Before I Wake

by Dee Henderson

  “The Sunburst. She likes to read the East Coast newspapers in the morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey, you two have to get along. I’ll be sending her to do the diplomatic work like getting license plates run and tugging police reports out of you.” Bruce lifted a hand in farewell and turned his attention to the phone call, asking for Rae’s hotel room.

  Nathan made a mental note to make sure he introduced Rae to his chief assistant. Most of Bruce’s requests were answered with a no, but it would definitely be an improvement having Rae Gabriella do the asking. Nathan turned up his jacket collar as he stepped outside.

  He held down the transmit button on his radio as he unlocked his car. “55-J, 10-98. Mark me 10-7 to the union hall.”

  “10-4.”

  If he managed to get to the paperwork on his desk before the late-night news came on he would be surprised. Former FBI moving into his town—it would at least generate a new topic of conversation at the café once word of Rae’s arrival spread.

  * * *

  Rae saw picket signs as she passed the town’s city hall. She didn’t see many of those on the East Coast; the sidewalks and roads were too crowded and the unions not as robust.

  At the stop sign she rolled down her window. A striker on the picket line stepped over. His gloves were frayed and his jacket zipped against the elements; the cold had chapped his exposed skin suggesting the man had been outside for a couple hours. “I’m new to town. Where’s the best place to eat a late lunch?”

  “There’s a little diner over on Franklin Road that has great steaks and fries; for hot chili the place to go is the Chili Den. There are also a couple pizza places that are worth a visit.”

  “How about directions to the diner?”

  He motioned to the next streetlight. “Take a right at the stoplight, two blocks will be Franklin, and you’ll want to go north half a mile. The M&T Diner—it stands for Mabel and Tom—is tucked in beside Sir Arthur’s. Be sure to try the onion rings.”

  “Thanks.” She nodded to the picket signs. “How long has the strike been going on?”

  “Fifteen days.”

  She read the stitching on his jacket, Mark Yates. “What do you do at the tile plant, Mr. Yates?”

  “Control the firing temperature for the tiles. Do the first oven walk-in to see how they baked.”

  She could see the aged scars on his calloused hands. The man was old enough to be her father and she liked him for no reason other than he had a nice voice and smile and took time to chat with a stranger. “If you stop by the diner later, there’ll be a cup of coffee waiting with my thanks. You’ve got a cold day for walking the picket line.”

  “If I happen to see you there, I’ll buy you a piece of Mabel’s famous pie.”

  They shared a smile.

  She followed the directions he gave. She found a parking place down the street and walked back to the M&T Diner. She stepped inside and was welcomed with the smell of warm bread, french fries, and the yeasty smell of donuts.

  The sign said Welcome. Take a menu and seat yourself. A waitress will find you.

  Rae took a laminated menu several pages thick from the stand and scanned the seating options. The food must be good for the late-lunch crowd was heavy.

  She waded into the mix of men in work boots, jeans, and heavy jackets draped over the chairs; of women in groups of two and three crowding around small tables.

  A waitress met her with a smile and pointed to a back table. “There’s a relatively quiet table that’s open in back, or if you want to chat strike politics you can sit at the counter where the guys are debating things. We’re always like this on a Saturday.”

  Rae smiled back. “Thanks, I’ll take the table.” She slipped the waitress a folded five-dollar bill as an early tip. “While I scan the menu, would you bring me a cold Coke and keep the refills coming?”

  “I’ll be glad to.”

  Rae walked back to the table.

  * * *

  Nathan noticed the Lexus with Washington, D.C., plates parked down the street from the M&T Diner. Rae Gabriella was either exceptionally lucky or a piece of good advice had led her to one of the best restaurants around.

  He debated stopping in for coffee to say hi to her and hear what the guys were saying about the contract talk breakdown, but those discussions would be better had at the union hall where the rank and file were free to say what they wanted without it becoming a community discussion. Nathan drove on.

  The union hall was beside the VFW hall, in what Nathan thought of as the civics corner of Justice, for it was next to the old courthouse that now served as the county-records depository. Nathan pulled into the union-hall parking lot, squeezing in between two trucks.

  Three men were loading picket signs in the back of a pickup truck. Nathan lifted a hand in greeting but didn’t pause.

  The union men saw this as a life-and-death struggle for their future and for every one of them the outcome of this strike was critical. That kind of lack of control over their own future worried Nathan, for they were proud, hardworking men, and without a job, anger and despair would set in. And that was a bad recipe for the officers who were charged with trying to keep the peace in this town.

  * * *

  Nathan scanned the tables set up in the union hall looking for Larry Sikes, the number two man at the union, who had direct responsibility for membership and morale.

  “Nathan, come over and join us.”

  He changed directions toward the back table where a group of guys were eating lunch—hot dogs and potato chips and take-out bowls of chili from the Chili Den. The old guards were here, the men who had worked at the tile plant for twenty-plus years.

  Nathan slapped shoulders in welcome and greeted the men with a smile. These were the ones who would keep the others settled and balanced. “How’s everyone doing?”

  “On this beautiful day, we’re doing just fine. Your dad was by earlier, playing checkers and talking baseball.”

