Vicky watched Stratton walk away until he disappeared around a corner. Then she climbed into her car and, unable to drive for the moment, sat there feeling a terrible sorrow for Stratton, for Josh and for herself.
26
Stratton heard Vicky call his name but chose not to respond. Any further conversation with her would have been pointless and, frankly, painful. He liked her, more than he’d imagined he could have when they’d first met, but if their worlds had been far apart that day they were out of sight of each other now.
He walked around the corner and crossed the road to an old workhorse of a GM pick-up truck parked in the quiet residential street. The grey paintwork was chipped in places, revealing patches of rust and its original fire-engine red. Storage cabinets ran along both sides with rails on top connected by crossbars for ladders. Stratton had seen it advertised in a local newspaper. Its previous owner was an old independent roofing contractor in Mar Vista who’d been happy to announce that he had finally given up hauling all the crap around himself after getting wise to subcontracting and buying himself a used but newer and smaller Toyota pick-up. From now on the only thing that he was going to haul up ladders and onto roofs was his own ass to inspect the work of others.
Stratton climbed in, put the key in the ignition and turned it. The heavy old petrol engine cranked over a couple of times before gunning noisily to life. The old man had said that she might sometimes sound as if she’d died in the night but apart from the occasional hangover she was a reliable old gal.
Stratton pulled the heavy door shut and wiggled the loose column gear change until the needle lined up with the ‘D’ and the vehicle shunted into drive. He released the brake, pressed the accelerator pedal slowly down and the truck jerked forward with surprising power. The wheel turned easily, aided by the power steering and he steered the pick-up out of the parking space, straightened it up in the centre of the narrow road and accelerated noisily between the cars parked on either side.
He turned onto Fourteenth Street heading south and five minutes later was driving east on Highway 10 that joined the 405 North within a couple of miles. On the springy bench seat beside him were the rolls of construction blueprints for Skender’s building, a couple of yellow-page directories and a sheet of notes: names and addresses of shops and warehouses and a long shopping list. Next stop was Bakersfield, 150 miles north of LA. From there, after acquiring the items on his list, Stratton was going to head for a small town called Twin Oaks just beyond Caliente where Vicky had been born and an operations base that he had found on the Internet thanks to something she had told him over dinner.
He had a plan, or at least a broad outline of one, that was going to need a lot of work to turn into reality. It was risky and it was big – and it was the only way he was going to get Skender’s attention. There was one aspect of it that Stratton chose not to think about in too great detail and that was the high risk to him personally. It was a two-part plan, each with several phases, the final one of which he would only implement if it looked as if he had failed to save Josh. He’d examined thoroughly the two choices he had – to go for it or to run – and had chosen the first simply because he knew that he could not spend the rest of his life with the guilt of having failed Jack and his family.
The freeways had not been very congested although the pick-up had struggled to climb the steep and winding southern slope of the Grape Vine, a hilly region of the San Andreas Fault that ran north of LA. Three hours later Stratton was pulling into a massive industrial and commercial complex on the east side of Bakersfield that was filled with manufactured-goods and materials outlets of almost every kind.
First stop was a hardware superstore where he bought a tengallon drum of quarter-inch ball-bearings, a tarpaulin big enough to cover the inside of the pick-up, four ten-gallon industrial cooking pots, the largest glass bowl he could find, a gas burner and gas bottle, several wooden serving spoons, a large sieve, a thousand-foot reel of thin cord, a packet of heavy-duty freezer bags, several rolls of masking tape, a couple of hundred feet of fine wire and thirty-two plastic sandwich boxes the size of house bricks.
Stratton’s next visit was to an outdoor-adventure store where he bought every camping-fuel stick or hexamine tablet they had in stock, which amounted to around seventy pounds in weight. It was short of the amount he needed but after locating every similar store in the city and clearing them of their stock he had about enough. The next place was hard to find and Stratton drove around the complex for almost ten minutes before he saw a sign advertising Alan’s Chemicals.
He pulled into the building’s forecourt, shut down the engine, stepped out of the truck’s cab and climbed onto the back to make sure that the tarp was neatly covering everything that he had bought so far. Then he jumped down and headed for the reception building, a small prefabricated add-on to the front of an old hangar-like warehouse.
A customer at the counter was being served and Stratton walked over to a small messy table covered in powdered milk and sugar where a coffee pot was brewing beside a sign inviting customers to help themselves.
An old guy in dirty overalls stepped out from the back and adjusted his spectacles on his nose to focus on Stratton. ‘Can I help you, mister?’ he called out.
‘Yeah,’ Stratton said, walking over to the counter while stirring his plastic cup of coffee.
‘What is it you need?’ the old guy said, wiping his hands on an oily rag.
‘You have ninety-per-cent nitric acid?’ Stratton asked.
‘Just a second,’ the oldster said as he punched several keys on a dirty computer keyboard and scrutinised the old monitor screen to check that he had brought up the correct page. ‘I know we got it, I just gotta get an invoice set up fer yer. How much do you need?’ he asked, satisfied.
‘Twenty gallons.’
‘Not a problem,’ the storeman said as he hit the keys and consulted his monitor again to make sure that he’d put in the correct order.
‘Ethyl alcohol?’
‘Yep.’
‘Five gallons?’
‘Five gallons,’ the other man repeated as he typed it in.
‘You sell mercury metal?’
‘How much you need?’
‘What’s it cost?’
‘I can sell you a pound for eight hunnerd dollars.’
Stratton had hoped it would be cheaper. He needed four times that amount and didn’t have enough money. ‘Just curious,’ he said. ‘That’ll do it.’
‘Trade or charge?’
‘Cash okay?’
‘Cash is always okay,’ the old man said as he punched several more keys and an aged dot-matrix printer at the other end of the desk came to life and started to spew out a page. ‘Lotta acid. What you makin’ there?’
‘Gotta couple of boilers to strip,’ Stratton said with a smile.
‘That’ll do the trick, I guess,’ the storeman said as he tore the page from the printer roll and placed it in front of Stratton.
Stratton read it as he pulled a wedge of crisp new dollars from a pocket and counted out the bills. The old guy checked the amount, placed the cash in the till and gave Stratton his change.
‘That your truck?’ the storeman asked.
‘Yep.’
‘See you outside in five minutes.’
Stratton left the reception building, walked to his vehicle and consulted a map to commit the next stage of his journey to memory. A couple of minutes later he heard the small tug and trailer drive out through the hangar entrance and looked up to see the old man at the wheel. Stratton walked to the rear of the pick-up as the storeman pulled to a stop alongside and shut off the engine.