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BO GATHERED ANOTHER gob and swung it over the mold. The glass was behaving just right, the team clicked along like a well-oiled machine, and the wide-opened loading dock doors and cracked windows let in just enough moist, spring air to make the heat of the furnace a pleasant companion.
Conversation didn’t stall, either.
“So the kid’s back?” Freddie asked as he waited for the gob to fall into the mold.
“His name is Eli,” Bo said. “And yeah. He insisted.”
Bob cut the still-glowing glass with shears, and Freddie pressed the lever, turning it into a condensing lens for a parking lot lighting fixture. As Bo turned toward the furnace again, he barely heard Freddie holler over the cooling fans and the metallic sounds of the machinery: “Betcha you’ll be glad when he’s outta your hair!”
If only.
Bo touched the ball of his punty to the glass melt surface, right inside the ceramic ring that floated on its surface. The steel ball caught the hot fluid, cooling it, coaxing it to stick to surface, and Bo twisted the handle to pick up more, then more again. The gob started to grow and sag under its own weight. Bo pulled it out of the furnace opening, carefully not touching the surrounding refractory brick, and gave it three slow turns. Just a bit to let it cool. Slow it down so it didn’t run off.
Then again, in and turn, then out and cool. In and turn, out and cool.
By the time he was ready to drip the gob into the mold, the sucker must’ve weighed a good fifteen pounds. The fine balance of Bo’s youthful strength and ample experience was the reason his team was put on his job, and he knew it. Gathering gobs this size, over and over, wasn’t for the young, nor for the guys who were still wet behind the ears.
Few gobs later, Joe showed up, coming out of the QC hallway with Eli behind him.
Bo nodded, then turned back to his work. The rhythm of the team wasn’t only productive – it was also safe. Predicable timing made for fewer accidents around hot glass. He couldn’t stop and walk over like he wanted to, but next time he turned around, he was grateful to see that old Bart stopped the flow of traffic to the lehr to give Eli safe passage.
Damn stubborn fool.
Bo’s subvocal mutter came with an admiring smile. Got to love a guy with this much grit. So much life, so much enthusiasm, so much knowledge. And so much love. It was too soon to speak of such things, but Bo knew he was falling hard, and he also knew he’d do just about anything to keep Eli out of harm’s way.
He saw them talk with the foreman – nothing new there – and he saw them head up the hallway toward the offices.
Now that was interesting. They could be off to do just about anything, but Bo had a strong suspicion that Eli wanted to find out more about the ceramic rings. A flood of relief pushed out the dread he hadn’t realized he held in his soul.
Joe was with him.
Anything was better than Eli investigating on his own while still on the disabled list.
Unless Joe was the guy.
“Bo, hurry up!” Frankie’s voice cut through, and Bo realized he’d been farting around with the same gob for way too long. He pulled it out and swung it over.
“Careful,” he said to Bob, the cutter. “I made this one too big.”
“No shit, dude. You going for a record or somethin’?”
Not Joe. Joe’s too regular.
Bo didn’t know whether he was trying to convince himself or whether his guess was right, but Joe liked being the head of QC, he was good at his job, and his life seemed to be going pretty well. He couldn’t see Joe stealing from the company, plus there was something – Bo didn’t know what – that made Joe a bad fit for their thief. Perp. On TV, in the police shows, whoever was stealing would be a ‘perp.’
The Old Man, Mr. Phillips, showed up on the floor at ten sharp, like just about every day, to look at the troops and talk to Halloran. He wore his usual slacks, white shirt and a nondescript tie, and he kept the chill off the shoulders with an old-fashioned brown cardigan. Inspecting each department daily and in person was one of those old-school trademarks that Bo actually appreciated. Now he waited for a break in traffic to walk up to the glass press and watched them make one lens, and when the carrier was done, he looked around, including Bo in his question.
“Where’s Halloran?”
“Saw him talking to Joe and Eli just a while ago,” Freddie said from behind the press. They all nodded. They were focused on their part of the production process, true, but their eyes did stray elsewhere for the sake of both general safety and entertainment.
“But where’s he now? We were going to discuss setting a new pot in the small furnace!”
“Should we tell him, Mr. Phillips?” Freddie asked, tilting his head to the side.
“No. I’ll run into him. Don’t let me hold up production,” Mr. Phillips said, wiping his hand over his bald head.
Bo nodded and turned his back to his team. Time to make another gob. He approached the furnace and readied his punty.
A heavy thud echoed from down below.
The floor shook.
Bo stopped, aware that activity around him slowed down to a halt.
Somebody screamed. There was no mistaking the sound, not now that the presses had stopped and the guys stood silent, assessing what might’ve happened.
Bo stood his punty against the furnace. He ripped his face shield off and tossed it on the ground along with his silver, heat-reflective gloves. “It was from down below,” he yelled. “I’m going! Call 911!”
“I’m going too,” Frankie shouted as he sprang from his seat.
