It was like waiting for justice to come in the mail, and come it did. Certain chemicals and pesticides that were on her list caused a great deal of excitement from the Potomac to the Mississippi, and three weeks after Colette mailed her boxes, she was in her little office when the front door flew wide, showing a procession of eleven state and federal agents and as many Louisiana state troopers, carrying arrest warrants for Bucky Tyler and his foreman. All day she watched men in respirators wander the plant yard taking samples from drums, piles of black slag, storage tanks, trucks, and bunkers. Lawyers ransacked the office and tried to get into the old third-hand safe. Bucky was served with court orders and subpoenas, then taken away in handcuffs, red-faced and cursing, and all workers were told to go home. The gate was padlocked, and that was it for the stink plant.

Late at night, Colette’s phone rang, and it was Bucky Tyler.

“Yes?” she said coolly.

His voice was a whisper. “Colette, if you care for me at all, you got to go out to the plant and get inside the safe and burn them records. They got a lot of shit on me, but I don’t think they got it all—not the real bad stuff in my letters.”

“Don’t let them scare you, stud.”

“Oh, lady, I’m plenty scared. They got me in this old jail in New Orleans that feels like the big house. They found out about that dieldrin that came in from Ecuador, and they think I’m Charles Manson. Hell, I’m under a million-dollar bond and I’m on the evening news. If they get aholt of my letters they won’t let me store piss in my own toilet. Darlin’, I could do real time. I never seen the pollution boys move on somebody like this. You got to get those letters out my safe. They don’t have the combination yet.”

“They’ve got the letters.”

A gasping silence filled the line. “How?”

“Why, I mailed those letters to them, along with all the other evidence against you, darlin’.”

“You turned me in? You shut down the company? Why?”

She picked up her head. “Because, you east Texas corn-shitting white trash, you tried to kill a good man just so you could get to me,” she screamed. “No one gets to me like that, you turd with eyes.” She slammed down the receiver on the word whoa and crossed her arms above her belly. Then her water broke in a cascade over her white canvas shoes.

Chapter Fourteen

Fourteen