“Do you mean that?” His wide eyes studied me for mockery. “In my family, not even my grandma thinks it’s all right to cry.”
“In my family, we think you shouldn’t wallow in your tears, we think you should act—but we believe that sometimes you can’t act until you’ve cried your heart out.” I put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “Look after Josie and Coach McFarlane. And yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
The skies had cleared. When I got to my car I could see the Big Dipper low in the northern sky; the moon was almost full. This was both good and bad; I wouldn’t have to use a light to find the factory, but I’d be visible if anyone was watching Fly the Flag.
I checked my flashlight. The batteries were good, and I had a spare pair in the glove compartment. I put them in my pocket. Checked for my extra clip to the Smith & Wesson. I left my phone on until I was a couple of blocks from Mary Ann’s, heading north, toward Lake Shore Drive and my home. At Seventy-first Street, I switched off my phone, then turned west and looped around the neighborhood until I was sure I was clean. I turned south again and made my way to Fly the Flag.
Once again, I parked on Yates and walked down to the factory. The Skyway embankment loomed in front of me, its sodium lights forming a halo above the street but not shedding much light below. Most of the streetlamps were out down here at ground level, but the cold silver moon lit the streets, turning the old factories along South Chicago Avenue into chiseled marble. The moonlight cast long narrow shadows; my own figure bobbed along the roadway, like a piece of stretched bubble gum, all skinny lines with little blobs where my joints were.
The avenue was empty. Not the quiet emptiness of the countryside, but one where urban scavengers moved under cover of the dark: rats, druggies, thugs, all looking for a fix. A South Chicago bus labored up the street. From a distance, it looked like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—its windows were filled with light, and the headlights looked like a grin underneath the big front window. Get on board, ride home in warmth and comfort.
I crossed the road and went into the factory yard. It had been over a week since the fire, but a whiff of smoke still hovered faintly in the air, like an elusive perfume.
Even though the traffic on the Skyway was loud enough to muffle my sounds here, I walked along the edge of the gravel drive so that my running shoes wouldn’t crunch in the loose stones. I went around to the side, to the loading bay.
I saw at once what had happened to Bron. Just as he had the heavy front load of the forklift suspended beyond the lip of the dock, ready to drop his load in the truck, Grobian had pulled away. The forklift had pitched headfirst off the dock, burying its forks in the ground. The cartons Bron had loaded on the front end were scattered in a wide circle around it. The fall itself must have broken Bron’s neck; the wonder was that Marcena had survived it.
I shone my flashlight around the ground. Sherlock Holmes would have seen the telltale broken weed, or displaced piece of stone, to say whether Marcena had been in the truck when it went over. I could only guess that her war zone training had given her a sixth sense of the danger, so that she jumped clear of the forklift as it fell.
I climbed around the machine. I looked underneath it as best I could, but I couldn’t see Marcena’s red pen. Maybe it was buried under the front end, but I’d save that possibility for last—it would mean hiring a tow truck to raise the forklift.
I moved in a circle around through the weeds and the gravel. This side of the building faced away from the fire, so I didn’t have to contend with the broken glass and charred remnants of fabric I’d found when I searched here last week, but there was still a tiresome amount of debris, jetsam from the Skyway, flotsam from the street. I’d read recently that Chicago’s landfills were just about at capacity and we were starting to ship our garbage downstate. If all the bags and cans I’d seen on the streets today had been put into the garbage, maybe we’d have filled our landfills even sooner. Maybe litterers were saving taxpayers money.
After an hour, I was as sure as I could be in the dark that the pen wasn’t out here. I put a foot onto the forklift and climbed up onto the loading dock. I sat on the lip and stared into the tangle of brush, trying to imagine Marcena.
Now that I wasn’t moving around myself, the night noises started to sound loud. I strained to listen under the whoosh of the cars and grinding gears of the semis overhead. Were those rats and raccoons rustling in the brush, or humans?