“He promised me five million, Ma,” Leonard sobbed, the words muffled by his fingers.
“He said he had the bank accounts in the Caymans.
He said if I helped him switch the records… if I got Cobb to sign off on the burial permits under my name… he’d transfer the bearer bonds to Veronica.
We were going to pay off the bridge debt.
We were going to build the new house in Westlake.
He was my uncle, Ma!
He was family!”
“He was a dog that bit every hand that fed him,” Clara said.
She looked at Roy Dale Hicks.
“Roy was his driver down in Mexico,” Clara told Thorne.
“Roy worked for Thomas Vance for twelve years.
When Thomas came back across the border in the back of an ambulance, he had Roy with him to do the lifting.
And when the old man died in that motel room on Harry Hines Boulevard last Tuesday… what did Veronica do, Roy?”
“She gave me five thousand dollars and a bottle of rye with three grams of horse sedative in the bottom,” Hicks said, his voice flat, untroubled by memory.
“Told me to drive the pickup down to the ravine on sixty-seven and wait for the tow truck.
Said they were gonna pay me fifty thousand to act as a witness for an insurance write-off.”
Hicks touched his crooked collarbone again.
“Only I don’t drink rye,” Hicks said.
“I drink bourbon.
I poured the bottle out in the ditch behind the gas station, waited until Leonard and the lawyer showed up with Thomas’s body in the back of the station wagon, and watched ’em torch the truck with the old man inside.
Then Leonard got nervous.
He saw me standing in the cedar brush.
He panicked, grabbed a tire iron off the tailgate, and took a swing at me.”
Hicks looked down at Leonard with a pity so profound it was worse than an executioner’s sneer.
“Hit me on the shoulder first,” Hicks said.
“Then caught the cheek.
I went down in the weeds, played dead until they took off in the Buick, and then I walked twelve miles down the railway line to the highway.
First payphone I found, I called the only person in McLennan County who ever gave a damn whether an old soldier lived or died.”
He nodded toward Clara.
“Mrs.
Clara took me in when I was sixteen years old, after my daddy ran off with a carnival woman,” Hicks said to Thorne.
“She put iodine on my ringworm and gave me a plate of fried salt pork every morning for three years before I went off to Fort Bragg.
You think I was gonna let these two hyenas bury her family’s name in a ditch?”
Thorne stood motionless in the center of the driveway.
The wind had died completely now, the silence of the Texas plains returning, vast and cold, under a sky that had turned from violet to ink.
“A family dispute,” Thorne said, her voice dropping its legal authority, leaving only the brittle, defensive edge of an operative whose entire mission had just turned into vapor.
“A fraudulent death certificate.
An insurance scam.
A tragic, sordid little circle of thieves.”
She looked at Clara.
“That doesn’t change the forty canisters of cesium, Mrs.
Vance.
My clients did not spend forty years and eighty million dollars tracking that shipment to leave here with empty trucks.
If they aren’t in this pit… where did Jesse put them?”
Clara walked across the yard.
Her boots were heavy with the white fire-suppressant dust, each step leaving a pale, ghostly footprint in the red clay.
She walked past the weeping daughter-in-law, past the broken son slumped against the pump house, until she stood two feet from the Assistant U.S.
Attorney.
“You’re thirty-four years too late, Thorne,” Clara said softly.
Thorne frowned.
“What are you talking about?”
“Jesse didn’t bury ’em on this farm,” Clara said.
“And he didn’t sell ’em to your clients.”
She reached into her coat pocket, past the .38 Special, and pulled out the tarnished silver plumb-bob.
She unscrewed the threaded cap with her thumb, took out the slip of waterproof synthetic film, and held it out between two fingers.
Thorne reached for it, but Clara did not let go.
“Read the header, Thorne,” Clara commanded.
Thorne leaned forward, squinting through the dim halogen glare of the Suburban headlights at the tiny, micro-printed alphanumeric characters across the top of the strip.
*PROJECT COLD HARBOR: U.S.
ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS / NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY.*
*FACILITY: WACO MUNICIPAL FLOOD CONTROL AND LOCK SYSTEM.*
*DATE OF DEPOSIT: AUGUST 14, 1991.*
Thorne’s breath hitched in her throat.
Her hand dropped from the film as if it had been heated to five hundred degrees.
“The dam,” Thorne whispered, her eyes wide, staring at the old woman with a horror that was absolute, vast, and cold.
“The Lake Waco dam.”
“Eighty feet of high-density reinforced hydraulic concrete,” Clara said, her voice steady as the flow of the Brazos.
“Jesse was the chief surveyor for the foundation pour in ninety-one.
When the contractor showed up with those forty canisters from Amarillo, Jesse didn’t put ’em in the dirt where they could leak into the sweet-water sand.
He had the Army engineers pour two thousand tons of slag and basalt directly over the casings in the center pier of the spillway.”
She leaned closer, until her spectacles were inches from Thorne’s face.
“They’re sealed under three hundred feet of river water and eighty feet of solid granite aggregate, Thorne.
They’ll be there until the sun burns out.
There isn’t a lawyer in Dallas who can unseal that concrete, and there isn’t a syndicate in Mexico with enough dynamite to reach ’em without washing half of McLennan County down to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Thorne stood frozen, the color draining from her lips until she looked as pale as the dead man in the Dallas morgue.
“The Department of Energy…”
Thorne stammered.
“The records…”
“Jesse gave the master manifests to the federal district court in Austin thirty years ago, sealed in a testamentary envelope to be opened only upon my death,” Clara said.
“The government already knows where they are, Thorne.
They’ve known since George Bush was in the White House.
The only people who didn’t know were the crooks who paid Thomas Vance sixteen million dollars for a map that led to a dry caliche pit on a fifty-acre goat farm.”
A low, collective murmur rose from the mesquite trees.
The tactical men—mercenaries hired through dummy corporations, men who fought for wire transfers, not causes—began to back away toward the secondary vehicles.
They knew the game was up.
There was no recovery.
There was no forty-million-dollar bounty.
There was only an eighty-year-old dam, a sealed federal archive, and a county sheriff who would be rolling down this lane with fifteen cruisers the moment the 911 call from the cemetery was cleared through the state dispatch.
