Chapter 15
The thunder came closer, and then the rain came with it, first as scattered drops that darkened the dust on the fence boards one spot at a time, and then as a real rain, steady and cold, drumming on the garage roof and running down the trench in little black rivulets. We had left the breaker box open when Bennett went to photograph the tags, and I saw it the same second Vasquez did: a fat drop, falling straight down through the rain, hitting the open box dead center, where the bus bars stood exposed.
The sizzle was loud enough to hear over the rain. A white spark jumped, and the smell of hot metal cut through the smell of brine, and I lunged for the box with my jacket already off my shoulders, throwing it over the open face before the next drop could find the same spot. My hands were shaking. Thirty-four years around machinery teaches you what an arc flash can do, and rain in an open box was the same invitation as throwing that breaker under load.
"Cover it!" Vasquez shouted, but I already had, and Bennett was there with a tarp from the cruiser, and together we got the box sealed under plastic, the jacket underneath, rain hammering on the tarp like fingers demanding to be let in.
Then the clamp moved.
I felt it before I saw it, my hand on the trench edge, the ground giving a shudder different from the pump cycle, sharper, wrong. The tape on the saddle casing creaked like a slipping belt, and the ten-inch C-clamp shifted half an inch along the fracture, its screw turning a fraction under the pressure. At the seam, a jet of black water broke through, not a weep but a hard thin jet that hit the trench wall and sprayed back in a fan of brackish dark, spattering my boots and Bennett's trouser cuffs before he could jump back.
"Back!" Vasquez shouted, and she had her arm out, herding Marlene away from the trench, but Marlene was already moving, because the ground under her feet was moving too. The lawn shelf along the base of her retaining wall, the strip of turf that had always looked so neat and level, slumped. It did not collapse. It slumped, the way a shelf slumps when the bracket underneath gives way, dropping several inches in one slow sickening motion, turf folding over itself, soil opening in a dark seam along the wall's base. A rose bush near the corner tipped sideways, roots half out of the ground, its blooms shaking in the rain.
"Everybody back!" Vasquez said again, louder, and this time her voice had the command in it that makes people move without thinking. Bennett scrambled up out of the trench, mud to his knees. Marlene backed onto her patio, her hands over her mouth. I stayed where I was for one more second, watching the jet, watching the tape, watching the clamp that had held since Tuesday decide whether it was going to hold through a storm.
The pump labored under my garage, and this time it did not sound like its normal cycle. It sounded off-rhythm, straining, kicking on too soon and staying on too long, as if the sensor had hit its fourteen pounds and then kept climbing past it. The pipe in the trench pulsed harder, and the jet at the seam pulsed with it, black water hammering the trench wall in time with the pump.
"The tape won't hold through this," I said, and I was not talking to anyone in particular. I was talking to the rain, to the clamp, to the ground itself. "It's holding a fracture, not a system. The storm is pushing water into the ridge faster than the pump can pull it out. Every minute this rain keeps coming, the pressure climbs, and the tape is the only thing between that pressure and your patio, Marlene."
She looked at me across the slumped lawn, in the rain, and she did not say anything. She did not have to. The lawn had said it. The jet had said it. The clamp, slipping half an inch, had said it.
Vasquez came and stood beside me, close enough that I could hear her over the rain. "How long?" she asked, the same question as before, and this time I did not have an answer that sounded like time at all.
"Until the tape goes," I said. "And then we find out what this void does when it stops being patient."
Another crack sounded from the base of the wall, softer than the first but longer, and a thin sheet of black water began to run along the seam in the soil toward the street. The rain kept hammering. The pump kept laboring. And the ground under the fence post, the post that had started this whole morning with its two inches on my side of the pin, felt soft under my boots in a way ground should never feel.