by Ada Stone
“Sorry, man, no one gave me one.”
At this he cursed under his breath. “Damn idiots. C’mon. You can’t be walking around here without one. I’ll get you a quick fit and if you last more than a day or two, we’ll get you one that actually fits. I’m just not losing my ass just ’cause you’re going to catch a falling piece of metal with your head.”
I glanced behind me at the other workers. None were paying me any attention, and the ones I’d spoken to already were deliberately ignoring me. I decided quickly that going with this man was my best bet—partly because I didn’t want to get my head crushed in. I followed him as he headed down a stretch before hooking a sharp left. He was the most talkative man I’d met that day and maybe if I played my cards right, he’d talk to me.
I followed him down a hallway until we reached a room that actually didn’t seem to have a door. Or if it did have a door, it had been taken off. We went inside to find a row of lockers and at the very back, a stack of hardhats.
“Here, try some of these on.”
I did as I was told. As I was trying them on, their fit awkward and a little uncomfortable, I glanced over at the burly man standing by to make sure I got a damn hat.
“Get a lot of accidents around here?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
The man shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s dangerous conditions, you know? Which is why you gotta be safe.”
I nodded my head and tried on another hat. “Do these things really make a difference though?”
He barked out a deep, quick laugh. “Not necessarily. They help with some of the things, probably save you from a hammer going through your skull, but if you get something big dropping on you, you’re dead either way. Still. Rules are rules and if we’re caught not following them, it’s a hefty fine and someone’s gonna lost a job.”
I considered him for a moment. He clearly knew what was going on, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. There was every possibility that he was just some average Joe worker and didn’t know anything about VCI. Or if he did, there was a high probability that he wouldn’t say shit about it. It seemed like that was the MO of the company thus far.
Still, he was the most forthcoming. What did I have to lose?
“Yeah? What about that collapse though? The one a few months back?” I tried to keep my tone causal, like I was just having a conversation, not interrogating him for valuable information that would change things dramatically for me.
He hesitated. “You mean that charity place? The one over on Central?”
I did my best to stay calm and not seem too eager. I tried on another hat. “Yeah, I think it was on Central. It was a huge deal. People died.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man tense. His lips pursed together into a thin line and it was clear he wasn’t overly happy about the topic of discussion. I expected him to snap at me, to tell me to shut up, or at the very least to simply shut up himself. But I was surprised when he shook his head. “That was a damn shame,” he told me, and he was sincere enough that I was convinced he honestly believed that.
I looked over at him in surprise. “Accidents happen, right?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, accidents.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Because you’re right. Accidents do happen. All the damn time. Which is why we do things the way we do things, you know? Accident happens, we change the way we do things so that they don’t happen again, right?”
I nodded my head. “Yeah, sure. Makes sense.”
“Right. Makes sense. So then why would you go back to the old way you do things if you know accidents are more likely to happen like that?”
I stared at him long and hard. This was it. This was the bit of information I was looking for all along. “Are you saying that they didn’t follow protocol or something? Skipped safety stuff?”
He shook his head. “Nah, not technically. They did it all by the books, but that don’t mean shit if you skimp out on the materials.”
And there it was. That one statement gave me what I needed. If they went cheap for the materials, they could skim a lot of money off the top, especially if they said they were using the right kind of materials. Everyone makes out, but like the big guy in front of me was saying, it meant that accidents were more likely to happen. And it meant that Sal fucking knew about it.
“You mean they didn’t use the right materials?” I clarified, just to make sure that this guy knew what he was talking about.
He gave me a grim smile. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s not a surprise the damn building went down. Cut on quality of materials. Cut on the time we were given to complete it. Cut on everything.” He shook his head again. “It’s a fucking shame and it ought to be criminal.”
I considered him and my next move very carefully before deciding. Finally, I decided to take a risk. “What if it was criminal?”
He paused. For a second it felt like all the air in the room had been sucked out as I waited for his next response. I could see it in his eyes that he was starting to get suspicious of me. That he was starting to question whether or not I was just some new idiot needing a hard hat or whether I was something with ulterior motives.
Finally, he said, “Then they ought to pay for it.”
I let out a breath. “How willing would you be to help make that happen?”
“Very.”
***
I learned that the man’s name was Calvin Serrano and he’d worked there at the steel factory for a while. He was actually a foreman and kept the other guys in line. The way they worked was that they would get called in to make steel beams and the like for buildings before or as they were constructed. They worked with a variety of different companies, most of them not giving them any problems.
