Chapter 4: The Foundry

The foundry in Flat Rock was a corrugated shed with one smokestack and a sign that said "Since 1961" in peeling paint.

Cleo had found it on a list of forty shops that were too small for Garland to bother with.

"They pour for tractors," she said in the car. "They've never poured anything this fine."

"Then they won't be scared of it," I said.

She drove her black coupe fast and without apologizing.

We pulled into the gravel lot at noon, behind a silver sedan with a Garland parking sticker in the windshield.

"No," Cleo said softly.

"Yes," I said.

We walked into the shed together.

Thirty men and women sat on overturned buckets and cable spools eating lunch, and the air smelled like hot sand and metal.

At the back, in a glass-walled office, a woman in her sixties sat across a desk from a man in a camel coat.

She had a burn scar on her chin and a cigarette she wasn't smoking.

The man in the coat was Garland's fixer, and I'd seen him in the hallways of the plant for years.

I'd never known his name.

He was the one Lyman sent when somebody needed to be made to sign.

He looked up and saw me through the glass, and his smile did not move.

"Mr. Danner," he said when I opened the door. "What a surprise."

"Is it?"

"I'm delivering an offer to your boss, as it happens."

He put a folded paper on the desk.

"Garland will buy all the brake drums this foundry can pour. Five years, guaranteed volume."

The woman looked at the paper.

"All I have to do," she said, "is stop talking to Rainey."

"It's a business decision," the fixer said.

"It's a trap," I said.

He turned to me with his hands open.

"Nick. You were a Garland man for eighteen years. You know the volume we move."

"I know what you did to the Toledo shop."

"Toledo was a mutual decision."

I walked out of the glass office and stood in the middle of the shed.

Thirty heads turned toward me.

"My name's Nick Danner," I said. "Garland fired me last Friday for refusing to ship a part that cracks."

I didn't raise my voice.

Foundry people don't need you to.

"The man in the camel coat wants your boss to sign a five-year deal for brake drums."

"I worked in that plant for eighteen years. I'll tell you what happens in year two."

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