Part 11:
Delia looked at him for a long second. Ryan. Yeah. I’m going to tell you a true thing about this work and it is the only speech I will give you, so listen. Okay? The people who do this kind of theft do not think they are thieves. They think they are underpaid. They think the company owes them. They think they are clever. They are not clever.
They are greedy and they are lazy and they leave tracks they do not see because they do not think anyone is looking. Your warehouse supervisor does not believe he did anything wrong. He believes he took what was his. This is important for you to understand because when we eventually put him in a room with a lawyer, he will not cry and he will not apologize and he will not ask for your forgiveness.
He will look at you and he will tell you it was not personal. Do you understand? Yeah. Good. Now sit down and let me show you what we have. She opened a file on the monitor. Ryan sat in the bad chair, which was in fact very bad. He pulled himself up to the desk. He looked at what was on the screen. It was the dock camera footage from the Regius Hollister warehouse.
Tuesday night, 11:47 p.m. Ryan saw himself on the screen moving crates. Living a life he did not yet know was being taken from him. And in the corner of the frame, for just 3 seconds at 11:49:06, he saw a second shadow move behind a forklift, a shadow that should not have been there. He leaned forward. “Play that again,” he said.
Delia played it again. “You see him?” she said. “Yeah.” “Recognize him?” “Not from that.” “From anything?” Ryan watched the clip a third time. The shadow moved behind the forklift, paused, and then slipped out of frame. As it slipped out, something on the shadow’s chest caught the light for just a fraction of a second.
A thin line. A lanyard. “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I recognize him.” Delia watched his face. “Good,” she said. “Let’s get to work.” Ryan sat forward in the bad chair. He did not feel afraid anymore. He did not feel tired anymore. He felt, for the first time in a very long time, like a man with a door to walk through and a reason to walk through it. He reached for the mouse.
Outside the windowless room, somewhere in the building, a phone rang and rang and was not answered. A coffee machine hissed. A keyboard clattered. Somewhere in another part of the state, Carl Voss was waking up in his recliner where he had fallen asleep with the television on, and he was stretching and yawning and pouring himself the first cup of coffee of a morning he believed was going to be like every other morning.
He was wrong about that. He just did not know it yet. The first week was numbers. Ryan had not expected that. He had expected the kind of thing you saw in movies, men in suits standing in rooms full of whiteboards, drawing lines between photographs. What he got was a chair that made his lower back ache by 11:00 in the morning, three monitors that were always on, and numbers.
Weight variances, timestamp logs, badge swipe records, GPS pings from the tractor-trailer fleet, thermostat data from the temperature-controlled units. He had not known until that first week that a warehouse generated this much data. You could have printed a book about a single Tuesday night and still not said everything there was to say about it.
Delia worked him hard. She was not unkind about it, but she was not warm, either. She would bring him a file and set it on the desk and say, “Before lunch.” She would come back at 11:50 and hold out her hand for it. And if it was not ready, she would not scold him. She would just look at him for 3 seconds and walk away.
And he would find the next day that the file she had given him for that morning was a little bigger. He understood her after the first 3 days. She was not testing whether he could do the work. She was testing whether he could do it faster than he thought he could. The answer, it turned out, was yes. He got home at 5:00 every night.
Celeste had been good on that. A car came for him at 4:30 every afternoon, and the driver, who was a heavy man named Theo with a beard like a Civil War general, did not make small talk and did not ask him how his day was. Theo drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. Ryan came to appreciate this enormously.
Emma did not ask him about the new job, not the first week. She knew he had a job again because he had told her so the night of the day he’d signed the paperwork, sitting on the edge of her bed while she brushed her teeth in the little bathroom across the hall. He’d said, “I got a new job, kiddo. It’s temporary, but it’s a real one.
” She had said, with toothpaste around her mouth, “Do you like it?” And he had thought about it for a second and said, “I think I’m going to.” She had nodded and spat into the sink. She did notice the new boots though. He had stopped at the mall on his way home that Friday, the day the check cleared, and he had bought her the boots.
Brown, lined with something soft. Two sizes too big, so she’d grow into them. He had also, without quite meaning to, bought her a winter coat which she did not need, and a pair of gloves which she did. He put the bag on the kitchen table. She came out of her room and saw the bag, and she walked over very carefully, the way she walked when she was afraid a thing might not be real, and she opened the bag and looked inside and then she looked up at him. “Daddy?” “Yeah.
” “This is a lot.” “I had a good week at work.” “Okay.” She pulled out the boots. She held them up. She looked at them the way a person looks at a thing they have not believed they were going to have. She did not squeal. Emma was not a squealer. She just held the boots for a long time, and then she said very quietly, “Can I put them on now?” “Even though we’re inside?” And Ryan said, “You can put them on now, kiddo.
