Fire and Ice Read online

  “I have a question,” she said. “Why do you bring that ax to work with you?”

  Matt had stowed the tool on the floorboard between the front and back seats. He didn’t take it inside the plant with him, of course, but he liked having it nearby. “It’s my talisman,” he said. “My good-luck charm. I don’t go anywhere without my ax.”

  “That’s not much of an answer,” Shelly said. She went into one of her spells then, staring through the windshield at something beyond the horizon.

  Matt had to tell people something when they asked, but the ax was really much more to him than a good-luck charm. It was an heirloom, for one thing, and the only remaining connection to his former life in Washington. His grandfather had wielded it, and his father, and he hoped to pass it along to his own son or daughter someday. And there was something else about it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was the only worldly possession he cared anything about, and he felt extremely uncomfortable when it wasn’t with him. Or at least within walking distance.

  After a few seconds, Shelly snapped out of it and looked at her watch and said, “Come on, we’re going to be late.”

  The way she drove, Matt thought, it was a wonder they weren’t late in more ways than one. He followed her to the loading dock at a trot, and then through the maze of shelving to the time clock. Shelly swiped her badge.

  “Made it!” she said. “Hot damn, that was close. I’m already on probation for clocking in late too many times. One more this year and I’ll get a three-day suspension.”

  “Maybe you could use a little vacation,” Matt said.

  “A little vacation,” she repeated.

  “You know, get away from here for a couple of days,” Matt said. “Remind yourself what the rest of the world looks like.”

  “You going to come with me?”

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  For a moment, her eyes took on that empty, dreamy look and the hint of a smile appeared on her face. Then a horn blew from somewhere inside the plant and she snapped back to attention.

  “That’s three days without pay. Can’t afford it.”

  Can’t rhymed with paint. Matt liked Shelly’s southern accent. He thought it was sexy. But as he got to know Shelly better, he was beginning to hear what lay behind that honey accent. She came across as laid-back and easygoing, but there was a sadness underneath. And why not? He could tell she must have been a knockout as a teenager. She’d probably thought she’d own the world. Now she had a no-future job in a chemical hell and the only good thing in her life was a guy who’d announced he wasn’t going to stick around more than a couple of days.

  They walked into the break room and put their lunch sacks in the refrigerator.

  “I’m going to head on over to the foreman’s office,” Matt said. “See what he has in store for me today.”

  “All right, sweetie. See you at lunch.”

  Shelly headed toward Shipping and Receiving, and Matt toward the area of the plant called Waterbase. It was already at least ninety-five degrees inside the building. By noon it would be a hundred and ten.

  Sweat trickled down Matt’s back as he made his way to the foreman’s office, a portable enclosure the size of a large closet with windows in front that overlooked the production area. From the office you could see the twin fifty-five-hundred-gallon stainless-steel mixing tanks where Fire and Ice were blended, Fire in the left tank and Ice in the right, and a press the size of a ’57 Cadillac where they were filtered. You could see the forklift charging stations and the scaffolds and hoses and the pneumatic pumps. Matt knocked on the door, and a voice from within said, “Enter.” Matt entered. The air-conditioned space felt like an oasis after a long trek in the desert.

  Mr. Hubbs sat at his desk sipping a cup of coffee and reading a memo. Hubbs was middle management, just a tiny notch above the laborers he commanded. He wore jeans and steel-toed shoes and occasionally ventured out to the production area to help the blenders dump bags of chemicals into the tanks. Unlike a lot of the supervisors Matt had worked for, he wasn’t afraid to jump into the fray with his subordinates.

  Hubbs looked up from his memo. “Good morning, Cahill.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Hubbs. Just wondering what you wanted me to do today.”

  “Have a seat. There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

  Matt sat in the steel and vinyl chair beside the desk. “What is it, sir?”

  “You’re a good worker, Cahill. I pulled some strings with the guys upstairs, and I’d like to offer you full-time employment right here in Waterbase. The starting pay isn’t the greatest, but you’ll get a raise after your three-month probation period and another one after six months. You’ll get health and dental, and all the other benefits Nitko has to offer.”

  Matt thought about it. He had been making three times as much money at the lumber mill back in Washington, and it didn’t involve working in an oven full of noxious fumes. The only future at Nitko was a bleak one. If he worked real hard and kissed plenty of ass, someday he might be able to afford a single-wide trailer and a ten-year-old vehicle from the buy-here/pay-here lot. If, that is, the heat and the chemicals didn’t kill him first. No, thanks. He had no intentions of working at Nitko forever, but he did need some time to investigate whatever it was that had brought Mr. Dark there. And signing on full-time would allow him to stay in Copperhead Springs a while longer and get to know Shelly better, maybe get to the bottom of her focal episodes.

  “What other benefits?” Matt said.

  “Are you accepting my offer for full-time employment?”

  “Yes.”

  Matt didn’t plan on staying, but he wasn’t out to dupe anybody, either. He would give Nitko an honest day’s work for the duration and then would give them proper notice when the time came to leave.

  “Great!” Hubbs said. “Welcome aboard. I want you to go over to Human Resources, and they’ll explain the pay and benefits package in detail.”

