Poison in the Aquifer

The air inside the trailer was thick and stale. It smelled of cheap cigars, scorched motor oil, and a pot of burnt chicory coffee simmering on an electric hot plate in the corner. An old Realistic CB radio hissed with low-frequency static on the wall, the red power diode glowing in the shadows.

A scarred plywood desk dominated the center of the room.

Filing crates were stacked three high against the particle-board walls, stuffed with dispatch manifests, grease-stained work orders, and rusted metal binders.

I had five minutes at most before the guards sorted out the transformer.

I stepped to the desk.

My fingers moved through the piles with practiced speed. I ignored the routine maintenance tickets and diesel fuel receipts. I looked for the heavy, bound dispatch ledger with the green canvas cover—the universal ledger used by every industrial freight hauler in northern Sonora and southern Arizona.

I found it buried beneath a stack of unpaid chemical bills.

I flipped the ledger open on the desk.

The pages were filled with scrawled entries in purple indelible ink. Dates, tanker volumes, chemical codes, and cash vouchers.

I ran my thumb down the columns.

June 12: Reagent grade sodium cyanide, 500 gallons.

June 28: Flotation solvent B-2, 300 gallons.

July 14: CN-409-LEACH, batch 088. 1,200 gallons.

My pulse slammed against my throat.

Batch 088.

I pulled the amber glass shard from my rag. I held the serial stamping against the invoice number recorded in the ledger.

They matched. Every digit.

This was the source. This camp had manufactured the poison that had contaminated the aquifer.

I turned the page to look for the freight destination and the buyer's authorization signature. If a rogue mining syndicate had bought it, there would be a dummy corporate name stamped in the box.

My eyes locked onto the buyer line.

There was no corporate stamp.

In the signature box was a heavy, jagged scrawl written in black grease pencil: B. Ramos — Highway 10 Freight Logistics.

Underneath the signature was a red rubber stamp with the howling wolf crest of the Highway Pack.

My breath locked in my lungs.

Baltazar Ramos.

Macario's chief supply lieutenant. The man who managed the fuel depot, the maintenance bays, and the northern convoy runs. The man who had stood three feet behind Macario when my Alpha had handed me the execution order yesterday afternoon.

The pieces violently snapped together.

The poisoning of the border well had never been a rogue coyote operation. It had never been an accidental spill or a ranchland provocation. Baltazar had purchased twelve hundred gallons of leaching cyanide using pack logistics funds, hired coyote mercenaries to dump half of it into Yaretzi's cattle tanks, and then staged the empty ampoules at the neutral border well to make Macario believe the ranch pack was trying to wipe us out.

Baltazar was manufacturing a bloodbath.

He wanted the ranch pack and the highway pack to tear each other's throats out so he could take the fuel routes and the artesian wells for himself.

"Find what you're looking for?" a voice whispered.

I whipped around, my nine-millimeter already clearing the holster before my brain recognized the scent of sweetgrass and rifle bore solvent.

Tlalli stood in the doorway.

She had slipped inside without making a sound. Her chest rose and fell in quick, controlled breaths. A streak of black transformer grease was smeared across her left cheekbone.

"Don't shoot your mate," she murmured, closing the door behind her until the latch clicked. "It's considered bad manners."

"Look at this," I said, my voice raw.

She crossed the small room in three long strides. She leaned over the desk, her shoulder pressing hard against mine. She scanned the ledger page where my finger pinned the entry.

Her jaw went rigid. "Highway 10 Freight Logistics. That's your pack's commercial front."

"It's Baltazar Ramos," I said. "Macario's second lieutenant. He authorized the purchase. He paid twenty thousand in cash for three tanker drops of flotation poison."

"To frame my brother," Tlalli said, her voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register. "Yaretzi is marching sixty wolves to your truck stop at sunset because he thinks your pack killed his herd."

"And Macario gave me twenty-four hours to bring him your head because he thinks Yaretzi poisoned our water supply," I said. "Baltazar set the fire on both sides of the fence."

"Can you use this?" Tlalli tapped the green ledger with the tip of a scarred knuckle. "Will Macario listen to ink on paper?"

"Macario is paranoid, but he isn't stupid," I said. "He knows Baltazar's handwriting. If I put this ledger on his desk alongside the glass shard, he'll hang Baltazar from the truck stop sign by his heels."

"And what about my brother?" Tlalli asked. "Yaretzi won't call off the raid for a highway ledger. He'll say Macario forged it to buy time."

"Then we make Baltazar confess on a radio channel both packs can hear."

Tlalli looked at me. A fierce, predatory gleam flared in her dark eyes. "You like dangerous plans, enforcer."

"I like staying alive," I replied. "And I like keeping my pack from dying in an arroyo for a traitor's paycheck."

I tore the three critical invoice sheets from the ledger and folded them into my inside jacket pocket. I shoved the green ledger securely behind the heavy canvas lining of my work coat.

"We leave through the rear wash," I said. "Before the guard finishes with the transformer."

Suddenly, the dusty blinds over the front window lit up in a blinding blaze of twin halogen beams.

The heavy, rhythmic thrum of an eighteen-wheeler's turbocharged diesel engine shook the floorboards beneath our boots. The air brakes hissed with a violent, pneumatic release right outside the trailer door.

Through the window slats, I saw a black Peterbilt flatbed truck idling in the center of the compound yard.

On the driver's door, painted in faded white stencil, was the emblem of Highway 10 Freight.

The driver's door swung open.

A massive man stepped down into the caliche dust. He wore a heavy canvas duster and steel-toed logging boots. A sawed-off shotgun was tucked casually under his arm.

Baltazar Ramos.

Two coyote mercenaries hurried out from the processing shed to meet him, carrying clipboards and empty chemical drums.

"He's here for the final shipment," Tlalli whispered, her fingers locking around the walnut stock of her Winchester. "The poison for the sunset drop."

I clicked the safety off my nine-millimeter.

The exit through the front yard was gone. The badlands trail behind us was wide open, but running now meant letting Baltazar load those tankers and drive them straight into the valley aquifer.

My wolf bared her teeth inside my mind. Fight.

I met Tlalli's gaze in the dim light of the trailer.

"We don't run," I told her.

Tlalli chambered a round into her rifle with a single, sharp metallic crack.

"I was hoping you'd say that," she said.