  “I can always count on him to know the inside scoop on things.”

  “Are you over here to tamp down trouble, or here to stir it up?”

  Nathan laughed and helped himself to a hot dog. “Martin, you know trouble just seems to come my way on its own. So what’s the biggest issue under discussion today?”

  “It’s a tough one, Nathan,” Lewis replied, joining the conversation. “For the last three years, the company has paid half the costs for prescriptions filled at the local pharmacy. Management is threatening to stop the payments for anyone who doesn’t cross the strike line.”

  “And those who immediately need the prescription-cost help are either ill or have family members who are ill,” Nathan finished for Lewis, finding the hot dog hard to swallow as the implications registered.

  “Of all the threats they could put down, this one strikes at the most vulnerable among the union membership,” Martin said.

  “It’s just words so far. Maybe they won’t do it,” Jim added.

  “Then they should stop threatening to do it. It’s cruel,” Martin insisted.

  Nathan nodded, agreeing with Martin. “I’ll make sure that message is passed on when I see Zachary,” he offered, knowing he would see the chief management negotiator in the morning.

  “It’s got to be coming down from headquarters to him, for there is no way Zachary would be for this move. His brother is one of the guys on strike and he’s diabetic. Zachary knows what this would do to the family finances.”

  “I agree; it’s not like Zach.” Nathan raised a hand in greeting as he spotted Larry Sikes coming through from the office. “I appreciate the update. Let me talk with Larry about it a bit.”

  * * *

  “How’s it going, my friend?” Nathan offered his hand, and Larry took it. They had gone to high school together and had been both track rivals and basketball teammates.

  “Are you getting any more sleep than I am?” Larry asked.

  “Probably not much.”

/>   Larry motioned to the office. They walked back to where they could talk in privacy.

  “Is this suspension of prescription payments a serious threat?” Nathan asked.

  “Adam thinks so. The strike is over health-care issues and management knows it’s a key place to apply pressure. We could probably make acceptance of a deal contingent on them making up the payments they owed, but in the meantime members will have to come up with the money out of their own pockets and we’re already seeing the first mortgage payments missed.”

  Nathan settled into a chair and stretched out his legs. He turned his left foot slightly to see the bottom of his boot. He’d walked through some dog droppings somewhere and crushed a few dead leaves into the goo. It matched the kind of day it had been. “Does the union have contingencies in place?”

  “We’ve got some reserve funds, but they won’t last long. Walter Sr. was over this morning to give us some numbers—how many prescriptions the current union membership has with his pharmacy, what kind of costs the company has paid out in the last two months. If the union has to make up that payment, he’s offered to cut his costs as low as he can, but there are only so many days he can carry the debt before the pharmacy also runs into cash-flow problems.”

  “We can’t lose the only pharmacy in town. And those who are sick need the prescriptions filled without a delay.” Nathan leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling. “This is a mess.”

  “Tell me about it. Does the company still want to have a tile plant in this town? That’s what it’s coming down to, Nathan. Adam thinks the conglomerate is ready to use the strike as a reason to get out of the slow-margin-growth tile business and simply shutter the plant. They can’t make up their mind on that question, so the negotiations go in circles. We’re not far apart. If they wanted a deal, there would be one with about twelve hours of negotiating the language.”

  “How many days can the union carry the costs if they do hold back the matching funds?”

  “Two, maybe three weeks, and that’s optimistic,” Larry replied. “That’s my day, so what’s on yours?”

  “My budget is stretched to the edge of what the town can afford; the overtime is killing me. Would you be willing to reduce the number of guys on the picket lines Sunday, so I can give one of my guys an afternoon off? Some of them haven’t had a day off since before this strike began.”

  Larry slid a pencil through his fingers from the tip to the eraser and back again. “What if we suspend the picket line downtown and have men walking only at the plant?”

  Nathan scraped at dirt under his thumbnail, thinking about it. Larry would take some heat from the rank and file for making the offer. “It would let me give two men the day off.”

  “Done. We’ll call the picket line at nine tonight and pick it up again at 7 a.m. Monday.”

  Nathan leaned forward and offered his hand. “Thanks.”

  “Today it feels good to have any decent agreement on which to shake hands.”

  “Did you get a chance to take Marla out for her birthday?”

  Larry smiled. “We went out for Chinese, and she got a fortune cookie saying Happy Birthday. It made her day; personally I had heartburn from eating the pork.”

  Nathan smiled as he got to his feet. “She loves you, man.”

  “I know it.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Larry.”

  * * *

  Rae listened to the conversations flowing around her in the diner, putting faces together with voices and topics that concerned them. The couple by the window were talking about their grandson, the table of three to her left were discussing where to go skiing next weekend, and the rest immediately around her seemed to be talking about different issues surrounding the strike.

  So who in this diner might make a good neighbor? She studied those around the restaurant as she ate.

  Safe neighborhoods were nice, but people who lived in safe neighborhoods rarely knew anything useful about what was going on in the town. She preferred to call neighbors those who had a friend or relative who had brushed through trouble with the law, for it was there that a pipeline of useful information flowed.

