Kade: Santanas Cuervo MC (2 page)

Once it was fully debugged, her software was going to be a quantum leap forward in natural resources exploration. Now geologists, such as herself, could see the strata and make educated guesses about where oil or natural gas could be found, but there was no way to know for sure until an exploratory well was sunk. They could find natural gas or oil, or they could find nothing but water, or sometimes, they found nothing at all. But her software
could
tell what they would find, or would once she had all the bugs worked out. After the software was proven, Kelly Oil could skip the expensive exploratory wells and go straight to production.

She smiled as another series of voids began to appear, this one full of water according to her software. They might sink a well just to be sure, but costly mistakes like that may soon be a thing of the past, at least for Kelly Oil. She knew they would never be the largest player in the oil market. They simply didn’t have the resources to compete on the global level with the likes of ExxonMobile, British Petroleum, or Royal Dutch Shell, but if they could always be sure of what they were going to get when they drilled, they would be massively profitable. It was going to be their secret weapon, they were going to be the only company to have it, and they were going to milk it for all its worth.

“We’re starting to get some garble,” Charlie said, pointing to the monitor with a finger. “Looks like the weather geeks were right.”

She rose from her chair and opened the door to the truck. The was a stiff breeze blowing, which explained the noise coming in on the data. They were using off-the-shelf components, other than her software, but her program required the most sensitive geophones available. That allowed her software to detect the minute differences in the reflected waves, but the downside was they were highly susceptible to noise. Even the wind shaking the scrub and grass was enough to pollute the data. She closed the door and returned to her chair.

“Shit,” she muttered then picked up the radio mic. “Greg, you copy?”

“Right here, Winter. I’ve been wondering when you’d call. We definitely have some dust blowing out here.”

“Yeah. We’re right at the limit. I think we’re going to have to pack it in for the day. No point in having to go back and sound this area again.”

“Copy that,” Greg said. “I was hoping to make it to the turn today, but…”

“Yeah. Can’t be helped. You and the boys go out and enjoy your short day.” She glanced at another computer. “Weather predicts the winds should drop to eight to ten around two tonight. We’ll pick it up then.”

“Copy that. I’ll let Ted know.”

“Thanks, Greg.”

Winter hung the mic up and leaned back in her chair and swiveled back and forth for a moment. They could sound until the winds hit about twenty miles-per-hour, maybe a little more if there were no bushes or tall grass immediately around the geophones. But out here, in the Texas desert, there was scrub everywhere, and once it got to shaking and moving, the geophones couldn’t tell the difference between a shaking bush and a seismic wave from the thumpers. It was a long-standing problem with geo-sounding that anyone was yet to crack.

She leaned over and unplugged her laptop and closed the lid. She’d been live recording the seismic data onto her computer and she was going to take it back to RV and compare it to the regular sounding map. Now that she had new data, she wanted to noodle around with it a little more.

“I’m going to go. I want to look over this data a little more closely.”

He nodded. “I’m going to button up here, transmit the data back to Houston, that sort of thing, but then I’m right behind you.”

Winter smiled and nodded. “Please don’t get shit-faced tonight. You’re so grouchy when you have a hangover.”

He snickered. “Jesus, am I ever going to live that down? Somebody took a potshot at us! I needed something to steady my nerves.”

She twittered a laugh. “And the chick with the big boobs had nothing to do with it?”

“Nothing at all! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

She snickered again. “Okay, if you say so. See you tomorrow.”

“Take care, Winter.”

She took her laptop and stepped out of the truck, slipping on her sunglasses and shielding eyes from the blowing dust as she walked to her Wrangler. It was scorching inside and she had the air-conditioning blasting the moment the vehicle started.

She bounced along over rough and rutted roads until she reached her RV, a forty-one foot Class A beast of a machine she called home when she was in the field. It was delivered to the site and serviced along with the rest of the sounding equipment. Where the rest of the crew was put up in motels or barracks like trailers, she lived in relative luxury.

She unlocked the coach then entered, setting her laptop on the table. “Gabbro! I’m home!”

Gabbro, a fat orange tabby, appeared, mewling his greeting as he blinked sleepily. She bent down and picked him up, giving him good scratch behind the ears before she placed him on the couch. “You hungry?”

Gabbro meowed he was and she pulled out a can of cat food and opened it, plopping the contents into a bowl and setting it on the floor by his water dish. While he ate, she checked the status of the coach. Sitting in the middle of nowhere, the RV was burning a lot of diesel keeping the interior cool, the water hot, and the lights on. The water and fuel tanks were going to need to be filled in a day or two, and the sewage tanks emptied. She’d mention it Greg, the site foreman, tomorrow, and have the fuel truck swing by when it went out to refuel the thumpers. Normally she parked her RV in a park with hookups, but there were none available within a two-hour drive, so she had to rough it. She wasn’t sure how Greg was going to handle the water and sewage problem, but he was an old pro at keeping her home operational, and she knew he probably had several options already lined up, so she didn’t worry about it.