“Everybody calm down!” Mr. Phillips waved his arms, trying to get the work crew settled. “Where is your foreman?”
Nobody knew. Bo didn’t care. All he wanted to do was make sure that Eli was still all in one piece. He hurtled down the narrow, corkscrew staircase behind the foreman’s office, halting on the last step.
He peeked out and looked around.
A trolley cart full of batch and cullet listed against one of the two thick structural walls that bracketed the big furnace gas burners. It reminded Bo of the luggage cart from the Harry Potter movie and the way it sort of stuck in the wall half-way through - yet there were no people milling in the dim, gas-lit space.
“Bo?” Frankie almost crashed into him from behind. “What's going on?”
“I don’t know,” Bo whispered. The sweat he’d earned by the furnace was now running cold down his neck, and inexplicably, he was overcome with a need to shiver.
One last step.
He came out with Frankie next to him. “Hello?” Bo barely recognized the rasp of his own voice. “Anybody here?”
Silence.
“Bo, look.” Bo looked to his side, where Frankie squatted by the broken cart. The impact must’ve broken its axle and the force of the collision seemed to have taken a good chunk out of the supporting brick wall. But Frankie wasn’t looking at the structural damage.
“Down here.”
Bo squatted. Gently, carefully he moved a chunk of orange cullet that had spilled form the cart along with the dry batch. Under the mixture of sand, flux, and colorants was something bulky. Something... familiar.
“A shoe,” Frankie whispered.
A black dress shoe like the one staff wore, with steel guards in the toes and good grippy rubber soles. With a foot still in it.
“Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph!” Bo sprung up and ran around the cart. The man squished by the cart, it might’ve been Eli. And even if it wasn’t, this was bad.
Real bad.
He bent down. “We need more light,” he called out to Frankie. “And we need to let the guys know. I hope the hot floor won’t fall on our heads!”
“I’m on it,” Frankie said in a flat voice. Soon a light switch clicked far away, and Bo could see a lot better even as the thud of Frankie’s boots receded up the staircase.
There was an arm, and a torso dressed in a white shirt, and... a mass, he guess. A wet, glistening mass where the head used to be. He could barely pick out the clumps of blood-stained hair against the brick. Was it Joe, or was it Eli?
“Joe!” Bo bellowed with all his might. “Eli!” His voice bounced around the textured space in a disjointed echo.
Soon, a stampede of feet announced reinforcements, and with it, conflicting orders.
“Move the cart!”
“Don’t move the cart!”
“Evacuate the area!”
“Wait for the police!”
Bo stepped aside, taking it all in. The trolley cart was heavy. He had done his share of pushing one of these carts from the mixing area up to the furnaces, as well as guiding carts filled with ceramics up the tangle of narrow corridors, all the way up to the hot floor. Each cart had parking brakes on it, and they didn’t get going on their own. Furthermore, this one came from the mixing area – and the narrow corridor from mixing wasn’t entirely straight. There was a little bend in it.
“Guys, don’t touch anything,” Bo shouted. “Don’t touch! This wasn’t an accident. This was murder.”
HE MIGHT have sounded perfectly level-headed, but Bo was screaming inside. Somebody had killed Eli, and that somebody was going to pay. Maybe that BB shot at the cullet pile wasn’t just some asshole hazing a new guy, hoping to make him freak out and jump away. No, maybe it was an intentional act, one meant to harm, incapacitate. Maybe even kill.
The cart? A murder for sure. Except Bo didn’t know who did it. He was pretty sure he knew why – but there were so many guys involved ...
Eli. He had to focus on Eli.
The crushed body had no crutches. Would Eli hold onto a crutch as the laden trolley pinned him to the wall? Or... maybe he got swept up and dragged, and that’s how he – Eli or the other guy – ended up underneath.
Eli, or the other guy, had to be here somewhere.
Bo broke into a run. The trolley came down the slope. Relative darkness enveloped him, and the heavy thudding of his heart rushed blood into his ears so fast, he could barely hear. He pushed ahead, scanning the floor, the walls. Small, yellow light bulbs cast inadequate light from their cages and Bo wished for the big Mag flashlight he kept in his pickup truck.
Halfway up, he tripped and fell flat on his belly. Pain shot up his elbows and his knee.
“Fuck!” He froze. Rolling onto his back was a bad idea in case he’d tripped over a body. A sob tore its way up his throat, then another, as Bo realize he’d been holding out hope the crushed body down below wasn’t Eli but somebody else. Preferably a stranger, an unknown and ephemeral visitor.
He felt his knee, the torn fabric and the sting as he touched the sticky abrasion. His elbows fared little better. Slowly, Bo stood up and looked around, peering at the pool of darkness between the two spills of tepid light.
A crutch.
He picked it up. The shiny aluminum tubing and the pale padded armpit support – it looked like Eli’s. Except Eli’s crutch hadn’t been bent like this, like someone crushed it with a cart.
“Eli!” Bo roared his despair as the caves, the hallway, and the ancient stone swallowed the last vestiges of his hope.
