The Blade Itself Read Online Free PDF Page A

filled with a righteous two hundred and twelve dollars – counting the remaining four the state had provided to bring him home.

4. A Man in Mind
    Nothing clicked today, and it didn’t help that Danny couldn’t focus.
    In front of him, five skeletal stories of structural steel rose to cut the sky in neat rectangles. A yard hand strode across a beam forty feet in the air, his orange jacket stark against swirling gray clouds. In one corner, a welder knelt over a torch, sparks cracking as flame kissed metal. The wind made plastic sheeting snap.
    Evan was back in town.
    Not the problem, he reminded himself. The problem was that on the schedule he’d prepared, this building had a roof and walls. In reality, it stood exposed. The materials they’d been waiting on hadn’t shown, and winter was fast approaching.
    Still. Evan was back.
    ‘We get our shipment next week, we’re fine.’ The foreman, a burly guy named Jim McCloskey, moved a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other as he spoke. His son stood beside him, lips turned up in a permanent sneer. ‘You know these things, Dan. Never on time. But it’ll get here.’
    Being called ‘Dan’ always set his teeth on edge, like he was back in school, the nuns preaching arithmetic and the Holy Trinity in the same breath. Father and Son making two he could deal with, but the mathematics of the Holy Spirit had never quite added up for him.
    ‘Everybody in town is fighting to finish before the freeze,’Danny said. ‘There’s what, four high-rises going up in the Loop? Plus office parks out by the airport, the new hospital. All we got is a midsized loft complex and a couple of restaurants.’
    ‘Even if it’s the week after, we’ll be okay. Ruiz and my boys have already got the floors, some of the wall studding, a lot of the stuff we usually do later. Once the steel arrives, we’ll get the exterior up pronto.’
    Danny shook his head. ‘It’s getting cold already.’
    ‘Just an early chill.’
    ‘Sure. Seventy again before you know it. We’ll be working in bathing suits.’
    The younger McCloskey snorted. ‘You mean
we’ll
be working.’
    Danny stiffened, then turned slowly, letting his gaze slide like he had all the time in the world. Gave the kid a street stare that mingled boredom and threat, like a predator who wasn’t hungry but would consider a sport kill. The kid’s eyes flicked to the building, back to Danny for a fraction of a second, then quick down to his feet. He muttered something vague. Danny held the stare as he spoke. ‘Why don’t we finish in the office?’
    Neither McCloskey needed to be told whom he was talking to. Danny turned and walked to the trailer that served as the on-site office, a single-wide with cinder blocks stacked as a staircase. As he pushed open the thin door, dry air and the smell of burned coffee washed over him. Space heaters blew on either side of a cluttered desk, below cheap horizontal blinds. A tired green couch ran along one wall; Danny’s boss, Richard, liked to joke that his son had been conceived on it, usually slapping backs and braying with laughter as he said it. The trailer, one of several owned by O’Donnell Construction, moved from job to job, a gypsy home for the men who built Chicago. Dannytook off his hard hat – project-manager white, as opposed to McCloskey’s blue – and walked to the Mr Coffee.
    ‘I’m sorry about that, Dan. He’s a good kid, a worker. He’s just young.’ McCloskey stood like a supplicant, hands folded and eyes down.
    Danny laughed. ‘You think I brought you in here to chew you out about the boy?’
    McCloskey shrugged.
    ‘Don’t worry about it. I mouthed off to a few guys in my day. I imagine you did, too.’
    ‘One or two.’ The foreman smiled.
    ‘It’s forgotten. No, I wanted to talk privately is all. Jim, I’m sorry, but I’m going to recommend to Richard that we put this site on hold for the winter.’
    ‘That’s a mistake. We’ve got two months,