Fostering Death (4 page)

Cursing my own stupidity, I switched on the outdoor light in the stairwell and opened the door.

The damn cat was back in the same corner, now wetter and more miserable-appearing than before. It looked at me and opened its mouth in a pathetic meow.

With a sigh, I stepped out into the cold and reached for the cat. Again, it didn’t hiss or try to move away. My foot landed in the slush. The new sock was now completely soaked. Sleet stung my naked legs.

I brought the cat inside and shut the door. It looked up at me and meowed again. It might be chubby, but when had it eaten last?

I was planning to make tuna sandwiches to take for lunch at work tonight. I supposed I could spare a bit for a cat. I put the cat down and grabbed the can opener and the can of tuna. I put a little of it in a bowl and put it in front of the cat.

It gobbled the tuna down and looked up hopefully.

I put some more tuna in the bowl.

The cat downed it and looked up again.

Oh, well. I could make peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. I emptied the rest of the can into the bowl. The cat ate it.

I looked around. I didn’t have anything faintly resembling a litter pan or cat litter. But I couldn’t put the damn thing out again until the weather got better. I’d bought a newspaper so I could cut Mrs. Coleman’s obituary out of it. I retrieved the rest of it from the trash and tore it into little pieces, putting it in a box that I lined with a trash bag. I lifted the cat into it and moved its paw in a digging motion. It got the idea right away and peed, then covered the spot with shredded newspaper. That didn’t mask the smell all that well. Great.

And of course it would need somewhere to sleep. I’d gone to the Laundromat that morning, wanting to be sure my jeans and shirt were clean to wear to the funeral home. I hadn’t put the clothes away yet, so I opened a drawer in my decrepit dresser and dumped the clean clothes in there. Then I put a soft towel in the bottom of the laundry basket and shoved the whole arrangement out of the way so I wouldn’t step on it, half under the foot of the bed, near the radiator. When I lifted the cat into the basket, it settled right down, purring.

At least it appreciated my efforts.

Changing to yet another pair of dry socks, I checked the alarm and climbed into bed.

When the alarm shrilled, I was heavily asleep. I reached over and slammed it off. A warm lump was nestled up against my neck and shoulder.

The cat.

Reaching over, I stroked it. It nuzzled my hand.

In bed, I was warm and comfortable. The air in the apartment was cold—the heat went off around nine p.m. I could feel the chill on my arm.

I knew better than to lie there after I’d turned off the alarm. I struggled up, trying not to disturb the cat too much. It didn’t have to go work a midnight to eight shift at a factory. It sat up on the bed anyhow, watching me.

My boots weren’t quite dry, but that couldn’t be helped. I pulled on another pair of socks, these ones wool, over the ones already on my feet. I finished dressing and packed my lunch—peanut butter sandwiches and a Thermos of instant coffee. Not the best lunch in the world, but come four a.m., I’d be glad I had it.

The cat was still sitting on the bed, now scratching at its ridiculous collar. I unbuckled it and hefted it in my hand. It was heavy. Who would put it on a poor cat? I tossed it onto the dresser and gave the cat a scratch on its chin.

“Sorry. I got no more tuna. Or cat food. I’ll see what I can get on my way home from work.” Like it could understand me and I could really afford to spend money on cat food and litter.

Stupid. The last thing I needed was a pet. What would happen to it if I got locked up again? Besides, it obviously had a home. Look at that collar. Someone would be searching for it. I should keep an eye out for posters for a lost cat.

As I tugged on my jacket and watch cap, the cat wound around my feet and followed me toward the door. I held the door open in case it had had enough of me and my apartment and wanted to go home. But it got one look at the chilly night and jumped back up on the bed, sitting and staring at me.

“Well, I got to go,” I told it, feeling foolish for talking to a cat.

“Meow,” the cat answered.

In spite of myself, I grinned and gave it a final ruffle behind the ears before I left.

As I passed the alley, a flicker of light caught my eye.

A door to the Tabernacle was propped open and one of the members, dressed in the characteristic saffron robes which could offer little protection against the chill night air, sat on a cinderblock next to the dumpster. Next to him sat a kid, maybe about nine or ten years old. The kid was wearing regular clothes. The light flickered again, and the man lit a cigarette. Or a joint. The security light shone down on him, shadowing his features.

I knew the cult had some pretty strict guidelines, and I doubted smoking anything was acceptable.

And what was a kid doing there?

None of my business, really.

The man lifted his head and looked in my direction, but didn’t say anything.

I shrugged mentally and hurried on to work.

Chapter 3

THE H
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and hot steel filled the air of the factory. Sparks flew and presses thundered as I punched my time card and gathered my hard hat and gloves. Most of my coworkers milled around the time clock, waiting for our foreman, John, to hand out assignments. Since I already knew I was going to be driving a forklift, I put my lunchbox on a table in front of the vending machines and headed for the charging station, where the electric lifts were plugged in to recharge their batteries.

Kelly was there ahead of me, going over the pre-shift checklist for the large lift she would be driving. Next to it was the smaller lift that was assigned to me. On a hook in the wall near it hung a clipboard with the grimy stub of a pencil tied to it by an equally grimy bit of string. I grabbed the clipboard and started going over the smudged list.

