“Oh, good.” Janet leaned toward her. “Now tell me what happened in the basement.”
Chapter Thirteen
Tony kept away from the community center all morning, messing around with paperwork in the office until he ran out of excuses not to do his job.
He drove the fifteen miles from Mount Pleasant to Camelot at a crawl. When he got there, the blonde was behind the desk, and Amber was nowhere in sight.
He found Patrick hanging sheetrock in the meeting room closest to the old part of the building, holding the panel up while a nineteen-year-old college dropout named Casey pounded in the nails.
Tony usually had Casey pushing a broom. He never gave him work that involved skill. The kid didn’t know his ass from apple butter.
“What are you doing?”
Patrick gave him a wry look. “Hanging rock.”
“Where are Rick and Matt?” Tony asked. His regular sheetrock guys had been scheduled to come in this morning.
“They didn’t show,” Patrick said.
“Neither of them?”
“Right.”
“Jesus. Did you call them?”
“No. Where have you been?”
“In the office.”
The sheetrock needed to get done by Wednesday, and Patrick had only three panels up. Tony and Patrick working together could have finished the whole room inside of two hours. Rick and Matt were even faster.
“How long you been at it?”
Patrick looked at Casey, and the kid shrugged. “I don’t know, since ten?”
Three and a half hours.
“Casey, you can take five. I’ll handle this.”
The kid handed Tony his hammer.
“Where are the nails?”
Casey pointed to a box on the other side of the room.
“What the fuck? Bring them over here. When your break’s over, go clean the floor in the aerobics room. Somebody’s been walking on it with dirty boots again.”
Tony took over pounding nails through the panels into the joists. It felt good to hit something. He’d spent the past two days filled with restless violence.
“Dude, where’d you go this weekend?” Patrick asked. “Cathy said she called you during the storm and you weren’t home. I called three times yesterday.”
“I was here during the storm. Working late.”
And I was home all weekend, pacing holes in the living room carpet like a caged animal.
His brother shifted beneath the panel, finding a better position for his hand. “You had to go down into the basement with the lights out?”
“Yeah.”