Sendoff for a Snitch (20 page)

Chapter 17

“W
as me, I’d be looking for another job.” Hank scratched his cheek.

I’d read him off the list of tasks for this shift, circling the important stock numbers and quantities on the paperwork, and handed him back the clipboard. He took it and scanned the circled numbers. He couldn’t meet my gaze.

A motley crew had assembled at eight a.m. at Quality Steel Fabrications to prepare the plant to reopen. I’d expected the dayshift foreman to be working. But it was Bucky, from second shift. Who didn’t like me in the least.

If he’d noticed me before I’d punched in, he might have told me to leave. Then I’d have to file a grievance with the union to get paid at all. Once I showed up, I was supposed to get a minimum of two hours pay. And after I was punched in, it would be a minimum of four hours. Bucky wasn’t going to let four paid hours go, so I knew he’d have me working that at least.

“Jobs are hard to come by these days,” I said to Hank as I adjusted my hard hat. “Especially if you’re on parole.”

He nodded, tucking the clipboard under his beefy tattooed arm. “Them forklifts cost a pretty penny. If’n they’re looking for somebody to blame, it’s probably gonna be you.”

“I get that. The lift was assigned to me.”

“Don’t seem fair. But the fact remains, it was signed out to you. And it ended up crashed. Right over the edge of a loading dock. They’ll say, where the hell were you?”

“Taking a leak. We always park the lift there if we’re gonna run into the head.”

He peered at the clipboard, the floor—anywhere but my face. “You left it running.”

I sighed. “Yeah. We always do that, too, if it’s just gonna be a few minutes. Never had a problem with it.”

“Until now.”

“True, that. Now, it’s a problem.”

He shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. “Who else was around that could have done it?”

I had an idea, but I said, “You got me. Wouldn’t you think a security camera would have caught the whole thing?”

“You’d think. But there are lotsa blind spots.”

“Do you think they’d let me look at the tapes or whatever?”

He shook his massive head. “Nope.”

“John might.”

“Maybe. Probably not. And he’s not working now. I hear he’s got flood damage at his place. Fences down. When you got livestock, like he does, you got to see to that. Bucky’s in charge now.”

“And he don’t like me,” I said.

“He don’t got to like you. Or nobody else. Just got to get the work done.”

I wiped a trickle of sweat from my face with my sleeve. This was a good job. I couldn’t afford to lose it. “Might be. But he was coming on duty when it happened.”

“Yeah. It was a Saturday overtime. One of his lift drivers was working, too. Diffy.”

Hank was thinking along the same lines as I was. I thought back to that morning. The foreman had been hurting for a plating room lead man, and he’d been trying to talk Hank into at least part of another shift. At double time. “You worked daytime, too, that day, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Part of it. I didn’t want to, but they needed somebody to oversee tearing down the platers. That takes a good six hours. I worked that long.” He looked over at the platers, now idle. “Good money. But the time comes when it ain’t worth it.”

I found it hard to envision that, but then, I’d never been offered two overtime shifts, back to back, after I’d worked a whole regular week. “So did anything…funny happen?”

He scratched his head under his hard hat. “Kind of. Diffy, he was all over the place. Had to track him down, a few times, when we needed stuff moved. You wouldn’t think you’d have to—we weren’t running full production, so he should have been able to keep ahead of it. I thought he’d be out in shipping mostly, but every blasted time I needed to find him, he was in the warehouse.”

“The warehouse?” That was funny. All he should have been doing there was picking up parts and dropping off finished products. That didn’t take much time.

“Yeah. And you know, there were a couple of other guys going back there. Guys who didn’t have no business back there that I know of.”

That was even funnier. Usually, the foremen ran a tight ship. Production workers were clocked in on a job, with a quota to meet. Everybody got two ten-minute breaks, one in each half of the shift, and an eighteen-minute lunch. Other than that, it would be unusual for anyone to be away from their work station.

Unless they weren’t punched in and working. Then the foreman might not even realize they were in the shop.

“You think you know what you got to do?” I asked Hank.

He frowned. “Yeah. I hope so.”

“I’ll be by every now and then. Flag me down if you need to.”

“You think Bucky’s gonna work us the whole shift?” Hank asked.

“I’m sure you’ll get the full eight hours. He might send me home early if he can. But I’m the only lift driver on—there’s not a lot he can do if he doesn’t have a lift driver. Whether he likes me or not.”

Hank grinned. “Don’t think there’s any question about that. He don’t like you. And if he can get you fired over that damaged lift, he’ll do it.”

I thought for a minute. “You think it’d do any good to talk to the union rep?”

“Can’t hurt. At least give him a heads up. He’ll do what he can.” He turned to unlock the cabinet that contained test kits for the contents of the plating tanks.

I pulled on my work gloves and reached for my own clipboard.

Hank finally met my gaze and shrugged, his tiny eyes clouded. “Good luck with everything.”

I swung up on the forklift. Not my usual one—that was lying somewhere a mangled mess. Probably back in the locked repair cage.

Who the hell had snagged it while I was in the john? And why would anyone send it off the edge of a loading dock like that? I could see some of the clowns I worked with deciding it would be a good joke to drive it around the corner or something so I’d panic when I came out and it was gone. Absolutely hilarious.

I’d panicked, all right.

It couldn’t have been strictly an accident, somebody who didn’t know how to drive it and lost control. The overhead door to the bay had to be opened. Not a big deal—the button that operated it was set in the wall right next to the door. It had certainly been closed when I parked and went into the john. On a cold, rainy night like the other night, for sure I would have noticed an open truck bay door. But someone would have had to open it deliberately.

And no one was hurt. My best guess was that whoever had stopped it at the very edge of the drop off, climbed off, and gunned the engine so it crept forward and toppled off.

