Chapter Three
Garrett
He spent the afternoon in a borrowed office on the second floor of the plant, with his laptop and the folder Cait Doyle had left with him and a cup of coffee that Dubowski's assistant had brought without being asked.
The coffee was better than he had expected.
He noted this the way he noted most things about a facility: as data.
The folder was thorough. He had worked with consultants who charged three hundred dollars an hour and produced less thorough work.
The infrastructure contract data was real, he had confirmed it by three-fifteen.
The retraining cost model was BLS-based as she had said and was, in fact, more accurate than his firm's standard model on comparable projects.
The margin error she had cited, eighteen percent, was actually nineteen point three percent on the two most recent cases he pulled.
He wrote that down. Nineteen point three.
At three fifty-eight he took his notepad and went down the corridor to the room Dubowski had offered for the four o'clock meeting. It was a smaller room, a working room, with a whiteboard on one wall and a table that seated six and no view worth mentioning.
Cait Doyle was already there. She had a different bag this time, a battered leather thing that looked like it had been through a decade of these meetings, and she had taken the chair facing the door.
She had a legal pad in front of her, half-filled with notes in a handwriting that was fast and legible in equal measure, and she was reading something on her phone when he walked in.
She did not put the phone down immediately. She finished the sentence she was reading. Then she set it face down on the table and looked at him.
He sat across from her.
"Nineteen point three," he said.
She blinked. One beat. "You went back to the source data."
"I always go back to the source data."
"On your own methodology."
"Especially on my own methodology." He opened his notepad. "The eighteen percent was a conservative figure on your part."
"I cited the average. The median was twenty-one." She turned to a page on the legal pad. "I didn't want to lead with the outlier."
He looked at her. She was not, he thought, someone who made many concessions to the room. The fact that she had made that one, choosing the more conservative figure to avoid appearing to overstate, was its own kind of information.
"The contract data," he said. "The Lake Shore expansion. The contractor who provided it, he's a member of the union here?"
"He's a member of the affiliated local. He bid on the steel supply contract. He didn't win it."
"So his company doesn't benefit from whether this facility stays open."
"No." She met his eyes. "He shared the data because he thought it was relevant. He's been a member for nineteen years."
Garrett wrote nothing. He was thinking about the press line, which he had looked at again after the morning meeting.
It was a Schuler press, German-manufactured, four-column, the kind of equipment that did not become obsolete in twelve years regardless of what the depreciation schedule said.
Someone at Meridian Steel had bought it knowing what they were buying.
"Who authorised the press line purchase?" he said.
Cait turned two pages on the legal pad. "James Kowalczyk. Plant manager before Dubowski. He retired eight months ago."
"And Dubowski inherited it."
"Dubowski inherited it along with the debt and the underfunded pension and everything else." She paused. "He's not a bad manager. He's been managing a facility that was already in trouble when he arrived."
"You're defending management."
"I'm being accurate." Her voice did not change. "I can tell the difference between a bad decision and a bad situation. The press line was a good decision. The debt structure was a bad situation. They're not the same thing."
He considered this. Outside, the light had shifted, the way it shifted in Chicago in November when the afternoon gave out faster than you expected, and the window above the whiteboard had gone from grey to something closer to dark.
"The partial restructure you're proposing," he said. "Sixty jobs cut, secondary line closed, retraining for the remainder. The timeline is eighteen months before the facility breaks even under the new model."
"Seventeen, if the first Lake Shore contract comes through in Q2."
"That's a conditional."
"Every business decision contains conditionals." She picked up her pen. "The question is whether the conditional is worth the bet. I think it is. You've done more speculative restructures than this one for less upside."
He had. He knew specifically which ones she was referring to because she had cited two of them in the margins of the folder.
"My partner will want a full analysis," he said.
"How long?"
"A week. Possibly ten days."
She wrote something on the legal pad. "I can have supplementary data to you by Friday. The full community economic impact assessment, the retraining cost breakdown by worker category, and the union's position on the pension underfunding. We have a proposal on that as well."
"Of course you do."
She looked up. Something crossed her face, quick and gone. It might have been amusement. "You say that like it's a criticism."
"It isn't." He closed his notepad. "It's an observation. You came to this meeting prepared to negotiate the pension as well."
"I came to this meeting prepared to negotiate everything." She held his eyes. "That's what I do, Mr. Knox."
"Garrett."
A small pause. "Garrett."
He stood. She stood. The table between them was not very wide, he noticed.
Three feet, perhaps less. She was shorter than she appeared when sitting, which was not a thing he would normally observe, but he observed it.
Her eyes were dark, darker than her hair, and she was looking at him with the same directness she had used since she walked through the door that morning, the directness of someone who had decided that the fastest route between two points was the truth.
"Friday," he said. "The supplementary data."
"By five o'clock."
"I'll be here until Saturday."
She picked up her bag. "Good," she said. "So will I."
She left. He stood in the empty room for a moment longer than was necessary and looked at the place where she had been sitting, the chair still angled slightly toward where he had been, the legal pad gone, the pen gone, only the faint impression of her focus remaining, the way a room held the shape of something after it had left.
He picked up his notepad and went back upstairs.
He had twelve calls to return. He made four of them.