site the depot?”
    “With that rig,” Ballinger indicated the offroader-trailer, “I’d be going somewhere off in the wild.”
    “What would you do when you got there?”
    “Unload the friggin cask. With a telly. Remember, knothead stole two of my telehandlers.”
    Soliano kept nodding. “And then?”
    “Come back here.”
    “Ah yes. Ready for the second swap, when the time comes. Last night. Which, to your dismay, went wrong.”
    Ballinger snorted. “Maybe I’m not such a hotshot.”
    “More than a mistake, I think. You, or your partner, shot out the tires. To stop the procedings, yes?”
    “Why I’d do that?”
    “Cold feet? Change of plans?” Soliano flipped a hand. “In any case, there follows the chase—Mr. Beltzman in his truck, Mr. Jardine in his pickup.”
    Soliano, I noticed, had just switched to calling the perp Jardine, instead of putting Ballinger in that role. Ballinger seemed to notice too.
    “And then,” Soliano said coolly, “we come to the end of the scenario. The crash, the shooting.”
    “Almost,” Ballinger said, easy now. “Then Roy comes into work this morning. That’s just nutso.”
    Maybe, I thought. But Jardine had learned something at work, hadn’t he? He learned he was leaving tracks. In talc. I’d made that plain enough, letting him know who was the geologist and who wasn’t.
    “If this scenario is correct,” Walter said, “where is the resin cask now?”
    We looked, as one, at the telehandler with its open arms empty. We’d seen the talc cask at the crash site. More than seen. So that meant the resin cask was here, last night, snuggled in the telly’s arms like a toxic baby. So at some point Jardine came back to retrieve it? I figured I knew when: while we were shopping and eating and going about our business in Beatty. I said, chilled, “Jardine got the jump on us.”
    Hap whistled again. “Boy’s got cojones.”
    “That he has.” Soliano regarded Hap. “And what does a boy with cojones do with this cask?”
    “My turn to be Roy?” Hap shuddered. “Depends on his motive. Who knows? That boy’s brainpan is beyond my ken.”
    I said, “What about the drawing on the radwaste truck?”
    “You asking,” Hap said, “what if the boy unleashes the beads?”
    I nodded.
    Hap ducked.
~
    W e had no idea where Jardine had gone from here. We had no soils from his blue Ford pickup to trace. So Walter and I went to the offroader rig: here was something we might be able to follow. Find the depot where he stored his toxic babies.
    Walter opened the field kit.
    Soliano herded the others out, promising to return with his trace analysis techs. I doubted they’d have much more luck here than they’d had at the crash site. Jardine was surely equally fastidious in here. Protocol, certainly, to wear protective clothing when you’re playing swap with radioactive waste. And even when you panic. I could see Jardine—couple hours ago? Spooked, rushing, but protocol says you suit up first. I hoped, fervently, that he’d worked up a nasty sweat. I no longer pitied him, with his sad face. I wanted to put him away, down deep somewhere where the sun don’t shine. I wanted to find his toxic cargo and see it buried where it