Nester

 

After busting with my short list of names, I decided I needed to try another route. If those affected by the accident wouldn’t talk, then I would have to try getting to the people who were directly involved with the construction. Whether that be suppliers, designers, or the actual workers, it didn’t matter. I’d try them all if I had to. Now that I knew something wasn’t quite right with Santos’s low key construction company, I wasn’t going to just let it go.

 

I would talk to Jackson about it and see what he was coming up with as far as how involved Santos was, but really I just needed someone to bounce my own thoughts off of. Unfortunately, I’d have to wait until he got back.

 

The whole thing with his little girl was getting out of hand. The kid’s mother had dragged her across three state lines and was trying to get sole custody of her. Jackson, unwilling to lose his parental rights, was making the trip to meet her and try to work things out outside of the courtroom. But if he couldn’t convince her, he was prepared to throw down. He had some nasty dirt on her and if she didn’t cooperate, he wouldn’t be above using it.

 

Anything to get Angel back.

 

He’d told me what was going on and was even apologetic about having to take off, but I made a point of waving him off. No big deal, I’d told him, though for me it kind of was. With the Berserkers’ numbers so low already, I couldn’t really afford to be down a man—my most loyal man, too—but I also wasn’t willing to let him lose his kid over the whole thing, too.

 

I probably wasn’t going to find what I needed against Santos anytime soon anyway. And if I did, there was nothing going on that was too pressing that would mean I couldn’t sit on it for a few days or more even.

 

So instead of worrying about Jackson’s personal stuff, I focused on research.

 

Getting the names of the people who had worked on the jobsite was difficult. I actually had to go and request the information from the lawyer who had initially been involved with the lawsuits against VCI. I was turned away at the door. But I managed to get a pretty little secretary to help me out a little bit—it only took a few minutes of flirting, promises of an amazing time in the sack, and taking her number to do it, too—and convinced her to give me a few names that showed up in the court files. I told her that it would be fine, after all, since the cases had been dropped anyway.

 

I walked out of there with a list of companies that supplied the resources for the building, and a dozen or so names of workers who were hired to do the job.

 

That day, I went to the local metal workers’ union.

 

In the shop where the men worked it was hot and filled with the smell of burning, of heated metal, and maybe of chemicals, too. From the window, I could see men the size of mountain boulders sweating beneath their hardhats, working like slaves amidst a spring of firework-like sparks spraying throughout the room. It was almost enough to make me glad that I was in this small air conditioned room with Mr. Caraway, sitting at his big uncluttered desk. Almost. The room was fine, a little bare, but clean and cool. The chair wasn’t strictly speaking uncomfortable, though I didn’t want to spend the day in it. And Mr. Caraway himself, though pudgy and red faced, wasn’t an unpleasant man.

 

He just also wasn’t a particularly helpful one.

 

“Well, I really can’t discuss things like that with an outsider,” he told me with a bland smile on his face. “I mean, what sort of company would we be if we just rattled off personal information to every Dick and Joe who walked in here?”

 

I wanted to tell him that it would be the kind of company that had a lot fewer employees who had black eyes and bloody noses, but in the end I refrained. I wanted him to help me, not call security.

 

Taking a steadying breath, I tried to be polite. “I understand that there might be some legal things going on, but I’m really not trying to cause any problems. I just wanted to talk to some of the guys who do construction around here.”

 

Mr. Caraway narrowed his already beady little eyes, but he never dropped the smile. That was probably one of the prerequisites of getting the job—always smile. It made me think he was a smarmy little bastard and it didn’t really make me like him more.

 

“I’m sorry, Mr.—?”

 

It was my turn to smile at him. “Smith.”

 

The smile on his face twitched, but he maintained it just the same. “Mr. Smith. I’m sorry, but I really can’t give out any names specifically. If you’re interested in a job, I can certainly take an application and would be happy to set up an interview. But beyond that, I can’t risk you being someone other than who you say you are and giving you access to these good, hardworking men.”

 

This, I felt, was a little ridiculous. What did it matter if I was who I said I was or not? Realistically, if they had nothing to hide, then there was no reason to prevent me from speaking to the guys who were working on the VCI building before it collapsed. In fact, I was doing my best not to even mention VCI because I was fairly certain that no one would give me the time of day if I did, but even without doing so I was left hanging out to dry.

 

“That would be great,” I finally told him, forcing a smile. “Can I get an application?”

 

Mr. Caraway looked at me skeptically, but after a moment he nodded his assent and asked me to wait just a moment while he rummaged around for an application. It took him several minutes to search through his filing cabinets and his drawers before he finally stopped and sighed. “I can’t seem to find one here. Would I be able to e-mail it to you?”

 

Sensing my opportunity, I shook my head. “Sorry to say that my computer is down right now and I don’t know that it’ll be fixed sometime soon. I’d much prefer to have a paper copy that way I can get it back to you as quickly as possible.”

