Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) (14 page)

“Well, then…”

“Well then, thank you, Nina. I thank you, and maybe the whole gulf coast needs to thank you. Now let’s catch your flight to New Orleans.”

The flights back were as uneventful as those coming had been.

On both legs, though—Lafayette to New Orleans, New Orleans to Bay St. Lucy—she was surrounded by a pleasant, comforting, golden glow.

The glow might have emanated from a small amount of alcohol, since she allowed herself a glass of cold, dry, Chardonnay on each flight.

Or it might have come from a bit of smugness, of self satisfaction.

This was not English literature. This was engineering. Physics. Chemistry.

Areas about which she knew nothing at all. And from the time she had set foot on Aquatica with Hector, she had felt silly, guilty, and out of place. She was intruding in a billion dollar industry, when she should have been staying in her little beach front shack, petting Furl and taking her morning walks along the beach.

And yet, and yet…

She had done something good.

Something was wrong, something so complex that she might never understand it.

And now it was going to be fixed.

She told herself, as she watched the sun go down and finally got a glimpse of the airport lights at Bay St. Lucy, that she would never hear anything more about Aquatica, and that everything would be all right.

And about both of these things, she was to be proved completely wrong.

INTERLUDE

He had long since forgotten what bar he was in.

There were so many in the quarter. All he knew was that he had studiously avoided the known tourist spots—Pat O’Brien’s, The Napoleon House, The Olde Absinthe—simply on the off change that he might be seen.

But he would not be seen.

He had been too careful.

The plan had taken months to perfect, but he had overlooked no detail.

And tomorrow—today, actually, since it was almost 3 AM—today, in little more than seven hours he would be on a tramp steamer heading to Hamburg.

A day or so in that festive German port city, with its sailors’ quarters and legalized prostitution, then on to London.

London with money.

He knew a woman there. She had no idea that he was coming, and she would probably be shacked up with someone. But she would be glad to see him.

She always was.

And as for his days on the Aquatica, the work he had done there…

…that was all in the past.

So that when the fruition of that work actually took place, he would be half a world away.

Such were his thoughts upon paying his bar tab, tottering his way drunkenly along whatever semi-deserted street—for streets in the Quarter are never completely deserted—finding the key to the apartment door, slipping it into the lock, and turning it.

Click.

Sleep would be good.

He had never been able to sleep well on the rig.

But he had escaped the rig.

And all the gibberish, the ‘once in, never out;’ malarkey…

That was to be proven wrong, once and for all.

He was, upon thinking about it, not at all convinced that such a character as The Tool Master really even existed.

He pushed open the door and stumbled inside.

Ah, the bed, waiting there for him.

“We don’t,” came a voice behind him, “encourage desertion.”

He thought about turning around.

And that was the last thought he ever had.

CHAPTER NINE: BEING COMPLETELY WRONG

The following morning Nina received an invitation.

It was the kind of thing she might ordinarily have turned down, preferring instead to get back into her routine of beach walking, Furlcurling, shackcleaning, and gift shop managing.

But these had not been ordinary days for her.

These had been days of deep melancholy mixed with utter confusion.

She had been dealing either with things she did not understand at all, or things she found completely depressing.

And so when Tom Broussard arrived on her porch at a little after ten AM (she had just brewed a new pot of coffee and was sitting on her deck watching a bright green plastic dragon try to strangle an eight year old boy in the surf, much to the boy’s—and his parents’—delight), when Tom, Bay St. Lucy’s favorite pornographic novelist, announced that he and his wife Penelope were planning a small overnight camping trip to one of the offshore islands and Nina should come along…

…she accepted without reservation.

Nor was she wrong to do so.

The trip proved everything she had hoped it to be.

She arrived with her Vespa at the dock around six PM, helped Penelope and Tom load the two tents they would be taking, as well as a small supply of rations (fish were to provide the major portion of what was to be eaten, and these fish would be caught later), lugged some of the coolers of beer onboard (the hosts were taking a thousand cans of Schlitz and a six pack of light beer, half of which were for Nina)—and then settled into her cozy stern niche as The Sea Urchin, Penelope’s squalid and efficient little fishing boat, bravely attacked the incoming tide and threw itself and its crew against a series of waves tinged gold by the setting sun.

