Chapter 7
Charles Whitman reached with his mittened hand and gently massaged his left shoulder.
He’d slept on his side last night, and that always made the old injury hurt.
Whitman had grown up in Somerset County and worked his way through the University of Pittsburgh—Pitt—at a builder’s supply company.
A nervous eighteen-year-old, he’d gone to that long-ago job interview in a starched and ironed white shirt, a suit coat and tie, but the job foreman had never even looked up at him.
The grizzled old man with hands as big as shovels grunted, then said, “Just got one question, son. Can you drive a stick?”
“Can I …?”
“Yes or no, boy. Can you drive a stick?”
Charlie had learned how to drive in his father’s old Ford truck that had a manual transmission so cranky you had to sweet-talk the clutch just right to get it into third gear.
“Yes, sir! I can.”
“You’re hired.”
What he had been hired to do was to drive a delivery truck for the builder’s supply company.
That part hadn’t injured his shoulder. What had worn away and eventually destroyed the ball and socket was the second part of the job, which was to load the truck at the store and then unload it for the customers—which meant hauling 94-pound sacks of cement up the steps to the houses in Mount Oliver.
Eighteenth Street started down by the Monongahela River and went all the way to the top, and the houses along it had steps leading up to them—ten steps, twenty, thirty. At one house, he carried a sack of cement up forty-two steps and then went back down before he brought up a second sack.
Gratefully, he’d learned to drive a stick shift in the snow and ice of Somerset County.
It had always seemed to him that every time it snowed, he’d have to make a delivery that afternoon to some house on the top of Mount Washington, four hundred feet of hillside above the mouth of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, with the whole city skyline laid out below.
Charlie rubbed his shoulder again. He had finally had to have surgery, and the shoulder never functioned properly afterward.
While he was healing, he’d worked at Danny’s Hoagies in the evenings, and on the weekends taking tickets at Pittsburgh Penguins’ hockey games in the old Civic Arena, the Igloo.
That’s when he’d developed a taste for gambling.
He shook it off, didn’t allow himself to dwell on his years of gambling addiction, what it’d cost him. He went to Gamblers Anonymous now, hadn’t placed a bet in three years, but what he’d had to do to pay off his final gambling debts still haunted him.
The roar of the snowmaking machine below him rumbled in his ears, magnified by the hearing aids that Wilma had made him buy because she got tired of him asking, “What did you say?”
If she’d been sitting beside him, she’d have told him to “turn up the volume on your hearing aids” so he could hear her talking over the roar of the machines. She just didn’t get it.
In a noisy environment, like here with the snowmaking machines roaring, or in a restaurant with people talking and laughing and the clatter of plates and silverware, turning up the volume just made all the sounds louder.
He didn’t hear the gunshot. Probably wouldn’t have even with his hearing aids turned up all the way.
He felt it though, felt the impact when the slug tore into his chest. Just the pressure, not the pain.
The bullet went straight through his heart, and he was dead before his body went limp, slipped sideways, fell out of the chair and disappeared into a swirling white cloud of snow.