  “Thank you for the opportunity, sir. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  Hubbs rose and smiled and shook Matt’s hand. Matt left the Waterbase office and headed for Human Resources.

  7:58 a.m.

  Shelly wrestled a fifty-five-gallon drum full of Fire onto an oak pallet. The guys in production usually palletized the drums, but this one was a stray that had come from the end of a batch, and it had come up a little light on the scales. It would have to be sent back and either topped off to the proper weight or repackaged into smaller containers. She climbed onto her forklift and guided the forks under the load. She had backed up and started to turn around when a voice behind her said, “Hey!”

  It was Drew Long, the Shipping and Receiving supervisor. “Meeting in my office in two minutes.”

  “Okay,” Shelly said. “You want me to take this drum back over to—”

  “Just leave it there. You can get it after the meeting.”

  Shelly eased the pallet to the concrete floor, switched off the electric forklift, and walked to the water fountain. She slurped and swallowed and slurped and swallowed and thought about Matt and the great time they’d had in bed last night. Matt was kind and gentle and attentive to her needs, and he didn’t gripe that she insisted on total darkness. Why couldn’t she have met someone like him fifteen years ago? Instead she pissed her youth away with a string of bad boys whose sole good feature was that they pissed off her mother. That seemed fun at the time, less so now that life kept insisting on teaching her that Mom had been right all along.

  “What are you, part camel or something?” Drew said. “We have a meeting, remember?”

  She wiped her mouth with her hand and followed him to the office. She was wet from sweat, and the sudden drop in temperature gave her a chill. She hoped the meeting wouldn’t last long. Drew held them only once a month, but he tended to talk a lot. That’s where he got his nickname. Drew Long-winded. People called him that to his face sometimes. It was good-natured teasi
ng, and he didn’t seem to mind. Drew was a nice guy. He was the kind of guy who would say things like don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, or one in the hand is worth two in the bush, or a hundred other corny clichés. Even so, Shelly liked him a lot.

  If you counted Drew, there were four full-time employees who worked the first shift in Shipping and Receiving. On very busy days, HR would sometimes send them a temp, but today was not one of those days. Shelly, Hal Miller, and Fred Philips sat on steel folding chairs as Drew wrote topic points on his dry-erase board. There were six topics to be covered. Looked like it was going to be a long one.

  She thought again about what Matt had said. A vacation. She hadn’t taken a vacation in so long. When she’d just started at the plant, she and a couple of girlfriends used to take long weekends every couple of months and trek off to find some beach where there was nothing but white sand, warm water, and cold margaritas. When she came back, she’d feel fresh and happy and relaxed for weeks.

  But her girlfriends got married and then they got pregnant and they couldn’t get away anymore. Then Shelly bought the double-wide and then the bastards who ran the plant slashed her pay when the market tanked, and now she couldn’t even pay her bills on what she made. Staying here was killing her slowly, but taking even a day off would kill her quickly. Someday that might seem like the better option, but that day wasn’t here yet.

  8:02 a.m.

  A short and narrow enclosed walkway connected the production plant to a two-story office suite. From the road, people saw the orange and blue Nitko sign and another sign with a smiling guy wearing a hard hat and the shiny mirrored-glass building and the electric gates on wheels. From the road, Nitko looked like a nice, clean, safe, happy place.

  Matt punched the code into the push-button lock, opened the door to the walkway, and strolled toward the office suite. When he got to the end of the walkway, he punched the same code into an identical lock and took a left toward Human Resources. Noise from the plant filtered over, and Matt wondered why the building hadn’t been better insulated. It all boiled down to money, of course. Why pay more when you can get away with paying less? He figured the execs’ offices upstairs had top-notch soundproofing, though. He figured those offices were as quiet as a church.

  When he turned the corner by the drink machine, he saw Kelsey Froman lying on the floor with a fat hole in her left buttocks and a gallon of bright red blood between her legs.

  The sight hit him like a gut punch.

  He’d seen a lot of death since his own, and it was always a shock.

  This was brutal, violent, and …

  Evil.

  It was what he came here to stop. He looked around. The sign on the door to his left said SECURITY. He banged on it, but nobody answered. He turned the knob and opened the door and saw a man in uniform splayed facedown in a puddle of brown goop.

  It was Officer McCray, the day-shift security guard.

  Matt’s pulse pounded in his eardrums. He stepped over the corpse and thought back over the last few days. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? What clues had he missed?

  He grabbed the phone on the desk. Dead. The shooter, or shooters, must have cut the phone lines. Nitko had a strict policy against bringing cell phones onto the property, something about stray signals having the potential to ignite some of the volatile oils used in the Petrol area. Any employee caught with a mobile phone was subject to immediate termination. Any employee, that is, except the security guards. They carried one in case of emergency. This certainly qualified, Matt thought.

  He checked Officer McCray’s gun belt and his pockets and found nothing but a can of Mace and a wallet and a set of keys. No phone. He stuffed the Mace into the back pocket of his jeans. He needed to call 911, and he needed to call Shipping and Receiving to warn Shelly. He had no way to do either. He thought about climbing the stairs to the executives’ offices. Surely those guys carried cell phones. Then he remembered that all the VPs were at a convention in Miami and the CEO was at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new toll road. The offices upstairs were empty for the day, but maybe the landlines up there were on a different circuit. It was worth a try.

