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over to where Miller was. There were two strangers with Miller. A tall snooty-looking male and a female dressed like she was going for a hike. They must be plainclothes cops. That made sense. He bet they came here looking for the resin cask.
    As long as they weren’t looking for him. How could they be? None of them were paying attention to him. The cops were listening to Miller.
    He wondered what Miller was saying. Some joke. Miller thought he was so much better than everybody, so he mocked them. One time when this dude contaminated a finger on a crapped-up wrench, Miller said he’d have to meter the dude’s nose and crotch too. Ha ha.
    But Jardine had to admit, when Miller mocked Ballinger, Jardine liked it.
    Ballinger was talking to the cops now. He was probably bragging how he rushed to work to make sure no terrorists were launching an attack, or something. Mr. Whoop-de-doo General Manager. Jardine wondered what they’d think if they knew what Ballinger’s nickname was around the dump. It was the password he used online: Hot-Boy . He told his bigmouth assistant it meant hot as in rad , and she told everybody. Everybody knew that when he logged onto his porn sites he didn’t mean rad .
    Jardine watched Hot-Boy bullshitting the cops.
~
    M ilt Ballinger jabbed a finger at the CTC flatbed from the crash site. “Just unloading the last package.”
    Indeed, only one of the casks recovered from the crash remained on the flatbed. The truck was parked within a coned-off zone. A crane loomed.
    Soliano eyed the cask. “It contains what it should contain?”
    “Hundred percent,” Ballinger said.
    “You know this how?”
    “Because it’s hot,” Miller put in. “Notice we’re remote-handling it?”
    I watched as the remote-operated crane attached a grappling device to the cask. Here’s where it happened, if the perp tried this before and succeeded. Here’s where the dummy cask got craned off the truck and, maybe, got jostled and, perhaps, shed grains of talc. I was going to have to get up there in the unloading zone, I saw. Up there where it’s too hot to touch. I had my own monitor—I wore the laser spectrometer slung over my shoulder like a purse—but it was not remote-operable.
    Ballinger nudged Soliano. “See that gal over there with the tallywhacker?”
    We looked at the suited figure poking a long telescoping wand into the cask lid assembly. Only way to tell she was a she was by the color of her booties, hot pink.
    “She’s not doing it long distance for grins.”
    “And what,” Soliano said, “does this tallywhacker tell her?”
    “She’s reading the surface dose rate.” Ballinger hooked his thumbs into his belt buckle, a brass horseshoe. “See, these’re high-gamma resins, gonna throw off some serious dose.”
    “How often do you receive these serious resins?”
    “Often as somebody has nasty messes to clean up.”
    I spoke. “What happens if the serious resins—the ones that are missing—get loose in the environment?”
    “Depends.” Ballinger shifted. “If they get cleaned up in time.”
    “In time for what?”
    “Before they release their rads.”
    “Into the air?”
    “Yeah. Air, soil, water, that’d be the worry.”
    Hap Miller sighed. “And then, by and by, we’d get John Q Public asking what’s your plutonium doing in my coffee?”
    I stared. “Are you serious?”
    “Nearly always,” Miller said.
    “C’mon,” Ballinger said, “we got one missing cask. You find it, we’ll bury it.”
    Soliano’s face sharpened. “You are certain this has not happened before?”
    “Darn right. We keep track of every shipment.”
    “How?”
    “Gal over there with the tallywhacker matches her readings to the numbers on the shipping manifest. Manifest says what’s in the load—types of rads, curie count, tracking numbers, the whole shooting match.”
    Soliano frowned. “The manifest cannot be altered?”
    “Doesn’t matter. Even if some knothead diddled it, we’ll catch it. See,