Gone To Ground by Morgan Hatch

Carlos rode the boom lift thirty feet up, stepped onto the deck of the viaduct, and worked his way through the final course of rebar, checking the snap ties as he went. By noon, it would all be covered with two hundred yards of cement, an act of finality that had left him sleepless and bleary-eyed. He got to the unfinished edge and gazed out at the yuccas standing in the morning sun, their knobby arms raised as if surrendering. The only movement, the only noise came from the survey team a quarter mile ahead, hammering stakes and taking measurements through transits. His phone buzzed with a text from Raymond, the lead surveyor. It was an image of a tortoise craning its neck.

Carlos pulled out his walkie. “How many?”

A pause. “I count about twenty, twenty-five.”

Carlos hissed. Nothing meant more trouble for projects like this than habitat issues, and the desert tortoise was at the top of the protected species list in this part of California. He kicked a water bottle off the deck, his head now flooding with a list of change orders, cost overruns, impact reports. The Sierra Club would have an injunction by the end of the week, his crew would scatter, and the job would be bad-mouthed in the trades, falton as they would call it. It was the bane of every publicly funded project. Things were always stop-and-go, and for contractors, consistency was king.

“We’ll need some video. Get a geotag on it and email it over.” He paused and then told Raymond one more thing. “Tell your guys to go home. We gotta pull them off the job for now.”

The radio chirped again. “One more you need to see.”

Carlos opened the next text. It showed the flat underside of one of the tortoises, four legs helplessly splayed out. Along one edge of the shell, a small strip of aluminum had been riveted to it. The last picture was a closeup of the tag, showing a bar code and a set of Chinese characters.

# # #

Tasha passed through the metal detector and retrieved her phone on the other side. She tapped the screen, a clip showing a pod of tortoises ambling across the desert. The image needed no explanation.

Muthafucka.

In her six years as the Senator’s Chief of Staff, she’d had to learn ways to corral her temper—deep breaths, long drinks of water, long drinks of Grey Goose—but today all she wanted to do was throw her phone across the capitol rotunda. The rail project was her ticket to Washington, with or without the Senator. If things went pear-shaped here in Sacramento, she’d be back running school board elections in Los Angeles.

She arrived in the back of the Senate chambers in time to catch the last legs of the reauthorization debate. Support was split for the bullet train, which was now so far over budget that it would require a fourth round of bonds. An eleventh-hour deal with a large off-shore hedge fund had given the project new life. The Speaker could either bring the reauthorization up for a vote now or tomorrow. Three hours ago, it would have been a lay-up for Tasha. She’d already put in an offer for a two-bedroom condo in Georgetown.

The vote count on the screen and the adjournment clock ticking down lent the usually staid chambers a charged air. The Speaker stood at the dais, gavel in hand, talking with a staffer over his shoulder. From the steps below, a senate page reached up and slid the Speaker a note. He read it and looked over the top of his glasses without moving his head. Tasha followed his line of sight. A lone figure stood hands in pockets, silhouetted in a balcony doorway, his presence apparently the message. When Tasha looked back, the Speaker was already bringing his gavel down. The vote would be delayed until tomorrow at eight a.m., an eternity in Sacramento during the deal-making days of August. Careers often turned on these votes, and Tasha felt hers slipping away. The Sierra Club was probably already setting up the presser with their righteous refrains. She’d done her best to curry favor with the green slice of the electorate, keeping the Senator at or above 80% favorability. Coastal set asides, old-growth logging regulations. And this had come at considerable expense to the donor list, a hit she knew was worth the points he’d scored with the base.

All those years triangulating, positioning, counter messaging, all the miles on the road, in the air, prepping, dodging, deflecting, polling, vetting, all that code-switching, hi-watt smiling, all the hours briefing and debriefing, and for what? So that a thirty-second video could expose him as an environmental hypocrite? Tasha knew this was no accident, and she knew who was behind it.

# # #

George Jones drove his matte black Land Rover past the valet at Torento, one of the few spots in Sacramento that could still be relied upon for discretion. He self-parked and walked past the hostess, straight to a corner booth where the Senator sat alone, hunched over a bowl of pasta. He saw Jones approach and dipped his head slightly to indicate an empty seat. Jones ignored the Senator, instead pulling up a rattan chair from a neighboring table.

The restaurant was dimly lit, the high-backed booths upholstered in Oxblood leather, the room full of the hushed tones of last-minute horse trades. “Your train is coming in,” said the Senator without looking up. “But I suspect you already knew this.” The Senator attacked his pasta, his torso rocking with each spin of the fork. “Something about turtles.” He finally looked up and let out a breath. “I hear they’re on loan from the Zhang Zhao Preserve. They must have cost you a small fortune.” Then he shoved a forkful of pasta in his mouth.

