Read Online Sendoff for a Snitch by KM Rockwood - Free Book Online Page B

have to climb up to the catwalk surrounding the tall tanks to fish it out. They would take a lot longer than the timekeeper thought they should, and the entire operation would fall behind schedule. Happened every time we ran those shelves, but there was never any allowance made for it, so Hank would be left trying to explain why his crew hadn’t reached their quota.
    “Thanks,” Hank said gloomily, putting the papers in a careful pile back on the desk.
    I left the office and climbed back on the lift, driving down the aisle in front of the platers. Two of the operators nodded a greeting, but the noise level was too high to say anything. The other two operators were not accustomed to running the platers and were struggling to keep up with the never-ending parade of plated parts and empty hooks. They had to concentrate on their work and couldn’t spare even a few seconds for a glance in my direction.
    Assuring myself that all the platers were stocked with parts, I drove out to the shipping room to see what Kelly and I needed to do. Truckers liked to be out on the road early, before traffic out on the roads picked up for the day. If anyone else was out in this weather.
    Semis were backed into several of the truck bays. Kelly was picking up loaded pallets from a row and loading them into a trailer. The driver, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, was checking his paperwork against the load.
    When I got closer, I could hear the rain drilling down on the truck bay overhang and the roof of the trailer. I shivered, thankful that I had brought the dry socks and jeans to change into. The socks were damp and getting damper by the minute, but damp was a far cry from squishy wet.
    I wasn’t looking forward to this shift.

Chapter 5
    J ohn was talking to a small knot of truck drivers, and he gestured me over.
    “We need to finish loading them,” John said. “They’ve got to get over the river, and at the rate the rain is coming down, they might close the bridge any time. Check the packing lists and see what you have to get from the warehouse.”
    I nodded. “Are we expecting shipments tonight?”
    “We were,” John said, glancing down at his clipboard, “but it’s anybody’s guess whether they’ll be able to get here.”
    I drove over to the dispatcher’s office, darkened and locked on this shift. Outside the door, a computer sat on a shelf, ready to spit out the multi-page packing lists. I climbed down, punched in a code and the date and shift, and stepped back while it spit out a huge volume of paperwork. I held my hand out to catch the sheets as they came out.
    When I’d first come to work here, just a few months ago, the packing lists had been hand-generated, one-page affairs with a straightforward list of what the shipment should consist of and the quantity. Some genius in the front office had redone the system so that a computer program took care of assembling the packing lists and bills of lading. It also was supposed to track inventory and make all kinds of information available at a glance. And of course, it created the complicated work orders for Hank in the plating room.
    It may have worked well for the office staff. As far as we were concerned, the computer didn’t tell us jack shit. All we were authorized to do was punch in a set of numbers and watch the reams of paper flood out. If we weren’t careful to catch all of it as it spewed forth, a cross-current in the drafty shipping area would catch some sheets of paper and blow them around. Even if we could gather them all—and I think there were still a few caught high in the rafters from before we’d all realized this—we’d have to try to reassemble them. Since they didn’t have headings or page numbers, that could be quite a chore.
    Now, instead of one handwritten page, we got a whole stack of paperwork we had to decipher. I didn’t mind so much, since I could read pretty fast, but some people, like Hank and Kelly, had trouble shifting through all