Otter Under Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

have far reaching ripples indeed.
    When Otter got home, the foreman for the crew working on her waterfall was waiting for her. He was a bull of a man, almost totally gray with big bushy eyebrows and hands like hams. They walked back to the pool together.
    “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” he said as he rummaged in a pocket.
    “It’s going to take longer to get finished, isn’t it?”
    “No, it’s those dragons you have on either side of the fountain. They are a problem.”
    “They were all plumbed and ready to install when you got them,” Otter said, “I checked them myself.”
    “Yes, yes they’re plumbed, but the problem is the spray out of their mouths. You want the water to go down into the pool and we have to make a special fitting for the nozzle to fit into.”
    “And this is going to cost…”
    “About a thousand extra,” he pulled two tubes of plastic out of his pocket and presented them to her. “We had to have these made special in a machine shop.”
    Otter quirked up an eyebrow at him as she viewed the plastic in his hand.
    “There are complicated angles in there,” he said defensively.
    Otter took the tubes and looked down the center of each one. They were three inches long with a hole bored through the center, ending in a slight angle--she would give him that. About fifteen minutes on a CNC mill including programming and she could have made them at no cost.
    “A machine shop made these, huh?”
    “Yes, a professional shop. When you have something custom made, it costs more.”
    “Well I manage a machine shop, and we’re not only professional, we’re Aerospace approved.” She looked inside one of the fittings again. “If a shop is charging you $500 each for these, you are getting seriously ripped off. Send me some prints and I’ll get you a quote.” She handed him her business card. Funny, she had never thought to give him her card before.
    He looked at her in shock.
    “I could program these in my sleep,” she assured him as she handed back the pieces.
    Her cell phone rang and she saw it was a call from work. She spent the next five minutes re-routing the schedule around a broken furnace. When she hung up he had gone. He had probably gotten tired of waiting.
    It was strange, but the fountain foreman reminded her of Ron Defray.
    Ice cold cinnamon tea hit the spot when Otter got out of the pool that evening. Tempest had brought home subs and salads and was setting them up on the patio table. Since it was already early September, it was the time for living outside. From September to May, the weather would be perfect for eating and playing outside. Sad kitties lined up against the patio door because they weren’t a part of the food and fun. Otter waved to them, took her seat and looked out toward the pool.
    People in cooler climates laughed when Phoenicians talked about cold weather, but after Labor Day the pools started to get too chilly to swim in without some way to heat the water. Otter was designing a solar water heater so they could swim year round, but she hadn’t put it together yet.
    “What I don’t understand,” Tempest said as they sat down, “is why you guys keep employees that are such dickheads.”
    “Because they are good at their jobs,” Otter said as she helped herself to some pepperoncini. “Ron Defray is one of the biggest jerks you will ever meet, but he really knows what he’s doing. He’s arrogant, insulting and self-centered, but I know that he will drive himself hard to get the work out. He screws me over on the machines and furnaces because someone asked him for a favor and he likes to look like he’s in charge, but he will also work overtime to get some big job out because I’m down to the wire.”
    “Do you like him?”
    “It’s complicated, sometimes I do, and sometimes I definitely hate his guts. It depends on the day.”
    “What about this other guy, Clark?”
    “Sometimes he’s a bigger jerk than Defray. He’s pompous and