Dick DeRichter was smiling benevolently at Sarah when Tom and Albert walked back inside and turned their attention back to them.
“Tom has asked to see the house,” Albert proclaimed. “And Sarah wants to see Angie and Tyler, so let’s go.”
They strolled through the living room, Albert carefully shepherding Tom, Sarah to one side, and Dick shuffling behind like a mascot.
“You see, Tom, it wasn’t easy for my father to create all this, but the next generation has challenges of its own. Uranium was a beautiful business back in Dick’s day, when the government guaranteed the price. Now of course, uranium is subject to fluctuations in the price of commodities, not to mention all the political uncertainty over whether it will be used for energy production and all of the new environmental regulations and permits that are required. So it’s prudent for the family to seek out new opportunities.”
As they walked through the ranch house kitchen and out a back door toward one of the outbuildings, a baby’s painful wail could be heard.
“So we’ve developed a much more lucrative business, one with far better margins.”
Albert opened the door to the small cabin and an odor of ammonia wafted out. Albert ushered them inside.
There were drums of chemicals along the walls and propane tanks hooked up to burners. Glass and plastic tubes connected glass jars to one another. On one of the burners a vat of chemicals bubbled away. A large fan set in a rear door failed to keep up with the prodigious production of fumes. Craig and Angie, along with another young couple, were absorbed in the business of operating the lab, oblivious to Tyler’s loud cries. He lay in a baby carrier in the middle of the room.
“Angie, how could you?” Sarah cried, rushing to pick Tyler up.
Angie sat a table where she was measuring out quantities of the lab’s finished product, crystal meth, and carefully funneling it into the narrow blue plastic zip-lock bags that Tom had seen before: at Brubaker’s place and in Denver, when he scored a bag of it. By Angie’s side there were cartons full of the trademark baggies, ready for shipment out to the market.
Was the resort just a front for a meth lab? Meth was pervasive, but ordinarily associated with cheap motels and abandoned buildings and the lab was out of context on North Mountain.
“Oh, hi mom,” Angie said, looking up without any hint of surprise, as if she’d been interrupted while making fruit preserves, or lavender soap, for a 4-H project.
“You come with me right now,” Sarah commanded and Angie responded with an adolescent roll of her eyes. But she obediently followed Sarah outside.
“I’m sure they have some mother-and-daughter issues to work through,” Albert said. “You know my son-in-law, Craig, of course. A fine young man. A real entrepreneur.”
Craig looked up from his work with a broad grin. In another context, his easy warmth would have made him instantly likeable.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.
“And I believe you’ve met both Randy and Melody.”
Tom recognized both of them: Melody had introduced herself when she had come to his office a few days earlier to retrieve the Uranium King. Randy was the longhaired thug who had roughed him up and the discoverer of Brubaker’s still-warm corpse. It was Randy, clearly, who had retrieved the incriminating fire poker for DeRichter.
Randy nodded in Tom’s direction but his pale eyes were devoid of any particular interest. Mugging Tom had just been part of a day’s work.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Why’d you send Randy to mess me up?”
“You know, Tom, that story you published about my father, that was a real cheap shot,” Albert said. “You knew he wasn’t going to open the Whispering Jim, not at his age, so I wonder why you’d do a thing like that? Hold an old man up to public ridicule? Did you do it just to piss me off?”
Tom frowned and shook head, not to reject the assertion as absurd, as much as he would have liked to, but to acknowledge, painfully to himself, that DeRichter saw through him so easily and was probably correct about his motives. In hindsight, it was clear that Tom had, in effect, taunted Albert and invited Randy’s assault.
The meth cooks had clearly sampled the product and were so intent on what they were doing that they paid virtually no attention to Tom and Albert.
“It’s quite an operation, isn’t it?” Albert said. “Just a few workers and it’s highly profitable. Of course, you wrecked my distribution network.”
“Sorry about that,” Tom muttered.
“It’s okay. You’ll make up for it.”
The two men surveyed the operation for a moment, Albert with an air of pride and Tom seemingly puzzled.
“Tell me why,” Tom said. “With everything you have, the DeRichter inheritance and the ability to do anything you want. With all you’ve put into the resort, and all the land that’s still left, why do you need this?”
“We’re diverse, Tom! Successful families adapt to changing times. There’s the next generation to consider, my daughter Angie and my new son-in-law, they need opportunities, not to mention that I’m a grandfather and there’s another generation to be planning for. The old man thought we should get back into uranium and he may be right that uranium is coming back, but not for the DeRichters.”
“The Uranium King is dead, long live the Meth King?”
“That’s good, Tom,” Albert laughed. “I like that.”
“I still don’t get it. You say you’re doing it for Angie and Craig, but you’ve turned them into crankheads.”
Hearing himself dissed, Craig glanced up, looking vaguely perplexed, and Tom shot him a half-apologetic look.
“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” Albert said.
Tom shrugged.
“People in Europe in the 1920s thought that absinthe was a diabolical drink. In the 50s and 60s they made up similar stories about heroin and ‘reefer madness.’ Then it was crack. So much hysteria…” He chuckled at the sheer absurdity of it. “Craig and Angie are adults and they make their own choices.”
