CHAPTER EIGHT
“Did you submit that purchase order?” I demanded.
Jason looked up from across the office we were now sharing since management decided to use our partnership to free up an office for Davis Brown, of course, whenever he dropped in.
He’d been staring at his phone, probably playing Mortal Death or whatever kind of video-game crap people like him entertained themselves with, while I scoured the approved purchase orders for the one I needed.
“What purchase order?” he asked in all innocence.
I gritted my teeth. “The one I told you to submit on Wednesday before you took off early. Where the hell did you go anyway?”
He looked annoyed. “I came in at six, didn’t take a lunch, and left at four. As for where I went, call it a family obligation.”
I paused. Jason didn’t often mention his family. I was having some trouble imagining him as emotionally available in that way. He’d always struck me as proudly selfish. “Was that really it?” I asked. “A family obligation?”
He leveled me with a hard look before answering. “Not all of us live and breathe the world of Lester & Brown.”
My defenses rose. “I don’t appreciate being attacked for prioritizing my job.”
Jason rolled his eyes and heaved a sigh. “I’m not attacking you, Audrey. You’re the one who questioned whether my family obligation was real.”
He had a point. I was out of line questioning his other commitments. Jason was a hard worker. Just because I was singularly focused on work didn’t mean I could expect everyone to follow suit.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Now what about the invoice?”
He shook his head. “Your estimates were excessive.”
“Who says?”
“Everyone I showed it to.”
I considered throwing my desk lamp at him. “Everyone you showed it to? Are you going behind my back?”
“I’m perfectly willing to go in front of your back. Seriously, Audrey, we’ve got to be conservative or we’ll wind up over budget before we’re halfway done.”
“Fuck, Jason!” My head went down on my desk. Since the courthouse had broken ground two weeks ago, I was getting an average of three hours of sleep a night. And I couldn’t even turn around in my own workspace without running into the wall of resistance that was Jason Roma.
“Hey.”
Something tapped my arm.
“Audrey.”
I curled my arms more tightly around my head.
“Go away.”
I just wanted to sleep. I didn’t have time for sleep anymore. I didn’t even have time to play around with my vibrator for ten minutes. Once I hit the bed, I was unconscious. But in the daylight hours when I needed to be at the top of my game, I was ready to explode. Or pass out. Either one would be fine right now as long as I didn’t have to look at Jason for a little while.
“Audrey, sit the fuck up and read this.” His voice sounded tight, angry, and since Jason’s usual response to my distress was laughter, I raised my head with curiosity. He shoved his phone in my face and I could feel the blood draining from my head as I read the text from the foreman.
“Oh my god.”
“Let’s get down there.” He slid the phone back into his pocket.
Once management caught wind of an accident down at the jobsite, they’d demand answers immediately. All we knew at this point was that a crane had tipped over and a man was trapped. We needed to get on top of this.
“We’ll take my car,” Jason said when we reached the parking garage. Another time I might have argued with him, but since we were traveling to a potential tragedy, it didn’t seem appropriate.
I had my phone on speaker, trying to get ahold of Barnes, the foreman. “Why aren’t we moving?” I snapped.
“Seat belt,” Jason snapped back. “I don’t feel like dealing with more than one disaster at a time.”
I huffily clicked it into place as Barnes answered.
“Emergency crews are on their way,” he assured me.
“Is the man conscious?”
“Yeah, but I can’t tell how badly he’s stuck,” Barnes hissed. “He’s just a kid, nineteen years old. Started two days ago. He shouldn’t have been driving the damn thing.”
I could hear the sirens in the distance as we left the garage and headed for Central Avenue. I’d left my closed-toe shoes and my hard hat in my own car, but it didn’t matter right now. Covering the two-mile distance in record time, Jason pulled right into the dirt by the construction vehicles. The bones of the future courthouse building were beginning to take shape, and on the far north side a crowd of people clustered around the fallen crane. Jason and I hurried over as the first fire truck arrived. The crane lay on its side like a crippled yellow dinosaur. I shuddered as I thought about the boy pinned beneath that mess.
