Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel by Tom Bouman

Author:Tom Bouman [Bouman, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

I HAD GOTTEN some sleep, finally, and on the crisp morning that followed I was en route to a well pad. Outside of Midhollow, Pennsylvania, a village in western Holebrook County, DiverCo had been drilling and fracking in an easterly line, with an eye toward connecting every well they dug to a major pipeline running south. It was nice country out there. They had drilled back from the roads and on hilltops surrounded by woods, so the scenery wasn’t entirely blighted. Their service roads dug deep into the slopes, often in wide switchbacks, and the gates shutting the citizenry out were equipped with video surveillance and often were manned by a roughneck guard. The whole area resembled a kind of industrial gated community.

Sheriff Dally had asked me to meet him at the well pad’s entrance, which was just inside the western border of Wild Thyme Township. He explained that Ben Jackson was getting his head and ear looked at and Hanluain was patrolling the Heights, leaving Lyons to hold down the office. We were paying a visit to this particular crew because of a man named Gerardo Contreras, a maintenance mechanic who fit the description of our John Doe. Contreras hadn’t made it home to Texas for Christmas, and his wife had filed a missing persons report in Elmira, New York, where he had bunked between jobs. The Elmira PD was able to turn him up once, in a roadhouse between Waverly and Elmira known for its drug trade. He’d disappeared again soon after that, and though his family and employers believed Contreras was alive, a DiverCo representative thought of him anyway when Dally asked.

As we arrived, a worker stepped out from under a canopy and spoke into a walkie-talkie before unlatching the gate and swinging it open for us. The service road was wider than anything in the township, including the paved routes. We curved into the woods on the ridge. Hundreds and hundreds of tree trunks, stripped of their tops and roots, lined the road in stacks twenty high; these had been bulldozed and would probably be pulped, as they were too small for lumber. On our way up we passed three white tractor-trailer cabs in a line heading back down, having dropped off whatever they’d been hauling.

After wending through the trees, we emerged onto a well pad the size of three football fields, ringed by forest. A mass of tanks, tubes, and storage units filled up much of the space, and out of it rose a rig ninety feet into the sky, painted red and bright blue. The rig and the pad itself were surrounded by a number of pickup trucks, all white, drones in a swarm of white king cabs with out-of-state plates that had descended upon us.

It took my eyes a moment to get used to the scale before I could pick out the workers, perhaps twenty in blue hard hats I could see scattered about the site. We approached the data van. It was a kind of custom RV with stairs that folded down from a door at midpoint.

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