The Cyanide Canary

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday, August 27, 1996
Evergreen Resources, Inc.
Soda Springs, Idaho
10:20 A.M.

Scott Dominguez pulled up the extension ladder, balancing it like a circus performer high off the ground as he stepped along the rounded surface of the acid storage tank. He fit the legs of the ladder into the twenty-two-inch-diameter entry hole and let the rungs slide through his palms until he felt it hit bottom. It was like dropping something down a manhole. Darkness swallowed it.

He sat down atop the eleven-foot-tall, thirty-six-foot-long rust orange tank dangling his steel-toed Redwings in the hole, thinking about the morning, and regretting his comment.

Theresa Cole, his fiancée, had driven him to work at Evergreen Resources, a phosphate fertilizer plant in Soda Springs, Idaho, at 6:45 that morning. She stopped the car near the construction trailer at the front of the plant, their normal routine. Dominguez kissed her good-bye, opened the car door, and turned to get out, but something made him stop.

"I'm afraid to go to work," he said.

He knew his comment had worried her, and he hadn't ... read full excerpt from: The Cyanide Canary ebook