Just The Pits (Hetta Coffey Series, Book 5) (2 page)

GIVE A WIDE BERTH (Nautical term): Provide sufficient space when anchoring or docking to avoid other ships (keep at a distance).

       Something Pedro could learn.
 

The question,
What in the
hey-all
am I doing here?
was not a rhetorical one.

I've heard it told that some people, before they take a job, actually check out a few things, like what the job
is
. That is not how I operate.

I require a satisfactory answer to the following: What does it pay?

The larger the amount, the less inclined I am to delve into petty details, such as, is
it legal? Give me a location, a date, and a willingness to pay in US dollars, a reasonable escape plan in case things go south, and I'm your gal.

So, on that Monday morning I was the only one on the bus who didn't know why they were there unless you counted the driver, who seemed dead set on doing everything except driving.

Even the delicious-smelling smoke of a taco stand we roared past, normally a beacon for my attention, couldn't draw my horrified eyes from the man who held my life in such an inattentive manner.

Cigarette in one hand, coffee cup in the other, cell phone balanced ear-to-shoulder, Pedro jabbered incessantly except when drawing a puff and taking a sip. What with all the traffic on narrow Mexican Highway Number One (referred to in Mexico as Mex 1) skirting Santa Rosalia, it was a miracle he only grazed a couple of pedestrians. Even more disconcerting was when he stopped talking and smoking, because he appeared to fall asleep. A joke by fellow Texan and humorist Jack Handey sprang to mind:
When I die, I want to go peacefully like my grandfather did—in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car.

Somehow old Jack's humor wasn't quite so amusing on this particular morning. And if I thought the first few minutes were bad, about ten miles out of town we began our ascent of—or more correctly, our assault upon—
La Cuesta del Infierno
.

This lovely little two-lane stretch of Mex 1, charmingly known as the Hill of Hell, snakes over two miles of treacherous hairpin turns, switchbacks, and blind curves, all without benefit of guardrails, shoulders or turnouts. Mere inches from the tires, the maw of an abyss lurked, just waiting for us to slip, plunge and crash. I made the mistake of looking down and saw the scattered remains of almost unidentifiable pieces of twisted metal, broken glass and rotting tires.

Obviously undaunted in the face of cockamamie possibilities like oncoming traffic, Pedro floored the van whenever impeded by a crawling transport truck in our lane. Shaving a thin layer of chrome off the creeping truck's front bumper, we narrowly escaped several head-ons. Only when the road straightened and smoothed did my hair follow suit. 

My clawed fingers lost all feeling after the first quarter-mile as I clung to anything within reach, and my right foot was numb from stomping an imaginary brake pedal. The poor guy next to me pried my fingernails from his perforated flesh and tried reassuring me. "It's okay," said he, "Pedro does this every day."

Not with me on board he doesn't.
I vowed, on the off chance that I survived this trip, to get a vehicle of my own. Problem is, every car rental agency within two hundred miles evidently has my name flagged with a tag that says, "Don't even
think
of renting a car to this nut job," for a minor incident last year. Okay, maybe not so minor, but it wasn't my fault the car was destroyed by a crazed druggie in a muscle truck. Besides, I'm sure the insurance covered the explosion.

I'd have to go get my pickup out of storage in San Carlos, Sonora, seventy-some-odd miles across the Sea of Cortez. Although I didn't look forward to a return overnight car-ferry ride, it paled in the face of subjecting my precious self to Pedro’s daily Passage of Peril.

We swerved—some drivers might turn, but Pedro swerves—off the main highway onto an unpaved but surprisingly smooth road, then up a hill past a large sign reading MINERA LUCIFER.

Before we'd ascended the Hill of Hell, I'd spotted what looked like a smoking volcano much closer than I'd like, but fellow passengers assured me it was dormant and the plume was only a cloud formation. "Heck," one guy told me, "it's been over a hundred years since she blew."

