Hell's Roundabout. Benjamin Vance
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found. Lucy had reverted to her normal self and Army thought it better not to show the burned piece of human hand to anyone else. He was sure Les Gilbert would be glad to get it though.
He thanked the other deputies and signed their time cards. After they dropped Sonora and Lucy off, Army found it was well past lunch time. He felt bad about forgetting a simple kindness and called Sonora and asked if she and Lucy would like to eat lunch with him and Charley. She accepted cordially and the two jumped back in the SUV and picked up the ladies. They dropped by the morgue to deposit their findings and then went on to eat.
After they arrived at the restaurant, ordered and Lucy and Charley went to play video games, Sonora asked what else they’d found after she and Lucy left the hill. Army actually drew a diagram of the bluff on the back of a place mat. She was aghast, and asked what kind of velocity it would take to imbed tires into a cliff like that. Army hung his head for a brief moment, then looked directly into the pretty lady’s questioning eyes and said, “They didn’t go into the hill Sonora … they came out of the hill.”
She looked at him like he’d mooned her, and then asked through an uncomfortable smile, “How … how does that happen? Am I missing something here?”
“You’re not missing any more than the rest of us Sonora. It seems impossible, but it happened. The tires are burned. If they’d hit the cliff like that, there would be burned rubber in an impact pattern all around the tires. There’s no impact pattern of any type and the plastic piece melted on … or out of the rock. I know it makes no sense, but the explosive accident may … sort-of ... make sense somehow.”
Sonora exhibited her logic skills with, “I thought the accident was like an explosion that went toward the hill, not away from it?”
“Good thinking Sonora. I only have a shaky fragment of an idea, but what if the Mustang was going toward the cliff at the same speed the Prius was supposedly … supposedly mind you, coming out of the cliff an instant later. It’d be an impact similar to a mid-air collision; almost nothing left. Also, since the mustang was mostly metal and heavier, perhaps some magnetic force created a North-South attracting situation for just a millisecond, like during a lightning strike and maybe the Prius’ batteries had something to do with it too, who knows what happened, or how, but no matter how one looks at it, it’s weird; it’s weird but it happened.”
He started to tell her more, including the Anderson story, but their food came and he went to get Charley and a reluctant Lucy. Their meal was good and the conversation from that point on was lighter. Army dropped the ladies off at 3:00 p.m. and he and Charley went to the office to see who was there and what other information had possibly been generated by any other agency regarding the terrible accident. However, there was no more information and the only person in the office was Gordon, a day dispatcher. Army checked his office messages, found one “call me please” from a Ms. Chiara Logan and proceeded home with his mind reeling.
One of the first things he did upon returning home was to call Chiara. Of course she didn’t answer, but he left a nice message and hoped for an early call back. Charley wanted to visit one of his buddies in the apartment complex so he let him go and got a cup of coffee and sat to think about the past hours. One of the first questions that ambled into his consciousness was the young stand of pines. Why were there smaller pines in that area anyway and why was the strip of young pines so pronounced? Perhaps they’d been legally logged, but why and when?
Maybe something else came out of that hill in the past and took down a line of trees with it; some mining equipment perhaps? The more he thought about it, the more preposterous it seemed, so he started to make notes. As a priority, he listed research on the number of wrecks at the intersection of canyon road and the state route, research on geology of the area and perhaps a trip to U.C. Davis to talk to someone in the geology department if there was such a thing ... or person.
On a whim, he went to the internet and looked up accidents in Bishop, California. Unfortunately, about all he found was blogger posts about suing the state or county for an accident that wasn’t the person’s fault, of course. He did find one about a mysterious accident 22 years earlier where a contractor claimed a car came out of nowhere and rammed his truck with such force it removed the rear of his vehicle. The other driver was killed in the fiery crash and could not be interrogated, but the strange part was that the car was registered in the Federal Republic of Germany, and no record of its importation was ever uncovered.
As he sat contemplating the right methodology for perusing the county’s historical records, his telephone rang and startled him. He thought it was Chiara calling back but when he looked at his caller ID, it listed Andy Shepard.
He answered with, “Sheriff?”
“Yeah Army it’s me. I was anxious to see what you guys found at the accident site today.”
“Oh … well, what didn’t we find, let me see … we found part of a burned human hand, several small parts of a vehicle; and two burned tires and some melted plastic sticking out of the damned cliff, Andy. They didn’t get stuck going in, they got stuck coming out. I know that sounds crazy, but I was just setting here at the kitchen table making notes about what kind of research I could do to rationalize the impossible.”
“You don’t have to rationalize it for me Army. There’ve been strange things going on up there for many years. The state was talked into putting in a roundabout after a state senator’s son was killed in a bizarre accident at the crossroad. He had a nice souped-up Chevy and about the biggest piece we found of it was the new rear end he had put under it. The serial number on it matched the one that was put in the kid’s car. It looked like the car was shot out of a cannon through the trees and just disintegrated on ‘em. There wasn’t much left of the kid or his girlfriend either.”
Army tentatively asked, “Is that why there’s a completely new stand of young pines up the slope rather than an old tree or two mixed in here and there?”
“Wish it were. One night about 15 … no 17 years ago I guess, not long after the senator’s son was killed, we got a call from Ned Stevens that a truck had lost a rock crusher and just left it in the road. Well it wasn’t left in the road; it was buried so deep in the macadam that we had to use a bulldozer to try to uncover it. We couldn’t get it out so we cut it off and left part of it in the damned basement rock under the road, Army. It’s still there. I guessed no one but me thought the ‘blow down’ of all the trees on the hill may have been anything but the result of a tornado.
“Tornado my ass; that huge piece of equipment came down that hill and buried itself in the rock like a flaming arrow. Oh, we had everybody on the force making claims that a tornado dropped the stuff there and some said it came out of an airplane, but I knew and I think a couple of other people knew it came out of that hill. I checked the hill myself; by myself. I saw some pieces of burned metal still sticking out and I knew, but I didn’t say it. I never have, and you shouldn’t say it either Army, at least to no one else. People will think you’re nuts.”
“Well, what about the guys who went with me? They saw what I saw and will be asking questions.”
“They won’t be asking questions Army. You’ll find everyone will think of some cockamamie reason that makes sense to them and they’ll rationalize it away. I knew you’d see what I saw. That’s why I encouraged your trip to New York. I think those lights have something to do with the phenomena and I want you to try to get to the bottom of it if you can. I can’t let you do research on county time, but if you need to make another trip to check out some explosives theory, you set it up. Are you with me?”
“I’m with you Sheriff, I’ll keep my mouth shut, but I have a question for you; do these accidents happen during storms?”
“Come to think of it, they probably do. Did you find out something about their relation to storms in New York?”
“Well if you want to believe a senile old Swede. He says when there’s lightning, things go away from a hill there. It’s around that mining area I told you about. Perhaps that’s the reason for the fire and the smell of ozone or sulphur.”
“Believe me,