The white man ambled over to Stafford.
“Yew the auder fella?”
Auder? “Auditor,” Stafford replied.
“S’what I jist said. You him?” The man was eyeing Stafford with visible suspicion.
“Yup. But I won’t bite.”
His attempt at humor was apparently lost, as the man appeared to consider his chances of being bitten. Finally he nodded as if he’d come to a momentous decision. “Heard about you. Folks here get stirred up, auder’s come aroun’. What you want here?”;, Stafford thought about that question, and how to play it. He could turn on his cop face and bust this guy’s balls a little, or he could play it down. The guy was obviously some kind of serious hick. “Routine checks,” he said. “We go around to the DRMOs to make sure everything’s being done by the book and nobody’s stealing anything. That kind of stuff.” He must be about six feet tall, Stafford thought, but skinny as a rail. It was wonderful what a childhood diet of Twinkies and soda pop could do.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The tall man peered down his long, bony nose and thought about that for a moment. “Corey,” he replied finally. “Corey Dillard. What’s yours?”
“I’m David Stafford. How long have you worked here, Mr. Dillard?”
“Fifteen years and some.”
“And what do you do here?”
Dillard appeared to be puzzled by the question, as if no one had ever asked him that before. He bent down a little; to talk directly into Stafford’s face exuding an aroma of tobacco and decaying teeth. Stafford blinked, forcing himself not to step back.
“Ah do what Boss Hisley tells me to,” Dillard answered. “Mostly, Ah feed the Monstuh. Load up’n this here belt, then we feed that thing. Looka heunh, you ain’t a cop? I seen auders, and you don’t look like no auder.
Boss Hisley, he’s sayin’ you’s a govmint cop.”
Stafford grinned at him. “Boss Hisley worried about cops, is he? Should I go talk to him, you think?”
Dillard straightened up, a look of alarm flashing across his face. “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about Boss Hisley.”
“Okay. I won’t tell him that you did. So what do you want to talk about?”
Dillard looked over his shoulder at the three men standing by the table in the corner of the building. They were well out of earshot, but they were definitely watching him.
“Looka heunh,” he said, bending forward again, “if’n somebody had something’ to tell you, he gonna git hisself in trouble, he tellin’ it?”
Well, well, well, Stafford thought. “I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Dillard,” he replied wanting to see where this was going.
“I seen it on the TV. Man had something’ to say, them cops done give him ‘munity.”
Better and better, Stafford thought. “Absolutely, Mr. Dillard. Although I’m not a cop, you understand. But I do know that cops offer immunity all the time. For the right kind of information. Long as it’s done right.” “Done right? How’s that?” Dillard asked, his eyes narrowing. He had put his hands in the pockets of his overalls. He was standing in front of Stafford, looking like a nervous stork.
“Two things. First, the man wanting immunity has to tell what he knows before the cops find it out for themselves.
Dillard blinked, then nodded his understanding.
“The second is that if more than one man knows something, the first man to do the telling gets the immunity.
Everybody else takes their chances. Like that.”
Dillard absorbed that and nodded again, and once more he looked over his shoulder before replying. The largest of the men at the coffee table was staring openly at them. That would be Boss Hisley, Stafford thought.
“How long you gonna be heunh?” Dillard asked.
“Don’t know, Mr. Dillard. A little while, probably. Like I said, though, I’m an auditor, not a cop. Is there something you want to talk about?”
Dillard started to say something, but then he shook his head after glancing back over at the big black man. “Reckon not,” he replied.
“Later, mebbe.” With that he started to shuffle back over toward the conveyor belt just as another forklift came bursting through the double doors at the back of the warehouse. Dillard stopped, and, turning his head, said something that Stafford couldn’t hear over the forklift’s engine noise.
“What?” Stafford called, cupping his left ear.
“Lambry,” Dillard shouted, keeping his back to the others. “Y’all need to find Bud Lambry.”
Stafford watched as the loading team went back to work, then he tried the walk-through door connecting the feed-assembly room to the demil building. It was locked, so he went outside. So much for his cover story about being an auditor, he thought. The collective blue-collar antenna had sensed already that something was up and there was a Washington cop of some kind here. Still, now he had something to do: Find some guy named Bud Lambry.
He went into the demil building after finding that door unlocked. There was nobody in the control booth when he entered the demil chamber. The empty conveyor belt led straight to the now-silent shredding bank. There were steel screens up on either side of the injection point, as well as plastic spray shields. With all the piping and other ancillary machinery coiled on either side of the shredding bank, the huge machine looked like a crouching steel dinosaur. The vertical band-saw blades glinted dangerously in the fluorescent light. He jumped when the conveyor belt started arid then stopped, but then he realized the men next door had advanced it to fit the next load.
So maybe there’s something going on here after all, he mused as he stood looking at the Monster. The working stiffs knew he wasn’t a DLA auditor.
The one man who had been williag to get anywhere near him, Dillard, had started talking about immunity. Saw that ‘munity stuff on the TV. I love it. But immunity for what? He couldn’t imagine that rocket scientist being capable of knowing anything really significant. So what was the next step? Ask Carson about this Bud Lambry? Or maybe get back to Dillard, in the cop mode this time, and ask Dillard about Carson? Maybe that’s why everybody here seemed to have a hate-on for the manager.
Maybe they knew he was running a scam of some kind. And — what? Not sharing? Probably.
He decided he would casually drop Lambry’s name the next time he talked to Carson. Say somebody he’d met out in the industrial area had mentioned the man’s name. See if Carson had any particular reaction.
Then he would put a call into the local DCIS office and ask them to run a NCIC check on Lambry. Careful, he reminded himself as he walked across the tarmac to see some more warehouses. You’re not supposed to go stirring things up. Heaven forbid you go do your job and uncover some actual crime here. He rubbed his aching right bicep as he walked back.
7
Sergeant Mccallister was not pleased. “Forty-five minutes before we secure the area for the day, and you’re bringing me this shit? I do not need this, Mayfield. I do not need this.”
Latonya Mayfield stared down at the pile of reports she bad put on the sergeant’s desk, but she said nothing. The sergeant was not one of her favorite people on this planet, and he was also not one of the world’s great listeners.