Barnes hailed us from his position beside the crane. “We were just about to call it a day,” he said as he ran a hand across his sweaty forehead. “Needed to move a pair of trusses, but I still have no idea what the kid was doing running the crane.”
“Where were you?” I asked.
Barnes lowered his head a little. “Signing for a materials delivery. I never gave the green light to start up the crane. I’m sorry.”
Jason patted the man’s shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. Can’t have eyes in the back of your head.”
Another fire truck and an ambulance arrived.
“You said he just started?” I asked.
Barnes nodded. “Two days ago.”
“Who went over the safety protocol with him?”
The big man thought about it. “I believe he . . . had a brief orientation.”
“Brief and apparently inadequate,” I muttered.
“Audrey,” Jason warned. “Not the time to point fingers.”
“I’m not pointing fingers,” I argued. “I’m trying to figure out why we have a nineteen-year-old new employee trapped underneath a crane he shouldn’t have been driving.”
Barnes looked miserable as he nodded. “I take full responsibility.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said. “After all, you’re not the one who insisted that I cut back on visits to the site to address safety issues with the workers.” I turned my glare on Jason.
Jason heaved a sigh of annoyance. “You want to come down every day and deliver the same harsh lecture. It’s demoralizing for the crew.”
I got in his face, challenging him eye to eye. Well, eye to collarbone since he stood about seven inches taller than me.
“It’s demoralizing to learn about safety standards? Or only demoralizing when the information is delivered by somebody without a dick?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Jason rolled his eyes. “Give it a rest, Audrey. Everyone is aware that you have a vagina. That’s not why they all fucking cringe when they see you coming.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you’re an overbearing, anal-retentive pain in the ass.”
“Well, you’re a shiftless, two-faced, conceited pig.”
Barnes cleared his throat loudly. It was enough to pull Jason and me out of our public shouting match and make us realize every word was being overheard by the workers, the first responders, and the news crew who had just shown up. The only good news I could see was that the pinned man had been unpinned and now rested on a stretcher.
“That’s enough, both of you,” Barnes warned us with quiet menace, as if he were the parent in this situation. He left us and walked over to kneel beside the injured worker, who moaned as a paramedic checked his vitals. The only visible injury was his bloodied right leg, but with an accident of this magnitude, there would be good reason to worry about internal damage.
Jason and I watched as the paramedics began to lift him into the waiting ambulance. A blonde reporter in a flashy, short red dress walked around with a microphone trying to get information from whoever was willing to talk to her.
“Shit,” Jason said.
“For once we’re in agreement,” I muttered.
My phone had been going off inside my purse, but I was afraid to look and see who it was. Yet the inevitable can only be postponed for so long, and I pulled it out, feeling dread as I saw The Man was calling.
“We’re down at the site now,” I told him. “The worker has been extricated. I’m not sure how badly he’s injured. The ambulance is getting ready to drive away.”
The Man barked something into my ear and I swallowed hard.
“I understand. We’ve got to deal with things here, but we will be there as soon as we can.”
Jason watched me as I ended the call.
“I take it we’re being summoned,” he said.
My stomach was starting to hurt. “Yes, we are.”
The first priority, of course, was finding out the condition of the injured worker, Jonas Ramirez. Barnes had traveled to the hospital with him and texted to say Jonas only had a fractured and lacerated right leg that would require surgery. Anyone who took one look at that toppled crane would come to the conclusion that Jonas Ramirez must have had a guardian angel on duty today.
Jason dismissed all the workers for the day while I answered questions from a police officer who’d arrived on the scene. After getting a few eyewitness accounts, he assured me that he understood the event had been an accident; however, we would likely face a fine from the city in light of the fact that a worker was operating equipment without sufficient experience.
When everyone had finally cleared out, Jason met my gaze.
“Ready to walk the plank?” he asked.
“After you,” I said.
When we returned to the office, most of the staff had either gone or were getting ready to leave. Jason and I trudged down the hall in morbid silence, bumping into Helen on her way to the elevator.
“Everything okay?” she asked, glancing from me to Jason. “I hear you guys had a scare over at the courthouse.”
“We’re told he’s in stable condition,” I said. “That’s what matters.” My tiredness weighed so heavily, I felt like I could see through time.