Hello? For a volcano a hundred years is a nanosecond. I hope someone's told it it's dead. And hadn't I read somewhere that the San Andreas Fault runs right smack dab down the center of the Sea of Cortez? Just a few miles east of Santa Rosalia? I'd been in Conception Bay just a few miles south of Santa Rosalia with Jenks, my significant whatever, before he left for Kuwait. We'd anchored off a beach with a rock pool, a soaking tub of sorts. These hot springs simmer up from the fiery bowels of the earth, the water so hot that you can only sit in the pool at high tide when seawater mixes in to cool it to a tolerable level.

And, according to my fellow workers, just a few miles north of the jobsite they were testing for the possibility of a geothermal energy plant.  

Was I the only one detecting a pattern here? Hill of Hell, Lucifer's Mine, a smoking volcano, a geothermal field, an unstable fault line
and
hot water boiling up from some seething cauldron under the sea?

I'd have to have a little tête-à-tête with that devil, Wontrobski, about my fee and maybe add a penalty clause to my contract about duty in unstable areas. Oh, wait, that's why they pay me the big bucks; he probably figures I'm more unstable than those I'm sent to mess with. 

My
numero uno
job-giver-outer (technical term) back in California, Fidel Wontrobski—his father was a Polish Communist, thus the name—is the one who hires me, or rather my company, on contract. His employers, the brothers Baxter, have made clear I should never again darken their payroll department after a little dust up in Tokyo when I ratted them out for gouging a customer, but somehow they didn't seem to mind when the Trob found me useful for their purposes. In fact, they don't much mess with the Trob in anything he does.

A little younger than me, Fidel is skinny and would top six-five if he’d unfold his horrible posture. With a hooked nose, a black scruffy topknot of frizzy hair, and an entire wardrobe of baggy black clothing, he resembles a giant bird of prey. A buzzard. A buzzard savant.

An engineering genius, Wontrobski is a one-man think tank on the exclusive top floor of the Baxter Building Engineering and Construction in San Francisco. Only the elite, such as the brothers Baxter and a couple of former high-ranking politicos, share his aerie. Which is amazing, in light of the fact that Fidel possesses not a single shred of social or political skill. But corporate heads, former Secretaries of State and their minions all defer to The Trob's brilliance.

Of course, they highly discourage any Trob interaction with other employees, and certainly never let him talk to clients. When we met many years before, lunch was delivered to his loft and, most nights, dinner. He lived in a nearby hotel, slept only four hours a night—midnight to four—and was the first one in the Baxter employee cafeteria for breakfast each morning. When I worked there, I was usually second.

For weeks after I first joined the firm, the Trob and I sat at opposite ends of the mostly empty cafeteria, studiously ignoring one another. Then one morning as I was passing his table we experienced a power failure. Hearing a frightened whimper, I reached in my purse, whipped out a flashlight, and sat with him until an emergency generator kicked the lights back on. We ate breakfast together that day and every workday until I was shipped off to Japan, where I managed to piss off the brothers Baxter by questioning their shaky ethics. One might argue that I was hardly one to be arguing ethics with anyone else, but if you're going to gouge the client wouldn't you think it wise to at least tell your own project engineer so she won't tip your hand?

Fidel was a prisoner of his superior intelligence, a wunderkind trapped in his own safety zone, until I introduced him to Allison Cuthbert, all five-feet plus a smidgen of her. A product of Houston’s fifth ward and the daughter of a black, second generation welfare mom, Ms. Cuthbert came up hard, as we say back home in Texas. Now a prosecutor with political ambitions, she possesses the body of a gymnast, the beauty of a model, the professional scrappiness of an alley cat, and a politician’s savvy. How in the hell she and the Trob fell in love is beyond me, but now they are not only married, but expecting a baby any second, the physical attributes of which scares the crap out of me. At least the kid will be smart.

Thanks to the Trob my past three projects, all in Mexico and Baxter Brothers related, have proven profitable if a little on the dodgy side. Since I wasn't too keen on a repeat performance involving running afoul of drug cartels, Jihadist radicals (is that an oxymoron?), suicide bombers or human smugglers, a simple day job at a mine in Baja seemed just the ticket.