But Calvin admitted that this last company had been a bit of a pain in his opinion. They sent over blueprints of what their plans were for the building, then they’d include a list of needed materials. Calvin told me that he oversaw some of that—not in any capacity that gave him real power, just put him in a position to have enough information to give direction to his guys—and noticed that what they were requesting was a little odd for a building of that caliber.
It was massive, and yet they were using the more brittle of materials.
“That’s dangerous,” Calvin explained. We weren’t in that room full of lockers anymore, because he said that the guys took their breaks there a lot of the time and if they didn’t, they’d stop by to get into their lockers at the very least. He sensed that what we were talking about wasn’t the kind of thing to be sharing with everyone. “If you start making something tall, you got to expect it to encounter way more wind, right? So you need something strong and durable, something that won’t bend too much, but won’t crumble under the sudden pressure. If you get something too brittle, it’ll start to weaken and then break.”
He explained that he’d even addressed the issue with Mr. Caraway, who was more or less the boss. Not of the entire company, but definitely of their little slice of it. He was the one who worked directly with VCI.
“I brought it to his attention that we should recommend a stronger material,” Calvin told me, his face a little flushed, and not just from the heat. He obviously was getting worked up about this. “I thought, hey, this is great for us, right? It means these assholes need to get the more expensive materials. But no, Caraway told me to shut up about it and follow instructions.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked him, though I had a hunch of my own. One that involved a little money lining a lot of pockets.
Calvin shook his head. “I wasn’t really sure. I thought maybe they just knew something I didn’t about the building, you know? I’m just a materials guy in the end, so maybe it was a design thing.”
“You don’t think that anymore?”
Again, Calvin shook his head. “No. I forgot something here one night after I left. When I came back to pick it up, I saw Caraway talking with someone.
I wasn’t sure who he was, but I had a feeling it was about Vanguard Construction. The next day, Caraway pushed the materials through and told me I needed to keep my mouth shut if I wanted to keep my job."
He looked almost guilty about the whole thing, scratching at his bald head beneath his hard hat. Maybe that guilt would be enough to make my next suggestion more reasonable. Maybe it would be enough to get him to help me.
“You think there’s a paper trail linking this guy? Maybe showing that some skimming might have gone on?”
Calvin studied me a moment, then said, “I don’t know who you really are, but if you’re asking if I’ll help you out with Vanguard, then I’m telling you now, I will. But you’d better make sure Caraway goes down with them, because my job’s on the line.”
I nodded. Realistically, it wasn’t something I could honestly promise. Caraway wasn’t on my list and so long as Sal got what was coming to him, I didn’t really care about the rest. Still, if I could avoid screwing the only guy who had been interested in helping me out, it would be all the better. I didn’t want Calvin to lose everything, but I also knew that there was some part of me that wouldn’t care if he did so long as Sal paid for his crimes.
And I wasn’t talking about the construction shit. The crimes he committed against me were at the forefront of my mind and they were, in the very end, all I truly cared about.
Still, if I could keep Calvin from losing his job, I would.
Chapter Ten
Zoe
I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, half expecting a maniacally crazed Sal to be driving drunk and careless along the road behind me, his face flushed with rage and alcohol as he swerved across the entire road, gunning for me. Determined and blood thirsty.
But the road remained empty behind me as I drove farther away from Sal and closer to where I knew Nick was staying.
He’d lost his place when he went to prison. We hadn’t lived together, despite being together for as long as we had. I’d insisted that I needed the personal space, a place to go to where I could immerse myself in the tough studying that came with being a student in nursing school. But in retrospect, I had to admit that it was foolish. Nick was over all of the time anyway and we spent the night at each other’s places more nights than we spent alone. The only practical thing about it was that if Nick got into trouble with the law, they at least wouldn’t come sniffing at my door. Maybe to ask questions, but not in the hopes of truly finding anything.
I almost laughed at the memories. How I’d stubbornly clung to my little house, even though I was madly, hopelessly in love with Nick. How I’d spent more time studying at the library in the end anyway and was only at the house when Nick was there to keep me company.
And the most ironic part of all: how I was going to lose that house in such a short amount of time when Sal and I married.
I shuddered at the thought. Marriage. We’d be married soon, and while I’d always known deep down inside that Sal was a ticking time bomb, I had seen firsthand tonight what it would be like to live with him.
A nightmare. An ongoing, never ending, rage fueled nightmare. One that would leave me bruised and broken and flinching at my own shadow. It wasn’t something I had ever wanted—Sal wasn’t ever what I’d wanted—but I didn’t know how to get out of it now.
