Dead on Arrival

30

Their trips to the refinery at night were the most dangerous.

During the day, there were cars and people about, and trucks and vans were constantly moving around the area. A boy walking his dog in the open field on the west side of the plant wasn’t particularly noteworthy, provided the boy didn’t get too close to the perimeter fence. And a vehicle parked for a few minutes at some spot in which a man in a baseball cap appeared to be studying a road map or adding water to the radiator wasn’t likely to give cause for alarm if the vehicle didn’t stay there too long.

But at night it was different. The businesses closest to the refinery were mostly industrial, plants that manufactured things like tires and cardboard boxes and sheet metal, and most of these industries were open only during the day. The nearest restaurants and retail stores and homes were approximately two miles away, so there were few reasons for people to be in the vicinity of the refinery at night.

And on this trip the boy needed to walk the perimeter of the plant.

They were completing the final phase of their prepar ations. They needed to find a point of entry and then the safest route to the tanks and pipes containing the hydrofluoric acid. The refinery was well lit in some places, with huge overhead lights that shined down onto pumps and control stations that housed meters and valves. But other locations throughout the plant were less well lit because there was normally no need for people to go into these areas at night.

The perimeter of the plant was similarly well illuminated, particularly near the entry gates, and lights were placed every fifty yards or so along the top of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the plant, but there were many places along the perimeter where the lights didn’t overlap. So the boy had been given two tasks: find the best place to enter the plant and find a route through the plant to the hydrofluoric acid tanks that was mostly in the dark.

The refinery worked three shifts a day. They would plant the devices on the graveyard shift, which began at 11 P.M. and ended at 7 A.M. There were only about ten workers on this shift. He had read that these workers maintained the equipment, and their primary duty was to ensure, when the main work-force came to work the next day, that the refinery was fully functional and ready to operate. And he had seen only two guards on the graveyard shift, two middle-aged men who sat in a shack near the refinery’s main entrance.

The graveyard shift. He liked that name.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Eddie Kolowski said, and pulled his glove back on. Every time he took off a glove to get a smoke, his damn fingers almost froze.

Before they’d assigned the new guy to their shift, when it had just been him and Billy in the shack, this job hadn’t been too bad. He and Billy would sit there bullshitting, listening to the radio, nodding off when it suited them — and if he felt like taking a little nip, he’d take a little nip. But now they had the new guy, a little Mormon shit. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t cuss. Eddie just hated the son of a bitch.

They were supposed to walk around the plant on a continuous basis, one guy always outside walking, while the other guy stayed in the shack to man the phones. In the summer, that wasn’t so bad, but in the winter, when it was colder than shit out, when the damn wind just came screaming off the lake, him and Billy said, Fuck that shit. No way were they going to freeze their asses off, walking outside. But now with this new guy, they were afraid he’d rat them out if they didn’t follow the procedure; he looked like the type that would. They figured after a couple of months he’d either quit — most young guys didn’t last too long — or he’d figure out that there wasn’t much point in just walking around in the dark, but for a little while they’d have to pretend they were playing the game.

There was one spot near the southeast corner of the plant where there was a good windbreak, and for some reason, maybe the chemicals they had in these pipes, the pipes there were hot. So Eddie, when it was his turn to patrol, always headed right for that spot and planted his ass on one of the hot pipes, and then he would sit there and take little hits from his flask and smoke until it was time to head back to the shack.

What the hell? Was that somebody standing there? The guy — he thought it was a guy, a little guy — was just standing there in a shadow between the lights. What the hell was he doing? Eddie waited a bit, figuring the guy was just some bum and he’d haul out his pecker in a minute and take a piss and move on, but the guy just continued to stand there. What the fuck?

Eddie thought about pulling the pistol out of his holster, but to do that he’d have to take off his glove again to unsnap the little metal button on the holster flap. Screw that. He pulled the flashlight off his belt and shined it right at the guy’s face.

It was a kid. A short, scrawny kid with a big honker. Not black. Mexican or something else, and man, did he have a nose on him! He figured the kid would bolt like a scared rabbit when the light hit him, but he didn’t. He just shielded his eyes with his hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Eddie asked.

‘Looking for my dog,’ the kid said.

‘Your dog? At this time of night?’

‘I live over there,’ the kid said, and pointed vaguely behind him. ‘My dog was barking, and when I looked outside to see why I saw him run off. He must have seen something, a raccoon or a possum, and he chased it. He came this way and I just saw him, here along the fence, but now I don’t.’

‘Well, he sure as shit ain’t on this side of the fence,’ Eddie said. ‘Not unless he dug a hole to get under it.’ Eddie shined his flashlight along the bottom of the fence. ‘And I don’t see no hole.’

‘Yeah,’ the kid said. ‘Maybe he went back home.’ Then the kid turned to leave, but before he did, he said, ‘Thank you.’

Nice kid.

‘Hey, what kind of dog was it?’ Eddie said.

‘A German shepherd,’ the boy said. ‘Be careful if you see him. He bites.’ Eddie thought the kid might have smiled when he said this.

It was his fault the boy was almost caught. He hadn’t been watching the guard shack at all. He’d been watching a group of three workers who had left one of the buildings and were working on a pump on the north side of the refinery, and he’d been making sure that the workers didn’t go to the other side of the refinery where the boy was. If they had, he would have called the boy on the cell phone he had given him. The boy had been told that if the cell phone vibrated, he wasn’t to answer it; he was to come quickly back to the car. But he never saw the guard leave the shack, and that was inexcusably careless on his part.

‘You did well,’ he told the boy. ‘Very well. The worst thing you could have done was run.’

He was extremely concerned that the guard had been standing where he was. Previously the guards on this shift had never left the shack near the front gate. And the boy said the guard had been sitting in the shadows, not walking where the lights were, so he hadn’t been able to see him.

‘You still think the southeast corner is the best place to enter?’ he asked the boy.

‘Yes. It’s the shortest route to the tanks.’

‘Well, the guards have changed their procedure since the last time we were here. We’re going to have to come back a few more nights and watch them.’

The boy didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head.

He loved this boy.