  Matt stuck his head out the security office door, looked both ways, and darted for the stairs. He climbed as quietly as he could in the heavy work boots. He bypassed all the vice presidents’ doors and went straight for the big guy’s.

  Matt had done some research on Lester Simmonds, the chief executive officer at Nitko, one night on Shelly’s home computer, and Shelly had told him some other things generally unknown to the public. Simmonds had graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in chemical engineering and then with a master’s in business administration. His résumé included stints with DuPont, International Paper, and Fuller Glue. He had worked for some lesser-known companies, all of which he had ruthlessly whipped into the Fortune 500. Nitko wasn’t quite there yet, but Simmonds had been with them for only two years. He’d frozen cost-of-living raises and merit raises, and he’d lowered the shift differentials by thirty percent. The company used to match 401(k) contributions dollar for dollar, and now it did only half that, fifty cents for every dollar.

  The production employees quietly referred to Simmonds as the Old Bastard. They hated him. He was as tight as a tightwad could be, but he was also extremely paranoid. He knew the workers hated him, and for that reason he kept a personal bodyguard nearby whenever he was out and about. Maybe he was paranoid enough to have a version of the Batphone in his office, a direct line to the police. Matt hoped so.

  He tried the knob, but the door was locked. Hell with it. He reared back and kicked the Old Bastard’s door right the fuck in. The jamb splintered and pieces of the brass lockset tinkled to the marble floor. Matt hoped the killer wasn’t close enough to hear the noise he’d made.

  The office was huge and windowless. There was a bank of television screens in front of a cherry desk you could have done the tango on. The screens were black. Matt figured the Old Bastard could monitor every inch of Nitko, inside and out, right here from his office. If Simmonds had been here, the authorities would have been alerted at the first sign of trouble. Simmonds, of course, wouldn’t have stuck around to see the outcome. His private helicopter would have taken him from the roof to a place of safety. No way the Old Bastard would have gone down with the ship. He loved himself too much.

  Matt searched for a switch to turn on the monitors. There was an electronic keypad mounted on the right side of the desk, and Matt figured the pad controlled everything. He pushed the button that said MONITORS, but nothing happened. The keypad must have been password protected, and Matt had no idea what the password was. So much for that.

  There was a multiline telephone next to the keypad. Matt lifted the receiver from its cradle and put it to his ear. He tried every line but couldn’t get a dial tone. He was about to try another office, hoping one of the VPs had left a cell phone on a charger or something, when the lights went out.

  8:17 a.m.

  Drew Long was on topic number five when everything went black. Shelly stayed glued to her chair, thinking the backup generators would kick in any second. They did not, which was very strange. Even stranger was the sound of the loading-dock doors closing and locking automatically, as if a ghost had thrown the switch.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Hal Miller said.

  “Everybody stay calm,” Drew said. “I’m sure it’s just a glitch.”

  In the event of a catastrophic spill—say, one of the fifty-five-hundred-gallon tanks rupturing or something—all the doors in the plant could be closed by a central switch in the main power closet. The doors had strips of rubber on their bottoms that created an airtight seal, thereby containing the spill until a hazardous-materials crew could come in and clean it up. In theory, everyone in the production area was to be evacuated before the doors went down. Once the doors were closed, there was no way in or out until the hazmat team declared an all clear.

  Shelly heard Drew fumbling around
at his desk. He pulled a flashlight out of a drawer and switched it on. He picked up the telephone receiver and started punching in numbers and then said, “Shit.”

  “The phone’s not working?” Shelly said.

  “It’s not,” Drew said. “Listen, I want you all to stay here while I go up front to see what’s going on.”

  “How about we all go up front to see what’s going on?” Fred Philips said.

  “No, there’s no point in all of us stumbling around in the dark. I’ll be back in two shakes. Promise. I only have the one flashlight, but I’ll leave it here with you guys. Try not to use up the batteries.”

  “How are you going to find your way?” Hal asked.

  “I know this plant like the back of my hand. Plus, there’s a little bit of light filtering in through the ventilation fans. I’ll be all right.”

  Back in two shakes …

  Like the back of my hand …

  Drew and his clichés.

  “We’ll be here,” Shelly said.

  Drew handed her the flashlight. “Shelly’s in charge while I’m gone.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Shelly said.

  Drew opened the office door and disappeared into the blackness.

  8:25 a.m.

  Kent Dillard, the maintenance man on duty, never knew what hit him. K-Rad had shot him in the back of the head while he was changing one of the steel-mesh filters in the main power closet. K-Rad had then pulled his night-vision goggles out of his backpack and put them on and had thrown the big red breaker switch that cut the power to the entire plant. He had taken the key ring from Kent’s belt and had tried seven different keys before finding the one that fit the emergency lockdown panel. He’d disabled the backup generators earlier, so now the plant was dark and everyone was trapped inside. Perfect.