Chapter 13
The clamp had been leaking since Tuesday. I showed them where, because there was no point in hiding it anymore, and because Vasquez had asked me to show her everything. The seam at the bottom of the saddle casing, where the two halves of iron met, had opened a fraction wider than it should have been, and the bolts that held it were stripping. I put my wrench on one and felt it turn without biting, the threads gone soft from years of wet and chemical and pressure. When a bolt strips like that, you cannot torque it back. You can only hold it together some other way, and hope the other way lasts longer than the problem does.
What I had done, on Tuesday night, was wrap the fracture with vulcanized self-fusing rubber tape, layer over layer, pulled tight until the tape bonded into a single black skin. Then I cinched a ten-inch C-clamp over the repair and drove it down until the screw bit into the tape and the tape bit into the iron. It was machinist work, the kind you do when a die comes in cracked and the shop needs it running by morning. You do not fix a thing like that. You hold it, you buy time, and you check it every day, because a held thing is still trying to come apart.
"It's holding," I said, and I put my hand near the tape without touching it. "But it's been holding since Tuesday, and Tuesday was four days of pressure ago. The bolts won't take another turn. If I try to tighten them, they'll shear, and then the casing opens for real."
Vasquez crouched down and looked at the tape, at the clamp, at the dark weep that had found its way out around one edge despite everything I had done. "How long does a repair like this last?" she asked.
"On a clean pipe, a long time," I said. "On this pipe, with this sludge eating at it from the inside? I don't know. Days. Maybe a week. I check it every morning and every night, and every time I check it, I find a little more weep."
Bennett had moved over to Marlene's retaining wall while we talked, and now he called us over. The wall was six feet of fieldstone, built along the property line to hold back Marlene's raised patio, and it had always leaned a little, the way old stone walls do. But this was not a little anymore. I put my level against it, and the bubble ran off to one side and stayed there. The wall was leaning outward by three inches at the top, and when Marlene put her hand to the mortar between the stones, it came away on her fingers as gray paste, soft as clay.
"That's new," she said, and her voice was very quiet. "That wall was straight when we built the patio. I have photographs."
"It's the pressure," I said. "The void pushes, the cap flexes, and the wall takes the torque because it's the stiffest thing in the ground. The mortar was the first thing to go. It turns to paste when the seep gets into it. I've been watching it for months, Marlene. I just didn't have a way to tell you that didn't sound like I was making excuses for the power bill."
Vasquez stood up slowly, looking from the wall to the trench to the enclosure, putting the whole picture together. "So let me get this straight," she said. "The clamp is failing. The wall is moving. The pump is the only thing holding the pressure down. And your repair is tape and a clamp."
"That's right," I said. "And the tape is the only thing between that sludge and your patio. I won't pretend it's enough. It's what I had on Tuesday night, and it's what's holding right now."
A thin crack opened in the soil along the base of the wall while we watched, no wider than a pencil line, running six feet before it stopped, a few grains of dirt trickling down into it. Marlene stared at it, and then she looked at me, and the anger that had carried her through the whole morning was gone, replaced by something I recognized from my own mirror: the look of a person realizing that the ground under their feet is not as promised.
"Then what do we do?" she asked.
It was the first time all day she had asked me that instead of accusing me. I wished I had a better answer.
"We keep the pump running," I said. "And we don't do anything sudden. Sudden is what kills us here."
Vasquez nodded, but her hand had drifted toward her radio, and I knew what she was thinking. Procedure said to call it in, isolate the line, and let the county take it from here. And I knew, with a certainty that sat cold in my stomach, that procedure was about to become the most dangerous thing on this street.