Chapter 11: The Floor

The Ellender Logistics warehouse is a gray box the size of four football fields, out past the interstate where the farmland starts.

I parked my truck on the shoulder across from the dock gate at ten to six.

The sky was black, and the sodium lights over the loading bays turned the wet pavement orange.

Cal sat in the passenger seat with a yellow vest on his knee and said nothing for three minutes.

"I fired the guy who fixed the lock," he said at last.

"What?"

"The week after."

"I wanted someone to blame."

"He was a maintenance lead with eleven years, and he'd put the work request in four times."

He stared through the windshield.

"I didn't know that until the deposition."

"Does Ray know?"

"I'm going to tell him."

"Then that's where you start."

He put the vest on over his coat.

He opened the door, and the cold came in.

"Dee."

"What?"

"Don't come in."

"I wasn't going to."

"Thank you for being here."

He shut the door and walked across the road alone.

I watched him go through the gate, small against the wall of orange light, with the yellow vest bright as a traffic cone.

A guard came out of the booth, looked at him, and went back in without a word.

At six the shift change began.

Trucks poured into the lot.

Men and women in work boots and hooded coats came across the pavement in twos and threes, steaming, carrying thermoses and lunch bags.

They all looked at the man in the vest at the dock door.

They did not look away.

I couldn't hear what they said to him, and I'm glad.

At six-twenty a woman in a gray coat stopped in front of him and held up her phone with her thumb on a photograph.

Cal looked at it for a long time.

At six-forty a big man with a beard took off his work glove and held out his bare right hand.

He did not shake Cal's.

He held it out flat to show him that it was missing the top of the middle finger.

Cal looked at it, and he took off his own glove and put his hand under it, palm up.

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