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It was one of a dozen lawyers’ signs decorating the highway.
Another sign was:
United Defense International, Inc.
Ferrington Advanced Tactical Systems Facility
Be a part of your Country’s future!
Now hiring. All shifts.
Someone had climbed to the bottom of the billboard and spray-painted:
Asshat!!!
She noticed his gaze.
“Kick in the teeth,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Ferrington survived the downturns. You catch that, Colter?”
“Plural.”
“Yep. The city was the iron capital of the Midwest a hundred and fifty years ago.”
The Range Rover was automatic but she used the steering-wheel paddles, which was manual transmission light, not real shifting. Still, it was more fun than just using your right foot and it let you tach into the red.
“Ferrington was never a pretty city. But it was grand. It was alive. It had more factories and rail yards than any city in the state. The hotels were as fancy as anything in Memphis or St. Louis.”
“But then,” Shaw said.
“But then. Iron was out and steel was in. That meant Gary and Pittsburgh and New Jersey were the new meccas of industry. And after that, China and Japan. Recently things started to look up. Some outfits saw cheap real estate and bought up some of the old buildings—Marty’s company, a chipmaker, and there’s a government contractor makes some parts or another for the Defense Department, nobody knows what. Amazon was considering a distribution center on Route Eighty-four. That got everybody excited. Things were looking up.”
“And the tooth kick?”
“The water. Nobody knew how polluted the old factory sites were. When they cleared acreage for the redevelopments, it unearthed the toxins. The Kenoah’s worse than the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Ward Cove.”
“What’s it polluted with?”
“Quite a cocktail. Coal tars, heavy metals, aromatic hydrocarbons, MTBE.”
Shaw shook his head.
“Methyl tert-butyl ether. Never heard of it either, but all you have to do is read theDaily Heraldfor the past six months and you’ll learn enough to get a degree in chemistry.
“And the companies looking our way were reading all about it too. Like that billboard? United Defense? They were going to be hiring fifteen hundred people on two campuses. Now it’s on hold, and probably not going to go through. Same with American Household Products. That hire was going to be eight hundred.”
Hence:Asshat...
“They going to reassess when the cleanup’s done?”