Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) (7 page)

The computer.

The computer in the locker.

For which she alone now held the key.

‘Don’t give it to the police. The oil men…they own the police, I think.’;

Now Senora Ramirez:

“Ms. Bannister. Nina. My teacher. Our friend. You are in our family now. Would you go? Would you go out upon this place—and bring my son’s things back to me?”

Nina nodded:

“Of course. Of course I will.”

Olivia Ramirez nodded slowly and then said:

“Vaya con Dios.”

And the matter was decided.

CHAPTER SIX: FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA

The ocean stretched below them, massive, silver-tinged, heaving quietly in great sub-aquatic swells that seemed to have a life of their own, and that, if one were knowledgeable enough about such matters, probably did.

“For some reason,” Nina was saying, “I’m more nervous about this than I thought.”

She glanced at the late morning sun, now mirrored in the carpet of water that rolled blank and featureless before them to the east.

Then she looked to her right, at the figure seated beside her.

Sandy Cousins. Strawberry blonde hair, bright blue eyes.

Sandy Cousins, public relations executive for Louisiana Petroleum.

Sandy Cousins, who had met both Nina and Hector at Bay St. Lucy’s regional airport, and helped them get outfitted in the bright orange jump suits everyone on the helicopter was wearing.

The helicopter which, she learned, made only two runs a day. A morning run to bring people out to the rig; and an evening run to bring back people who had completed their two week shift.

“What are you nervous about, Nina?”

Nina looked in front of her and behind her.

No one seemed to be listening.

Perhaps that was because the various crew members being ferried out to Aquatica were lost in reading something or other, or were immersed in listening to something or other, thick black headphones sprouting like tumors from their ears.

Which was the case with Hector, seated one row in front of her.

“I don’t know. I just have an image of what it must be like to be on one of those things.”

“You mean an offshore rig?”

“Yeah.”

The sea rolled on beneath her as she turned away from Sandy, who sat just to her right, and back to the window, which was reflecting the sun-glitter to her left.

It was as though the two of them were on a tour bus, so elegant was this sky cruiser of a helicopter––row after row of beige leather seats, all built as though meant for private clubs overlooking Central Park or Chicago’s business district.

They looked to be meant for beefy men smoking cigars, except that no tobacco was allowed past debarkation point.

Or alcohol.

Or cell phones.

Too much danger of explosions.

Explosions?

Perhaps that was why she felt a little nervous.

“So what is this image you have of life on an offshore rig?”

“Narrow corridors too tight for two people to walk abreast; the men all shirtless, sweating; tiny bunks built into the side of the hull; that constant noise of ‘tapokita tapokita,’ pressure gauges everywhere; that ‘ping’ of the radar…”

“Nina, that’s a submarine.”

“What?”

“You’re thinking about a submarine.”

“Oh.”

“Actually, a World War I submarine.”

“I guess that’s what I am thinking about.”

“This is a state of the art oil rig we’re going to, just finished two years ago. It cost seven billion dollars and eighteen million man hours to construct.”

“No depth charges, then?”

“We don’t go under the water; we float on top of the water.”

“I’ve just seen all those movies.”

“Those are war movies. We aren’t at war with anybody.”

“So it’s safe out there?”

Sandy adjusted her glasses.

“It’s perfectly safe, except that it could blow up at any minute like a hydrogen bomb.”

 
“Thank you. I feel all better now.”

“Actually, now that I think about it, the explosion would probably be bigger than a hydrogen bomb. You have to bear in mind that the rig is sitting on a field of ten billion cubic meters of natural gas, which huge tubes are sucking out of cracks in coal buried a half mile beneath the bottom of the ocean floor, which itself is more than a mile beneath the surface of the water. The field also holds about eighty million barrels of crude oil, which is being brought up with the gas, so that the two things can be separated onboard the rig.”

Sandy nodded, thoughtfully, then said:

“Yeah. That would make quite an explosion.”

“But it’s all worth it, right?”

“Of course it’s worth it, Nina! Aquatica pipes to the shore fifteen million standard cubics of natural gas a day, and that is worth about twenty-six million dollars. Just the gas, never mind the oil. In one day. From this one rig. And bear in mind, the thing that should comfort you, Nina, is that if anything does go wrong…”

“Yes?”

“You won’t know a thing about it.”

Sandy leaned closer, the vinyl in her inflatable jump suit hissing across the seat cover while, with every quick movement, she came to resemble more and more what all of them on the helicopter resembled: huge living Halloween pumpkins with rip cords for instant inflation.

“Don’t worry about it, Nina. We’re going to take very good care of both you and Hector. Everybody on Aquatica thought so much of Edgar. We’re all just devastated. We were also told that you were the one who found the body.”

“Yes.”

“My God, what that must have been like.”

Nina said nothing in reply.

