“Natural gas being processed near Barstow. They add a chemical called mercaptan to it so that it’s detectable. Then the excess—like everything within three hundred miles—ends up drifting into our valley.”
Bob nodded. “Show me Michelsen’s trailer park.”
She put the car back into gear and rolled past the empty lot. Just south of its entrance, the road led into a vast field of mobile homes, all permanently set on blocks. People milled around, talking in what passed for front yards, kids playing.
“Doesn’t feel that bleak. Sure smells it, though.” He nodded towards the mountains. “That haze—it looked like it was hanging over downtown when I arrived.”
She nodded. “The dust collects other pollutants as well. Pretty normal these days, with so much of the county’s topsoil disturbed. There’s a lot going on here, a lot of money and productivity. Not a lot of worry about the effects on any of these folks, really.”
Behind them, Bob heard the squeal of dusty brake pads. He checked his six. A moment later, an older dark blue Dodge truck with a Confederate flag on the door rolled slowly past their vehicle.
Through the passenger window, a stone-faced man with a short brown crewcut watched them, his eyes dark, a half cigarette clamped between his lips, smoke billowing. He raised one hand and flapped his fingers in a downward motion, a blunt little half-wave.
“Recognize him?” Bob asked.
“I do. That’s Tommy Kopec. Famous local trouble. Tommy Clobber to his friends and the many frightened souls he’s beaten down over the years. He’s made the news a few times.”
“Charming.”
“His twin brother Vern was probably driving.”
“Michelsen’s men?”
“That would be my guess, or they wouldn’t be near the place. Vern’s famously slow. He beat a murder charge last year. The paper said he was caught in the middle of removing some guy’s kidneys.”
“Excuse me?” That was a new one.
“In less-than-sanitary conditions,” Sharmila noted.
“And they both harassed Hap for months?”
“Uh huh. Hard to tell them apart, except Vern’s got a big scar above his left eye,” she said forlornly, like they were in the last place she wanted to be. “Dad didn’t tell me at first, but the pressure in the last two months really got to him. Gangsters rolling by his place, miming shooting him through the car window, using their fingers as guns, that sort of thing. Stunting, the police called it. Bottles thrown at his front door, windows shattered, his tires slashed.”
“Frightening.”
“They showed up at my place as well, when he came over for Sunday supper,” Sharmila said. “My husband came out with his double-barrel twelve-gauge, let them know what would happen if there was a return visit.”
Nice to know the hardy pioneer spirit extends to both sides, Bob thought wryly. Nobody deserves to be terrorized by people like this.
“And did Tommy Clobber and his brother ever show?”
“They came by the clinic one day. One of our clients recognized his former meth dealer and knows him to be supplied by Michelsen.”
“And the police…”
“The police had little interest.”
“To be fair,” Bob said, “that isn’t much they can work with. They’d be tough to individually identify, tough to make the argument it was a deliberate threat without a stated rationale, tough to even pick them up for questioning on that.”
Sharmila frowned. “I know.”
“Sorry… I just thought—”
“It’s not like we’re all yokels, Bob. I don’t need everything explained to me.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine. I know you’re just trying to help. And most of the police here have been nothing but good to us.”
Bob gestured to the empty land stretching out from the town. “So your dad’s idea was to stop this from going ahead?”
“If he could. He figured as sheriff, he could make a strong law enforcement-supported argument that any new affordable housing should be proper homes, built at cost, sold to the new owner through a combination of sweat equity in building them and low-interest or no-interest loans.”
“Because nice neighborhoods don’t attract drug dealers, they deter them.”
“Pretty much, yeah. And initially, he thought he’d get some help from the local business community. About a quarter of the undeveloped land was owned by Jenkins Mechanical.”
“Marcus’s employer on his job placement?” Bob said. “That’s darn coincidental.”
“Possibly just that, however,” Sharmila proposed. “For such a big city, Bakersfield can be awful small sometimes. And Oildale never won any awards for sophistication.”
“They didn’t take his ideas seriously?”
“He said they did, said he spoke with Dick Jenkins personally and he seemed enthused.”
“I sense a ‘but’…”
“You got that right,” Sharmila said.
