“No problem!” Carlos said with emphasis. “Tonight I keeelll him!”
SEVENTEEN
Monday night, January 26th
Straightening up with a groan, Kim stretched his back. Abandoning his heavy wooden-handled mop, he put his hands on his hips to get maximum extension.
Kim was by himself mopping the front hall, starting from the reception area. He’d had his earphone in for the last ten minutes, complaining to Tracy how exhausted he was. Tracy was sympathetic.
The cleaning had been extensive. The whole crew had started with high-pressure steam hoses on the kill floor. It was backbreaking work, since the hoses weighed several hundred pounds and had to be hauled up onto the catwalks.
After the kill floor, they had moved into the boning rooms. Cleaning them had taken the rest of the shift up until the dinner break at six. At that time Kim had gone back out to the car and even had had the stomach for some of the lunch he and Tracy had packed that morning.
After the dinner break, Kim had been sent out on his own on various jobs around the plant. As the others had slowed down, he’d volunteered to mop the front hall.
“I’m never going to complain about surgery being hard work again,” he said into his microphone.
“After all this experience, I’ll hire you to do my house,” Tracy quipped. “Do you do windows?”
“What time is it?” Kim asked. He was in no mood for humor.
“It’s a little after ten,” Tracy said. “Less than an hour to go. Are you going to make it?”
“I’ll make it. all right,” Kim said. “I haven’t seen any of my cleaning colleagues for the last hour. It’s time for the record room.”
“Be quick!” Tracy urged. “Your being in there is going to make me anxious all over again, and I don’t think I can take too much more.”
Kim stuck the heavy-duty mop into his bucket and pushed the contraption down the hall to the record room door. Its broken central panel was covered by a piece of thin plywood.
Kim tried the door. It opened with ease. He reached in and turned on the light. Except for a larger sheet of the same plywood over the sashless window facing the parking lot, the room looked entirely normal. The broken glass and the rock he’d tossed in had all been taken away.
The left side of the room had a long line of file cabinets. At random, Kim yanked out the nearest drawer. It was jammed full of files so tightly that not another sheet of paper could have been added.
“Gosh,” Kim said. “They sure do have a lot of paperwork. This isn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.”
The end of an El Producto cigar burned brightly for a few moments and then faded. Elmer Conrad held the resulting smoke in his mouth for a few pleasurable moments and then blew it contentedly at the ceiling.
Elmer was the three-to-eleven cleaning crew supervisor. He’d held the job for eight years. His idea of work was to sweat like crazy for the first half of the shift and then coast. At that moment he was in the coasting mode, watching a Sony Watchman in the lunchroom with his feet up on a table.
“You wanted to see me, boss?” Harry Pearlmuter asked, poking his head into the lunchroom from the back hall. Harry was one of Elmer’s underlings.
“Yeah,” Elmer said. “Where’s that queer-looking temp guy?”
“I think he’s out in the front hall mopping,” Harry said. “At least that’s what he said he was going to do.”
“Do you think he cleaned those two bathrooms out there?” Elmer asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Harry said. “You want me to check?”
Elmer let his heavy feet fall to the floor with a thump. He pushed himself up to his full height. He was over six-feet-five and weighed two hundred forty pounds.
“Thanks, but I’ll do it myself,” Elmer said. “I told him twice he had to clean those heads before eleven. If he hasn’t done them, he will! He’s not leaving here until they’re done.”
Elmer put down his cigar, took a swig of coffee, and set out to find Kim. What was motivating him was that he’d received specific instructions from the front office that Kim was to clean the bathrooms in question, and he was to clean them alone. Elmer had no idea why he’d gotten such an order, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was that it was carried out.