Nick was staying at a house that belonged to one of the guys who was part of Heaven’s Wrath. One of his more loyal friends. Jordan was a decent guy, always the sort of person who was really good to me, but never in a way that made me feel uncomfortable, like he was hitting on me. Part of that was that Jordan was a family man. Maybe he didn’t walk the straight and narrow path—that seemed pretty hard to do given that he was a part of a motorcycle club—but he was good to his little girl and had made a huge effort to be the kind of husband you wanted to come home to.
Not that it had worked out in the end. His wife had left him and I didn’t know what was going on with their kid. I had to assume there was some sort of arrangement, but if there was a custody battle, I was sorry to say I had a feeling Jordan would lose.
I felt bad going to Jordan’s house knowing that Sal could follow me and Jordan’s little girl could be there, but I truly didn’t have anywhere else to go. No family. No real friends. Sal had made sure of that. And if I went home, surely Sal would go there first to find me.
No, I couldn’t risk it.
It was what kept me driving. I promised myself that I would leave if Jordan’s daughter was there. And I convinced myself that Sal wasn’t following anyway.
I pulled up along the road beside Jordan’s house. There were still a few lights on, for which I was grateful. It meant someone at least was still up. A trickle of fear ran through me. What if Nick told me to get lost? That I’d made my choice and deserved what I got? I forced those thoughts aside. I couldn’t think like that. I had to believe that, however mad Nick might be with me, he wouldn’t throw me back to the wolves after something like this.
Getting out of the car, I headed up the sidewalk, wrapping my arms around my middle defensively. My face hurt, the quickly forming bruises throbbing on my cheeks and the taste of copper lingering from my split lip. I felt paranoid, glancing behind me to make sure that Sal wasn’t creeping up just a few steps after me.
But no one was there.
I got to the door and knocked. When no one came immediately, I knocked again, harder. I was about to knock a third time, when the door swung in to reveal Nick dressed in a pair of loose gray sweats and a form fitting t-shirt that covered some of his snaking, rolling tattoos.
For a moment, I just stared at him, relief flooding me. He was here and everything would be okay. I opened my mouth to try and explain myself—why I was here, what had happened with Sal—but nothing came out. I couldn’t tell him the awful things he’d said to me or how he’d hit me.
But it turned out I didn’t have to.
Nick stepped closer, reaching for me, and within moments I was wrapped up in his strong arms. He was warm, burning almost, and it seeped into me, soothing my aching, trembling muscles.
“I’ll fucking kill him,” Nick whispered into my hair, his voice low and dark, quiet because it was so filled with the promise of violence that it couldn’t get any louder. “No one fucking touches you. Not ever.”
The anger building inside of him was palpable. Even if I couldn’t hear it threaded through his deep voice, I could feel it in his body as it held me tightly. He was tense, a tightly coiled spring ready to release into action, to propel the rest of him into a deadly fight. And the best part of it was that I didn’t feel any of that anger, not a drop of it, directed at me. All I felt was security and protectiveness and the sense that finally I was safe.
For a glorious moment, I reveled in it. Nick would protect me, and in this moment, I felt that he still loved me, too. Something I was craving desperately.
I wanted to let Nick do whatever he needed to do while basking in his protective embrace, but I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. If Nick went after Sal, it all would go horribly wrong. What if Sal called the police and got Nick thrown back in prison? Or worse still, what if Nick got himself killed? Sal wouldn’t fight fair; I knew that much at least. He’d use every dirty trick he could—including letting his boys help him out—to make sure that Nick didn’t win.
And I couldn’t lose him. Not again.
The tears came suddenly, though maybe not unexpectedly. I felt them burn my eyes and I nearly choked on them as I buried my face deeper into Nick’s chest. I hugged him tightly, clinging almost desperately to his hard frame, because I needed him and I was so scared I’d lose him forever.
A sob wracked my body and Nick pulled me even closer, his arms clutching at my back to hold me to him.
“Shh, you’re okay now,” he whispered to me, the anger in his voice still there, but pushed to the side so that he could be soothing for me. “I won’t let that bastard hurt you. I won’t.”
I shook my head, still sobbing but trying to talk thro
ugh the tears. “Don’t, please, you can’t… he’ll…he’ll…”
I couldn’t get out the words, couldn’t even say that Sal would kill Nick and then I’d lose him forever. But Nick seemed to understand. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just knew that I was too upset for him to leave me alone, for him to go there tonight and try to kill the man who had done this to me.
With a sigh, he whispered, “C’mon, Zo. Let’s get you inside, baby.”
I let him pull me in and close the door behind us. I couldn’t tell if Jordan or his little girl were home, but I hadn’t seen his bike parked outside that I could remember, so maybe not. Nick escorted me to the couch, then sat me down into its warm, giving cushions. There were pillows and a blanket strewn across it, letting me know that Nick had been sleeping here.
