Instead of doing something else with a fist—like coldcocking the smartass and losing his own job and benefits—Bob set into his wife’s meatloaf sandwich and thought,God bless that woman. As he chewed, he couldn’t decide if the fact that opening his lunch box was the highlight of his work night was a good or bad commentary on his life.
Better to have the home thing going right, he decided. You could always find another job.
As the tone and volume of that asphalt assault got higher and even louder, Bob shifted his eyes over the field of dumpsters, construction equipment, and debris. In the noon-bright glare of the cage lights, real-name Devlin was bearing down on the jackhammer like the piece ofequipment better get him to the center of the earth or he was going to throw the hunk of crap into the Hudson. Steam rose off a set of weight-lifter-worthy bare arms, his reflective bib and t-shirt all that he was wearing—unlike the rest of them, who were so layered, they were basically human Gobstoppers.
And yeah, okay, fine. Big D’s intensity was a little weird, and the never-taking-a-breather stuff on shift was pretty stupid. The collective bargaining agreement for the union guaranteed you two fifteen-minute breaks as well as a thirty-minute lunch, but if you didn’t take them, it wasn’t like you got overtime. Still, the guy rarely sat down, and not because he was some tweaking kind of drug user. He just seemed to want to work, and between that drive and all his strength, he could do in an hour what three regular guys took half a shift to get done.
Which was why motormouth with the slurs had a problem with him.
Not that Big D cared. He just ducked his head and—
The jackhammer’s engine got cut, and Big D easily put it aside. Then he bent down and picked up a chunk of sidewalk the size of a car hood. As he walked off with the load, he might as well have been strolling through a park, and when he tossed the section over the lip of a dumpster, there was no grunting, no groaning—
“Hey, Dick! You know we got a lift for that shit!” Petey called out.
Bob went back to his sandwich with a grim fixation. The skyscraper they were renovating was a hundred years old and had last been updated about four decades ago—so they were in the total demo stage of things, ripping and tearing out every square inch of carpeting, all of the cubicle walls, and any fixture there was down to the faucets and toilets in the bathrooms and every goddamn fluorescent ceiling bar that had ever been made. Of course they were behind schedule, but he wasn’t allowed to let Dev stay inside and keep cranking. The rule was, when it was break time, everyone had to vacate whatever level they were on and come out here into the open air as a group.
Big D had started working the jackhammer on the sidewalk just this week, and he’d already made it about a quarter of the way down thebuilding’s block. After he was finished? Well, he could start on the front entrance’s stone stairs if he wanted to—
“Yo, Big D!” Petey shouted over again. “How ’bout you bend over some more. You look like you want a fucking date!”
As the nitpick continued, a couple of the guys grumbled and looked over pointedly. At Bob.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said under his breath. “I got it.”
Except before he could figure out his next move, Petey shot to his feet and marched away from the break area, a greasy string bean on a bad-idea mission.
Toward Big D.
Bob polished off the last of his sandwich and extricated himself from the bench. As he jacked up his insulated work pants, he was reminded of why he hadn’t really wanted to become foreman. Too bad the pay was so much better, and it looked like tonight he was going to be forced to earn the extra ten bucks an hour.
“Can wenotdo this—”
The wind whipped around again, caught a drywall bucket, and sent the damn thing right into his shin. As he cursed and hobbled, Petey stepped in front of Big D while the other man headed back for the jackhammer.
“Say somethin’,” Petey barked. “Fuck, speak wouldya!” Big D just stared down at the guy. Like all the noise at his feet was a walkie-talkie that had been dropped.
“That’s it? You just gonna look at me? That’s all you got, you motherfuckin’—”
As the slur was dropped for a second time, what happened next was something that Bob would replay for the rest of his life:
Big D still didn’t respond, so Petey palmed up and punched the guy right on the pecs. The double strike was like a toddler tantruming a brick wall.
And that’s when Big D, the strong, silent type, finally reacted.
That heavy right arm snapped out and he grabbed Petey’s throatlike a rope. The lift that followed wasn’t exactly a surprise, but when was the last time anybody’d seen a full-ass grown man dangling from a fist grip, with his work boots clapping together as if they approved of the find-out after all the fuckin’ around?
Bob hurried his own Timberlands up, but he had to dodge another tumbleweed bucket, a flag of netting that had torn off one of the pedestrian barriers, and something that could have been a panel of particle board—or might have been a fantastical flying beast, because this shit was surely some kind of screwed-up fever dream.
By the time he got to the problem, Petey was clawing desperately at the hand around his neck, his jowls all basset-hound bunched up, his already ruddy face barn red and getting worse.
Bob tried to put some authority into his voice: “Hey, Big D, how about you put him down—”
His voice dried up as the guy’s head cranked toward him. Those eyes… so unremarkable before… had a soulless gleam to them that made them unforgettable: There was nothing behind the ice-cold stare. Not a scrap of humanity, and no recognition, either.
And as the other dozen or so guys on shift came over from the picnic tables, Bob stopped them with a glare. A pile-on might be a good solution in another situation. In this one? He was worried that Big D might snap Petey’s fucking neck and then get to work on the rest of them.
“Hey, D,” he said in what he hoped was a reasonable tone, “let’s put him down, ’kay? You don’t want to go to jail over him. He’s not worth it. Plus he’s sorry, ain’t you, Petey.”
