Spin State - Chris Moriarty [69]
He listened while Li explained what she was looking for, then turned to McCuen. “You can trust her,” McCuen said after a moment.
“Yeah, but can I trust you?”
“You know you can.”
Louie stared hard at McCuen for a moment. Then he turned back to Li. “Sharifi didn’t have a regular crew,” he said. “That’s why you can’t find them in the pit logs. Haas just let her pull miners off slow faces. Most of them are back on the Trinidad now, poor buggers.”
“Do you think you could get us a complete list?”
He shrugged. “Easier if I just let ’em know you’re looking for them. Plus there’s nothing written down that way.”
“You didn’t work for her, did you?” Li asked.
“You crazy? I still won’t go down there.”
“So how’d she get the others to go?”
“Easy.” Louie laughed and his eyes widened in the white circles left by his cutting goggles. “She paid union scale. She actually put a sign up at pit bottom saying she’d pay scale. Wish I could have seen Haas’s face when he read it.”
“How’d she know what union scale was?” Li asked, knowing the answer already.
Louie shrugged his massive shoulders.
Li glanced behind her to make sure the miner who’d gone off to piss was still out of earshot. “Was this a union project? Was there an official push on it?”
Louie caught her drift instantly. The union pushed members toward specific cutting faces or veins depending on its own often obscure political or economic goals. Union approval of Sharifi’s project would have meant better-qualified, more highly motivated workers. Union workers. And union oversight, even if the cat-and-mouse game of union and management meant that no one could risk publicly admitting they were union. Had Sharifi been politically savvy enough to know that? Or had the union approached her on its own initiative?
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Louie said, looking fixedly at Li. There was a message in his stare, but whatever it was she couldn’t read it.
“But you might have heard something.”
“Some things I try not to hear.”
“Who’s the pit rep?” Li asked.
Louie’s face shut like a slamming door.
“Oh, come on!” McCuen sounded exasperated. “You know goddamn well who the pit rep is. It was your damn brother two elections ago!”
Louie stared at McCuen, and Li could see half a lifetime of distrust and resentment in his broad face. “All I know,” he said, “is that you pull your paycheck out of Haas’s back pocket just like the rest of the Pinkertons. And if you think I’m going to roll over just because we—”
“Fine,” Li interrupted; she could hear footsteps moving toward them up the drift. “Just drop a word in the right ears, okay?”
“Right.” Louie bent to check his lamp. “See you around, Brian.”
“Thanks for nothing,” McCuen snapped.
Louie’s reply was so quiet Li barely heard it over the shovels of the cutter crew. She bent over him. “What?”
“I said talk to the priest. Just don’t tell him I sent you.”
The priest’s name was Cartwright, and it took them half the shift to find him. He’d scrawled his mark on the shift log when he came in that morning, but he hadn’t checked out a Davy lamp and they didn’t see his numbered tag on any of the gangway boards.
“Independents,” McCuen said. “They’re so damn sure the company’s going to steal their strikes, they’d rather die than tell the safety crews where to look for them. We’ll just have to go out and hunt him down. If you think it’s worth it.” He looked doubtful.
“You know him?” Li asked.
“Sure,” McCuen said. “Everyone does.” He made a circling gesture near his temple with one finger: crazy.
The rest of the shift ran together in a blur of dripping walls and flickering lamplight. They soon passed beyond the AMC-wired sections of the mine and into regions lit only by miners’ lamps and the occasional battery-powered emergency bulb. They poked their way up crooked drifts