Free Buried Biker by KM Rockwood Page B

for the operators, but now they only had to load the line until the first ones made it all the way through all the plating tanks and back to the front of the squat behemoths. It would take much of the shift before the first gleaming pieces returned to the front.
    Hank, the plating room group lead, stood with his clipboard in his beefy hand, checking the work list.
    “Jesse,” he shouted over the sound of the lurching machinery. “Come into the office. We got to go over the work orders.”
    I eased the forklift to a stop next to the office and followed him in. The office was stifling hot. Hank was pulling dirty papers from equally grimed file folders. “Damn new system,” he muttered. “I can’t figure out what the hell we’re supposed to be doing here.”
    Some enthusiastic new junior executive hire had implemented a new computer tracking system for both inventory and work flow. It was supposed to let everyone know exactly what needed to be done when, what parts and supplies were running low and what we had in stock to fill orders. It probably worked perfectly well from the point of view of the office workers, but as far as I could see, it just complicated the work for those of us who actually had to do the work. Instructions that had been scrawled on one sheet of paper were now on five-page printouts. Some of it was almost indecipherable even to reasonably intelligent people who could read well. For years, the only requirements for hiring laborers had been a strong back and a willingness to work hard, regardless of educational level. And the best of the workers, those who understood the jobs and the machinery and could get things done, were promoted. Hank was one of the old-school group leaders.
    I owed Hank. He’d been decent to me when I’d first been assigned to operate a plater, showing me how to do the work. I’d been a probationary employee, and he’d given me a chance to learn the ropes. I knew he had trouble reading, so I took the papers and sorted through them.
    “Oven shelves are top priority,” I told him, taking his pen to circle the part names and numbers so he could pick them out easily. “And they aren’t fussy, so we should run them until the platers are going good. Then maybe start one of the platers on those big grills—I don’t know what they’re for, really, but they need a fair number of them. If you get far enough along, you could start those breaker boxes, but they don’t ship until Wednesday, so they’re not a rush.”
    Hank nodded and rubbed a thick finger against his nose. The tattoos on the backs of his hands glistened with sweat.
    He shifted his massive weight uneasily and peered at me from under his shaggy eyebrows. “I know it ain’t really none of my business, Jesse, but you know, I been working with Kelly for years. I was real upset to hear somebody’d done that to her.”
    I took a deep breath. “I know what you mean.”
    He squinted at me, his small eyes piercing. “ Did you have anything to do with it?”
    “No. I wasn’t anywhere near her when it happened.”
    “I thought you two was an item.”
    Wiping my hands on my blue jeans, I said, “Not really. We saw each other sometimes, but you know, her dad got out of prison, and he was using her place as his reported residence. I can’t associate with convicted felons, and he’s sure as hell a convicted felon, too. So I was staying away.”
    He nodded. “Was her dad hanging around a lot?”
    “I think so.”
    “And how about them bikers he rides with?”
    “Them too.”
    “Don’t they got a clubhouse up in the hills? Out behind that excavating business some of them run? Nobody cares what they do out there.”
    “I don’t know about the excavating business, but Kelly did say they had someplace outside town they could go. I think Kelly wasn’t real happy having them around her kids so much.”
    “Why hang out at Kelly’s place in town? That’s just asking for trouble.”
    “Wondered that myself. I