Fostering Death (20 page)

“No charge to you. Not while you’re part of the trial. And if it works like it’s supposed to, it could actually be an advantage for you. Belkins can check to see where you’ve been. Ought to eliminate you as a suspect if anything else happens. Or—” he stared down straight into my face “—put you right where it happened.”

The options were limited. And he was right—I might as well look at the bright side. Unless a crime happened right where I was, I would have an ironclad alibi. If the damn thing worked.

Mr. Ramirez was saving me the monitoring fee. That was something.

“You gonna fix me with it now?” I asked. I hoped my ankle wasn’t too swollen. My socks and boots were pretty damp, but at least the socks had been clean when I put them on last night. They might smell of wet wool but shouldn’t stink of sweaty feet.

“I have to put in a requisition for the unit,” Mr. Ramirez said. “They don’t have that many of them yet.”

Just my luck to get one of the few.

“I’ll probably get it in two or three weeks. Until then, shall we just continue with the present conditions? With the exception of your propensity to become a suspect in murder investigations, it seems to be working pretty well.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chapter 14

J
OHN
M
ET
M
E
A
S
I approached the time clock. “Another shipping disaster,” he said gloomily. “You’re on the clock as soon as you can get punched in.”

“Same deal as last time?”

“Pretty much. But they printed out a bunch of shipping lists rather than leave a dispatcher on duty tonight. You’ll have to work from them.”

He peered more closely at me. “What happened to your face this time?” he asked. “Now you’ve got a cut on your lip. And the bruises look worse.”

“Fell again.”

“And landed on your face again?”

“Slipped in some ice and hit one of them newspaper vending machines on the way down.”

“Is that why you’re limping?”

I guess I hadn’t been doing as good a job as I’d thought of walking normally. “Yeah. Twisted my ankle.”

“You okay to work?”

“After tonight, I’m done with the three months probationary employment. You bet I’m okay to work.”

John grinned. “Good for you.”

When I went to get a lift from the charging station, I was relieved that no one was hanging around smoking anything. None of the group had showed up for work last night, and I hoped they decided to take tonight off, too. That would give us the whole weekend before we had to face each other. I was still undecided what I would do with all the wallets and keys I’d collected, but they should be safe until next week.

Kelly was in the shipping room, frowning as she tried to sort the paperwork. Several sheets drifted to the floor. “This whole damn system’s messed up,” she complained.

“True, that.” I picked up the papers from the floor.

She glared at the sheets. “Look at all these shipping lists! I can’t make heads or tails out of this.”

“Let me see.” I laid them on top of a packing crate, sorting them first by order number, then by page number. “It’s not so bad as it looks. Each one has a couple of pages. It’d help if they’d staple them together so they wouldn’t get mixed up.” When I got them in proper order, I took the first bunch and folded down one corner. Then I ripped a narrow strip down the dog eared corner, pressed it back behind the last page and gave it a twist. It wasn’t foolproof, but it would keep the pages together.

“How’d you learn to do that?” Kelly asked, taking the papers and putting them on her clipboard.

“Can’t have no paper clips in prison.” I repeated the procedure with all the shipping lists. “What’s first?”

“This order of root baskets. The truck’s already here. The driver’s gone to the head, then he said he’s gonna work on his log. But he wants to get going ASAP.”

“Root baskets again. Weird. What size and how many?”

Kelly peered at the paper. “Thirty six inch baskets,” she said. “Forty eight stacks of them.”

I swung up onto my lift and headed out to the warehouse.

It was still early to ship root baskets for the spring, and we’d pretty much cleared out the ones in the front of the warehouse. I’d have to move quite a few loads before I could pull the pallets with the root baskets on them.

Darius, a back-up driver on the afternoon shift, had gotten a fair amount moved, but the path he was clearing went to the place where the bigger root baskets, the forty-eight-inch ones, were stored. Not too many baskets were being run now, and they almost never got run on that shift. He probably didn’t know where each size was stored. I started moving pallets back into the path he’d cleared to work my way to the thirty-six-inch ones.

When I finally got to them, I scooped up a pallet and drove it out to shipping. At this end of the shipping dock, the bay door was open with an idling truck backed into it.

Kelly was down at the other end of the dock, finishing loading one of the regular trucks.

I made a few more runs with more pallets of baskets. Kelly drove over and started loading them onto the truck.

We worked steadily for the best part of an hour, me carting the pallets out of the warehouse and Kelly loading them. When we were done, the driver came over for the paperwork. Kelly climbed off her lift and handed him the clipboard.

The driver checked the paperwork, then went into his trailer to check the load.

He came out and went back to Kelly, shaking his head. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the din of conveyors and the packing room.

Kelly’s face turned red, and she folded her arms over her ample bosom. The driver continued to shake his head.

When I’d put my load down, I swung off my lift and went over to see if there was a problem.

Kelly turned on me. “You brought the wrong size!”

“Let me see that.” I reached for the clipboard. “Size: forty eight inches,” the bill of lading read. “Quantity: thirty six stacks, twelve per stack.”

The old shipping lists had always put the quantity first and the size second. Although this one had the numbers in different places, it was clearly thirty six stacks of the forty eight inch baskets. We were doing it backwards. And Darius had been heading for the right ones after all.

I shook my head. “I thought you said thirty six inch baskets,” I said to Kelly. “So that’s what I brought out.”

“Well, you thought wrong!” she fumed.

