by Jude Hardin
Fire and ice
( Dead man - 8 )
Jude Hardin
Jude Hardin
Fire and ice
6:05 a.m
Pete McCray was in Nitko’s security office dumping sugar into a cup of coffee when Kevin Radowski marched in and shot him five times in the chest. McCray dropped to the tile floor facedown, knocking his ceramic coffee mug and the glass sugar dispenser off the table in the process. The blood oozing from his body mingled with the hot coffee and the sugar granules, creating a ghastly stew that, remarkably, smelled like grape jelly. Kevin finished him off with a shot to the back of the head.
“Have a nice day,” Kevin said, tipping his Nitko cap to the fallen officer.
Kevin had grown up in one of the shitty little company houses on the dirt road behind the plant. He’d had a happy childhood, mostly, but on a shelf somewhere in the deepest, darkest recesses of his subconscious cellar stood a row of Mason jars marked Bathtime with Mama. All of these jars were filled with splish-splash warmth and joy, with Mr. Bubble and toy boats and a rubber dinosaur named Roscoe.
All of them, that is, except one.
In this one particularly cloudy sample, two-year-old Kevin did something horrible, something vile and disgusting and practically unforgivable.
But he was only two, after all. He thought massaging Mama’s back with poo-poo was a good thing. He did it while she rinsed her hair, and she told him it felt oh so good. But when she looked in the mirror and discovered what Kevin had actually done to her, she cursed and shouted and violently beat his tender little ass raw with the palm of her hand.
It was the last time he ever took a bath with Mama, and the painful memory was repressed almost immediately.
Despite the nightmares and frequent bouts of constipation related to his grave mistake as a toddler, Kevin Radowski did well in school and managed to project an appearance of normalcy. In tenth grade he even tried out and made the baseball team. Some of the guys started calling him K-Rad that year, using the great major league infielder Alex Rodriguez-A-Rod-as inspiration.
The nickname stuck.
K-Rad graduated from high school with a B average, but he lacked focus and discipline and flunked out of college after two semesters. That’s when he started working for Nitko. That was twelve years ago.
K-Rad had never been arrested, had never been in any trouble with the law, and had obtained a Florida concealed-weapons permit with no problem. He owned a pair of Berettas, the M9 model used by the U.S. military and scores of police agencies, and he owned two twenty-round magazines and a silencer and a LaserMax for each pistol. He went to the firing range every chance he got. It was his hobby. It excited him in ways that a woman couldn’t.
He grabbed Officer McCray’s pistol and cell phone and shoved the items into his backpack. He knew the silenced gunshots from his Berettas would attract very little attention. Nitko was a noisy place, even in the offices. Booms and clanks and whistles and horns, electric motors blending product and pneumatic pumps sucking it through the presses and into packaging machines, forklifts whining and ventilation fans humming and every other kind of noise pollution imaginable filtered in from the production area all day every day. And on top of all that, many of the front-office employees listened to music through earbuds while they worked at their computers. An army tank could blast through the front door and they wouldn’t know it.
K-Rad closed the security office door, poured himself a cup of coffee, and waited. In a little over an hour, the real fun would begin.
6:10 a.m
Matthew Cahill rose with the sun, grabbed his ax from his backpack, and walked outside. Behind the double-wide mobile home there were pieces of oak branches and sections of trunk cut into eighteen-inch lengths with a chainsaw. The wood appeared to have been thrown haphazardly from the back of a truck, and someone with a log splitter could have come over and turned it all into stackable firewood in a few hours. The job would take Matt a lot longer, but if he came out early for a while every morning, he should be able to finish in a week. That was the plan.
He positioned the largest piece of trunk roughly in the center of the mess and used it for a chopping block. He hefted a log onto the block, came down hard with his grandfather’s razor-sharp axhead, and split the formidable chunk of hardwood into two pieces with a single swing. He split those two pieces in half, grabbed another log, and repeated the process.
