Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“Is she-” Waters dropped the thought. “Never mind.”

“What? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about hooking up with her. Not Ward Cleaver himself.”

“No. She just came on to me a little, and I was curious.”

“Yeah? Watch out, then. She’s a hell of a lay, but too twisted for me. She’s a sly one. Always looking for advantage. Reminds me a little of me. I like my women a little more… pliable. ”

“Yes, you do.”

“Hey, though, Evie does this thing with her-”

Waters stopped him with an upraised hand. “Don’t tell me, okay? I don’t need to know.”

Cole snickered. “You don’t know if you need to know or not until I tell you what she does.”

“I think I can live without that knowledge.”

“Okay, fine. Now come on up here and hang out with the great unwashed, okay?”

“I will, if you lay off the scotch. I’m looking for two million barrels, but this baby could shale out in a heartbeat.”

The levity that ruminating over sex with Eve Sumner had brought Cole vanished from his face. He stepped out of the grass and into the mud, his Guccis sinking ankle deep as he marched to within a foot of Waters.

“Listen to me, partner,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more negative waves, okay? Especially not around the mullets.”

Negative waves? “Hey, I’m just telling it like it is.”

Cole laid a heavy hand on Waters’s shoulder and squeezed. “That kind of honesty’s for the classroom and the confessional. This is sales, Rock. You’re not so far up the ivory tower that you’ve forgotten that.”

“Cole, what the hell is going on? Something feels wrong about this.”

The big man smiled a beatific smile. “Nothing’s wrong, John Boy. Nothing a few million barrels of crude won’t fix.” He leaned in as close as a lover and spoke with quiet earnestness, his breath a fog of scotch. “We need this one, partner. I need it.”

Waters shook his shoulder free. “You know there’s no way to-”

Cole waved him off and walked up out of the mud. “Don’t be long. We’re gonna be celebrating in a couple of hours.”

Waters turned back to the dark river, his gut hollow with foreboding, his mind roiling with images of two women, neither of whom was his wife.

Claustrophobic. That’s how it felt in the Schlumberger truck, where Waters sat in the glow of a CRT with Cole and the money men and the engineer crowded around him. The driller stood on the metal steps in the door, some roughnecks lined up behind him. Everyone wanted to know whether the work they had done was for a reason or not, and interest in the outcome-and the risk riding on it-increased with proximity to John Waters.

He watched the paper log scroll out of the printer like a cardiologist reading an EKG. The logging tool had been lowered down the bore hole to total depth and was now being slowly pulled up, electrically reading the properties of the fluids in the geologic formations around it as it rose. Waters’s predictions were being proved or negated with every foot of rise, and soon he would know whether the potentially oil-bearing sand was where he’d predicted or not, and if so, whether or not it held oil.

Cole’s face looked red and swollen, his eyes almost bulging, and Waters sensed that his partner’s blood pressure was dangerously high. The tension slowly wound itself to an almost unbearable pitch, but Waters shut it out: the dripping sweat, the grunts and curses, white knuckles, taut faces. He was waiting for a moment none of the others had known and never would. There was a point when you didn’t know what you needed to know and another when you did, the sliver of time between those two states not quantifiable, during which the human brain, trained by evolution to search for patterns and by rigorous education to interpret them, read the data as voraciously as any Neanderthal had searched the savannah for game. The slightest tick of the needle could trigger your instinct, and even before the actual data emerged from the machine the knowledge was there in your medulla, as sweet as the moment you plunged into a woman or as terrible as the ache of metastatic cancer in your belly. Fate’s hand was revealed, and it was all over but the bullshittin’ and spittin’, as Waters’s father had so often put it.

“I missed it,” Waters said in a flat voice.

“What?” someone whispered.

“Shaled out.” Waters clenched his jaw and took the hit, accepting his failure as the price of courage. “It happens.”

“What the fuck?” muttered Billy, the sullen-faced Cajun. “ What happens? You sayin’ there’s no oil?”

Waters expected Cole to reply, but he heard nothing. He took his gaze away from the log tape long enough to see that the redness in his partner’s face had vanished. Cole was as pale as a fish’s belly now, his chin quivering.

“What the fuck, Smith?” bellowed Billy. Cole wasn’t “Cole” anymore. The Cajun glared at Waters. “What about show? Gotta be some goddamn show , right?”

Waters shook his head. “Show” was the presence of oil in a sand stratum, but usually not enough to justify “running pipe,” or completing the well to the point of production. After wells were logged, debates frequently arose over whether pipe should be set or not. Some people wanted to set pipe on marginal wells to be able to boast that they had made a well. Waters was thankful there would be none of that.

“This ain’t right,” said the other Cajun, silent up till now.

Waters focused on the log. This ain’t right? What the hell was that supposed to mean? This was the way it worked. Every prospective well was an educated guess, nothing more. Had Cole not made that clear to them? Was this the first well they’d ever invested in?

Cole gave a little shudder that only Waters noticed. Then he straightened up with his old bravado and said, “Fate hammered our ass, boys. Let’s give the man some room to do his paperwork.”

“Hammered…my ass, ” said Billy. “I got money tied up in this well!”

Waters thought he heard the Schlumberger engineer snort.

“You got something to say, bookworm?” snarled the Cajun.

The engineer looked like he did, but he was working for Waters and Cole and would not speak without their leave.

Waters expected Cole to manhandle the whining mullets right out of the truck, but for some reason, Cole didn’t look up to the task. Waters hesitated a moment, then dropped the log and stood up. At six foot one, he rose above both investors, and in the closeness of the truck, he stood well into their space.

“We gave it our best shot,” he said quietly. “But we missed it. I’ll lose more money today than either of you, and-”

“That’s shit, ” said Billy. “You guys take a free ride on our money, and keep the override too.”

“I don’t get carried,” Waters said, his palms tingling with potential violence. “I keep the major interest in every well. If it’s a duster, I take it right in the wallet. So if you guys don’t want to do anything but whine about what you lost, your partner needs to unass that chair and you go back to the car and drown your sorrows in scotch.”

Billy looked like he wanted to knife Waters in the gut. Cole was staring at his partner as if he’d just watched a transformation of supernatural proportions. Rather than retaliate against Waters, Billy grabbed Cole’s arm and growled, “This ain’t over, Smith. Bet your ass on that. Now get out there and drive us back to town!”

Billy stomped down the steps of the truck, followed by his stone-faced companion, but Cole stayed behind.

“Been a long time since I seen you do something like that, Rock,” he said. “I enjoyed it, but…Well, no use talking now.”