She prepared herself a meal of pan-seared chicken breasts with shallots and a quick cooking package of seasoned rice for a side. As she ate, she scrolled through the data, comparing her program’s data with that of the standard 3D-mapping software most of the industry used, Kelly Oil included. The voids and strata data were a near-perfect match, which made her sigh in relief. At least she hadn’t screwed up that portion of the code. She rotated the maps, looking at them from different angles. If her data, while far from complete, was accurate, they were sitting on a field rich with natural gas and crude. Not surprising, actually, considering how rich the surrounding fields were, but she’d seen stranger things. She worked on the data until well after dark, absently stroking her cat, until her brain began to feel like mush.

“I think that’s enough for tonight, don’t you?” she asked Gabbro as she picked up the dish and glass. She gave them a quick rinse and popped them into the dishwasher. The washer was full so she set the machine to run in the middle of the night, conserving the hot water for her shower.

Shower finished she dressed in her nightshirt, a pale yellow affair that reached her knees, with the words,
Geology: It’s Rock-It Science
splashed on the front. It wasn’t the sexist thing she owned, but Gabbro didn’t care and it was supremely comfortable. Picking the cat up and placing him in her lap, she curled up on the couch and turned on the television, flipping through channels until stopping to watch John Wayne put out an oil well fire, slowly stroking the animal until she got sleepy.

***

Kade rolled to a stop outside the Santanás Cuervo clubhouse, his rumbling Harley falling silent with the flick of his thumb. There were twenty-one other bikes there already, his making twenty-two. The club was all there. He dismounted and stretched the kinks out before walking into the clubhouse.

The Santanás Cuervo clubhouse was huge, a 60 x 120 prefab the club had erected years before. It had a large main room with a pool table, bar, and plenty of seating, with a kitchen and three small bedrooms sharing space with the chapel in the back. Both the inside and the outside of the clubhouse had a slightly faded and worn appearance.

The clubhouse was built when the Santanás Cuervo had over two hundred members and the resources to maintain the building. Now, with only twenty-two members and no income for the club, upkeep was coming out of members’ pockets, and, though not yet a dump, it was slowly falling into disrepair.

Kade walked in and went straight to the bar to wash the road dust out of his mouth. He picked up his bottle and poured a splash into a glass and downed it with a toss, grimacing as the amber liquid burned all the way down.

“So, what did Kelly Oil want?” Bickers asked as he slowed to a stop at the bar while the rest of the club gathered around.

Kade grinned and pulled out the check and slapped it on the bar.

Bickers picked it up and looked at it. “Eighteen thousand. What’s this for?”

“That’s for a job.”

“For us or for you?” Bickers asked.

“Us. It’s made out to me, but I’ll deposit it then write the club a check. We are now, officially, a security firm.”

“Security firm?” Anders asked.

“That’s right. Kelly Oil wants us to babysit their head geologist and the President’s daughter. That’s the same person by the way. I’m not sure how we’re going to do it, but the pay is
good!
A thousand a day for twenty-four hour protection.”

“Where is she?” Duck asked.

“Way the hell out in the scrub, somewhere. They gave me a map, but I’ll have to figure it out because their map is full of longitude and latitude lines, but has no road names. I assume she is around somewhere close, but she could be in Bumfuck Egypt for all I know.”

“How long is this job supposed to last?” Bickers asked.

Kade shrugged. “Don’t know, exactly. A couple of months, probably.”

“Sixty grand? That’ll come in handy,” Big Dick said.

“Amen to that, brother,” Bickers replied, “but why us?”

“I asked the same question,” Kade said. “I think it’s because they’re desperate. I get that impression anyway, and we’re the only game in town. We can do this. We know how to run protection. There shouldn’t be that much difference between protecting a person instead of a product. I thought about it on the way back from Houston. I’ll meet with her tomorrow, and figure out how we’re going to set this up, but I’m thinking two man teams on twelve-hour shifts. That way we’ll only have to pull a detail once every six days or so. I have no idea where she’s staying at night. That’s the kind of stuff I’ll work out with her tomorrow. Hopefully this is an easy job and they’ll be paying us to sit around on our asses.”

Bickers nodded. “And the best part: it’s legal.”

“I think this calls for a celebration,” Anders said, stepping behind the bar with Kade. He began tipping over glasses and lining them up on the bar, then poured a splash into each one. When he was done, he picked up a glass for himself. “To being in the black again.”

A chorus of agreements rumbled through the club and the men tossed back their drinks. Kade looked around. It was the first time he’d seen everyone looking this happy and hopeful since the purge. He just hoped he hadn’t committed the club to something they couldn’t handle.

***

“Did you find her?” Bickers asked as he and Anders stepped up behind Kade sitting at a table with a pair of maps spread before him. They were the last three men in the clubhouse, the other members having already left for home.

Kade looked up and grinned. “I think so. It took a while to find something I recognized, but here, see this road?” he asked as he drew his finger along a line on the Kelly Oil map. “I think that’s Eagle Pass Road. That much I figured out early, but finding the rest of this hen scratch is what took so long. But doesn’t this,” he said pointing to the Kelly map again, “look like this?” he continued pointing to his Texas Road map.

“Looks like it to me,” Anders said.

“Me too,” Bickers agreed.

Kade stabbed the Texas map with a finger “Okay. Then she’s here.”