It was a hazy, humid, late-summer dawn, and Matt soon worked up a thick lather of sweat. He peeled his shirt off, wiped his face with it, and kept chopping. How Janey had loved to watch him swing that ax. She would stand on the deck with a cup of coffee and watch the splinters and sweat droplets fly, and when he finished she would often attack him in the bedroom before he had a chance to shower. She would drop to her knees and lick the salty skin on his inner thighs. She drove him crazy when she did that, and what she did next could only be described as magic. Matt would never love another woman the way he loved Janey. He knew in his heart that he would not.
He looked over and saw her standing there with a white ceramic coffee mug, and for an instant he was back in Deerpark, Washington, and his beloved was still alive. He shook his head, squinted, and focused. It was Shelly Potts, of course, standing there in her pink bathrobe, and this was Copperhead Springs, Florida.
Copperhead Springs had a Wal-Mart and a community college and a single-screen movie theater built in the twenties. The U.S. Army had housed troops there during World War II, and some of the barracks along the river had since been torn down and others converted to condos. There was a tattoo parlor and a barbershop and a two-story motor lodge painted flamingo pink.
Matt had struck up a conversation with Shelly a few nights ago in a bar and grill called the Retro. Matt said he needed work, Shelly said she knew of a temporary opening, and one thing led to another. Shelly seemed to enjoy his company, in and out of bed, knowing he would eventually be moving on. The temporary job she helped him get was at her own place of employment, a hundred-degree metal oven disguised as a chemical plant called Nitko. Today would be his third and final day.
Shelly had a towel wrapped around her head, and her face looked freshly scrubbed.
“Hey, sexy. Come on in and I’ll fix you some breakfast.”
“Sounds good,” Matt said. “I’ll just grab a quick shower first.”
Shelly laughed. “I was going to suggest that.”
Matt bathed and put on a fresh pair of Wranglers and a clean white T-shirt. He walked to the kitchen. A glass of orange juice, six strips of bacon, and a stack of pancakes waited for him at the table.
“Looks great,” Matt said. He sat down and slathered the pancakes with butter and squeezed some syrup on them from a plastic bottle. Shelly brought him a hot cup of coffee.
Matt had ridden into Florida on a Greyhound and had seen a billboard advertising Nitko Chemicals just south of Palm Coast on Interstate 95. The smiling man on the sign had ulcers the size of quarters all over his face, shiny rotten boils oozing with green pus. Matt could see it. Others could not.
Not so long ago, a ski slope avalanche had buried Matt alive, and he spent three months in an icy grave. When he started thawing in the morgue, the doctor performing the autopsy discovered he had a pulse. Everyone called it a miracle. He made a full recovery, but soon after the accident a mysterious entity named Mr. Dark started frequenting his nightmares and waking moments alike. Everything this ghastly doctor of doom touched turned to rancid decay, and Matt had somehow acquired the ability to see it. Mr. Dark had obviously set up shop in Copperhead Springs-at Nitko, specifically-and Matt wanted to know why.
So far, he didn’t have a clue.
“Eat up,” Shelly said. “We need to get going in a few minutes.�
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Matt took a bite from the pancake stack and washed it down with some coffee. There was something very satisfying about being here with Shelly, yet something disturbing as well. She projected a genuine warmth Matt hadn’t experienced in a long time, but occasionally she would stare into the distance as though entranced by some faraway vision. Matt wanted to know what it was she saw, but every time he brought it up she changed the subject.
She brewed another pot of coffee and filled a thermos with it. She wore jeans and steel-toed boots and a chambray work shirt. Her dark brown ponytail dangled from the back of a red Nitko ball cap. She sat at the table across from Matt.
“I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already,” she said. “So what are your plans, Mr. Matthew Cahill? You just going to wander around aimlessly forever?”
Matt had been traveling around the country for a while now. For the last few weeks, he’d been sleeping under the stars, bathing at filling-station restrooms, and dining on beans and Spam and bologna sandwiches.
