Poachers
Stories
Chapter One
Grit
Chugging and clanging among the dark pine trees north of Mobile, Alabama, the Black Beauty Minerals plant was a rickety green hull of storage tanks, chutes and conveyor belts. Glen, the manager, felt like the captain of a ragtag spaceship that had crashlanded, a prison barge full of poachers and thieves, smugglers and assassins.
The owners, Ernie and Dwight, lived far away, in Detroit, and when the Black Beauty lost its biggest client—Ingalls Shipbuilding—to government budget cuts, they ordered Glen to lay off his two-man night shift. One of the workers was a long-haired turd Glen enjoyed letting go, a punk who would've likely failed his next drug test. But the other man, Roy Jones, did some bookmaking on the side, and Glen had been in a betting slump lately. So when Roy, who'd had a great year as a bookie, crunched over the gritty black yard to the office, Glen owed him over four thousand dollars.
Roy, a fat black man, strode in without knocking and wedged himself into the chair across from Glen's desk, probably expecting more stalling of the de ... read full excerpt from Poachers ebook
