Free Serpents in the Cold by Thomas O'Malley Page A

them all away, and he wished that he’d be able to sit on the precipice, taking in his last fix, and watch them all burn and suffer, knowing that soon enough the flames would come his way and pull him down to join them.

13
    _________________________
    Wholesale Food Terminal, Boston
    THE WAREHOUSE TERMINAL at the fraying edges of Dorchester, Roxbury, and South Boston spread out on the west bank of the Fort Point Channel like a vast industrial wasteland with trucks rumbling in and out of warehouse bays. Cal had often passed it coming from Uphams Corner without giving it a second thought, but as they came in through the Southampton Street entrance, the size of the place momentarily overwhelmed him.
    “Jesus, how many warehouses are there here?”
    “I dunno, maybe fifty? Sixty?
    “And how many of them are cold storage?”
    “Most of ’em.”
    “Christ.”
    “Keep the faith. You might get lucky straight off.”
    A quarter of a mile in Jimmy waited for a truck to pull out and then turned the rig wide before a row of empty bays beneath the sign BOSTON MEATS and slowly backed it to the dock. Inside the warehouse Cal followed Jimmy to the dispatcher’s office, where a woodstove burned by the desk and drivers were drinking coffee and waiting for their loads. A blackboard covered the far wall listing the truck numbers and times in and out and their scheduled pickups and drops in glaring white chalk, pressed hard to the board. Jimmy led him over to a desk by the loading dock where a large ledger showed the drivers’ assignments, their rigs, and their times, signed in and out with each return to the hub. The door to the office was propped open by a cinder block, and from the warehouse beyond came the sound of blaring forklifts and shouting loading-dock workers.
    Cal looked at the log. He didn’t know what he was looking for other than a sign that something was off. If someone was using a reefer to pick up, kill, transport, and then dump bodies, it would take time, time that had to show up somewhere. Forty trucks, and every truck accounted for in the last twenty-four hours, including Jimmy Gleason’s, his neat script logging his most recent run. And every truck on the page within twenty minutes of its scheduled pickup and drop-off.
    Jimmy waited. “Any luck?”
    “No. This isn’t the place. I’d better get my walking shoes on.”
    “Jesus, that’s a shame. Listen, I’ve got to drop my load and get to Fall River, but a quick tip. Most of the warehouses here do retail food sales to locals, so they usually don’t mind people coming by the docks. But stay out of the way of the loading—that’s the fastest way to piss people off. Just tell the dispatcher your story, lie where you need to, and perhaps you’ll get what you’re looking for.”
    Cal extended his hand. “Thanks, Jimmy. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
    Jimmy’s grip was like a vise. “Same here,” he said. “You remember to look after that wife of yours, okay? She sounds like a peach if she’s stuck by you,” and he laughed.
    “Sure thing, Jimmy.”
      
    CAL HAD SPENT the better part of the day searching the terminal, and now, nearing dusk, his thigh was throbbing. The place was the size of an airport field. He’d watched refrigerated semis coming in, loading, and leaving from one warehouse after the other, their rumblings jolting the tarmac beneath his feet and trains on the B&A line—the Boston-to-Albany Twilight Express—churning back and forth out of South Station in the distance. He passed the cold storage fish warehouses with their dumpsters reeking of rotting fish and upon which big harbor seagulls fought and screeched. Whatever reefer carried her body to Tenean, he doubted it was carrying fish. The pallet loading aboard the trucks wouldn’t allow it, never mind the smell.
    The need for a drink to ebb the pain pressed at the forefront of his thoughts, but he pushed it back down, unwilling to give in to it until he had something that he