“Do they know any more about how his death might have occurred?”

“Not really. Officially he drowned. There was a high level of alcohol in his bloodstream.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

And there the subject came to rest. It was an awkward feeling for Nina, who had a strong urge to confide in this bright, cheerful young woman.

It was the same urge she had felt to confide in Jackson Bennett, or in Moon Rivard.

But something prevented her.

‘You don’t get over on Ms. Bannister…’

How ridiculous! She wasn’t a high school principal any more, and, if she was, these were not school children she was dealing with.

This was a matter of life and death.

But Hector trusted her. Only her.

Edgar had been frightened.

He had called someone.

He had left home in the early morning hours…going where?

And Nina now had a small silver key in her jump suit pocket.

A key to Edgar’s locker. Where, probably, they would find his computer.

And on that computer?

Maybe nothing.

And yet. And yet…

The previous evening in her bungalow, sitting behind the glowing screen of her own computer, she had Googled “Disastrous Oil Spills,” and she could remember reading the words of one environmentalist, describing the causes of one particularly bad accident:

“They were cutting corners. No one person could do it; a number of people had to be involved. But there were warning signs.
The continual influx of hydrocarbons, the missed checks on well elasticity, the venting directly onto the rig—none of these things would have been disastrous, by themselves, But taken together—the main point is, when a spill happens, or when a disaster happens, it’s almost always caused by greed. By someone neglecting to do the third backup check after the first two have been questionable. It’s caused by a lack of redundancy. The little bit of extra care that should be taken, not being taken.”

Was that kind of thing happening on Aquatica? And had Edgar discovered it?

The huge mega bus that posed for a helicopter turned westward slightly, and began to descend. She could feel her ears pop.

Then they leveled out, and the sea stretched on, endlessly, as before.

She looked at her watch––ten- thirty.

She was silent for a time.

They both were silent for a time.

After a while, she sat back in her seat, and put on the headphones connected to the console in front of her.

There was a selection of music.

She punched the button labeled “Songs of the Sea.”

The music began, punctuated, as their conversation had been, by the throbbing of the propellers.

She heard a vocal rendition of “The Tides of Old Bay Fundy.”

She heard “The Lighthouse at St. Mary’s.”

And then another.

And then another.

And then, to their right, just on the horizon, loomed the rig.

It was a carnival of a thing, one spire jutting up into the sky, and a labyrinth of gigantic tubes, like psychedelic worms, crawling all around it.

“There it is,” Sandy whispered. “There’s Aquatica.”

They overflew it once, then circled, came back low and hovered.

Red ants that were safety-suited workers scrambled below.

The helicopter stopped dead still in the sky and began to ease straight down, as though they were in an elevator.

There was the pad, a glaring yellow circle.

And there, on either corner of this huge square rectangle, were giant white tubes that she was later to learn supported them in the water.

The helicopter was now perhaps a hundred feet from the surface.

The last song on the band came on.

She looked down at the people waving at them, and then outward at the ocean surrounding them.

Then she half smiled and half frowned, as, almost subconsciously, she whispered the words of the song she had always, being an ocean dweller, revered:

Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bid’st the mighty ocean deep,

Its own appointed limits keep.

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

Going down the landing ramp of the helicopter would have been like walking into a windstorm, except the winds were coming from straight over her head and howling vertically rather than horizontally.

She could not decide what battered hardest upon her senses: the constant motion of the tarmac beneath her as the rig moved in the waves; the shouting of everybody who was run-walking around her; the noise of the propeller blades fifteen feet above her head; or the dazzling array of colors, huge red tunnel here, orange pipe here, yellow oil derrick there, and underlying everything and overarching everything, the blue of the sea and the identical blue of the sky.

“Over there! Over there! That way, Nina!”

She was bending almost double as she walked, terrified of being decapitated by the rotor blades, although she knew quite well that they were spinning at least twenty feet above her head.

“There! Through there! Watch out for the cranes! The crane operator has probably the most dangerous job on the craft. A supply boat is unloading now, and the ocean chop is pretty strong. The crane offloads huge containers of machine parts that may weigh as much as a ton. Once a few weeks ago one of the containers almost swung into a departing helicopter. It was pretty scary! Come on though—everything looks clear now!”

Sandy hooked an arm beneath her elbow and led the way through a churning crowd of orange people arriving on the rig and orange people leaving it.

“Over here! Come this way!”

Figures everywhere, all of them wearing yellow construction helmets, all of them shouting through cupped hands.

They made their way along, out of range finally of the fierce copter downdrafts, able to smell the wind off the churning waves that surrounded them, able finally to stand upright and breathe deeply.

“My God,” she found herself whispering, for no other reason than to express the other worldliness of it all.

Too loud, too bright, too unstable and rocking, too far removed from her little stable coffee and beignets world.