Bad Penny (24 page)

24
H. C. and Sons

FRANK SAT WITH Sam and Carmen in the minivan in the parking lot of a wholesale plumbing store across the wide road from H.C. and Sons. He set Sam’s binoculars down. The bakery with its high cement walls looked as industrial up close as it had in the Google map—one more industry in the industrial part of town. They’d driven the streets around the place, zoomed in with Google satellite view. This was going to be a front door operation.

“Time for the chicken to cross the road,” Frank said. “We need a warm body to trade or an address where we can find one.”

“You want me to go to the parking lot.”

“The cameras mounted on the roof will pick you up. I don’t want you recorded on anyone’s tape. I don’t want them coming out to see who’s squatting in their parking lot. So stay here. Watch my back. Let me know when something happens out front.” He tapped the Bluetooth piece in his ear.

Frank put on his workman’s cap, got out of the minivan, and walked to the edge of the big road. Traffic zoomed by in waves. When there was a large enough break, he jogged across. On the other side his phone rang, and he answered the call without pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“We’re conferenced in,” Sam said via the Bluetooth.

“Pinto?”

The noise of a lawn mower came on. “Here,” Pinto said.

Frank looked up, shaded his eyes from the late afternoon sun, and spotted him up in the sky.

“I’m going to put it back on mute,” Pinto said and the lawn mower cut out.

Frank walked down the drive and crossed the lawn. He avoided the front entrance and headed straight for the truck bays. Right to the blue door he’d watched men come and go through the last fifteen minutes. He walked past a truck that said White Transportation. “Going in,” Frank said then walked up to the door, opened it, and stepped inside to a wide loading area.

There was a guy at a desk close up to the wall. Fat yellow lines had been painted on the floor around his area. Beyond him was a wide cement floor and then aisles of pallet racks seven levels high, all stacked with bags and boxes and buckets filled with various forms of sugary death.

Frank whistled. “This ain’t your mother’s bakery.”

The guy at the desk looked up.

Frank said, “I’m with the truck that just came in. I got to take a leak.”

The guy looked him up and down then pointed at a path on the shining cement floor. “Stay between the yellow lines. It’s right around the corner.”

“Thanks,” Frank said. He followed the yellow brick road of safety that was provided to keep men safe from the forklifts. It led him over to the wall. Frank followed it to the corner and glanced back. The guy was heads down, a testament to the miracles a little uniform can perform. Frank turned the corner. The towering storage aisles stretched out into the distance. Up ahead on the right was the door to the bathroom. Frank walked to the bathroom, opened the door, and went in. A moment later he walked right back out and proceeded down the hallway to the center of the plant where the offices were.

He walked past a woman wearing a white smock and hair hat. Up ahead he saw a number of smocks hanging from pegs on the wall. When he passed, he helped himself to one of the bigger smocks as well as a disposable hair hat from a cardboard box and continued on. It took about two seconds to shove his workman’s hat into a back pocket and don the smock and hair hat. The name patch on the smock said Shawn Wykstra. The hat was nothing more than a thin white bag with an elastic around the edge—oh how Chef Boyardee had fallen.

Some distance ahead stood the entrance to the factory proper. Through the double door windows, Frank could see folks in white smocks and white bag hats working along a production line. Frank didn’t go to the production area. Instead, he turned into a hallway that looked like it led to the front entrance. A number of pictures hung on the walls. There were pictures of frosting and scones and strawberry filling, pictures of three stellar employees who looked like they needed to get out and see the sun a bit more, and a picture of what looked like a Christmas party. On the opposite wall hung three framed portraits. On one side was José, on the other was Hector, and right in the middle was a woman named Flor.

Flor and José looked like they were in their late fifties. Flor had short hair. She was wearing a pink blouse and too much makeup on a face that had sagged. It was the face of a grandmother, but there were no kindly wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. It was a hard face. Not anything at all that you’d put on TV to sell snack cakes.