“What makes you think my wandering is aimless?” he said.
“Ah. Let me guess. You’re searching for your soul. You’re trying to find the true meaning of life.”
“Or the true meaning of death,” Matt said. He took a bite of bacon.
“Ever think about settling down?”
“Sometimes.”
“You might be able to get on permanent at the plant. I know for a fact there’s an opening in Waterbase. One of the guys there got fired last week. It’s hard work, but the pay sucks.”
Matt grinned at Shelly’s joke, but the thought of signing on full-time at Nitko made his stomach tighten. Shelly had driven him there Monday morning and had led him up a set of concrete stairs and in through one of the loading-dock doors. Sweat beaded on his forehead almost immediately. Huge electric ventilation fans hummed high on the corrugated steel walls, but they didn’t move enough air to cool the building much and they didn’t adequately lift the blanket of chemical fumes. Shelly guided him through a labyrinth of industrial shelving stacked twenty feet high with cardboard boxes, five-gallon jugs, and fifty-five-gallon drums. Some of the containers were marked with labels that said, “Fire,” others with labels that said, “Ice.” Fire and Ice were Nitko’s flagship fountain solutions, Shelly had told him. They were top-of-the-line cleaning products for the printing industry, considered to be the gold standard worldwide since the mid-sixties. Fire was acidic and the color and clarity of orange soda, while Ice was alkaline and a shade or two darker than Windex.
In the distance electric motors whirred and pneumatic pumps pulsed and human beings shouted instructions at one another. Forklifts darted to and fro like confused squirrels, picking up pallets of product here and dropping them off there.
Matt and Shelly made it through the maze to the north side of the building, where there was an employee break room and men’s and women’s locker rooms and a Kronos electronic time clock. Shelly swiped her badge, and from there she took Matt to Human Resources and then to the main production area to talk to the foreman. The air was even hotter there, the fumes thicker and the din exponentially louder. The workers’ grim expressions spoke volumes. Stories of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams, of being stuck in a long and arduous never-ending journey to nowhere.
The conditions were horrible, the pay obscene. Matt felt sorry for Shelly and everyone else who depended on Nitko for a paycheck. Anyone unlucky enough to be born in Copperhead Springs stood a good chance of ending up in that hellhole, and it just wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. No, Matt had no intention of working there permanently, but he did want to extend his job as a temp. He needed to find the reason behind that rotting face on the billboard.
He sipped his juice. “I like you a lot,” he said, “but I have to be honest with you. I’m just not ready to settle down yet.”
Matt saw Shelly’s hand tighten around her coffee cup. The muscles flared in her wrist and then relaxed, some battle surrendered without a fight.
“Typical man,” Shelly said. “Unable to commit. Come on. Let’s go to work.”
7:21 a.m
An administrative assistant who worked in Human Resources stood at the cluster of vending machines outside the security office, trying to decide which brand of soda to buy.
K-Rad stood behind her.
The woman’s name was Kelsey Froman. K-Rad had known her since elementary school. She’d been a homely little girl-thick glasses, metal braces that made her breath smell like the lid of a sardine can, hair the color of dirt. Cruel little monsters that they were, the other children nicknamed poor Kelsey Froman Frog Man, and they bullied her and teased her and reduced her to tears almost every day of fifth grade. She had blossomed at some point, though, and had morphed from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Now she had a great body and a killer smile and contact lenses that brought out the blue in her eyes. Her long brown hair was expensively styled and streaked with highlights the color of bourbon. K-Rad had asked her out for a drink one time, and she had stifled a laugh and made up a lame story about her cousin being in town. Her loss.
Pepsi or Mountain Dew? Which one would it be? Kelsey Froman chose Mountain Dew. K-Rad’s favorite! She pressed the button, and her selection clattered to the receiving tray. When she bent over to retrieve it, K-Rad blasted a hole the size of silver dollar through the left cheek of her shapely ass. She fell to her hands and knees and retched, like a cat trying to cough up a hair ball. K-Rad lifted the back of her skirt, positioned the Beretta’s muzzle between her legs, and fired twice. She fell to the floor and stared blankly at the bottom of the drink machine. K-Rad opened the Mountain Dew and chugged it.
