Chapter 3 - The Broken Watch
The sun rose over the Los Angeles basin like a flat copper disc through a layer of coastal smog.
By seven-thirty, the yard outside my window was alive. The sound of seventy-ton diesel engines turning over—that low, rhythmic, hydraulic cough that shakes the teeth inside your gums—filled the office. Men in orange safety vests and steel-toed boots walked between the maintenance bays, grease guns in hand, checking oil levels, torquing lug nuts, inspecting the cable spools on the fifty-ton Manitowoc crawler.
These were my men. Half of them had been with me for twenty years. Their fathers had worked for my father. When their kids broke an arm, the bill went to the company health plan; when their wives had babies, a five-thousand-dollar check went into a college fund before the birth certificate was filed.
They looked through the office window as they passed, seeing my silhouette against the glass. They didn't see the swollen eye. They didn't see the blood on my shirt. They saw Leonard Mercer, the old man who hadn't taken a sick day since the Carter administration.
I stripped off my bloody Carhartt coat, threw it into the industrial washer in the shop locker room, and pulled a fresh flannel work shirt from my locker. I washed my face with cold water and yellow lye soap in the tin sink. The sting on my lip was sharp, clean, purging the smell of seared duck and expensive perfume from my skin.
I took the 1968 Rolex from my desk and walked out to the main maintenance bay.
The shop smelled of gear oil, acetylene, and ground iron. At the far workbench, under an articulated halogen lamp, sat Javier Mendez.
Javier was sixty-two. He had lost three fingers on his left hand in an oil-rig blowout off Santa Barbara in eighty-seven, but his right hand could rebuild a Caterpillar hydraulic pump in the dark by feel alone. For forty years, Javier had been my master mechanic, the man who kept two hundred pieces of aging iron running through three recessions and two general strikes.
He was using a micrometer to measure the wear on a crane bushing when I stopped beside his bench.
Javier looked up. His eyes, dark and heavy-lidded under thick gray brows, dropped to my split lip, moved to the massive purple hematoma covering my left jaw, and then rose to my eyes.
He didn't say a word. He didn't drop his tool. He simply picked up an oily rag, wiped his thumb, and waited.
"I need a box," I said, laying the Submariner on the clean rubber mat beside his micrometer.
Javier leaned down, adjusting his reading glasses. His scarred fingers touched the stainless-steel case with an instinctive, delicate reverence that only mechanics understand.
"Reference 5513," Javier muttered, his voice a low, gravelly Spanish-inflected growl. "Original bezel. The tritium dots on the markers have turned to cream. Where did you get this, boss?"
"Geneva," I said. "It was Arthur’s dream."
Javier turned the watch over. He looked at the lugs, checking the serial numbers engraved between the steel horns. "He never got to wear it."
"No," I said. "He didn't."
"And the boy?" Javier asked, his eyes staying on the watch face. "Ryan?"
"He didn't want it," I said.
Javier didn't ask why my face was broken. He didn't ask why there was blood dried under my fingernails. He had known Ryan since the boy was six years old; he had seen Ryan walk through the shop yard three years ago in a four-thousand-dollar suit, stepping over hydraulic hoses with an expression of disgust, refusing to shake the mechanics' hands because of the grease.
Javier opened a drawer beneath his bench, pulled out a small, velvet-lined steel case that had once held a set of German precision gauge blocks, and laid the Rolex inside.
"What do we do with it, Leonard?"
"Keep it in the shop safe," I said. "Beside the titles to the Peterbilts. It belongs to the company now."
Javier clicked the steel case shut. The latch sounded like a rifle bolt sliding home.
"The boys are heading out to the 405 interchange project in twenty minutes," Javier said, looking toward the open bay doors where three lowboys were idling. "The state inspector is complaining about the slump on the southern pier pours. He wants forty core samples by noon."
"Tell him he'll get twenty," I said, my voice hardening back into the rhythm of forty years of command. "Tell him the mix design was certified by the state engineer in ninety-eight, and if he doesn't like the aggregate, he can come down here and test the gravel himself."
Javier smiled—a slow, weathered grin that showed a gold tooth on the left side. "Yes, boss."
I turned toward the yard, but Javier reached out, his scarred right hand catching my forearm. His grip was like an iron clamp, solid, unshakable, the touch of a man who had stood beside me in the mud for four decades.
"Leonard," he said softly.
"Yeah, Javi?"
"The house in the hills," he said, his eyes drilling into mine. "The big one with the white gates."
"What about it?"
"The concrete we poured for that foundation... we used the high-early mix from the harbor job, didn't we? The stuff with the silica fume?"
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"We did," I said. "Eight thousand PSI. It'll stand for three hundred years."
Javier let go of my arm, picking up his micrometer. "Good," he murmured, looking back down at his steel bushings. "A shame to waste good concrete on bad timber."