Besides, I had time to kill while waiting for my sig-other, Jenks Jenkins, also on contract to Baxter Brothers, to finish up in Dubai. Highly pissed with the present administration in Washington and tired of being used as a punching bag in the mainstream press, the Baxter Brothers were relocating their substantial headquarters to Dubai, as did Halliburton a few years back, and they’d hired Jenks to front for them. When Jenks's Dubai gig is done, our plan is to take
Raymond Johnson
back to the San Francisco Bay Area.

If
I lived through Pedro's lousy chauffeuring and a possible violent discharge of steam and molten rock of some sort.

Pedro played chicken with a huge earthmover and won, leaving the driver in a shallow ditch. To take my mind from what was surely my last day on earth, I closed my eyes, decided to think positive and began a mental list of stuff I needed onboard in preparation for a voyage north up the Pacific Coast: six cases of wine, ten bottles of bourbon and a bunch of rum….

The van slewed to a dusty stop in front of a group of doublewides marked:

Gerencia/Administration
.

Pedro, still chattering into his cell phone and puffing away, jumped out and opened the slider next to my seat. Once out of the van, my fellow passengers took off walking with purpose toward various buildings, the van left, and I stood alone in the road like a duck looking for thunder. Hearing my name called, I pivoted and spotted a guy waving from a pickup. He climbed out and sauntered toward me.

Six or so inches taller than my five-four, he had that lanky, but muscular, Marlboro Man build that reminded me a bit of Jenks. Longish red hair curled out from under a gold hardhat plastered with stickers like MINERS DO IT IN THE DARK and MINERS DO IT DEEPER. He wore a bright orange vest that almost matched his hair color, and his face was dotted with more freckles than a turkey egg. He had those rugged good looks that always snag my attention, and according to his hat his name was Joe "Safety" Francis. He removed his sunglasses and squinted at me with bright blue, Robert Redford eyes. As he opened his mouth to speak, I beat him to the draw. "Let me take a wild guess here, Joe. You're a miner?"

He grinned and stuck out his hand. "Everyone calls me Safety. He said you were a fast study."

"And
he
be who?"

"Your boss."

"Right answer." I offered my hand, we shook and I trailed him to his truck, a big old diesel dually.

On the passenger seat was a white hard hat, no clever stickers, just my name.  I tried it on for fit, adjusted the strap to my head size. "Thanks. How come my hat is white and yours is gold?" I asked, even though I knew the answer: Gold hardhats are for honchos.

"Because I'm a guy?"

"Wrong answer."

"Your
jefe
also said you could be a pain in the ass."

"The Trob is always right."

He grinned, put the dually in gear and took off down the road. "Anything I can fill you in on before we get to your office? Like, what we've hired you to do?"

"Not really, " I lied. "Besides you didn't hire me."

"Point taken. Your official title is Liaison Materials Engineer."

Like I didn’t already know that. "I don't liaise well with others, but Materials Management is my game."

"So we've—" He braked to avoid an out of control dirt hauler the size of a locomotive. The big machine rocked to a stop as well and a diminutive Mexican woman waved, then gave us a "sorry" shrug.

Safety cursed under his breath and said, "Trainee. We're so hard up for people that we started a driver’s training program for local Mexican women. Unfortunately we've had one fatality and almost had to dump the program, but the Mexicans wouldn't hear of it. After all, while learning the women get a hundred a week, US, and after that, it doubles. They'd probably faint if they knew what
you
make."

"How do you know what I make?"

"I don't, exactly, but I can guess. People like you don't come cheap."

"Yeah, well, for your information, I can be very cheap."

"Heard that, too."

We shared a chuckle and I decided Joe could be my new best friend. I also noticed his speckled finger didn't sport a wedding ring, and that's a good thing. I've found that male new best friends are better when there's no wife involved.