He entered the mixing area, not having remembered walking the last twenty yards. The dusty space was lit and humming, the huge mixer to his left turned slowly as a conveyor belt lumbered to its fixed opening, spilling sand into its maw.
The mixing area. He’d helped out here before when Mr. Sloan’s helper turned sick.
Got to warn Mr. Sloan.
Niceties like knocking before entering had been wiped from Bo’s mind as he opened the wooden, glass-paned door. The office seemed empty, but from the sound of it, Mr. Sloan was mixing colorants in the annex next door.
Bo passed through a short hallway lined with shelves full of chemicals. Their distinct odor made him crinkle his nose, but some containers were open and he saw the rich yellow of sulphur, the dark gray aluminum powder, and the deep black tellurium oxide open to the air, with labels clearly printed on each tilted plastic bucket.
Mr. Sloan would be weighing it out.
Bo peeked in. The bucket mixer was on, a batch of dark colorants turning over and over. Their mass fell over the stationary mixing blade, puffing up a fine mist of dust that rose from the bucket mixer’s opening.
He caught Mr. Sloan’s eye. His stare was wild as he thrashed on the floor, duct tape over his face, feet taped together and hands fastened behind his back.
Halloran, wild-faced and feral, growled. He kicked Mr. Sloan. “Stay still, old man,” he said.
“What did you do to Eli?” Bo wanted to shout, but his voice creaked at the edge of terror. He took few steps into the tight space. The mixer was turning, turning, turning on his right and the digital display of the abandoned scales gleamed to his left. This was no place to take a man down.
Halloran loomed. “You!” He lunged himself at Bo.
Bo backed up a step. Eli’s bent aluminum crutch was still in his hand. He stuck it out like a weapon.
“You and your nosy dweeb, getting into my shit,” Halloran spat, yanked a long-handled scoop out of a bucket of some blue chemical.
He hacked at Bo with the scoop, pushing in. Bo swung at him as hard as he could, backing up through the dust-laden air.
The two improvised weapons crashed with a spark and a metallic clang.
The mixer exploded, flash and bang. Its contents shot out of the tilted bucket like out of a cannon, covering Halloran’s upper body.
Bo backed away, coughing. His eyes stung.
The empty mixer kept turning, turning, turning.
Bo smelled the chemicals, but their flavor had changed in the back of his throat and he coughed, suddenly finding air rare.
Like fire.
The dusty air flashed with fire, its spontaneous combustion sudden, unexpected, and violent.
Halloran dropped his scoop and began to scream.
The loud blare of the fire alarm split the air, and just two seconds later, the water sprinklers opened with a hiss. Rain from the ceiling fell in big, fat droplets.
And Halloran writhed on the floor, screaming.
“What, what?” Bo braved the rain. Halloran was clawing at his face, holding his eyes. Behind him, Mr. Sloan whimpered into the strip of duct tape that covered his mouth.
Bo sidestepped around Halloran, ripped the duct tape that bound Mr. Sloan’s bony ankles, and pulled him up. His glasses were wet and Bo well knew he couldn’t see without them. “I’ll carry you,” he said.
“Mppht! Mphhhhht!” Mr. Sloan sputtered into his duct tape. Bo dropped Eli’s crutch, hoisted Mr. Sloan over his shoulder, and carried him out.
LeRoy almost crashed into him as Bo turned to exit the mixing office. “Fire, Fire!”
“In here,” Bo gasped. “Halloran’s on the floor. The colorants blew up at him.”
“Shit. Okay.” LeRoy waved few more volunteers over. “Tell the EMTs its down here. And we have a chemical spill situation!”
Bo carried Mr. Sloan past the bins of flux. The big mixer was still turning and the conveyor belt was trying to stuff its overfilled belly. Sand was spilling down the sides in cascades.
“Stop the mixer!” Bo shouted to one of the men he passed before he carried Mr. Sloan up the stairs, through the packaging area, and out the front door.
The parking lot was milling with evacuated employees. Two fire trucks tried to make their way down the hill to reach the mixing room’s loading door , The police, with their flashing lights and barricades, worked to keep the office staff from returning into the building.
“Here, sir, put him down.” The calm order cut through Bo’s haze of adrenaline. He turned toward the policeman. “The EMTs will check him over. You found him like that? Bound?”
Bo nodded. “There’s more people inside.”
“We’ll need your statement for later. Don’t go anywhere, okay?” The officer looked at him. “You’re covered in some kind of a dust.”
“Yeah?” Bo wiped his face off with his hands. His skin went from gray to grayer. “Oh shit. That’s the colorants. Chemicals.”
“We got another one,” the officer called to the EMTs. He gave Bo a stern look. “You gotta get decontaminated. Don’t go home like this.”
Bo let a burly man in an EMT uniform lead him to an ambulance like he was in a haze. “Eli,” he groaned, yanking against the EMTs firm grip. “I need to find Eli!”