Bones of Contention - Part 1

Ths is a short story (current length ~9100 words) I recently finished. It's kind of a different take on hardboiled, and it's the first thing I ever wrote in first person. I'm publishing the first part here for critique. I'm really hoping to polish this into something I can submit to a mystery magazine, to begin building some publishing credits, so please be brutally honest! 

Bones of Contention

I was cold. This cannot be overstated. Winter in northeast Ohio along the coast is beautiful but brutal. On this particular February day, high up on an old waste compound, far above any wind break that the trees might have provided, we could see Lake Erie. The shallow water was finally starting to ice over, hopefully bringing some respite from the blinding snow squalls, but that only meant that the wind whipping off the frigid lake was that much colder.

            I was bundled in my Carhart coveralls, supervisor weight, flip-top gloves with warming pads tucked in the palms, stocking cap, fleece scarf, and thinsulate-lined boots with heavy socks. I had to look like Nanook of the north, and I was still freezing. It didn't help that every ten minutes or so I had to take my hands out of their cocoon of warmth, to don a pair of thin gloves, break through the ice in the decontamination buckets, and scrub the split spoons. Only the Environmental Protection Agency could be this sadistic.

            To be fair the EPA was not solely to blame. The client, Lawton Environmental Management, was perhaps more culpable. Lawton management kept delaying beginning the drilling work through the summer and fall with one excuse after another, finally declaring that it was too late to begin the work due to 'inclement weather'. I knew from experience that it was far more likely that they were putting off drilling due to inclement cash flow. I worked for Lawton years ago, when I first moved back to my home town, and left soon after my first paycheck bounced.

The EPA only puts up with delay so many times. Unfortunately, they chose January to put their foot down, informing Lawton that they didn't care how bad the weather was, it was time to begin making some progress on closing the unit. So, here we were - freezing our asses off to make some bureaucrat happy, and to keep the client from incurring a hefty fine. Such is the life of a hapless environmental management consultant. We're always the ones caught between the regulators and the regulated, trying our best to keep both sides from calling in the lawyers.

            "Yo, Al," Lumpy Granger, the driller, called above the whistling wind and the thrumming rig. He was talking to me, Alison Quinn, human ice cube.

I turned from the view to give Lumpy my full attention, and he shouted above the din, "We're down to the next sampling interval."

"20 to 22 feet?" I asked, and Lumpy nodded in confirmation.  He picked up a clean split spoon, a two foot tube of metal, split down the center, and held together by a driving tip. He threaded the spoon onto the end of the sampling string, and began lowering it through the hollow stem auger with the help of his assistant, Dave 'Smitty' Smith.

"We're at 20 feet. We'll see if you get to practice yer countin' this time," he flashed me a teasing grin as he made three equally spaced marks on the string where it extended above the wrench, which rested on the augur and held the sampling string immobile.

I made a face at him, and referred to my paperwork. Under normal conditions, I would keep track of the number of blows of the hammer it took to advance the spoon each third of the sampling depth, which was why Lumpy marked the string. In this case, though, the waste was very soft, and his efforts would be for naught. I hadn't counted since we made it through the temporary cap at 8 feet.

             "'Fraid you don't get to count this time either," Lumpy yanked the wrench off to release the sampling string and it began to slowly sink under its own weight, "Like chocolate pudding down there, kid."

            I had just started to make the appropriate notation on the drilling log, when Lumpy grunted, "Well I'll be jiggered, it stopped," he gave the string a push, but it didn't move, "Looks like we found an erratic," he said, referring to the large, sometimes boulder-size rocks found in many glacial deposits, "Maybe you'll get to count after all."

            "We're in the middle of the waste," I stomped a frostbitten foot, "Shit! I hope we don't have to move over and start again."

            "My virgin ears," Lumpy grinned good-naturedly as he raised the rig's hammer to begin delivering the carefully modulated blows to the string, "We'll see if we can break through. If we're lucky it's just a little rock that'll push right out of the way."

            As he began to deliver the blows, I silently counted, getting more and more irritated as the number mounted. Lumpy's grin was replaced by intense concentration, as he watched for the slightest bit of downward movement in the sampling string. We were up to 9 on the blow count when the string broke free. Just a couple more blows, and we were through the entire two-foot sampling depth.

