Walk the Wire (Amos Decker #6)(36)

He washed up, changed into clean clothes, and headed out.

He met Baker as the big man was walking up to the bar.

“How’s the investigation going?”

“It’s going. How’s the fracking?”

He grinned. “Hot, and I’m not talking temperature wise.”

They went inside, miraculously found an empty table, and ordered two beers on draft.

When the drinks came, they each drained about half their mugs.

“I spoke to Renee again,” said Decker.

“Yeah, she told me. I hope you feel better about things.”

“Look, Stan, you don’t have to worry about whether I feel better or not. If you two are good with it and the kids are taken care of, then that’s great.”

Baker looked surprised but also pleased by this statement. “Thanks, Amos. I still care for Renee and she does for me. Guess it’ll always be that way. We were together a long time and then we got the kids, of course. That’s the glue that really holds a family together regardless. The kids.” Baker paled a bit with this last part. “Um, I mean . . .”

“I know exactly what you mean, Stan,” Decker said, taking a sip of his beer. “So you like it here, you said?”

“Oh, yeah. Some of the younger guys, they think it’s too isolated. Hell, I’ve lived in Alaska. ‘Isolated’ takes on a whole other meaning up there.”

“So tell me about this fracking business,” said Decker.

Baker looked surprised. “Why does that matter to you?”

“I’m investigating a murder. People get killed for lots of reasons, like money and power. The money-and-power thing here is tied to fracking, right?”

“Right. Otherwise, pretty much nobody would be here. So what do you want to know?”

“Basically how it works.”

“There’s oil and gas in the ground. And folks pull it out and sell it for a lot of money.”

“That part I get. Only I understand it wasn’t always that easy to get out of the ground.”

“That’s right. So before I came here I read up on it. I’m not a young punk with no obligations. I needed to make this work, so I wanted to know whether this thing had legs. North Dakota has gone boom and bust before.”

“Understood. Go on.”

“Well, the first bit of oil in North Dakota was discovered in a small town called Tioga back in the early fifties. But drilling up here, in the Bakken region, was considered a no-go because the oil was too hard to get out. All the big boys had given it a try over the decades and failed. They just assumed that it would be stuck down there forever. So by the end of the nineties, drilling was done here. Then, it turned out the oil companies were drilling in the wrong direction. Vertical doesn’t work here like it does pretty much everywhere else. You had to drill horizontally after you’ve drilled vertically down far enough to reach the shale region. And you had to do that in combination with fracking, or piping water and mud and chemicals down into the deposits. That’s done both to keep the drill going and to break up the shale. And you send sand down too in order to keep the breaks in the shale from resealing.”

“You mean like stents a surgeon puts in to open up a blocked artery?”

“Exactly. And on the extraction end think of a straw inserted into a cup of water. You pour more liquid and other stuff through the straw and into the water. With no place else to go, the water down below has to come up through the straw. Here, after fracking a deposit, the oil starts to flow to the surface.”

“How far down do you go?”

“About two miles vertically, and then you move sideways, or horizontally in a series of carefully monitored stages. That could be quite a few more miles. All told, you’re talking about twenty thousand feet or more of drilling and piping.”

“Then all these rigs I see around are over deposits of oil and gas?”

“Yeah. You pretty much always find one with the other. It takes anywhere from one to five million gallons of fresh water to frack a single well. And a couple thousand truckloads of sand. Each well from site prep to readiness for production takes about three to six months. But then the well could be productive for twenty, thirty, or forty years. When all the oil and gas have been gotten out, they plug everything, clean up the surface, and the owner who leased the land goes back to using the property.”

“What’s your job in all this?”

“When I first came here I was just a run-of-the-mill oil field hand. I ran pipe and worked drilling rigs with all the youngsters. Then, when they found out I had real experience, they put me in charge of monitoring operations at some of the rigs. I get to sit in a trailer and watch computer screens. I’ll show you sometime if you want.”

“That’ll be great, Stan. I appreciate that.”

Baker smiled.

“What?” asked Decker.

“This is the most I’ve seen and talked to you since you graduated from college and went pro.”

“Right,” said Decker. “So tell me about Caroline Dawson.”

Baker looked embarrassed. “I know, you’re thinking what is a rich, smart, beautiful, young gal doing with a big old lug like me?”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“You’re a bad liar.”