Renée clicked through them. The same clearing, different nights, the date stamps in the corner going back to June. Different trucks. A close shot of the hose coupling. A close shot of a manifest on a clipboard, a page with a well pad number on it, and a line that said DELIVERED TO: CHAPMAN TREATMENT FACILITY, and a signature. A shot of a creek, brown-orange, with a scum of white foam at the edge of the rocks. A dead trout in the shallows, belly up. A video, when she played it, of a man's voice in the dark, low and shaking: It's July nineteenth. This is the third load tonight. They're telling us take it to Chapman but nobody's taking it to Chapman. Chapman costs eleven cents a gallon. This is free.
"Brine," Bev said quietly. "Frack water. Flowback. It's got everything in it. Salt. Barium. Radium, some of it. You're supposed to haul it to a treatment plant. It's expensive as hell." She looked at the screen. "Or you can pour it down a hole in the woods and pocket the difference and write delivered on the paper."
"That's Kettle Creek," Ferris said, looking at the brown water. "That's Kettle Creek, below the bore. I've fished that my whole life." His voice had gone strange. "My well's a mile from there. Half the trailers in Renée's park are on wells off that same water table."
Renée had gone completely still, Toby on her lap, the two of them staring at the dead trout on the screen.
"They killed him for this," she said.
"Yes," Hollis said.
"For eleven cents a gallon."
"Times a few million gallons," Hollis said. "Yes."
The last file in the folder was a text document. Renée opened it. It was a letter, unfinished, addressed to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Northcentral Regional Office, Williamsport. My name is Jesse Kline and I have driven for Shuler Water and Haul since 2023. I am writing to report— It went on for two paragraphs and then stopped mid-sentence.
Nobody said anything for a while. The computer hummed.
"Okay," Hollis said finally. "Here's what we're going to do."
* * *
He laid it out for them in the kitchen, standing by the flat-top, in the same voice he had used once to lay out other things, worse things, thirty years ago in the back room of a clubhouse on Parade Street in Erie. He noticed that, and did not like noticing it, and kept going anyway, because the voice was a tool and a tool does not care what it was used for before.