He stared at me briefly, then pointed to the opposite corner without speaking. I threaded my way back past the machines, stopping to watch a giant drill move in and out of a thick metal bar on one side. On the other someone was raking more metal curls onto the floor. The men operating the equipment were totally oblivious of me.

Finally I moved to the far end of the floor, where I found yet another minuscule office. A man of about fifty sat behind a desk inside talking on the phone. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal massive forearms. I’d be careful not to make him mad enough to want to pick up one of the presses and hit me over the head.

When he finally finished his conversation—which consisted mostly of a series of grunts and the statement that the fifteenth wasn’t possible—he looked up at me and grunted again. I went through my worn-out spiel about Uncle Mitch.

“Did you know him when he worked here?”

The foreman shook his head slowly, not blinking his flat, rather lizardlike eyes.

“I’d like to talk to some of the guys. A couple of them look old enough that maybe they overlapped a few years. He was around here a week or ten days ago. One of them was bound to have talked to him.”

He shook his head again.

“You know they didn’t talk to him?”

“I know you don’t belong on this shop floor, girlie. So why don’t you get your cute ass out of here before I move it for you.”

I looked from his flat, lizard eyes back to his massive fore-arms and left with as much grace as I could muster.

19

The Prodigal Son

I sat in Lotty’s car, drumming my fingers on the hot steering wheel, trying to decide what to do next. I felt as though everyone in Chicago had been bullying me the last few days, from Todd Pichea through the sheriff’s deputies and now the crew at Diamond Head. It was time to fight back, or at least to prove that I wasn’t just lying down in my sweaty clothes and dying because they’d frowned at me.