            I let out the breath I was holding, "Didn't go too high for ya, did I Al?" Lumpy began pulling the string.

            "If you'd gone much higher I woulda had to take off my shoes and socks," I responded, and was rewarded with a guffaw from Smitty.

            They quickly pulled the sampling string. Smitty broke the split spoon free, removed the drive tip and dropped it into the first decon bucket, then brought the spoon to me. He cracked it open and laid the two halves side by side on the cooler I was using as a makeshift table.

            Recovery in the sample was lousy at less than 50%, which meant that of the two foot sampling depth, we only collected about one foot of actual material. I pulled on a pair of thin, blue, nitrile gloves, grimacing as another gust of arctic wind buffeted my nearly naked hands and numbed them instantly.

            Smitty was still standing there, and poked at the hard anomaly that had been the cause of the problems in this sampling interval, "That doesn't look like a rock . . ."

            I reached down, picked up the offending chunk, and wiped at the rust-brown muck that clung to it. My ministrations revealed a smooth, though pitted, ashen-colored piece of bone. The sharp edge of the split spoon had broken the bone just below the joint. I was dumbstruck, and held it out to Smitty, "Is that what I think it is?"

 "Looks like the end of a dog bone," he answered. Now I'm no expert, but if my vague memory of skeletal anatomy was correct, that was the top joint from a femur, and it looked about the right size to be human. It was just a little too surreal.

            "At 20 feet?" Lumpy said disbelievingly as he idled down the rig and joined us.

            I pulled out a sample bag and dropped the bone into it.  I sealed the bag and noted the sampling depth on the outside with my all-weather pen, "I'll have to take a closer look later. Let's drill down two feet and collect another spoon."

            Normally we would have drilled another ten feet then taken a split spoon. Continuous split spoon sampling was definitely going to take a lot more time. But while I hated the thought of dragging this whole ordeal out, I wanted to know what was down there. 

It didn't take Lumpy and Smitty long to drill the two feet and get the sampling string back in place. Barely enough time for me to collected the routine samples, and dump the remainder of the muck in the drill cutting drum.

            This time, the sampling string hit 22 feet and sat there. Lumpy began pumping the hammer, slowly advancing the spoon through the two foot sampling interval. The hollow ring of the sampling string hinted that all was not right.

            Smitty began pulling lengths off the sampling string as Lumpy pulled it up.

            "We've definitely run into something odd down there."

            Lumpy and Smitty both came over with the split spoon. When Smitty cracked it open, there were several more bone fragments. I pulled on gloves and poked around in the muck and bone distastefully, then stopped suddenly. I picked up a lump, about the size of a small blueberry, but angular. I opened the cooler and pulled out the deionized water bottle, and squirted the muck off of my prize, revealing a diamond that must have been at least five karats, if not more.

            Lumpy let out a low whistle, "In 30 years, I've never come across anything like this," he considered me seriously, "Think we should call the cops, Al?"

            I nodded and pulled out my cell phone to see if I had any signal, which I didn't, "Lumpy, power down, but leave the auger in place. I imagine the police will want to see everything as is. I'll package this up . . ."

            "You shouldn't disturb the evidence," Smitty said hastily.

            "Somehow I think the time for that is long gone, Smitty," I carefully placed each fragment into the bag, "Let's wrap this up and call the police from somewhere warm."

*************************

            Detective Leo Percival looked at my bone collection, his brows furrowed, "You got these, where?"

            "Between 20 and 24 feet below the surface of that lagoon cap up there," I nodded in the direction of the waste compound. I had both of my red, chapped hands wrapped tightly around a mug of scalding coffee, desperately trying to absorb enough warmth to keep from shivering uncontrollably.

            "So you were drilling to collect environmental samples," Percival paraphrased the information I already provided, "And when you reached 20 feet, you started pulling up bone fragments."

            "Well, maybe more like 21 feet, but yeah."

            "You seem to be taking this in stride, Ms. Quinn," he looked at me shrewdly, "You find a lot of bones in your line of work?"

            "Well, there was that time that I pulled up a skeleton in a bailer," I paused for effect, before adding, "It was a mouse skeleton, though. I've never encountered bones . . . like that, during a drilling job before."

            "Can you explain to me what's in that . . . lagoon, did you call it?" at my confirmatory nod, he continued, "How could these bones have ended up in the lagoon?"