An hour and a half later, they had caught five whitefish.
 
These Penelope dutifully cleaned while Tom built a driftwood campfire. And now they were sitting on the beach of DuBois Island, a place virtually unknown by tourists for the simple reason that it contained nothing of interest save dunes, scrub brush, and isolation.

So for a while they simply talked of this and that—why various members of the Democratic Party should be shot for what they were doing to the country, why various members of The Republican Party should be shot for what they were doing to the country—the last brutal murder Tom had planned and executed by typewriter, the number of pieces the corpse had wound up in and where they were by Chapter Six…

…and other such conversational morsels.

…which they chewed over along with the fish, while two of their party guzzled beer after beer and the other of their party drank
a
beer.

One, which lasted an hour and a half.

And then a second, which lasted until bedtime.

The stars, Nina could remember thinking, as she drifted off to sleep with the unmistakable aroma of sea air and tent fabric filling her nose, were superb.

And that, then, was the way her night had gone.

Absolute perfection.

No coulees, no corpses, no computer disks, no oil rigs, no incomprehensible data…

...just the exquisite kind of an evening that those people who live on the sea coast can experience whenever they want, and that everyone else in the world cannot.

The following morning was just as good.

They awoke at first light of course, Nina feeling a slight twinge of dizziness from her two cans of light beer, Tom and Penelope feeling no effects at all from their two hundred cans of actual beer. The air was deliciously cool. They combed the beach, noting the sand crabs, quivering bits of unidentifiable marine life, and white/pink ribbed shells that lay in dark, hard-packed sand; and they rekindled the fire, poking it a bit, prodding at the hissing coals, and blowing on various sides of driftwood teepee until it had begun to crackle again and could prove a satisfactory base for the beat-up old coffee pot they had brought along.

They ate a ‘b’ breakfast.

Bear Claws beignets and bagels from Bagatelli’s.

A day old, perhaps, but who cared?

And so Nina was, for a time, cured.

The events of the previous week had been no more than a dream.

She felt this way, at least, during the boat ride back to Bay St. Lucy.

She felt this way for the entire afternoon, as she puttered around Elementals, shifting pots and paintings and ferns and tea services for absolutely no reason, and selling something now and then…

..and she felt this way for most of the early evening, during which she apologized to Furl for leaving him unattended, and fried in her favorite little skillet two of the filets that had been given to her by Tom and Penelope.

She even felt this way as, at approximately nine PM, she began to read her Dorothy Sayers.

It was, in fact, all the way until ten minutes after nine—Lord Peter was just exiting the Bellona Club—when the cell phone buzzed, that she stopped feeling this way.

“Hello?”

The buzz on the other end sounded far away.

She wondered how she could differentiate near and far buzzes.

Weren’t all buzzes the same?

There was no time to speculate about this, because a voice had now embedded itself in the buzz, or, she mused, embuzzed itself.

“Am I speaking now with Ms. Bannister?”

“Yes?”

“Ms. Nina Bannister, of Bay St. Lucy?”

“This is she.”

“This is Professor Daruka Narang calling.”

Oh shit
, she thought.

So much for remote islands, campfires, and sleeping under the stars.

“Yes, Professor Narang?”

“I am calling you because…well, because a somewhat difficult situation has arisen.”

Of course a ‘difficult situation’ had arisen.

What had any of them expected, if not for that?

“All right. Tell me.”

“I completed this morning a thorough examination of the materials which you supplied me with.”

“Okay.”

“The situation at Aquatica is quite serious; perhaps more serious than I might have conjectured upon a first glance at the available data.”

“How serious is it, Professor?”

“We may be talking about something quite imminent, and something quite large.”

“An explosion?”

“Yes, and one which would involve many fatalities on the rig itself. Also, given the amount of oil and gas involved, the environmental aspects would be absolutely devastating. Unprecedented, I would say.”

