Chapter 5: The Port

Hammer let go of the brother's fist, and he fell backward over a bumper.

The man with the phone ran for the stairs.

"He'll post it," Hammer said, shaking out her arm. "Do you want me to go after him?"

"No. Drop me at the Canton rail yards."

"Why?"

"Because I'm on the night shift at ten."

She stared at me for a long moment.

Then she started laughing so hard she had to lean on the pickup.

At ten that night I stood at Gate Four of the Canton Yards in a hi-vis vest.

It was two sizes too big, and I held a radio and a clipboard.

The night supervisor had hired me at six, on a handshake, for twenty-four dollars an hour.

He hadn't asked me anything except whether I could count.

"Hart," he'd said, writing it on his palm. "Don't touch anything and don't talk to the tour people."

By ten fifteen the yard was a parking lot of screaming.

Eleven white tractor-trailers sat jammed across three loading docks.

A woman in a black bomber jacket stood on a pallet jack, shouting at the supervisor.

She was small and fast.

Her black hair was pulled into a high ponytail with one silver-blond streak at the front.

A headset hung around her neck, and she gripped a laminated clipboard.

"I have a stadium rig in eleven trucks," she was saying. "My sound check is in sixty hours."

"Your yard has turned my entire stage into a game of Tetris!"

"Ma'am, there's a customs hold on dock five."

"Then take the hold off dock five!"

"I can't."

She said something in Korean that made two dockworkers look away and a third one grin.

Then she said something in English that was worse.

I walked the whole yard, once, with my clipboard.

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