The Last Good Guy by T. Jefferson Parker

Author:T. Jefferson Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

LIVE AND URGENT FROM PARADISE FARMS

BURT

26

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DUST rising in bright light and the strangeness of things happening without sound.

Clevenger’s motion-activated wasp-cam streamed beautiful video, startlingly clear. I recognized the bunkhouse with the modified freezers in the living room and the gloves and white hazmat suits hanging on the walls.

The front door had been propped open. Connor Donald and Eric Glassen crossed the porch and disappeared inside. A forklift pulled up to the front porch, Adam Revell in the cage, four wooden crates stacked two-on-two waiting on the forks. Flat-Top Woman with the gun on her hip stood talking to him, her mouth working silently.

I put Burt on speaker as I watched Clevenger’s wasp-cam feed.

“None of the usual activity earlier,” said Burt. “No SNR vehicles coming and going. No Paradise shipping trucks in and out. No kids to the barn with their laptops and backpacks. They cleared the decks for this, whatever it is.”

Back to my desktop monitor: Connor Donald and Eric Glassen coming from the cottage, wearing long black rubber gloves and hazmat masks. Flat-Top Woman on her way inside. Adam Revell hopped down from the forklift and followed.

“I didn’t know you need heavy gloves and hazmat masks to handle dates,” said Burt.

Flat-Top Woman and Revell came out a moment later, suited up like the others.

Wasp-cam four gave us a good look at the wooden crates, each bound with three metal bands. No brands, labels, writing, or numbers on them. Pine? They looked to be nearly five feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep.

Revell and the woman took one end of a crate, squatting and straining mightily, horsing it away from the others. Connor and Eric took the other end, and the four of them—two on each side, short-stepping, backs straight—carried the crate toward the cottage.

“Clearly not TV dinners,” said Burt. “What can it be now?”

The heaviest material per volume I’d ever handled was ammunition in Fallujah. A 420-round steel can of .223-caliber M4 ammo in each hand put you in a hurry to get where you were going. Hoping you got there before the steel handles bit you. But one of these wooden crates at Paradise wouldn’t hold more than ten of those cans. Four adults? It looked like they were hauling something a lot heavier than that.

“Metals?” said Burt. “But why freeze them?”

“Gas under pressure,” I said. “To keep it contained.”

“Unstable chemicals. Isotopes.”

“Of course,” I said. “Things that date farmers and security guards depend on in their everyday lives.”

They got up the low porch steps and crept inside on their eight straining legs, like a giant spider.

A minute later they came out, rested in the porch shade, then went to the forklift for round two. Revell lifted his mask and wiped his forehead on his sleeve before taking his corner of the crate. Flat-Top Woman was breathing hard. Donald and Glassen had sweated through their black golf shirts.

A few minutes after the last delivery, the four were back on the porch, breathing heavily and conversing, their hazmat masks and gloves left inside.

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