  Families affected by crime cared a lot about stopping it, but they were not always willing to talk directly to the police, making it fertile grounds for her and a stack of agency business cards.

  “Rae Gabriella, you are hard to track down.” Bruce pulled out a chair across from her at the table. “I heard a rumor that you were in town, got to my office, and found the proof.”

  She looked up and bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from reacting to the fact that someone had beat him up and recently. It had to have been a polar bear of a guy to get past Bruce’s head-snapping right hook.

  “A hotel room is not a place I like to hang out.” She accepted the ring of keys Bruce held out. The back of his hand looked bruised, so he’d given some of what he had received.

  “Your new office key is the blue-tabbed one, not that you’ll need it.”

  She smiled at the quiet dig and pulled out her own ring of keys to add them to.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” Bruce asked.

  “I’ll catch a nap later.”

  He helped himself to one of the remaining onion rings.

  She returned her attention to her lunch. “This steak is as good as advertised.”

  “Everything here is good, especially the cheeseburgers. How was the trip?”

  “It was nice to have the time to think. Are you going to explain that face, or should I guess?”

  “A restraining order needed to be enforced and I was the closest when it came time to do it.”

  “It looks like it hurts.”

  Bruce smiled. “Only when I smile. I’ve closed up the office for the day. Would you like to look at housing or take a drive around town? I’m yours for the afternoon.”

  “Actually, you’re just in time to join me for dessert. I want a slice of chocolate cream pie. Let’s go to the Dessert Palace.”

  Rae reached for her cash, taking advantage of the fact that Bruce had just given her an excuse to move them out of here. The lady at the next table over had just angled her chair to make it easier for her to overhear their conversation. The teenagers had started whispering, and one was craning her neck to see Bruce. Her friend was a bit radioactive at the moment. This was probably not the place to talk details of her job or the cases Bruce was working on.

  “The Dessert Palace is more than an hour north of Chicago.”

  “Yes. So?” She slid bills to pay for dinner onto the tray with the ticket and left a large tip on the table. “I’m driving.”

  Bruce laughed. He got up and picked up his jacket. “You haven’t changed, Gabriella. I’m getting the lemon meringue, and when my blood sugar goes high enough to kill me, I’m blaming it on you.”

  “Can we take your Jaguar?”

  “After the snow clears you can have a set of keys. Until then, we rough it in yours or take my Caprice.”

  “I’m upgrading the Lexus to something with less miles on it just as soon as I get settled in here. I didn’t want to pay the district tax.”

  Rae picked up a toothpick at the counter and a copy of the free town advertiser in order to read the ads later. She pushed open the door. She pointed to her car and dug the keys out of her pocket.

  “It’s going to take a while to adjust to a small town where everyone listens in. You were getting a lot of attention back there and speculation about that bruised face.”

  “You’ll get use to the attention. The best defense is to never explain; they add to the facts anyway.”

  * * *

  Rae drove at the speed limit through town and turned toward the highway. “So what do you see me doing this next week and month?”

  “Whatever interests you. This is a job, Rae, but it’s also a slice of freedom. You can acquire your own cases or share the work on mine. We’ll be partners all the way down the line. I figure it will take a couple weeks for you to decide on
housing and get an office up and put together. Your work with your uncle is going to be event driven, so we’ll let that govern how you split your time during the week.”

  “They’ve got a murder/suicide cleanup to deal with; I figured I would join them Monday to help out.”

  “All I ask is that you carry a good cell phone so I can find you.”

  “I turn it off when I’m having an interesting discussion with someone.”

  “I remember. I can shout at your voice mail.”

  She laughed and sorted out change for use later on the toll roads around Chicago. “It’s good to be back, Bruce.” There was something so comforting about the oldest of friends. For the first time in months she was with a friend she knew cared more about her than a case outcome. And there was something refreshing knowing Bruce had already encountered most of her bad habits, and would be more amused than offended when they inevitably reappeared.

  “I’m glad you decided to say yes. I’ve missed having a partner who can talk through the cases, debate the details, and keep me company when the stakeouts last all hours. You’re going to let me pick up the tab for really nice office furniture too and not fuss about it.”

  “That kind of welcome gift I’ll accept.” And it fit his nature; he was generous with his friends.

  Rae glanced over at him. In years past she had been able to read him, but it was a skill she would need to reacquire. She felt a sudden uncertainty, that the gap between what she was certain of with him and what would have to be rediscovered after eleven years apart, might be vastly wider than she realized. People changed. Not allowing for that would be devastating if they took a misstep. “Bruce, one caveat? For now, it’s just business.”

  Bruce just smiled. “Noted. Give me a few months to catch up on your last eleven years and then I’ll think about changing your mind.”

  She wondered if when he knew the details, if he would still be of that mind-set. He had an image in his mind that was frozen from years ago, and so much about her had changed in those years. Maybe not in appearance, in habits, or in the memories they shared, but inside—she was nothing like the lady he remembered. She knew the changes had gone too deep in how she saw things in the world around her. Too many betrayals and hurts and failures had left their scars. The optimist he remembered had died a long time ago. “I hope you’re not disappointed with what you find.”