But it shouldn’t move without some weight on the seat.

I remembered Diffy’s pants, wet to the knees. If he’d driven it off the edge, I’d expect him to have been hurt.

What was he up to, spending so much time in the warehouse on a Saturday overtime shift?

Could I ask Victor, the union steward, to see if he could review the security tapes? There were cameras all over, but the shipping department, where outside truckers and their helpers were often wandering around more or less unsupervised, was particularly well covered.

Bucky came by about two thirty and told me to punch out. It wasn’t a whole shift, but the money would be welcome.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through stuff in my apartment to take to Mandy’s garage or throw out. There wasn’t much of mine left there.

The soaked furniture and the mattress had come with the apartment and were the landlord’s financial loss, not mine.

Last time I was there, I’d left the window open in the hopes of getting some fresh air through the place, but it hadn’t made any difference, I noticed. The wet mattress still smelled funky, and the furniture seemed to be growing a layer of slippery algae. Or maybe it was mold. Whatever it was, it was pretty nasty.

I hoped the landlord had flood insurance.

The floor was slippery with mud. And sewage. The day was much brighter than it had been the last time I was there, and I could see better. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

In the bathroom, a circle of even fouler muck than everywhere else surrounded the drain. That half-used bar of soap would have to go. And there on the floor, in the muck, was the toothbrush I’d been missing. It followed the bar of soap into the trash bag. Looked like nothing else of mine was left in the bathroom.

Next, I tackled the kitchenette. I never kept much food, but I didn’t think what there was would be salvageable. Definitely not the opened package of powdered milk and oatmeal. Why hadn’t I put them in the basket I’d tied to the pipes? Or the bread. I hesitated over the jar of peanut butter—it was tightly closed, and that stuff was getting expensive—but in the end, I tossed it. I did keep a couple of unopened cans.

I didn’t have too much kitchenware, but it should clean up all right. I piled the kettle, the frying pan, my two plates, and my two bowls on the dresser. The dish drainer should be okay. The almost-new, but soggy roll of paper towels were an obvious discard. The cutlery would have to be wrapped in something so it wouldn’t poke holes in the bag. I tossed two forks, three spoons, and a paring knife toward the dresser. One of the forks slid right over the slippery surface and disappeared over the edge. Served me right for being too lazy to walk over there and put them down carefully.

I went over to retrieve the fork, but it was nowhere in sight. With the toe of my boot, I scraped through the muck on the floor, but it wasn’t there.

It had to be somewhere. I pulled the dresser away from the wall.

Without the dresser pushed up against it, a half-sheet of the wall paneling sagged away from the chair rail. It was in such bad shape now that I didn’t see how pulling it out a little more so I could look behind it would do any more damage. The paneling would have to be replaced when, or if, the landlord decided to renovate the place so he could rent it out again.

I gave it a yank and moved aside so what light came through the window would reach back there. Peering into the space behind it, I caught a reflection of something metallic catching a glimmer of light. I pulled the paneling out farther, finally ripping it away from the wall.

The fork was there. So were a few grimy coins. And something else. I picked it up. It was round, heavy, about the size of a bracelet, and completely covered with the muck.

I took it over to the sink and turned the faucet. No water. I couldn’t wash it off. Carrying it, I went outside and up the stairs, looking for a fairly clean puddle. Or at least one that didn’t smell entirely foul.

As I swished it around in the water, bright colors began to wink up at me.

It was a heavy band of some kind of jewelry, set with stones. Not really right for a bracelet, but something like that. It looked familiar.

A cat collar.

A few months ago, a cat had showed up on my doorstep in the middle of a nasty snow storm. Of course I’d taken her in. She’d seemed to hate her collar, scratching at it, and I’d taken it off and tossed it on the dresser.

The weirdos in the storefront church upstairs had reclaimed the cat, saying she was their “goddess.” They worshipped her. She slept in a “gold” box that was really just painted wood and wore the jeweled collar.

When one of the members had mentioned it missing, I’d given the area a half-hearted search, but never found it. I hadn’t worried too much about it. The cat didn’t like wearing it.

The cult leader had claimed that the collar was expensive. I had no doubt he was right; a plain cat collar at the Best Deals for Your Dollar was a couple of bucks, so a fancy one like this might run ten dollars or more.

The entire church kind of fell apart when the leader was locked up. I took the cat in again and took her and her kittens to Kelly’s, where the kids loved them and the cats had a good home.

Claims were made that some of the jewels set in the collar might be real and the collar worth a fair amount, but it didn’t seem likely to me. They also said the box the cat slept in was real gold, but it was gold-colored paint on wood.

Now I had the collar back. And I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It didn’t belong to me, for sure, but the members of the tabernacle hadn’t been around much lately, and I knew some of them had decided to leave the area.

I dried it off with the tail of my T-shirt and stuck it in my pocket.

Not much else left here for me to do. It wouldn’t make much difference if I tried to clean up more, and without any running water, I didn’t think I could do it anyhow.

I put the kitchenware in the bag with the cans of food. I picked up the bags and headed out. As I closed the door behind me, I turned and gave the room one last look. It hadn’t been much, but it sure had beaten a prison cell.

A convenience store on the corner had a pile of discarded furnishings and merchandise at the curb. I dumped the bag with the trash on top of it.

The neighborhood where I’d be staying when I was house-sitting was much nicer than this one. And its electric power had been restored. Mandy’s house was one of the oldest in town, and it was still one of the nicest. But not one of the most expensive—the McMansions just outside the city limits had that distinction.

When I dropped these things off at her place, I could ask when I could move into the carriage house. Until then, I could just go to Jumbo George’s.

I skirted the county complex, where the lights were on, and turned down Mandy’s street.