14. Body Count
15. Dead Wrong
16. Bishop as Pawn
17. Call No Man Father
18. Requiem for Moses
19. The Man Who Loved God
20. The Greatest Evil
21. No Greater Love
22. Till Death
23. The Sacrifice
24. The Gathering
Here is a special preview of
Kill and Tell
The Father Koesler Mysteries: Book 6
The fires of hell.
Why did he invariably think of hell whenever he encountered fire? It didn’t matter whether it was a house afire, a fire under a pan on the stove, or a campfire. Always hell. It must be all those years in parochial schools and the good old Baltimore Catechism, he concluded.
“Why,” the Catechism would ask, “did God make you?”
“In order,” the Catechism would respond, “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.” And little Frankie Hoffman and all the other little Catholic kids would memorize not only the Catechism’s answers, but its questions also. It was only many years later, when Mr. Francis Hoffman became a junior executive in a major automotive company in Detroit, that he reidentified his personal goal in life: to become chairman of the board of his company—of The Company. And to do whatever might be necessary to get there.
“We call this our ‘batch,’ Mr. Hoffman,” explained Amos Culpepper, the black manager of the glass plant. “It’s got all the ingredients used in making glass, plus a goodly amount of cullet—glass that’s discarded along the way in the process.”
Hoffman stared at the grayish powder being almost imperceptibly pushed into a fiery furnace that was radiating enormous heat. “How hot is it in there?”
“Oh,” Culpepper answered, “anywhere from 2,450 to 2,800 degrees.”
Hoffman gave a low whistle. Once, he had forced himself, because he thought he had needed the discipline, to view a cremation. Till now, he had never experienced a similarly intense heat. If one approached the furnace too closely, the waves of heat were enough to literally take one’s breath away. “What would happen if you put a man’s body in there?”
Culpepper chuckled. “Someday soon somebody would be looking out of a car through him.”
Hoffman experienced a shudder. He had begun this day with an ominous feeling that had intensified as the day wore on. Breakfast had culminated in an argument with Emma, his wife. And it had not helped that for days he had been dreading this assignment given him by Charlie Chase, his immediate superior. He had complained to just about anyone who would listen about having to review the operation of The Company’s glass plant. He would get Chase for this. Oh, yes, he would.
In the meantime, and for some inexplicable reason, the blast furnace was making Hoffman extremely nervous. He moved away from the batch and around to the side of the furnace where the heat was only slightly less intense. The considerable entourage that accompanied this VIP moved with him.
“This is your first visit here, isn’t it?” Culpepper said.
Hoffman nodded.
“That’s why I’m taking you through our process step by step, right from the beginning.
“Now, this area here is what we call the tin bath. The mixture is liquid now, and in this phase, it conforms to the perfectly smooth surface of the tin.”
The heat, though less than that at the open furnace, was rapidly becoming unbearable. Hoffman led his entourage farther into the plant. “God, this is hot! When do you shut it down?”
Culpepper shook his head. “Never.”
“Never!”
“Shut it down and the walls’d break up. Runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Furnace lasts six, seven years; then we rebuild it.”
It was Hoffman’s turn to shake his head. He was beginning to understand why the plant’s annual budget was in excess of $35 million.
“Now,” said Culpepper, “this is where the glass is stretched and sized.”
“What are those things? They look like anti-aircraft guns.”
“They’re tweels. They’re the robots that stretch and size the glass. A good bit of our operation is automated. More every year. Imagine by the time I retire most everything’ll be done by robots.”
In spite of himself, Hoffman was growing interested. Like many men, he easily became fascinated with machines that carried out automated functions. He could easily stand and watch by the hour as a machine carried out human, sometimes superhuman, tasks.
He became aware of a marked drop in temperature.
“Not as hot, is it?” Culpepper sensed his relief. “This is the annealing process. We relieve the stress on the glass by lowering the temperature gradually. The glass is cooling. But,” he added quickly, as he saw Hoffman approach the emerging thin, smooth glass, “you wouldn’t want to touch it yet. Still quite warm.”
Hoffman, hands now inserted in trousers pockets to avoid further temptation, stepped away from the glass.
A series of revolving cylinders conveyed the glass rapidly forward to a point where it was cut for the first time. The process was, again, automated. Two cutters, acting in tandem, were propelled alternately across the breadth of the glass. “Primary cutters,” said Culpepper. “Looks real simple, but actually they’re a little monument to engineering. Looks like they’re cutting on a bias. But what they’re actually doing is compensating for the movement of the glass through here.”
Hoffman initially found the cutting process engaging. Once again, he was drawn by the automation. Now, informed of this special technological achievement, he became engrossed in the operation. Gradually, he became aware he was standing directly in the path of one of the cutters. As the razor-edged blade raced repeatedly across the glass’s surface, each time it stopped abruptly and automatically, only inches from his navel. He looked at Culpepper with a challenging grin.
The manager correctly interpreted Hoffman’s smile. “Never fails. The blade’ll always stop at that precise point. Every bit of automated equipment we’ve got in the plant is monitored by fail-safe devices.” His smile exuded confidence.
Maybe, thought Hoffman. But he wasn’t convinced. As fascinating as he invariably found automation, he also firmly believed nothing was fail-safe. As long as humans were involved, and the thing was made up of parts, and Murphy’s Law remained ubiquitous, machinery would find ways to fail.
Hoffman could not identify what was making him edgy, but he could not deny the feeling. The incredible heat of the blast furnace; this automated cutter, which, were it to break loose from its arm, undoubtedly would kill him —everything seemed to contribute to his sense of nervous foreboding.
The group moved along the production line.
“These are the cord wood cutters,” Culpepper pointed. “Now the glass’s in rectangular shape. It’ll be cut one more time into the desired windshield size further on down the line. See? Some of the glass has already been broken or damaged. Well, these guys,” he indicated workers wearing heavy gloves and positioned on either side of the conveyor, “pull off all the spoiled glass and just let it drop down there, where another conveyor going in the opposite direction takes the glass back to the beginning where the cullet becomes part of the batch all over
