"I was the district for thirty-one years, Mr. Osgood. I know precisely what I'm doing with that valve. Probably better than whoever they were going to send you on Monday."
I walked over to the pit. I'd never really looked down into it before, not past the meter. The pit was about five feet deep, a concrete tube a little wider than my shoulders. The meter sat a foot below the lid, with the round black antenna puck on top of it. Below that, down where the light gave out, I could just make out the curb stop itself, a squat brass valve with a flat tang on top, the kind you can only reach with a key exactly like the one Georgine was holding. The tang was turned crosswise to the pipe. Closed.
"Give me the key."
"I will not," Georgine said, and she actually took a step back and held it against her chest. "That curb stop is the property of the Cottonwood Bluffs Water and Sanitation District. So is the meter. So is the pit. It is a crime in this state for an unauthorized person to operate that valve, and if you touch it, I will report it."
I stared at her. Efrain, in the trench, made a small noise, a cough or a laugh that had gone wrong halfway, and looked at his boots.
"You," I said to him. "What's your name?"
"Efrain, sir. Efrain Sotomayor." He had a sunburned neck and a Front Range Turf & Tree logo on his shirt and he couldn't have been more than twenty-four. "She said it's an emergency leak. She said it was a district thing, like, she still does work for them, she said. I'm just supposed to dig."