Deep Dive by Chris Knopf

Author:Chris Knopf [Knopf, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579625863
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2019-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Daniel Osterman, the young executive director, wore awkwardness like an itchy shirt. I knew what he wanted to talk to me about, but I was up on a ladder and made him work for it.

“It would be better if you could just come down,” he said.

I finished driving in a nail and did as he asked.

“Obviously you’ve encountered Ruth Bellingham,” he told me when I got there. “She wanted me to fire you.”

I tried to look sheepish, apologetic, and a little defiant all at once. Not sure which of those showed as intended.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” I said. “I need the work.”

“We need you to do the work, which is what I said to her. But we can’t have people just wandering around inside the main building. You understand that?”

“Of course you can’t. Especially with the big boss around.”

He didn’t exactly know how to respond to that.

“Ruth’s not the big boss, but she works for them in New York. She’s escorting some very important people. That’s what she does. It’s a very demanding job, and she’s a demanding person.”

I reassured him as well as I could, offering to paint the new bookcase if Ramon could dig up some paint. That was apparently the worst suggestion I could have come up with.

“No, no, no. We’ll manage that ourselves, thank you very much,” he said, too loudly, as if it made his lousy Spanish more coherent, then he beat it out of there.

Ramon shook his head but kept the unspoken remonstrance to himself.

OVER LUNCH I asked Ramon if he ever did any work at the Caring Center. He nodded as he swallowed a mouthful of a three-meat sandwich called a tripleta.

“They did better in Maria,” he said. “The hill blocked the wind. But there was still plenty to do. Nice people. They were grateful,” implying a contrast with our current supervisors.

“What sort of folks are they looking after?”

“The poor. In this part of Puerto Rico, it’s hard to tell the poor from the rest of us, but they find a way to do it.”

“Families? Women and children? Daddies and mommies?”

“And grandmothers. No single men.”

“But single women,” I said.

“Indeed. They have their own dormitory up here in the hacienda.”

“Why the separate housing?” I asked.

He shook his tripleta at me, grinning. He called me a nosy bastard, using a local colloquialism that sounded nothing like what it meant.

I let him eat in peace for a while, then asked, “Did you leave any tools on the job at the Caring Center?”

“Nothing we need here. Maybe the impact drill. I love that tool.”

“We definitely need an impact drill, Ramon. Why didn’t you tell me we had one of those?”

He looked a little embarrassed.

“I told you, I’m a mason.”

“I’ll go get it,” I said. “Just tell me where it is.”

“You’ll have to ask the executive director,” he said. “He’ll give you a permission slip.”

“I’ve worked on military bases with less security than this place.”

He let that slide by, but changed the subject.

“Where were you born, actually?” he asked.

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