“Have a nice day, Frog Man,” he said, and walked on.
7:27 a.m
A six-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and razor ribbon guarded the perimeter of Nitko’s property. Employees were required to scan their badges and enter a password into an electronic keypad to open the double set of gates to the parking area. There was one way in and one way out. It reminded Matt of a prison.
Shelly tooled around the parking lot in her 1995 Ford Taurus station wagon, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour speed limit, her head bobbing to the beat of an AC/DC song on the radio. She finally whipped into an open slot and braked to a stop with an abrupt jerk.
“I have a question,” she said. “Why do you bring that ax to work with you?”
Matt had stowed the tool on the floorboard between the front and back seats. He didn’t take it inside the plant with him, of course, but he liked having it nearby. “It’s my talisman,” he said. “My good-luck charm. I don’t go anywhere without my ax.”
“That’s not much of an answer,” Shelly said. She went into one of her spells then, staring through the windshield at something beyond the horizon.
Matt had to tell people something when they asked, but the ax was really much more to him than a good-luck charm. It was an heirloom, for one thing, and the only remaining connection to his former life in Washington. His grandfather had wielded it, and his father, and he hoped to pass it along to his own son or daughter someday. And there was something else about it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was the only worldly possession he cared anything about, and he felt extremely uncomfortable when it wasn’t with him. Or at least within walking distance.
After a few seconds, Shelly snapped out of it and looked at her watch and said, “Come on, we’re going to be late.”
The way she drove, Matt thought, it was a wonder they weren’t late in more ways than one. He followed her to the loading dock at a trot, and then through the maze of shelving to the time clock. Shelly swiped her badge.
“Made it!” she said. “Hot damn, that was close. I’m already on probation for clocking in late too many times. One more this year and I’ll get a three-day suspension.”
“Maybe you could use a little vacation,” Matt said.
“A little vacation,” she repeated.
“You
know, get away from here for a couple of days,” Matt said. “Remind yourself what the rest of the world looks like.”
“You going to come with me?”
“Let’s do it,” he said.
For a moment, her eyes took on that empty, dreamy look and the hint of a smile appeared on her face. Then a horn blew from somewhere inside the plant and she snapped back to attention.
“That’s three days without pay. Can’t afford it.”
Can’t rhymed with paint. Matt liked Shelly’s southern accent. He thought it was sexy. But as he got to know Shelly better, he was beginning to hear what lay behind that honey accent. She came across as laid-back and easygoing, but there was a sadness underneath. And why not? He could tell she must have been a knockout as a teenager. She’d probably thought she’d own the world. Now she had a no-future job in a chemical hell and the only good thing in her life was a guy who’d announced he wasn’t going to stick around more than a couple of days.
They walked into the break room and put their lunch sacks in the refrigerator.
“I’m going to head on over to the foreman’s office,” Matt said. “See what he has in store for me today.”
“All right, sweetie. See you at lunch.”
Shelly headed toward Shipping and Receiving, and Matt toward the area of the plant called Waterbase. It was already at least ninety-five degrees inside the building. By noon it would be a hundred and ten.
Sweat trickled down Matt’s back as he made his way to the foreman’s office, a portable enclosure the size of a large closet with windows in front that overlooked the production area. From the office you could see the twin fifty-five-hundred-gallon stainless-steel mixing tanks where Fire and Ice were blended, Fire in the left tank and Ice in the right, and a press the size of a ’57 Cadillac where they were filtered. You could see the forklift charging stations and the scaffolds and hoses and the pneumatic pumps. Matt knocked on the door, and a voice from within said, “Enter.” Matt entered. The air-conditioned space felt like an oasis after a long trek in the desert.