Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel by George R. R. Martin, Melinda M. Snodgrass Read Free Book Online

happened here,” Sheeba said, demonstrating her unfailing ability to state the obvious.
    What was your first clue? Jamal wanted to ask, but didn’t. Surely it couldn’t have been the Warren Country Emergency Services unit parked halfway onto the shoulder of the two-lane asphalt road, and the crime scene tape delineating two squares—one large, one small—in the ditch.
    The drive from Manhattan had taken twice as long as it should have. Sheeba Who Must Be Obeyed had elected to follow her Navstar, overruling the obsessive freak behind the wheel who kept insisting that it was taking them around three sides of a square. “Couldn’t we have booked a helicopter?” Jamal said, only half joking.
    “Unavailable,” Sheeba snapped, meaning she had actually made the query.
    The extra minutes they spent stuck in traffic allowed Sheeba to recount—largely for Jamal’s benefit—the flurry of text messages, e-mailed maps, and other communications that resulted from one simple fact: sometime last night a vehicle had gone off this lonely New Jersey highway and spilled a container of ammonium nitrate.
    “Why did it take so long?” Jamal had asked, not, he thought, unreasonably.
    “No one found the container until noon today,” Sheeba said. Her voice suggested that there was something lacking in the moral fiber of the residents of Warren County, New Jersey, that they would fail to note a container of dangerous material by the side of one of their roads.
    Feeling a bit like an actor in a bad action movie, Jamal had felt compelled to persist: “And why are we chasing this and not DHS ?”
    “One of the locals said the whole thing felt joker-like.”
    “Some kind of keen perception?” Jamal said. “The smell, maybe—?”
    “The crash site.”
    And so, yes, here they were, in the company of a pair of Warren County hazardous materials types, and Deputy Sheriff Mitch Delpino, a tall, hunched nat around forty who wore a gunslinger’s mustache that clashed with his old hippie manner.
    “It appears a vehicle went off the road here,” Delpino said, spreading his hands and gesturing, as if the tracks could possibly have been mistaken for anything else.
    “And it should have wound up nose-first in that ditch,” Sheeba said. “It’s pretty deep. How do you suppose it got out?” She turned to Delpino. “Any calls for tow trucks out here last night or this morning?”
    Delpino glanced at Jamal, as if to say, you poor bastard, having to work with this . “Yes, we checked with all the services. No one got a call out here or anywhere near here in the past forty-eight hours.”
    Jamal said, “Officer, assuming this truck was carrying something illegal when it ran off the road, how likely is it, do you think, that it would call a legitimate service whose destination could be traced?”
    Delpino allowed himself a smile so faint that only Jamal could see it. “Quite unlikely.”
    Jamal turned away and let his eyes adjust again. There was something odd about the tracks where they crossed the mud. “Any insights into what kind of tires were on this truck?” he said.
    Delpino stepped forward like a grade schooler eager to recite. “These are not tire tracks,” he said. “They are narrower than any commercial U.S. brand or any European one we know. And there’s no tread.”
    “In fact, it looks as though they were thin and solid, like wheels on a kids’ wagon,” Jamal said. “It does sort of feel like a joker thing.”
    Ten yards off the road, its passage still obvious from crushed vegetation, a yellow plastic barrel sat upright in the weeds. “Was this how you found it?” Jamal said.
    “It was on its side,” Delpino said, which was a good thing: neither haz-mat specialist seemed eager to talk. “It hit and rolled. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a small crack on one side. Some fluid spilled.” He smiled. “Which we were able to identify as ammonium nitrate, which is why we called you. Well, DHS .”
    Sheeba