Chapter 14: Fifty-Eight Names

Allison's POV

The chair at the dock desk had tape on the left arm and a lump in the seat.

I sat in it on Thursday at ten and nobody said good morning.

Forty drivers stood around the desk in a ring.

They did not say anything at all, and they did not leave.

I had a scanner, a clipboard and a stack of manifests, and I had never in twelve years touched any of them.

"Where do I start?" I asked the floor.

A loader with a gray beard picked up the top manifest and set it in front of me.

"Read it," he said. "Find the mistake. There's always one."

I read it.

It was a wrong pallet count, and I knew the man whose initials were at the bottom.

I had docked him for it in March.

"This one's mine," I said.

"Yours?"

"I changed the count the night before and never told anyone."

"Nobody on this floor made that error. I did."

The loader looked at me for a long moment.

"Huh," he said, and walked away.

By noon I had found nine more.

All nine were mine.

I had a list in my head of everyone I had punished, and now it had a column beside it for what they had not done.

I knew what Russell's first condition meant.

I did not wait until Friday to start.

At three o'clock I asked Kayla for the break room and the list.

"Which list?" she asked.

"Every person I've docked. Every shift. Every dollar."

She printed it without a word.

It ran to fifty-eight names across six years.

I stood at the front of the break room at four, in my white badge, and read them out.

Not as a speech.

One at a time, to each person's face, as they came in off the floor.

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