Knowing what’s going through my head, Beau slaps my arm with the back of his hand in a gesture of solidarity before exiting the truck, and I follow him. My stomach settles slightly when my feet are planted on solid ground, and the crisp air cools the sweat coating my skin. We’re stepping across the street when a white pickup truck with a large black crane serving as a logo stamped onto the door coasts to a stop opposite where Beau parked.
I tuck my shaking hands into my coat pockets as we join him.
“Finally showing this guy a little love, huh?” the driver asks, an older man who pulls a white hardhat and a small toolbox out of the extended cab. He slams the door and drops the box onto the road with a clatter. After he fights with the zipper to zip his jacket, he pulls on white work gloves and adjusts the hardhat over his grey hair. He spits into the street.
The sound of tools clanking in the metal box grates at my nerves. I hate toolboxes. Can’t stand looking at them without fighting a panic attack. I avert my gaze toward the site which doesn’t help.
“Something like that.” Beau tugs a set of keys out of his pocket. “Better to do it now than when it’s colder than hell.”
“Supposed to have a mild winter,” he says. “John Seville, not sure you got my name. Haven’t been with Merritt Machines for long, transferred here from Cincy so the wife could be with her grandkids after she retired.”
“Good as place as any,” Beau mumbles, unlocking the padlock holding together the thick chain and pushing the fence door open with a shriek.
“Too much Sweet on the streets,” Seville says. “Don’t like it. Don’t trust that woman as far as I can throw her, and I’m not as weak as I look—I haul my grandkids around all the time.”
“What woman?” Beau asks, amused, and I listen to their exchange as I trudge behind them onto the site, dragging my feet because I can’t think of anything I want to do less than this.
“The Sweetheart of Cedar Hill. She’s got a slippery feel about her, that’s all I know.”
“You sound like my fiancée,” I say, earning me a dirty look.
“You ask her when I wasn’t looking?” Beau asks.
“Projecting.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“Your fiancée’s got a good head on her shoulders. All right,” Seville says, rattling his toolbox as we approach the crane that’s still lying on its side. “What are we looking at here?”
“The crane operator said the warning system didn’t alert him when the truck was about to tip over.”
“Yeah?” Seville asks, rubbing his forehead. “That’d be something. Numbers remained stable?”
“That’s what he said. Anthony Kelly had years on the job. Was one of my best men,” I say, smoothing my hand over a cracked tire.
“This might be more than me pulling apart the dash. Might need to haul it back with me and pull it apart.”
“If you can do what you can here, we’d appreciate it. We don’t expect you to find anything. Just a freak thing, you know?” Beau says.
“Yeah, sure. Malfunctions can happen. Hate it when it causes something like this, though. Can you keep yourselves busy for a few? I gotta get up in there, and it will be a hot minute. That’s slang. My grandson taught me that.”
“We’ll go piss along the wall,” Beau says, shoving his hands into the pockets of his wool jacket.
“Don’t hit your shoes,” Seville mutters, but his attention is already on the toolbox at his feet.
“What did Devyn think about being out here?” I ask as we amble along the site. The wind whips against my face, adding to the chill. I’m already cold, reliving the day of the accident, tripping over my own feet in an effort to alert the ironmen four floors above me, a dreaded loop over and over, my head slamming against a toolbox left out in the open, and nothing but black after that.
“Before or after someone started shooting at her?”
I scowl. “Before.”
“She seemed sad, but Christ, anyone would be, looking at this. What are we going to do with it, Rick?”
Uneasily, I lift a shoulder. “I don’t want to finish it.”
“Because of the two men who lost their lives that day, or because you still have an emotional attachment to Renata?”
I drift away from him, but he follows me into the structure.