“There isn’t time,” he replied. “We have to hurry.”
Terrence was on the ground, facedown. It was over for him.
I felt sick, despite the fact that this wasn’t even the first dead body I’d seen on this wonderful vacation. Clay used a booted foot to push him over, and it rolled with a strange limpness. There’s something rather vacant about a corpse, the way the shoulder flops over. The feet surrender. The expressionless face.
Clay kneeled, inspecting the body. I doubted it was easy for him to do what he did, but it was hard to detect telltale signs of a conscience in Clay. He seemed fine.
He looked over to tell me the heavy words I knew were eventually coming.
“Aaron’s not innocent.”
I didn’t have a response.
“But he’s a good man,” he continued. “And you’ll need my help if you want to bring him to a doctor.”
He let that sit for a second. He stood up. Need his help? His help? I was suspicious but I knew I had no choice.
“A doctor?” I questioned.
“The clock’s ticking.”
I had to oblige him. In all these outlandish happenings, it made sense that the only way out was an outlandish offer.
“All right,” I said. “But on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“The keys to the SUV…I carry them.”
He dug in his pocket and tossed them to me. No hesitation. He was willing to do whatever I wanted.
I had more to say, more to demand. “The rifle…I hold it.”
There was a natural pause here but I hit him with a third condition before he could object.
“And you…” I said. “You keep in front of me.”
He weighed his options, looking across the canyon and the river, with so many nooks and crannies where one might hide. He stepped forward, closer to me but not intrusively so. I nodded to the river. He seemed to know immediately what I meant. We’d be hiking upstream.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder. The upper hand was mine now. It was tangible. Not because of the weapon, but because of the map in my head.
“Let’s go,” I said to him.
“Let’s go save lives,” he said back.
Chapter 20
I guided Clay through the canyon without saying anything other than where to turn. Dark thoughts were swarming around my soul like flies on a carcass. Aaron isn’t innocent. Aaron may have hurt people. Aaron hid something.
“Veer toward the crest,” I said to Clay.
You start a marriage with two eyes open, you stay in it with one eye closed. This is the standard advice. Yet had I proceeded along with both eyes closed? Was I also wearing earplugs? And a sensory deprivation suit? Did I know my husband at all?
I finally spoke up about a half hour into our hike. “Okay, fine, let’s hear it,” I said. “What sort of cataclysmic thing could you and Aaron be involved in?” I had a thousand questions, but needed to ask him things without telling him things.
“Oil,” replied Clay.
We were hiking across the eastern vista, in the midst of the most spectacular sedimentary erosion I’d ever seen. Everything out here looked like a beautiful forgery of the Grand Canyon. If only I were in a place to enjoy it.
“Oil,” I scoffed.
“The answer to ninety-nine out of a hundred questions.”
“Is money.”
“Is oil,” he insisted.
My rifle was pointed at his back. I know there’s safety protocol to weapons and triggers and where you aim, but I was done being safe. If I accidentally tripped on a pebble and shot him in the spinal cord, so be it. I’d apologize in the eulogy.
“Did your husband ever tell you about the case of Drake v. Llorenzo?”
“No.”
“That family?”
“No.”
“From the town of Chasm? Drake v. Llorenzo? He really never told you?”
“Keep facing forward.”
I was lying. Aaron had told me, but I wasn’t intending to trust Clay yet. I needed to keep my guard up. Both verbally and physically.
“Llorenzo’s family got long-term illnesses from a water supply polluted by fracking,” he said. “Drake Oil’s fracking lines.”
It was a legendary litigious nightmare spanning years. Clay knew every nuance of it and retold the chronology well enough for me to believe he was at least part of Aaron’s legal department, or had been well briefed. The trial controversially ended when the Llorenzo family was exposed for taking bribes from a rival corporation. Another oil company was bribing Llorenzo to fabricate the entire lawsuit. The whole case was exposed as a lie. That was the brilliant Drake defense team at work. That’s what won.
“I don’t see how this is news,” I replied when he finished.
“Ah, okay, good. So you’re up to date,” said Clay. “So what you probably don’t know…what Aaron probably hasn’t told you…is that those bribes never happened.”
“You mean Drake fabricated the bribes?”
“Drake fabricated the family.”
He was no longer the requisite twelve feet ahead of me on the trail. I’d dropped my guard. I’d completely lost focus on our spacing.
Fabricated the family?
“I don’t get it,” I said to him.
“Our legal team found a father of three who was willing to say he was sick.”
“Even though he wasn’t? Sick?” This made no sense. “So Drake invented its own fake case? Against itself?”
He was walking alongside me. My gun was no longer safely defending my personal bubble. He could’ve easily done something to me during this time. He could’ve strangled me, pushed me down, and disarmed me. I’d been completely distracted by his claim.
“It’s a con game,” he said. “We called it a false god. You control your enemy by controlling their hero: you create their hero…then you humiliate their hero.”
“Why?”
“So you can make sure one big case, just one, will lose exactly the way you need it to. And when that case loses, it sets a precedent for all other cases to lose. It sways public opinion. It sways juries. It’s unstoppable.”
“How would you pull that off?”
“Pay everyone. Pay opposing lawyers. Pay the clerks. The cops. Judges. The hardest judge is the