The driver stepped back. “Hey, I don’t care whose fault it is. I need to get out of here as soon as I can. With the right load.”

He had a point. Kelly glared at me, climbed on her lift and started to unload the truck. I picked up a pallet of the wrong size baskets and ran it back to the warehouse where I deposited it in a corner while I began to clear a path again to the larger size baskets.

Kelly would have to explain the mistake to John when he came to check on our progress. He wouldn’t be happy, but right now that couldn’t be helped. All we could do was fix it as soon as we could.

We worked right through our first break to get that truck loaded. Then we cut our lunches—already a scant eighteen minutes—short and skipped the six am break, trying to catch up with the rest of the night’s work. At seven thirty, just as the foreman from the day shift was walking in the door, the last driver checked his load, pulled his trailer door shut, locked it, and climbed into his cab.

Kelly hit the switch to lower the door to that truck bay. She leaned back in her seat and sighed.

It hadn’t been pretty, but we made it.

It was Friday morning. The weekend stretched before us. “You wanna go for breakfast?” I asked Kelly. “My treat.”

She shook her head, not meeting my eyes. “I got stuff to do,” she said, and headed off to plug in her lift to recharge.

I wondered if she was mad at me over the mistake in the root basket sizes. I was pretty sure she’d told me the wrong thing, but the trucker had been right; it didn’t really matter whose fault it was. We’d been able to fix it, although it had thrown the whole night’s work behind.

Not much point in worrying about it. I let her get a ways ahead of me, then swung my lift to follow hers.

A few minutes after eight, she beat me to the time clock and punched out. I tried to step up next to her and see if she’d talk to me, but she circled around the tables by the vending machines and left. I still had to go find John and get my paycheck. Most everyone else had direct deposit. I didn’t even have a bank account.

Probably about time to face the fact that there was no future for us. She was pretty moody, and she drank. On top of everything else, that was not a good place to establish a solid relationship.

I could get sent back to prison at any time, either on a new conviction or just a violation. Not exactly the best basis for making plans. I didn’t have a damn thing to offer a woman. Especially a woman with vulnerable kids. They’d already been through hell when their parents divorced, and she was still mad at me for what she saw as interfering with the way she took care of them. Much better that I bow out, at least for now.

Boy, would I miss the evenings in her comfortable old house, spending time with the kids. Not to mention the sex.

I walked to the bank to cash my check. Someday soon I’d open a bank account and start saving for that pickup truck. Of course, I’d have to get a driver’s license before I could drive it. That in itself was a major hassle and expense.

Kelly’s old station wagon was parked across the parking lot of the half-vacant strip mall where the bank was located. What store had she gone into? I paused to look around. Maybe I should be more tolerant of her moods, and maybe she’d settled down some. She did that. Maybe I could still ask if she wanted to go get breakfast.

She was coming out of a liquor store. With two heavy bags clutched in her arms.

She saw me and stopped. “What the hell are
you
looking at?”

That wasn’t a good sign. “Nothing. You want some help with those bags?”

“These bags are none of your business. Are you following me around?”

Better not ask about breakfast. “No. I’m just going to the bank. You okay?”

“I’m just
fine
, thank you,” she said, shifted the weight in her arms. I heard glass clink on glass. Bottles. Southern Comfort? Didn’t seem to bring much comfort in the long run.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black and white patrol car pull into the parking lot.

I considered turning around and walking in the opposite direction. No reason they should be looking for me, but cops made me nervous.

“You’re judging me, aren’t you?” Kelly’s voice was beginning to rise. “You, of all people.”

I said nothing. From where she was standing, I was pretty sure she couldn’t see the patrol car. I wished she would just shut up, and we could both leave. I’d rather go together, but at this point I’d certainly be satisfied with apart. As long as I could get away from there.

But she was getting more upset. “Just leave me alone,” she practically shouted.

The patrol car pulled into a parking space. The window rolled down. I winced. “See you around,” I said, hoping to sound friendly and neutral. Poor choice of words.

“Not if I see you first,” she retorted. She took a few steps toward to me. I smelled whiskey on her breath already. Did she have an open bottle in the car? I didn’t want her to get in trouble, either.

“Okay.” I kept my voice calm. “I’ll just be going now.”

“Oh, sure. You just get going. And stop stalking me. Or I’ll call a cop.”

That was a deliberate taunt. Kelly knew how much trouble she could get me into if she complained that I was stalking her. She probably didn’t really mean it, but I didn’t want to take a chance.

And if she didn’t mean it, she’d picked a really bad time to say it. Two uniformed officers climbed out of the car.

“Is this man giving you a hard time, ma’am?” the tall one asked.

Kelly turned in surprise. “Nothing I can’t handle,” she said.

“What’s he to you?” the cop asked.

“We work at the same place. On the same shift.”

“That’s all?”

Kelly shifted the bags nervously in her arms. “Well, we dated a little. Nothing serious.”

“He ever threaten you? Or hit you?”

“No. No. I got to get going.” Kelly turned and opened the car door. She dumped the bags in the backseat and climbed into the driver’s seat.

The cops and I watched as she drove out of the parking lot.

Hadn’t they noticed the alcohol on her breath? Evidently not. Not something they were looking for at nine in the morning, especially from someone in work clothes.

The two cops now turned to look at me.

Oh, great. They were both young. One was much taller than I was. The other only had me by a few inches, but he was solidly built. They were probably both rookies.