George Martin - Lowball

Terrific.

After a torturous commute from Manhattan, Sheeba and Jamal had arrived at the spill site close to sundown, the worst possible time to conduct a visual investigation. Too bad we aren’t making a movie, Jamal thought. It was the golden hour, that last bit of the day when directors and cinematographers preferred to film the kissing scene or something equally romantic.

Not that Stuntman had been involved in many such scenes. But he had frequently found his shooting days rearranged around the need to have the crew ready for golden hour. “Something funny happened here,” Sheeba said, demonstrating her unfailing ability to state the obvious.

What was your first clue? Jamal wanted to ask, but didn’t. Surely it couldn’t have been the Warren Country Emergency Services unit parked halfway onto the shoulder of the two-lane asphalt road, and the crime scene tape delineating two squares-one large, one small-in the ditch.

The drive from Manhattan had taken twice as long as it should have. Sheeba Who Must Be Obeyed had elected to follow her Navstar, overruling the obsessive freak behind the wheel who kept insisting that it was taking them around three sides of a square. “Couldn’t we have booked a helicopter?” Jamal said, only half joking.

“Unavailable,” Sheeba snapped, meaning she had actually made the query.

The extra minutes they spent stuck in traffic allowed Sheeba to recount-largely for Jamal’s benefit-the flurry of text messages, e-mailed maps, and other communications that resulted from one simple fact: sometime last night a vehicle had gone off this lonely New Jersey highway and spilled a container of ammonium nitrate.

“Why did it take so long?” Jamal had asked, not, he thought, unreasonably.

“No one found the container until noon today,” Sheeba said. Her voice suggested that there was something lacking in the moral fiber of the residents of Warren County, New Jersey, that they would fail to note a container of dangerous material by the side of one of their roads.

Feeling a bit like an actor in a bad action movie, Jamal had felt compelled to persist: “And why are we chasing this and not DHS?”

“One of the locals said the whole thing felt joker-like.”

“Some kind of keen perception?” Jamal said. “The smell, maybe-?”

“The crash site.”

And so, yes, here they were, in the company of a pair of Warren County hazardous materials types, and Deputy Sheriff Mitch Delpino, a tall, hunched nat around forty who wore a gunslinger’s mustache that clashed with his old hippie manner.

“It appears a vehicle went off the road here,” Delpino said, spreading his hands and gesturing, as if the tracks could possibly have been mistaken for anything else.

“And it should have wound up nose-first in that ditch,” Sheeba said. “It’s pretty deep. How do you suppose it got out?” She turned to Delpino. “Any calls for tow trucks out here last night or this morning?”

Delpino glanced at Jamal, as if to say, you poor bastard, having to work with this . “Yes, we checked with all the services. No one got a call out here or anywhere near here in the past forty-eight hours.”

Jamal said, “Officer, assuming this truck was carrying something illegal when it ran off the road, how likely is it, do you think, that it would call a legitimate service whose destination could be traced?”

Delpino allowed himself a smile so faint that only Jamal could see it. “Quite unlikely.”

Jamal turned away and let his eyes adjust again. There was something odd about the tracks where they crossed the mud. “Any insights into what kind of tires were on this truck?” he said.

Delpino stepped forward like a grade schooler eager to recite. “These are not tire tracks,” he said. “They are narrower than any commercial U.S. brand or any European one we know. And there’s no tread.”

“In fact, it looks as though they were thin and solid, like wheels on a kids’ wagon,” Jamal said. “It does sort of feel like a joker thing.”

Ten yards off the road, its passage still obvious from crushed vegetation, a yellow plastic barrel sat upright in the weeds. “Was this how you found it?” Jamal said.

“It was on its side,” Delpino said, which was a good thing: neither haz-mat specialist seemed eager to talk. “It hit and rolled. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a small crack on one side. Some fluid spilled.” He smiled. “Which we were able to identify as ammonium nitrate, which is why we called you. Well, DHS.”

Sheeba reasserted command at that moment. “So strange truck rips along, loses a barrel, and then goes off the road? Seems wrong, somehow.”

“How so?” Delpino said.

Sheeba’s phone jingled. As she held up her finger, Jamal answered for her: “The logical sequence is, vehicle goes off the road first, spills its cargo … then gets out of ditch with no obvious help.” She gestured at the crash site. “With all the rain, there would be tracks if another vehicle helped out the first one.”

“So we have a mystery,” Jamal said. “First step, though, is to secure that material.”

“Where do you want it driven?” Delpino seemed eager to have this case off his plate as soon as possible.

“Let me check.” Jamal reached for his phone. “They’ll probably want us to cordon the place off.…”

Before he could make the call, however, Sheeba rejoined the conversation. “Get this,” she said, clicking off her phone. “Highway 519 is already cordoned off between Bergen and Hackettstown. New Jersey Highway Patrol.” Sheeba turned to Delpino. “What do you know about this?”

“Not a thing. Traffic here is light; the spill is minuscule. And we really don’t have the authority-”

Jamal looked down the road. Several sets of headlights burned. “Looks like an accident scene.” Christ, now he was stating the obvious. All these months with Sheeba must have affected him.

“What are the odds of two unrelated accidents at the same time on this stretch of road?” Sheeba asked. She turned to Delpino. “Do you know anything about this?”

“Not a thing. I got a call from dispatch just before noon and came straight here. Called in the haz-mat unit before one.” Delpino hooked a thumb toward the haz-mat truck. “This is Warren County.” He tilted an index finger toward the scene two hundred yards away. “One of those vehicles says ‘New Jersey Highway Patrol.’”

“Shoot,” Sheeba said, “not this again. Different jurisdictions.”

Jamal said, “The bane of SCARE’s existence. Wherever we go, we have to make sure the local PD and the highway patrol and the sheriffs are all in the same loop…”

Sheeba finished for him. “… and they never are!”

“Why don’t I go?” he said. It would be informative, and would get him away from Sheeba as her blood sugar drove her to more frequent rages. He chose to walk. The cars weren’t that far, he needed the exercise, and it saved him from a pointless discussion about being sure to bring the Explorer back. Maybe Sheeba suspected his eagerness to drive away and never look back.

Walking also allowed him to show up more or less unannounced, without adding that big movie moment of the black Explorer arriving at a crime scene.

Which is clearly what this was: a New Jersey State Police prowler half blocked the road, its flashing cherries clearly visible in the twilight. (Even in bright sunlight, the SCARE team would have seen them from the truck spill site, except that there was a small hill between the two locations.) A coroner’s van was next to it.

The yellow chalk figure in the middle of the highway told Jamal much of what he needed to know: they had found a body. And, from the apparent height and shape-not that a chalk outline was remotely reliable-some kind of joker.