 

Mr. Caraway let out another long winded sigh, as though finding a paper copy of the application was just the hardest damn job in the world. It made me grin just a little bit, pleased with myself over the whole thing.

 

“Fine, fine,” he told me after a moment. Heaving his jiggly, round body up from the desk, he waggled a mini sausage-like finger in my direction. “I’ll go look in the main office for one. Maybe I can get one to print off for you. You wait here until I get back.”

 

I nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Caraway. I really appreciate it.”

 

He waved off my thanks with an engorged hand, then waddled off to the main office. When he was out the door, I tracked him with my eyes. It wasn’t until he reached the elevator and stepped in, the metal doors closing behind him, that I got up out of my chair.

 

I gave it half a second, then darted out the door and into the overheated working area. I started snooping around, seeing if I couldn’t catch someone off their guard long enough to get some answers, and some proof.

 

As I walked along, I tried to get the attention of several of the men, but they all waved me off or worse, when I asked them about the collapse and VCI, they told me to fuck off. I was about to give up hope, when a big burly man with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed beard laced with ginger strands of red came over to me.

 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He didn’t quite seem enraged, but he wasn’t pleased either. In fact, he mostly looked annoyed, like I was one in a long string of idiots who had been causing him problems lately.

 

I shook my head. “I don’t mean any harm. I’m just trying to—”

 

“Get your head smashed in? Yeah, I can see that,” he said smartly, interrupting me without so much as a care.

 

I frowned at him. “What?”

 

He gestured towards my head. “Where the hell’s your hat, you moron?”

 

Surprise probably showed on my face because he actually rolled his eyes at me and let out an impatient sigh. His muscles glistened with sweat and I saw that they were huge as he moved to put his hands on his hips. There was no question that the man was big and I wasn’t one hundred percent positive that, if push came to shove, I would be able to take him in a fight. Deciding quickly that it was for the best to just not test that, I put up my hands in what I hoped was universal for placating apology.

 

“Sorry, man, no one gave me one.”

 

At this he cursed under his breath. “Damn idiots. C’mon. You can’t be walking around here without one. I’ll get you a quick fit and if you last more than a day or two, we’ll get you one that actually fits. I’m just not losing my ass just ’cause you’re going to catch a falling piece of metal with your head.”

 

I glanced behind me at the other workers. None were paying me any attention, and the ones I’d spoken to already were deliberately ignoring me. I decided quickly that going with this man was my best bet—partly because I didn’t want to get my head crushed in. I followed him as he headed down a stretch before hooking a sharp left. He was the most talkative man I’d met that day and maybe if I played my cards right, he’d talk to me.

 

I followed him down a hallway until we reached a room that actually didn’t seem to have a door. Or if it did have a door, it had been taken off. We went inside to find a row of lockers and at the very back, a stack of hardhats.

 

“Here, try some of these on.”

 

I did as I was told. As I was trying them on, their fit awkward and a little uncomfortable, I glanced over at the burly man standing by to make sure I got a damn hat.

 

“Get a lot of accidents around here?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

 

The man shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s dangerous conditions, you know? Which is why you gotta be safe.”

 

I nodded my head and tried on another hat. “Do these things really make a difference though?”

 

He barked out a deep, quick laugh. “Not necessarily. They help with some of the things, probably save you from a hammer going through your skull, but if you get something big dropping on you, you’re dead either way. Still. Rules are rules and if we’re caught not following them, it’s a hefty fine and someone’s gonna lost a job.”

 

I considered him for a moment. He clearly knew what was going on, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. There was every possibility that he was just some average Joe worker and didn’t know anything about VCI. Or if he did, there was a high probability that he wouldn’t say shit about it. It seemed like that was the MO of the company thus far.

 

Still, he was the most forthcoming. What did I have to lose?

 

“Yeah? What about that collapse though? The one a few months back?” I tried to keep my tone causal, like I was just having a conversation, not interrogating him for valuable information that would change things dramatically for me.

 

He hesitated. “You mean that charity place? The one over on Central?”

 

I did my best to stay calm and not seem too eager. I tried on another hat. “Yeah, I think it was on Central. It was a huge deal. People died.”

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man tense. His lips pursed together into a thin line and it was clear he wasn’t overly happy about the topic of discussion. I expected him to snap at me, to tell me to shut up, or at the very least to simply shut up himself. But I was surprised when he shook his head. “That was a damn shame,” he told me, and he was sincere enough that I was convinced he honestly believed that.

 

I looked over at him in surprise. “Accidents happen, right?”

 

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, accidents.”

 

“Why do you say it like that?”

 

“Because you’re right. Accidents do happen. All the damn time. Which is why we do things the way we do things, you know? Accident happens, we change the way we do things so that they don’t happen again, right?”

 

I nodded my head. “Yeah, sure. Makes sense.”

