“Is he mean to you?” Diana asked.

“No, he’s mostly very nice. In his gruff way.”

“Is he harder on you than on everybody else?”

“He actually tends to use me as an example of how everybody should be doing things.”

“Does he like you?”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far.”

“But he admires your work?”

“Frequently.”

“Does he realize that you’re a woman?”

“He says I’m the exception that proves the rule.”

“Whatever that means,” Diana said.

“If he knows you’re onto him,” Josie suggested, “he could fire you.”

“He’s not going to fire me,” I said.

Josie smiled at me. “You’re adorable. Yes, he is.”

Diana nodded in agreement. “Yeah, he’s probably going to fire you. If it was him.”

“Who else could it have been?” Josie asked.

I shrugged. “It could have been anyone, really. Six-Pack has lost a ton of money—hundreds—betting against me. I absolutely annihilated Tiny in a game of hoops one time. DeStasio and Case were never thrilled to have a woman around. But there’s no obvious villain. They’ve all been surprisingly nice to me.”

“They underestimate you,” Diana pointed out.

“But not in a vicious way,” Josie said. “In a chivalrous, slightly patronizing way. Not mean-spirited.”

“Maybe it was the rookie,” I said then, and they both lowered their crochet.

“Absolutely not,” Josie said.

Diana shook her head, too. “Impossible.”

“Why not? It’s the perfect alibi. Pretend to be allies and then do a double cross. Oldest trick in the book.”

“He’s not pretending. I saw the way he looked at you.”

True enough.

“Why do you want to work with these guys, anyway?” Josie asked. “They seem very high maintenance.”

I shrugged. “I love the job.”

“And she’s good at it,” Diana added.

“I love the job because I’m good at it.”

“Maybe it’s the fact that you’re so good at it that’s the problem. It’s got to be someone who’s jealous of you. Or who feels threatened by you,” Diana said.

“That could be anyone,” I said.

“Maybe you could lay some kind of a trap,” Diana said. “Maybe rig a squirt gun full of paint to go off when somebody opens your locker.”

“That’s a little flawed,” I pointed out. “I have to open my locker.”

Diana and Josie thought I should report it, but I couldn’t.

I couldn’t go to the higher-ups, because that would be not just complaining but also squealing and breaking ranks. I couldn’t confront the stalker, because I didn’t know who it was. In different circumstances, I might have just worked harder, tried to get better, in hopes that whoever didn’t like me might come to see my value.

I suspected that Graffiti Guy had never wanted me there and had expected me to burn out on the job and quit. Well, I hadn’t burned out. And once he realized I wasn’t going to fail on my own, he’d decided to make me so miserable I’d have to leave.

I wasn’t going to do that, either.

But how bad did things have to get before he got it?

I worried about it constantly.

Until the captain gave us something else to worry about.

Twenty

ONE EVENING, AFTER we’d cleaned up from supper, the captain called us all to order at the dining table.

“I just had the strangest phone call of my career,” he said.

We all waited.

“Apparently, the city’s got a budget shortfall. Nobody’s exactly sure what happened, but there was some graft, some corruption—some bad investments made. Somehow, the projected city budget is not what it should be, and not what it was last year. There’s an investigation, blah, blah, blah—but the long and the short of it is, they’re cutting city services.”

We waited.

“Cutting staff on city services, is what I mean.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They hired some planning consultant to come in and advise them on how to make up the gap, and his recommendation is to cut two percent of teachers, police, and firefighters in the city. Among many other things.”

The captain looked down at the floor and shifted his weight.

“They’re retiring some old-timers early,” he continued, and just as I glanced over at DeStasio, who was the oldest guy on the crew, the captain went on, “and they’re suspending the contracts of some of the newest hires.”

Everybody looked over at Owen and me.

“What I’m saying,” the captain went on, “is that two of the city’s newest contracts are on our shift, and it looks like we’re not going to get to keep both of them.”

“You’re letting them go?” Case asked.

“Just one,” the captain said, like that was an upside.

“Which one?” Tiny asked.

Before the captain could answer, the guys all started shouting out their suggestions.

“Keep the girl!” DeStasio shouted, just as most of the others shouted to keep the rookie, and I felt a spark of gratitude toward him before I wondered if he was being sarcastic. Also: Really? The girl? I’d been working here for five months. Didn’t I get a name?

“He can’t sack the rookie!” Case was shouting. “That’s Big Robby’s kid.”

“Well, there’s no way he’s keeping the girl.” That was Tiny.

The guys all started debating our various merits and drawbacks, all at once, everybody talking and nobody listening. My upsides were, apparently, competence and skill, while pro-rookie arguments seemed to stress that he was “a good guy.” The captain let everybody vocalize for a few minutes before shutting us up again.

“It’s a tough situation,” he went on. “I don’t know who I’m letting go, but I do know it’s going to mean we’ll have a reduced crew on this shift and several others. That’s unsafe for us, and it’s bad for the community—but there’s nothing to do about it right now. We’ve just got to roll with it until they get this thing sorted out. Nobody here is a stranger to hardship. We’ll handle it.”

“But who are you firing?” Tiny wanted to know.

“Normally, I’d just fire the newest guy, but these two”—he gestured between us—“started on the same day. The chief’s given me a few weeks to decide—and despite what you might be thinking, my mind is not yet made up. It’ll be a hell of a decision.”

For a second, I found myself wondering if the captain was the stalker, and he was just making this all up as a ruse to get rid of me, but then he showed us the letter from the chief laying the whole situation out. I had to admit it seemed pretty official.

The captain didn’t seem as mad at me lately, anyway. Despite the scene he’d made about the cyanide kits, in the end, he’d put one on each apparatus—the engine and the box. Other things had arrived, too—the gear dryer, three infrared cameras, a voucher for seven new mattresses at a local store—and he’d kept them all.