Chapter 7: The Crusher

At eleven forty-five that night we sat in two trucks and a flatbed behind a chain-link fence in Hamtramck.

Garland's warehouse stood across the street, a long windowless box with six loading docks lit orange.

At the third dock, two scrap trucks idled with their rear doors open.

Three wooden crates sat on the concrete beside them, each as big as a refrigerator.

I knew what was in those crates.

I had bolted two of the engines together myself, in 2022, on a Saturday no one had paid me for.

"Two guards on the dock," Marty said, lowering his binoculars. "One on the gate. That's it for midnight."

"Do I know them?" I asked.

"You know all of them. You signed their overtime."

"Then I'll go talk."

"Nick, they'll call the police."

"They might."

Cleo gripped the wheel of her truck.

"I'll go with you," she said.

"Stay in the car. If it goes wrong, they'll want me and not you."

"That's the stupidest sentence you've said yet."

I got out anyway, and she got out right behind me.

We crossed the street in the dark, side by side.

The crew followed a hundred feet back, with the forklift creeping along the curb.

The guard at the gate was a heavy man who had worked nights at Garland for twenty years.

He saw me and put his hand on his radio.

"Nick," he said. "You can't be here."

"I know."

"They'll fire me."

"Did Lyman ever give you your holiday pay, the year he cut the night shift?"

He didn't answer.

"He cut yours by forty percent," I said. "I know because I fought for it, and I lost."

"Nick."

"Those crates are the last engines I ever built for this company."

"They're going to a crusher in an hour, and I'm taking them to a car instead."

"That's theft."

"It's an engine nobody wants, in a crate nobody's counting."

He looked at me, then at the crowd of men behind me.

Then he looked at the Garland logo on his own chest.

"My radio's been on the fritz all week," he said. "I'd have to walk to the dock to tell anybody anything."

"How long's the walk?" Marty asked.

"Long," he said, and he turned away from us and sat down on a bollard.

The two dock guards were harder.

They were young and nervous, and one of them took a step toward me and put out his hand.

"Sir, this is private property"

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