Tom might have argued that Tyler didn’t choose to become addicted to meth, but there was no point.
“You’ve explained everything, or almost everything,” Tom said.
“Almost?”
“What happened to Ray?”
Albert grimaced. “You never want to be forced to take extreme measures,” he said. “But Ray left us no alternative. He allowed his troubled relationship with his daughter, with Angie, who is really my daughter and only his stepdaughter after all, to interfere with common sense. He threatened to expose all this….”
“Just like he did twenty years ago, when he protected Sarah.”
“I have a different perspective.”
“She was a child.”
“We’re back to philosophy,” Albert smirked. “You have your illusions and I have mine.”
“Maybe, but they’re not equal,” Tom thought to himself but said, instead, “That’s true.”
“Ray always had a chip on his shoulder,” Albert said. “Even though dad took good care of him and his mother, he thought he should have more. It never pays to yield to blackmail.”
“So you had Randy take care of him?”
“You’d agree that Randy does good work.”
“Clearly, it’s not smart to cross the DeRichters.”
“Like other powerful families, we have interests to protect.”
Albert didn’t see or didn’t care that his father had slipped in past them. The elder DeRichter caught Tom’s eye, held his gaze, and nodded to confirm his complete understanding of the situation. More precisely, Dick DeRichter was confirming Tom as an eyewitness to his son’s gargantuan megalomania, which resembled nothing so much as a nuclear reaction racing out of control. The son made the father’s greed, and his hunger for control over the power of the atom, seem quaint, as if the cataclysm that meth visited on its victims was a modern variant on an atomic weapon, albeit one that exploded within the individual and wreaked its devastation on the landscape of the psyche. Dick DeRichter had not turned up at Tom’s office randomly to proclaim he was re-entering the uranium business, which was eminently respectable compared to the tawdriness of a meth lab, but in a valiant if vain attempt to reassert himself against the incomprehensible depredations of his son.
But the Uranium King wasn’t dead yet. He angled his head to indicate the flames beneath the boiling cauldron of chemicals. Tom took the cue and repositioned himself, as if he were further inspecting the premises, so that Albert unwittingly turned his back to his father in order to continue talking to Tom. At the same time, Tom was close to the door for a quick exit.
“So where does this leave us? You and me?”
“You’re my kind of guy, Tom. You’re a fraud and a killer. I can use a man like you.”
“You might just be right,” Tom nodded. “I’ve been looking for the right opportunity.”
“I’m glad you see it that way because,” Albert glanced at his watch, “Sheriff Martin will be here soon and…”
Before he could complete his sentence, Tom lunged at him and shoved him forcefully toward the center of the room. Simultaneously there was a loud whoosh. Dick DeRichter had thrown himself against the vat of boiling chemicals, spilling the contents onto the flames below and setting off an explosion, the force of which blew Tom back, right out the door.
He picked himself up and ran backwards, away from the rapidly exploding blaze. From a short distance away, Angie and Sarah were watching in horror, the baby in Sarah’s arms.
“Craig!” Angie screamed.
“It’s too late for him,” Tom shouted over the roar of the fire. There was another explosion and flames leapt higher out of the building’s roof, which collapsed inward. Nearby trees were starting to smolder, and a neighboring shed had already caught fire.
Tom pushed Sarah and Angie further away from the burning building.
“We have to get out of here fast,” he shouted. He was beginning to be overcome by the smoke.
Sarah nodded and grabbed Angie by the arm and they ran the hundred yards to where the car was parked. Tom revved the engine, pulled the car around, and headed for the road. The forest had ignited and the fire was racing almost faster than Tom could drive them to safety. Angie and the baby were both shrieking, and then, thankfully, the fire was visible only in the rear-view mirror. Tom hit the brakes. The three of them looked back to see that the main ranch house was engulfed in flames. They watched for just a moment as the fire quickly spread to the new resort structures, and then Tom lifted his foot from the brake and they headed down the mountain.
Halfway down, they passed a Slickrock County Sheriff’s vehicle, Sheriff Martin himself behind the wheel, heading up. Both cars slowed down and Martin and Tom exchanged a look, an acknowledgment that they’d seen each other. However the story would play out in the coming days, they were witnesses to one another’s deep involvement in it.
Tom didn’t stop again until they reached the Forum office and Tom’s adjoining house, just as the town’s single fire engine was pulling out of the station. The Radium Volunteer Fire Department would be no match for the conflagration.
As they climbed out of their car, a terrified but relieved Ray Jr. stepped out of the shadows to join them. He had biked into town to look for them when his mother had failed to return home after work a few hours earlier.
“I thought something bad must of happened,” he said to Tom.
“Something bad did,” Tom answered, putting his arm on the boy’s shoulders. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”
The entire population of Radium, Tom and the Walker family among them, stood silently on the highway beneath the brilliantly illuminated night sky, watching the spectacle of Dick DeRichter’s ultimate fireworks display, as smoke, embers and ash drifted down on them.
The fire would burn hot all night, all the next day, and all the following night, until there was nothing left to burn on North Mountain.