Susan Smith - Out at Night

“We’ve had lots of experience. There won’t be seepage.”

He waited.

“Fine. All right. I get it. I’m not going to say anything.”

“We’ve gotten word from FIG, Field Intelligence Group, out of Norwalk. They did a threat assessment on the convention. My SSA and the OCC’s involved, and when FIG passed along—”

Acronyms made her testy. “Okay, so your boss in Riverside and the operational control center out of L.A.—”

“Right. OCC is set up to manage big situations. We’ve been lining up assets and manpower for months, pulling in bodies from all over Southern California. Field Intelligence monitors Internet chatter, blog sites, confidential sources. We have reason to believe a group calling itself Radical Damage has plans to disrupt the agricultural convention during closing ceremonies.”

“What is it?”

“A violent offshoot of ELF out of Northern California.”

He shifted in his seat.

“These guys aren’t worried about collateral damage. They’ve taken credit for explosions in three labs that have led to the deaths of four scientists and crippling injuries to five others. One guy was left blind and without hands. The victims all worked with genetically modified plants. Here’s what’s at stake. There are delegates from every state and almost sixty countries at this ag convention. Frank Waggaman’s had death threats. He heads up the teams that created ten fields of GM crops here, six soy, a couple of sugar beets, and two corns.”

“I didn’t think any of that stuff grew here.”

“That’s why they picked Palm Springs for the convention. The genetic modifications—each field tweaked differently—had to do with making crops drought-, pest-, and weed-resistant. Ag convention director Frank Waggaman believed that one field in particular, USDA Experimental Crop Project 3627, held the key to helping solve world hunger.”

Grace stared. “And that’s where Bartholomew was killed? In USDA Experimental Crop 3627.”

Pete nodded. “This whole thing could explode in our faces. The GM fields are off-limits now to delegates, but all we need is a foreign delegate killed and an international incident on our watch.”

“Monday night.”

“Monday night.” He glared at Grace, his eyes small balls of bright fury under drooping lids. “Two days from now. We need to figure out what Radical Damage has planned and stop it. The clock, as they say, is ticking. And damn, I hate that expression.”

“Same old Uncle Pete. You still haven’t told me how I fit into this.”

He glared. “Same old Grace. Always pushing it.” He stepped away from the table. “We’re done here. Not you, Grace. You’re coming with me.”

She followed her uncle past a gray fabric wall with notices tacked to it. On the other side of the wall was a row of workstations with access to a balcony that ran the length of the agency. Her uncle’s silence made her review every wrong thing she’d ever done. He kept walking and that gave her a chance to flip it, and think about every wrong thing he’d ever done, and by the time he opened his office door and motioned her in, she was herself again.

He stood uncertainly, as if wondering whether to hug her, and Grace pretended to dig through her bag. She dropped into the chair across the desk from him, and when she looked up, he was seated.

He looked smaller, somehow, diminished. His shirt had a button loose and he needed a shave. “Thanks for coming.”

“Did I have a choice?” She folded her arms.

He studied her a long moment. “I don’t think there’s anything I could have done that would have changed it.”

Grace looked away. The walls were devoid of personal touches except for a framed photo of a much younger Pete in a SWAT group shot, but family photos jammed the top of the filing cabinets behind him. Her eyes settled on a black-and-white of three dark-eyed skinny boys shivering in wet swimming trunks, arms around each other. Her body knew it before it registered in her mind; heat coursed through her and pressed against her eyes. Her dad smiled back, the one in the middle, a tooth missing, squinting at the camera.

“He always looked up to you.” Her voice caught.

“When your dad ran off with Lottie—”

“We were cut out of almost every family gathering, and why? Because he’d married outside the faith? Outside the Portuguese community? Give me a break.”

“Look, you don’t know how it was.”

“I know exactly how it was. I lived it. It’s the first story I ever learned.”

Her dad, Marcos, the middle son and two years younger than her uncle Pete, had impulsively stopped by a bar one night on his way home after cleaning his boat, The Far Horizon . He was twenty-three.

He’d been at sea for three months chasing tuna, sunburned and exhausted and dry mouthed, and it was his dry mouth that night that had gotten him into trouble he never quite got out of. At least not easily.

Not until the night he disappeared for good.

But that night in the beginning, Marcos, the shy, methodical man not given to bouts of spontaneity, blinked in the sudden blaze of the spotlight as Lottie pranced onto the dusty beer-washed stage, shimmying and sparkly, with platinum hair and fishnet stockings, and inexplicably, hours later, he’d decided to drive to Las Vegas with her and get married.

In the faded photo Grace had of her parents shot in the Temple of Love, Marcos stood up in his reeking, fish-slimed jeans, a glazed and thunderstruck look on his face, mouth gaping open, as Lottie leaned next to him, her spandex top somewhat obscured by the yellow rain slicker he’d given her as a cover-up. Her head was cocked and she had a triumphant smile on her face, but the lines around her eyes and mouth were those of an exhausted woman, as if she’d just landed the biggest fish imaginable after a long and harrowing battle at sea.

“He was engaged to a Portuguese beauty from a good family,” Uncle Pete said feebly.

“Well, your wife seems to have gotten over him.”

“I was comforting her.”

Grace threw up her hands. “All I’m saying is, this cord was severed long before I ever came into the picture, and you—you were the favorite son, the favored son, the oldest. One word from you and things would have been different. You did nothing.”

“That’s not true.” He looked pained.

“I was eleven when Dad died. I spent the rest of my childhood living out of suitcases while Lottie worked the West Coast, playing in countrywestern bands. She dragged Andy and me all over the place.”

“She never told you? Aunt Chel and I tried to get you. Both of you. Fold you into our bunch. What’s a few more? Your mother wouldn’t hear of it.”

The blood drained from Grace’s face and her skin felt damp.

Her uncle stared at her wonderingly. “Jesus. She didn’t tell you.”

Her heart pulsed in her throat; she could taste the anger. She wondered if he’d told himself that lie so long that he believed it.

Grace scraped a hand through her hair. “We both know you’re lying.” Her voice was raw.

She shoved her chair back.

“I can’t do this. I absolutely can’t do this, so if this is what it is, I’m out of here.”

“You will sit.” His voice was low.

As a child he’d scared her. He scared her still. In her father’s eyes, she’d hung the moon, a bouncy, luminous pumpkin moon. In her uncle’s, that same moon withered and dried and blew away in a gust of stony fragments.

The silence stretched. Her uncle cleared his throat. She averted her eyes, hating him. She sat heavily back down in her chair and stared out the window. The field office wasn’t far from the Agua Caliente Indian reservation, and her uncle’s office overlooked a row of date palms and government buildings. The San Jacinto Mountains rose in a cliff of jagged granite.