José was dried up, like he’d smoked too many cigarettes. Hector was younger, in his late thirties. A good-looking guy. A ladies’ man.

Frank walked down the hallway toward the front and found more bathrooms, a closet, a stairway, the reception area, and two small offices. One said Phil Dean on the door plate, and another said Sales. These weren’t the digs of a big shot. Those would be upstairs with the window views.

Frank took the stairs. It opened onto a space with a number of low-walled cubicles, the kind where everyone can see everyone else, head and shoulders. There were three women working in the cubicles. They all glanced at him.

Behind the cubicles were three offices lined up side by side. They all had big glass windows facing the office areas with blinds.

Frank walked up to the first woman and said, “Is Hector in his office?”

She looked at his name patch, looked back up at him with a quizzical look on her face. She turned to the other women. “Did Hector come back?”

The women shrugged.

“We all just returned from the meeting in quality,” she explained. Her eyes fell back to his name patch. Rose again to his face, her curiosity sharpened.

“I’ll check,” he said and walked on by. He hoped this would be his lucky day. He hoped in this card game a Hector might be just as good as a Flor. And if there wasn’t any Hector sitting in one of the offices, maybe there was an address.

“Who are you?” one of the others asked as he walked past.

“Sam Alito,” he said. “Shawn lent me his smock.” Two of the offices were smaller. One had a long spread. Frank headed for it and was rewarded when he saw Hector’s name on the closed door.

Frank walked right up, grabbed the handle, and shoved. But the door was locked. He wrenched the handle again, but it was a good lock.

“Hector,” he called like a long lost buddy.

“Who did you say you were again?” one of the gals asked.

“Doctor Alito,” Frank said.

There was a thin slit between the window frame and the edge of the blinds. Frank leaned in close and cupped his hand around his eyes so he could see in. It was dark. He looked at the door. It was seated in a steel frame. It was going to be a bugger to bust down. It would be easier to break the glass. And then what? He’d search, hoping to find an address, and one of these women would call security, and they’d corner him on the stairs.

Frank turned around. The women were all looking at him.

“This is a bit of an emergency,” Frank said. “I have his results back. He’s going to want to know this.”

The older gal shrugged.

“I don’t think we want to wait with this. I’m going to need his home address.”

The younger woman glanced at the older gal, but the older gal was playing it cool. She said, “Check with the front desk. They can ring him.”

“I already tried that. You’re his secretary, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“We don’t have much time,” he said.

“I never made a doctor’s appointment for Hector.”

“Some things men want to keep discrete. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I need the address.”

Frank waited. He was playing a doctor. And doctors usually got their way.

She furrowed her brow but took out a piece of paper and a razor sharp pencil.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. They were heavy footsteps. A man’s footsteps.

The older gal scratched out 7-4-3.

A heavyset white guy appeared on the stairs. “There you are,” he said. “I think you’ve got my smock.”

Frank looked down. The older secretary had scratched 743 Lu.

They peered across the cubicles at Frank. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s mine. Who are you?”

“Doctor Alito,” Frank said. He looked down at the older gal.

She’d stopped writing. The pencil was still in her hand, poised above the paper.

The youngest gal said, “He said you lent it to him.”

“No,” the guy said confused.

The women in the back had been careful not to draw attention to herself. She’d been quietly watching the whole scene, which was why Frank almost missed her hand movement. She slowly reached one finger out and pushed a button on her phone and then held perfectly still.

Odds were she’d just called security.

The older woman put her pencil down. She said, “I think he’s still here. It’s such a big place. The receptionist can page him.”

“We checked all over downstairs. Someone said he’d left, but I thought I’d come up here. He needs this information.”

The old gal looked at him, and then decided to call his bluff. “I’m really not supposed to,” she said. “Talk to the receptionist.”

“A man’s life is on the line, and I get the run around from his employees. He’s going to hear about this.”

The women did not budge.

He’d been seconds away. He looked at the gal in the back who’d been silently watching him the whole time. He figured he had less than two minutes before the cavalry arrived.