“My God.”

“Yes, it is indeed quite serious. Which is why we have come to the matter of my calling you.”

“What can I do?”

“You have done much already, my dear Ms. Bannister. But there may remain a more difficult challenge still.”

“Tell me.”

“I shall. You must understand that my normal path of action in a situation such as this would be somewhat subtle. I would make specific contacts and offer specific recommendations. Certain scientists and engineers, certain specialists familiar with the problems particular to the offshore drilling process…”

“Yes.”

“But now more drastic measures seem to be called for.”

“And so?”

“So I have written an article outlining, rather graphically, the urgency of the problem. And this article I have submitted, by means of a few special contacts I have collected over my career, to
The New York Times
.”

The words
New York Times
seemed to send a small electric shock through Nina’s cell phone.

“
The New York Times
?”

The current seemed to disappear when she said the name of the newspaper. Perhaps because of the question mark she had inserted.

“Yes. It is a publication of quite extensive circulation.”

“I’ve heard of
The New York Times
, Professor. But, I have to ask: if the situation is that bad, shouldn’t you just call Louisiana Petroleum immediately?”

“Perhaps. It is an option that I have naturally considered. But I must point out, that Louisiana Petroleum has allowed this situation to come about.”

“Yes, yes, I see.”

“But the bottom line is, I have just finished talking on the phone with several of the newspaper’s editors.”

Darkness had fallen on Bay St. Lucy now. She could see through the kitchen, on beyond the plate glass sliding door that led out to her deck. The waves were scudding in, silver breaker foam glowing in moonlight.

“Because of the urgency of the situation—and perhaps because of my modest reputation—they are agreeing to print the article.”

“When?”

“Well, that is the question, my dear Ms. Bannister. This is a story of immense ramifications.”

She could feel what was coming.

She did not like it.

But what had been to like since her discovery of Edgar’s body?

Nothing

“This being the case, the editors have naturally asked me the source of my information. I explained that all data had been collected from the mainframe computers currently operational on Aquatica, and was, unmistakably, accurate. However…”

“However, they still wanted to know where you got the data.”

“Precisely.”

“And you told them?”

“That I had it from an unnamed source.”

“I see. That didn’t satisfy them, though.”

“Not entirely.”

“But Professor, I see stories all the time that come from ‘unnamed sources.’ I thought reporters were not required to reveal their sources.”

“They are generally not so required. But this is a very difficult area. You have also read, I am certain, of reporters who are required to do so by the courts. And these reporters frequently…”

“Go to jail.”

“Precisely. You must understand, Ms. Bannister, that my recommendation in this article is to shut down Aquatica immediately. To evacuate it, and to set about a series of extensive checks and repairs that would cost months of time and billions in revenue.”

“So they want to know where you got the disk.”

“Yes. They do.”

“And the truth is, I stole it.”

“Well…”

“I and a fourteen year old boy.”

Silence.

The waves continued their long, silent, scraggly roar.

“Did you give them my name?” she asked, almost as an afterthought.

“No, dear lady. No. I must have your permission to do that.”

“And what do you think will happen if I let you give them my name?”

“Oh. Oh dear. Well, I believe the expression is ‘all bloody hell will break loose for your life.’”

She smiled at the phone, and then at Furl, who was watching the conversation from the straight chair on the far side of the room.

Neither smiled back.

“Yes. I guess it will.”

“Again. I can quite easily proceed with channels that are…”

“Slower.”

“Yes. And I can almost certainly avoid bringing you into the situation. But…”

“By that time, Aquatica may have blown up, and killed everybody out there. Not to mention destroying half of the gulf coast.”

“Oh no, not half.”

“No?”

“No! All!”

She breathed deeply.

“All, my dear Ms. Bannister. This is an installation much larger than any we have dealt with previously, and sitting on much greater energy reserves. If all elements converge at precisely the right—or in this case, wrong—instant, then we are talking about an enormous explosion, which would release millions of gallons of oil per minute, and which could not possibly be stopped for weeks. The effects of such a calamity would be…”