            I glanced up at Sally Lewis, but quickly looked away when I saw the disturbed, but oddly amused look on her face. I was afraid I might burst into inappropriate side-splitting laughter.

Sally is the lab tech/environmental liaison/waste manager and all-around girl Friday at Lawton Waste Management, now. Though she would never get the title due to the physical limitations of having breasts and a vagina, Sally was the one who kept things together in this backwater of Lawton these days. 

Years ago, when I was employed here, we often discussed about how easy it would be to dispose of a body in this place. The possibilities were numerous, and there was one seagull manager, in particular, that we fantasized about doing in. It was eerie to think that someone had actually put into practice one of the macabre methods we joked about.

            "The waste in that unit came from an old primary neutralization process located at the north end of the property," I spoke analytically and studiously avoided Sally's gaze, "Waste acid was brought in, dumped in the holding pond . . ."

            "Pond A," Sally interjected.

            "From there it was pumped into a big tank with lime slurry in it, and neutralized. Any metals would drop out as metal hydroxides. The neutralized waste was pumped into the lagoons where we were sampling today. The salt water would run off into the lower holding pond, and the metal hydroxide sludge and un-reacted lime would settle out and remain in the lagoons."

            "How long ago did the process operate?"

            "Old Site 1 was closed and dismantled over 30 years ago, when this 'new' system was constructed," Sally replied, "Lawton hasn't used those lagoons for a long, long time."

            "Detective," I ventured into the ensuing silence, "Are those . . . human bones?"

            Percival nodded slowly, "I'd almost guarantee it, Ms. Quinn, though we'll have to wait for the ME to take a look to know for certain.  We're looking at an old death. I imagine it might have been accidental . . ."

            "Shit, back then, there was no fence around this facility," Sally quickly interjected, "Any idiot could have walked onto the property and fallen into those lagoons accidentally. If they couldn't swim . . ."

            "But wouldn't the gasses from the decaying body have floated it to the surface?" I drew upon knowledge gleaned from obsessive viewing of the various crime scene investigation programs on prime time television. I was a true prime time crime junky.

            "You have a point," Detective Percival said, and I glowed with the praise. I always wanted to be a CSI, at least since George Eads had demonstrated just how sexy the profession was. Sure beat the hell out of environmental management consulting.

            "What are the other possibilities?" Percival prompted.

            I stole a glance at Sally, before venturing one of my favorite scenarios," Well, if the body was in the lime, most of the flesh could have been rotted away fairly quickly," I said, "But the skeleton could have stuck around. Once in the slurry, the acid would eat away at the bones. But if they were caked in lime, they could have made it through the treatment cycle mostly intact . . ."

            "Could someone have accidentally fallen into the lime?"

            "Even then the lime was stored in a silo," Sally said, shaking her head, "No Joe Shmoe could just accidentally fall into the silo."

            "So we'd be looking at foul play, under that scenario," Percival confirmed.

            "But if you wanted to get rid of somebody, why not just push 'em into Pond A," Sally continued an on-going discussion we waged periodically when bored, or pissed with the asshole manager.

            "And have a body floating in the pond?" I argued.

            "Not for too long," Sally responded predictably, "that pond had a really low pH back then. Would have eaten the body up quickly."
            "Including the bones," I said triumphantly, "The only way the bones could have survived is if the body was in the silo."

            "Sounds like you ladies have had this discussion before," Percival glanced worriedly from Sally to me, "I'm not going to find another body out here, am I?"

            "You haven't even found one whole body yet. Don't you think it's a little early to start looking for another?" My energy was sapped from hours of being out in the cold. Now that I was warming up, I wanted nothing more than to go home, kiss my husband and kids, and curl up in front of the fire with a good stiff drink.

            "You have a point," Percival said equably. I grimaced, realizing that my earlier pleasure at what I thought was praise was really just a trite pet phrase that the Detective threw out when he didn't really have anything to say. So much for my CSI aspirations.

            "Can I go home, now?" I asked peevishly.

            "I have all your contact information. If I have any further questions, I know how to reach you," Percival said, "Now remember . . ."

            "Don't leave town?" I felt a glimmer of my former excitement at the thought of being involved to that level in the investigation.

            "No" Percival smiled in obvious amusement, "Don't forget to buckle up on your way home and take it slow. The roads really suck."

            "Oh."