“If he comes back,” Frank said. “You tell him to call me.”

“Sure,” the old gal said.

Frank walked passed Shawn. “I’ll leave it hanging on the hook.”

“You’re supposed to have an escort,” Shawn said.

“It’s an emergency,” Frank said and crossed to the stairs. He headed down before Shawn could reply. On the way he removed the smock and hat.

At the bottom, he checked the hallway to make sure it was clear. Across from him hung the three framed photographs. He pulled all three off the wall, frames and all, stacked them up, and wrapped them in Shawn’s smock.

He heard the static of a personal radio out in the warehouse. Heard someone running in his direction.

Frank saw the women’s bathroom for the office folks, pushed the door open and stepped inside. Someone with petite white sneakers was utilizing one of the stalls. Frank said, “Sorry, I’ve just got to fix the door. It will only be a moment.”

“Okay?” the woman said.

Moments later he heard the sound of running footsteps turn into the hallway. Two people. One of them clomped up the stairs in heavy boots. The other ran past the bathroom to the front of the building.

Frank counted to four then walked out of the women’s bathroom. At the one end of the hallway, the door to the reception area was closing. He figured the man who had run there would be back in about ten seconds. Frank turned the opposite direction and walked toward the warehouse, smock and photographs under his arm.

Sam’s voice came on the line. “Are you okay?”

“It’s a bust,” Frank said.

“Do we need to come get you?”

“The last thing we need is for our vehicle to be tagged. Just stay put.”

He did not turn back and go the way he’d come. Instead he walked out into the aisles of pallet racks, into forklift land, and made a quick turn to put a wall of stock between him and those who had been called to take care of the intruder.

The lane was clear all the way to the end. He could hear a forklift a few rows away, grabbing stock. Frank took long quick strides down the row back toward the loading docks and the blue door. As he walked he pulled the photographs out of the smock. He threw Shawn’s smock into one of the stock bays, then proceeded to tear the backs off the frames and remove the photographs. He left the three frames lying on boxes of butter flavoring. The large photographs he folded up and stuffed into the big front pocket of his pants.

He was about halfway down the long row when a forklift drove through the intersection about thirty yards ahead of Frank. There was one guy driving the lift and another guy hanging on the side. The guy hanging on the side was wearing a dark blue shirt and a dark cap.

The forklift stopped. Backed up. Then turned onto Frank’s row. There were big white letters on the one guys dark cap. They said “Security.” The security guy called something in on a radio attached close to his shoulder. He held up his hand for Frank to halt. He had a flashlight in his black utility belt on one side. On the other side he had a gun in a holster.

Frank slowed.

Behind Frank, at the far end, another forklift turned into the row. Another security guy hung on the side of that one.

A lot of security guys for one bakery. But maybe they were worried about corporate espionage. Maybe H.C. & Sons had a secret million-dollar recipe they needed to protect from the French and Germans.

Frank looked left, looked right. Saw an open stocking location ahead on the ground. The pallet there wasn’t full, just a couple of bags of sugar. Furthermore, Frank could see daylight on the other side.

“I need you to stop,” the security guard said.

Frank dashed for the pallet, scrambled over the sugar and found his way blocked by another pallet partially stacked with boxes full of cinnamon. Almost a dead end, but not quite. There was just enough space to slip past the boxes.

The forklift accelerated down the row toward the spot where he’d scrambled in.

Frank wormed his way past the boxes and spilled out onto the cement lane on the other side.

Behind him, the forklift’s rubber wheels screeched to a stop. “He’s on the other side!” the guard called. “Aisle four!”

“Roger,” someone called out of the man’s radio.

Frank ran down the aisle, heard the whine of the forklift backing up on the other lane, knew the second forklift was doing the same. He suspected they might have others. Heck, they might have a whole fleet of traveling security.

Frank reached the intersection, jumped to the next row back and kept running, but the aisle was too long. Way too long. It was going to be like playing against the rooks in chess. Sooner or later they were going to corner him.