“They’re tortoises, not turtles, and I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jones. A waiter arrived with a menu, and Jones waved him off.

The Senator pulled out his napkin and dried the sweat from his upper lip, then stabbed at something in the sauce. “Turtles, tortoises. No one cares. All I know is they’re slow, and there’s too many.” He took a swallow of wine. “You have my ass in the air, and the vote is tomorrow. Seems like your reputation is well earned, Mr. Jones.” He broke off a piece of bread and dragged it through the white sauce. “Singapore, Athens, Hyderabad. Your resume, Mr. Jones,” his mouth finally empty, “some biblical shit.”

Jones had actually flirted with the ministry at one point. “Pox and pestilence, rivers into blood. Moses didn’t fuck around, and neither do I.” A college girlfriend had once examined the headline of his palm, straight and uncrossed, and proclaimed it a sign of either intense religious conviction or a tendency toward psychopathy. “If there’s a transit node involved, I’ll salt the earth myself.” He made a show of checking his watch.

The Senator leaned back, let his hands rest flat on the table, as if ready to make it levitate. “We’re prepared to reroute the line to Panorama City. Just know you’re the ghetto option.” He folded the napkin and looked at Jones. “And as we both know, bullet trains don’t stop in the ghetto.”

“Of course it’s coming to the ghetto, Senator. There’s nowhere else to stick it.” He ran a hand down his pants to flatten a wrinkle. “Ghetto for now, Senator.” Jones nodded at the Senator’s bowl of pasta. “But I’ll bet you another bowl of that alfredo you seem to love so much that in a year, you’ll be making offers on our condos before they’re even out of plan-check.”

The Senator gave Jones an appraising look. “Have you seen Panorama City lately, Jones? Great town if you’re a pole dancer. They have a tent city the size of Rhode Island.”

“For a curious man,” he said, standing, “you ask the wrong questions.” Jones passed his gaze around the room. “Your work is done, Senator. Time for the ground game.”

When he got to his car, Jones pulled out a phone and spoke first in Mandarin before ending in English. “Call LA. I want updates every six hours.” Then he pulled out the second phone and punched in a text.

VDL go

# # #

The man in the boat hadn’t had a bite and didn’t much care. He came for the solitude, the stars, and the sounds of the reservoir at four a.m. Most people fished during the day from the dam wall where it was wide enough to park their coolers and fold-out chairs. Van der Lipp Dam itself was the third largest in the western United States and the oldest by a decade. A sluice had been built at the base of the dam’s southern end, a failsafe option for a uranium enrichment plant from the 1950s. The plant had long since been dismantled, though the sluice, which emptied into a dry lakebed in the San Fernando Valley, remained.

A vehicle approached, the light wash of high beams coming through the pine trees. The man in the boat had not seen anyone use the access road in his twenty-odd years of fishing the reservoir. It was a white panel van, and it very quickly turned, reversed itself, and backed up ten feet from the water’s edge. The rear door opened, and a team of five people climbed out, two of them in wetsuits, hoisting scuba tanks from the back of the van. They worked without talking, testing the respirators, buckling their weight belts. In less than a minute, they were walking backwards into the water, each clutching something the size of a shoebox. Soon, the only evidence of either of them was a trail of bubbles rising to the surface.

The man then took out a pair of binoculars he kept for birding and watched two other men walk out onto the dam’s catwalk. The first man carried a coil of rope slung over his shoulder; the second wore a backpack and had on a climber’s harness. When they were about one hundred feet out, the first man sat down and tied himself onto a railing stanchion and belayed the second man over the edge of the dam. The team worked noiselessly, their movements practiced and efficient. In twenty minutes, the divers surfaced and took off their flippers and tanks. Soon after, the man in the harness reappeared on top of the dam.

As they loaded up to leave, a fish took the man’s lure and pulled the rod off his lap, hitting the aluminum gunwale. A second bang followed when the reel hit the bottom of the boat. The noise echoed across the lake. All five men stopped what they were doing and looked in the man’s direction. The man, still hidden in darkness, also froze. Five seconds passed. Then ten. Finally, one of the five men from the white panel van reached for something in the front seat and disappeared into the woods. The other four climbed back in and drove back down the access road to somewhere called Panorama City.

Ten minutes later the man in the boat lay face down now, hidden amongst the tule in the shallow water of the lake, two in the chest and one in the head. His boat lay at the bottom of the lake, also with three holes shot through it. The shooter had collected the six empty shells and then walked the eight miles back down the access road to the city street. He’d boarded the 154 bus which would take him to meet up with the others. Someplace called Frogtown was about to become the newest body of water in Los Angeles.

***

Excerpt from Gone To Ground by Morgan Hatch. Copyright 2024 by Morgan Hatch. Reproduced with permission from Morgan Hatch. All rights reserved.