When I got done, Kelly was fussing with her waist-length dark hair, sweeping it into a tight ponytail which she pulled over her shoulder and tucked under the hoodie she was wearing. I tried to tear my gaze away from her magnificent chest, but I must have looked a moment too long.

She laughed. “Keep your mind on your work, buddy. Not to mention your eyes.”

I grinned and looked at her face. “You wanna go out for breakfast when we get off work?” I had an emergency twenty stashed in my wallet. I could certainly justify this as an “emergency.” Especially if we ended up back at her place.

She shook her head. “I got an appointment with a lawyer after work today. How about tomorrow? You can come over my place, and we can fix breakfast there.”

Much better. She knew how tight money could be, and if we were already at her place, we’d be that much closer to her welcoming bed.

Our foreman John rounded the corner, clutching his clipboard with all the information he’d need for the shift, like what jobs were to be run and what shipments needed to be loaded.

He consulted it now, raising his bushy white eyebrows. He tilted his hard hat back a bit. “Can you two stay a bit over when the shift ends?” he asked.

Kelly frowned. “I got an appointment at nine fifteen.”

“It’ll just be a few minutes,” John assured her. “And you’ll get overtime for it.”

Kelly would get overtime, but I might not. I had another two weeks to go before I’d been employed three months and would join the union. Without union protection, I certainly wasn’t going to insist on overtime. I knew John would try to authorize it and slip it through, but it might not be approved.

“Okay,” Kelly said. “But not more than half an hour.”

“More like two tenths,” John said.

I would be staying regardless. I wasn’t about to jeopardize this job over a few minutes, whether I got paid for it or not.

The whistle blew, signaling the machine operators to take over from the previous shift workers.

Kelly climbed into the seat of her lift, checked her ponytail to make sure it was securely out of the way, and headed off to the shipping room where she’d spend most of the night loading and unloading trucks.

Starting my lift, I drove toward the warehouse to fetch the first load of dozens to bring parts to the shop floor. The night proceeded uneventfully.

When the shift ended, Kelly and I ran through the post-shift checklist and went to hang around the time clock, waiting for John to finish going over the shift notes with the eight to four foreman.

“You still on for tomorrow after we get off work?” Kelly asked.

I grinned and cast an admiring look over her full figure. It curved in all the right places. My hands itched to reach over and pull her up against me. She certainly wouldn’t appreciate it here at work, so I didn’t.

“You bet.” I glanced around. That was all I was going to say with all these people around.

She smiled back. “The kids’ll be in school,” she reminded me. “And we’ll need a shower after work…”

I bit my lower lip and nodded. I felt heat spreading throughout my body.

Kelly was the only woman I’d ever slept with. An experience I was more than ready to repeat whenever the opportunity offered.

My throat felt tight, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to talk. I managed to get out, “Want me to pick up anything?”

She shook her head. “Maybe we could go out to lunch or something.”

“Okay. Or wait till the kids get home and take them to McDonald’s for supper.”

“It’d have to be an early supper. They’re going to their Dad’s for the weekend.”

Did that open up the opportunity for us to spend the entire weekend together? I took a deep breath and tried to refocus on the sounds and smells of the shop around us, not on Kelly’s proximity to me.

A worried thought wormed its way into my mind. Kelly’s ex wasn’t exactly a model parent. I asked, “After he got drunk and left them in the car for hours last time he had them overnight, the judge is letting him take them for the whole weekend?”

Kelly shrugged. “He agreed to leave them at his mother’s if he goes out. And his lawyer argued he should have another chance to prove himself a fit parent.”

“Does that mean he’s still trying to get custody?”

“Yeah. But he prob’ly won’t have much of a chance at least until next school year.”

If it were my kids, I’d be more concerned about it than Kelly seemed to be. But she’d been going through this since the divorce, so she had a much better handle on it than I did.

John appeared and handed the clipboard over to the next shift foreman. He turned to us.

“We’re getting a new inventory/dispatch procedure,” he said. “Everybody who needs to use it is supposed to be trained. It’s going to be you two who are impacted most, so I got permission to give you a brief overview this morning.”

“When’s it going to be implemented?” I asked.

John sighed, his eyebrows meeting over his nose. “That’s the thing. Tomorrow.”

Kelly frowned. “As in midnight tonight?”

John nodded. “As in midnight tonight.”

I scratched the stubble in my cheek. I hadn’t shaved since before Mrs. Coleman’s viewing. Maybe it was just as well Kelly hadn’t taken me up on the invitation to breakfast. “It’s certainly not my place to decide this stuff,” I said, “but why on a Friday? Seems like Monday would make more sense. Especially if a lot of people need to be trained.”

“They want to have a test run on Friday, so they have the weekend to iron out any problems that arise,” John said. “And as for the training—they had sessions for the other shifts, but they forgot about us. As usual.”

Kelly shook her head. “And we’re supposed to be the first ones to make the change.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s different?” I asked.

“It’s an automated system. For now, they’re just switching the procedure with the finished products. They intend, though, to have parts inventory on it eventually. That’ll effect you, Jesse, more than Kelly.”