Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,53

the middle of nowhere?” I tossed it back to her.

“Drug drop. Distribution point?”

“Cop thinking,” I said, with a cynical twinge.

“Duh, yeah.”

I might have thought of it myself. But it had been a while since I’d worked narcotics and only in the streets of South Philadelphia, never in the swamp.

“OK. It’s isolated enough for drop-offs, but the only way you distribute from here is by airboat,” I said. “Only way quick enough.”

“Too piecemeal and too expensive,” she said and ate more of the peaches.

I stared off toward the end of the bed, like I was thinking, but really looking at her toes, for discoloration. Though her mind was sharper and her mood higher with the food and rest, we were going to have to get her out of here soon. The chances of someone coming by or looking for us were minimal. Even if Billy started looking for me, which he would, or if Sherry’s supervisors got anxious, would there be anyone dispatched to my river shack? And when they found it, if it were still standing, would they make a jump in reasoning that I’d been stupid enough to take us somewhere by boat? It could be days and we sure as hell didn’t have days. I didn’t see a way to patch my canoe with the materials we had. Whatever was in that room might be our savior if we were to have one.

“The Fisher Body plant in Lansing, Michigan,” Sherry said. Her tone turned my head because she did not seem to be directing the odd and disconnected words to me but to the wall. She was looking off to a memory.

“I must have still been a teenager. It was one of those stories in the news that for the first time took my attention away from that bullshit in high school.”

I knew Sherry had grown up in Michigan, the daughter of blue-collar parents, working class in an area and in a time where working class was a prideful tide.

“I remember it because I was scared to death back then of being stuck somewhere without air. Maybe I’d been swimming somewhere in the lake and lost my breath or maybe my brothers had locked me in the closet or something when I was little. But I was always scared back then that I would be trapped somewhere without air.”

I looked closely into her face, then straight into her eyes, checking for the dilation of her pupils. If she was going into some kind of hallucination from the trauma, I might have to just patch the canoe as best I could and make a run for it. I took her hand in mine.

“There’s plenty of air, Sherry. We’re OK. All right? You can breath here, baby.”

Her eyes reacted and she shifted them to me.

“Oh, shit. No, I’m sorry, Max,” she said. “I’m not flipping out on you. No. I was thinking of an old story, back in my hometown.

“There was this accident at the auto factory. There were these three workers, guys in the paint department on the line at Fisher Body where all the cars for GM were assembled. These guys were doing cleanup in one of these deep pits where they dipped the cars for rust-proofing or something. They were pits that were sealed and waterproof. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance that they had to go down in these things and clean up excess paint or something.

“But whatever they were using, maybe some new solvent or something to break down the paint, they got themselves surrounded in a cloud of the stuff. They couldn’t breath and started choking and collapsed and when the supervisor realized what was happening, he went down the ladder to help them and he was overcome by the stuff too. By the time someone got an oxygen mask on to go down for them, they were all dead.”

She was staring at the wall again, remembering. I gave her time. Sherry is not someone you ask too early what the hell her point is.

“After that, the company installed trapdoors in all the sealed pits, a way to get out if something happened, a quick- release porthole in the floor that someone could get out of if they fell in or got caught down there.”

Again, I got caught looking at her eyes, like I had many times since I’d met her, amazed.

“I’ll go down under the room and check it out,” I said. “Good idea,” Sherry said and smiled, a real smile this