Helen squeezed my arm. “That’s good news.”
Jason was looking toward the long, empty corridor. “They’re waiting for us, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “They’ve been waiting for a while.”
Jason nudged me. “No reason to put this off. It’s not like they can kill us.”
“No, they can only fire us,” I said miserably.
“Accidents happen,” Helen assured me. “Especially on construction sites. This isn’t the company’s first accident, Audrey. It’ll be okay.”
But it was the first accident on any of my projects. It was the first accident on the most important project the firm had ever undertaken. It was an accident that could have been avoided.
“Don’t beat yourselves up over this,” Helen instructed. “Get some rest this weekend.”
“Is it really the weekend?” I asked tiredly.
“It’s Friday,” Jason said. “Most people consider that the start of the weekend.”
“Great. Let’s get this over with.”
We knocked on The Man’s door together and walked in to find half a dozen members of Lester & Brown’s senior management awaiting our arrival. The Man was standing behind his desk, his ferret-like face flushed with anger.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
The only available seating was a leather couch where supposedly The Man took a nap now and then. Personally, I couldn’t imagine him sitting still long enough to sleep.
We dutifully sat down on the couch, the cushions pushing us intimately together. There was something unnerving about the grim expressions confronting us. Every eye in the room was focused in this direction, and there was nothing friendly about the vibe. I was reminded of this low-budget horror movie I’d seen years ago and could easily imagine that any second The Man would begin chanting and throwing animal blood at us.
“Is something funny?” The Man shouted as he threw his pen, and I realized I’d giggled out loud over my fleeting horror fantasy. I was cracking the fuck up. I had to be. Because there was nothing funny about any of this at all.
“No, sir,” I said, and tried to look properly contrite.
“I’m not going to mince words here,” said The Man. “I’m sick of your shit. I’m sick of getting calls from subcontractors complaining that the two of you are at each other’s throats and giving conflicting information half the time.”
Jason kept his eyes focused on The Man. I folded my hands in my lap.
“I’m disappointed in you two,” our boss went on to say. “It seems your egos are getting in the way, and I expected a hell of a lot better. You’re the best we’ve got. The best project managers in the whole company. And you are both one fuckup away from getting tossed right off the largest project we’ve ever had. Do I need to remind you what a career killer that would be if you plan on remaining in the Phoenix area?”
He glared as he awaited our answers.
“No,” Jason and I replied in unison.
“Fix this,” said The Man as he pointed a finger first at me and then at Jason. “I don’t know what your problems are, and you’ve both worked with me long enough to realize I don’t give a shit. Get the job done or get the hell out of the way. Now get yourselves back on track, because you’d better believe we’ll be keeping a close eye on you.”
The Man crossed his arms and waited for us to leave. He didn’t want to hear any mumbled apologies, so we didn’t give them. We crept out of there like two kids leaving the principal’s office, and we didn’t say a word until we were back in our own office with the door closed.
Jason broke the silence. “That was brutal,” he said as he leaned back in his desk chair.
I smoothed a few stray strands of hair back. “It sure as shit wasn’t fun.”
“Did you think it was creepy as fuck how no one else in the room so much as breathed too loudly?”
“Seriously. I was wondering if they were going to start performing some kind of satanic ritual.”
“Is that why you laughed?”
“Yeah. Plus I might be a little lightheaded because I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
Jason was rocking back slightly in the chair and gazing at me closely. “That can be easily remedied.”
“What exactly are you offering to remedy, Jason?”
“Dinner. Everyone deserves dinner, Audrey.”
“I suppose they do.”
Jason changed positions and leaned forward, setting his palms flat on his desk. His large, rough hands looked like they were capable of doing hard work. I remembered how they felt on my body.
His handsome face turned earnest, apologetic. “I know you think I don’t care enough about work, but I’d like to prove otherwise. I really don’t want to fuck up this project. Why don’t we go out to dinner and see if we can clear the air?”
“Clear the air?”
He grinned. “Yeah. Just a casual dinner between two long-standing colleagues who possess a sort of resentful respect for one another.”
With my stomach growling, I got to my feet. “That doesn’t sound half bad.”