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Show Night Keys/5 key station. Then a key in fiberglass. At the indoor foreman's shack he halted. Continued cautiously. No one was there. Only his own ghostly silhouette, caused by the light from the one rafter bulb thirty feet above and behind, and a pale sheen from a certain angle through the window on the other side of the shack. Out to the railroad gate. The two gas pumps stood lonely at the edge of the floodlights, the black fields beyond. Dollar's truck was parked among the other empty trailers. He scanned the jumbled shapes of the machinery in either direction along the outer fence. This far out from the city and the freeway there was no sound, rarely a cricket. Sometimes the sound of a car on the main road a quarter mile north of the plant. He worked his way in again through the garage to the keys in metal fabrications and the upstairs locker room. Dollar wasn't there either. He keyed in at the Explosives Room and returned down one of two darkened lanes which met at the vending machine area, a pool of fluorescent light inside its own chain link fence. It was muggy even at this time of night and stayed hot until dawn, especially inside the plant. He got a coke in a paper cup with beads of syrup on the outside which stuck to his fingers, only a few bits of ice floating in it. A hush of compressed air came from one of the nearby bays. He took off his cap and blotted the sweat on his face and forehead on his upper arm. A vending machine kicked on, whirring. |