Badlands by C. J. Box

Willie Dietrich? I’ve always heard Willie is hooked up.”
    T-Lock: “That guy has hated me since we were in junior high.”
    Winkie: “But he don’t hate me. He used to bang my sister, remember? I know him. I can talk to him. But what’s in it for me, man?”
    T-Lock: “I’ll cut you in.”
    Winkie: “How much? What’s my cut?”
    T-Lock: “I’m still figuring it out. But it’ll be enough to make you rich, I’ll tell you that right now. But we’ve got to do this right. We can’t let anybody know I’ve got all this shit. If assholes find out, they might try to come and get it.”
    Winkie: “I’m excited but I’m also starting to get a headache. This might not be easy, you know. It might get scary as hell.”
    T-Lock: “You don’t worry about that. I’m the one doing the thinking here. I’ve got it handled, man. I’ve waited my whole life for something like this. I’ve already figured out a way to launder that marked cash. You just go out and sniff around Willie and his guys and see what you can find out. See if you hear about anyone missing a shitload of meth and cash but don’t tip anyone off about what we have. Just leave it all to me.”
    *   *   *
    KYLE STOOD unsteadily. The bottle was empty. The sounds from the next room seemed to meld together into a kind of background noise, like when the house was buffeted by wind.
    He thought, So this is what being drunk feels like. And he wondered why adults spent so much time and money wanting to feel this way. All he wanted to do was to go to sleep.
    Kyle staggered across his room and fell face-first onto his bed. Even though his room was messy he always made his bed. He always had.
    He went to sleep with the droning sounds of T-Lock and Winkie scheming and arguing.
    Then he dreamed about his boat, and what it would feel like to push it away from the riverbank. What it would feel like when the current took them away.

 
    CHAPTER NINE
    AFTER CRUISING through the pre-boom residential areas and new developments that were going up in every direction on the outskirts of Grimstad, Kirkbride cursed under his breath as he merged into the nonstop convoy of huge muddy trucks on Main Street headed north. Steam and exhaust rose from the pavement and from beneath the vehicles. Kirkbride pointed out the trucks belonging to the major players in the oil boom: Halliburton, Sanjel, Baker Hughes, Whiting, Continental Oil, Marathon Oil, Scorpion, and Nabors.
    The problem with the traffic, he said, was that the city and county had not yet had the chance to build new infrastructure that could handle the sudden tenfold increase in vehicles and machinery. The oil field traffic going north or south had to be funneled through the middle of town on roads designed to accommodate residential traffic flow, thus almost impenetrable bottlenecks were created.
    â€œWe don’t even know what our population is,” he said in answer to the question Cassie asked. “It’s growing that fast. A few months ago, I would have said thirty-five to forty thousand in the county. There are over ten thousand units in the man camps alone. But I was talking to the director at the water treatment facility and he says they’re handling sewage now for sixty thousand plus. Imagine that,” he said with a snort, “we guess how many residents we have by the sewage they produce.”
    She shook her head as he reeled off positive talking points he’d no doubt repeated many times:
    â€¢ A million barrels of crude from the Bakken Formation were being shipped every day by thirty-five to forty tanker trains that stretched over a mile long each;
    â€¢ North Dakota was now the second-biggest oil-producing state in the country having surpassed Alaska;
    â€¢ The state’s population was increasing by the thousands each month;
    â€¢ The unemployment rate in