 

“Right. Makes sense. So then why would you go back to the old way you do things if you know accidents are more likely to happen like that?”

 

I stared at him long and hard. This was it. This was the bit of information I was looking for all along. “Are you saying that they didn’t follow protocol or something? Skipped safety stuff?”

 

He shook his head. “Nah, not technically. They did it all by the books, but that don’t mean shit if you skimp out on the materials.”

 

And there it was. That one statement gave me what I needed. If they went cheap for the materials, they could skim a lot of money off the top, especially if they said they were using the right kind of materials. Everyone makes out, but like the big guy in front of me was saying, it meant that accidents were more likely to happen. And it meant that Santos fucking knew about it.

 

“You mean they didn’t use the right materials?” I clarified, just to make sure that this guy knew what he was talking about.

 

He gave me a grim smile. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s not a surprise the damn building went down. Cut on quality of materials. Cut on the time we were given to complete it. Cut on everything.” He shook his head again. “It’s a fucking shame and it ought to be criminal.”

 

I considered him and my next move very carefully before deciding. Finally, I decided to take a risk. “What if it was criminal?”

 

He paused. For a second it felt like all the air in the room had been sucked out as I waited for his next response. I could see it in his eyes that he was starting to get suspicious of me. That he was starting to question whether or not I was just some new idiot needing a hard hat or whether I was something with ulterior motives.

 

Finally, he said, “Then they ought to pay for it.”

 

I let out a breath. “How willing would you be to help make that happen?”

 

“Very.”

 

***

 

I learned that the man’s name was Calvin Serrano and he’d worked there at the steel factory for a while. He was actually a foreman and kept the other guys in line. The way they worked was that they would get called in to make steel beams and the like for buildings before or as they were constructed. They worked with a variety of different companies, most of them not giving them any problems.

 

But Calvin admitted that this last company had been a bit of a pain in his opinion. They sent over blueprints of what their plans were for the building, then they’d include a list of needed materials. Calvin told me that he oversaw some of that—not in any capacity that gave him real power, just put him in a position to have enough information to give direction to his guys—and noticed that what they were requesting was a little odd for a building of that caliber.

 

It was massive, and yet they were using the more brittle of materials.

 

“That’s dangerous,” Calvin explained. We weren’t in that room full of lockers anymore, because he said that the guys took their breaks there a lot of the time and if they didn’t, they’d stop by to get into their lockers at the very least. He sensed that what we were talking about wasn’t the kind of thing to be sharing with everyone. “If you start making something tall, you got to expect it to encounter way more wind, right? So you need something strong and durable, something that won’t bend too much, but won’t crumble under the sudden pressure. If you get something too brittle, it’ll start to weaken and then break.”

 

He explained that he’d even addressed the issue with Mr. Caraway, who was more or less the boss. Not of the entire company, but definitely of their little slice of it. He was the one who worked directly with VCI.

 

“I brought it to his attention that we should recommend a stronger material,” Calvin told me, his face a little flushed, and not just from the heat. He obviously was getting worked up about this. “I thought, hey, this is great for us, right? It means these assholes need to get the more expensive materials. But no, Caraway told me to shut up about it and follow instructions.”

 

“Why would he do that?” I asked him, though I had a hunch of my own. One that involved a little money lining a lot of pockets.

 

Calvin shook his head. “I wasn’t really sure. I thought maybe they just knew something I didn’t about the building, you know? I’m just a materials guy in the end, so maybe it was a design thing.”

 

“You don’t think that anymore?”

 

Again, Calvin shook his head. “No. I forgot something here one night after I left. When I came back to pick it up, I saw Caraway talking with someone. I wasn’t sure who he was, but I had a feeling it was about Vanguard Construction. The next day, Caraway pushed the materials through and told me I needed to keep my mouth shut if I wanted to keep my job."

 

He looked almost guilty about the whole thing, scratching at his bald head beneath his hard hat. Maybe that guilt would be enough to make my next suggestion more reasonable. Maybe it would be enough to get him to help me.

 

“You think there’s a paper trail linking this guy? Maybe showing that some skimming might have gone on?”

 

Calvin studied me a moment, then said, “I don’t know who you really are, but if you’re asking if I’ll help you out with Vanguard, then I’m telling you now, I will. But you’d better make sure Caraway goes down with them, because my job’s on the line.”

 

I nodded. Realistically, it wasn’t something I could honestly promise. Caraway wasn’t on my list and so long as Santos got what was coming to him, I didn’t really care about the rest. Still, if I could avoid screwing the only guy who had been interested in helping me out, it would be all the better. I didn’t want Calvin to lose everything, but I also knew that there was some part of me that wouldn’t care if he did so long as Santos paid for his crimes.

 

And I wasn’t talking about the construction shit. The crimes he committed against me were at the forefront of my mind and they were, in the very end, all I truly cared about.

 

Still, if I could keep Calvin from losing his job, I would.