She chewed her cookie, getting up and making her way through the much smaller crowd to the galley area to find herself some milk. She spotted Nan curled up in a chair near the back of the bus sleeping, and she felt a little bad about keeping the woman around so long.
"Hello, Ms. Stuart" Danny appeared, his sling covered in concrete dust. "Boy, we're sure getting things done here today, aren't we?"
Kerry leaned against the counter as she poured her cup of milk. "You know, we are," she admitted. "It doesn't seem like that to me, because there's so much left to do, but you guys are doing an amazing job."
Danny took a root beer from the small refrigerator and opened it, sucking down half the bottle in a gulp before he answered. "It's dry as heck in that room," he explained. "But let me tell you, Ms. Roberts is amazing."
Kerry felt a smile stretch her face muscles out. "She is."
"I mean--I know you know that." Danny blushed, just a little. "But we never got to work with her before, and you hear all kinds of stories from people but in reality, wow."
"Dar is an amazing person," Kerry said. "And I'm not just saying that because she's my boss, or because we're partners. She really is. In fact, I was about to head over there and see if I could get her to take a break for a few minutes. I know you guys have been at it for hours."
"It's tough work," Danny agreed mournfully. "I just came back to pick up more zip ties. The other guys don't want to take a break while Ms. Roberts is there cause she hasn't."
"Oh for heaven's sake." Kerry drained her milk and set the cup down in the small sink. "C'mon. Let's go back over there. Those poor guys." She dusted her hands off and wiped her lips on a napkin, as Danny hurried to finish his root beer. "I'm going to tell the bridge I'm going offline."
She walked back over to her laptop and put her ear buds in again. The chatter had faded off the last hour or so, only a few sporadic voices coming back on at intervals. Kerry keyed her mic and cleared her throat a little. "Folks, this is Miami exec. Just want to advise I'm going offline for a little while. I'll have my cell if anything's urgent."
"Noted, Miami exec," a soft voice answered. "This is Houston night ops. Everything's pretty quiet right now."
"Great. Check in with you later." Kerry unplugged herself and shrugged her jacket on, then she met Danny at the door and they exited the bus into the chilly night air.
DAR WAS PRETTY well convinced she'd actually died and gone to hell. She braced her tester with its one attached wire and reached for yet another dangling strand, bringing it over to touch it against the probe.
The tester lit up, surprising her. "Son of a bitch," she muttered, unclipping the wires and twisting them together. "Gimme a tag."
Mark handed over a piece of cardboard with a string. "Here you go," he said, his voice slightly hoarse. "Hey, that's ten, isn't it?"
Dar shook her head, re-clipping the wires and reading off the identifier. She scribbled it on the tag then tied the tag firmly to the twisted cables. "First person who gets our circuits gets a 200 percent raise and a month vacation."
A soft chorus of voices answered back. Dar glanced to either side of her, where techs were almost covered in the prickly, copper mass of wiring, testing patiently cable by cable looking for a match.
It was like finding a bird feather, and catching each one you saw to see if it was the one who lost it. Frustrating, maddening, aggravating, uncomfortable--if Dar had possessed a machete the chances were, she decided, that she'd have just gone amok with it and ended the problem in a mass of copper fragments.
There was no place to sit, no place to relax. You had to stand almost inside the cabinet to reach the wires, and the ones you weren't testing were poking through your clothes like tiny needles.
She and Mark had started off doing the testing. They'd managed to show three other techs how to use the testing sets, but though there were four other units, there wasn't any more space in front of the cabling cabinet so they'd just started plugging through it.
Dar knew she could get someone else to take over her set, and do the testing. She was, after all, their ultimate boss. But she felt all the eyes on her, and understood she had to live up to her reputation, and so she kept slogging.
Her eyes burned. She blinked a little, then a very different odor penetrated all the concrete and plastic and she turned to look over her shoulder as a woman entered the room with a tray and a pitcher. "What do we have here?"
"Cookies and milk," the bus attendant smiled. "Ms. Stuart told me to bring them over here."
Dar could smell the chocolate all the way in the back of the room. "Are those just baked?"
"They are," the woman affirmed.
"Is that cold milk?" Dar asked, as she saw the techs all starting to turn around, faces covered in smudges of dust and eyes exhausted.
"Yes, it is," the attendant said.
Dar held her hands up, letting the tester fall against her thigh. "Did you bring towels?" She displayed her grunge covered palms with a wry expression.
"Ah." The attendant had to admit to being at a loss. "Well, we can go get some."
"Cookies will get cold." Dar eased away from the cabinet, carefully extracting her boots from the snarls of cable. "Take a break, boys. Let's not waste good, warm cookies."
The techs needed no further prompting. They laid their tools down and scrambled out of holes in the floor, stretching out sore backs and shaking out stiffened fingers. "Man, what time is it?" one asked. "I feel like I've been doing this for three days."
Dar wiped her fingers on her shirt to get the worst of the dust off, before she selected a cookie from the tray and accepted a cup of milk from the smiling attendant. "Thank you."
"You should really thank Ms. Stuart," the woman chuckled.
"She'll get hers later," Dar responded, with a somewhat rakish grin, which grew even more wry as a short, blond woman appeared in the doorway, leaning against it as she looked inside. "Well well. Speak of the devil."
Kerry entered, waving at the techs who all called out greetings. "How are you guys doing? Is Dar running you into the ground yet?"
"Hey." Dar seated herself against the bare wall, extending her legs out as she took a sip of her milk. "I'm working here too."
"I know." Kerry sat down next to her, the entire reason for her coming over now moot, but she didn't care in the least. "I came over to see how you were doing." She glanced up at the crowd, but they were clustered around the cookies, moving away once they'd gotten their share and settling down on the other side of the room.
Or wandering outside in the hall. Kerry wondered if they were being given space out of courtesy or just coincidence.
"I'm doing complete and utter suckitude." Dar gazed down at her now empty hand, its palm scraped and reddened. "We've found ten circuits out of a thousand in six hours."
"Jesus."
"If he was here, I'd give him a phone tester and tell him to get his ass working," Dar said. "Ker, this is insane. "
Kerry took hold of Dar's hand and stroked it, clasping her fingers around her partner's. "Can I help?" she asked. "I'm tired of yapping on the bridge. Why don't you go yap for a while, and I'll do this."
"And make me feel like a total zero for sticking you with this nightmare while I lounge in the bus?" Dar eyed her. "I don't think so."
"Are you saying that's what I was doing?"
Dar saw the quirk of Kerry's eyebrows, and the sudden bunching of her jaw. The last thing she really wanted to do this late in this crappy a situation was trigger her partner's temper. Kerry was tired. She was tired. No way she wanted a squabble. "No, hon. I sent you to the bus, remember?" she replied. "Is there any sense in both of us being miserable?"
Kerry studied her face. "Yes." She laced her fingers with Dar's. "Because I was just in that damn bus thinking I was a creep for not being out here with you," she admitted. "I'm tired of people telling me all their problems, and politicians calling to yell at me. The governor of New York wants his new office connected."