wondered if there were Braille codes on the cartons corresponding to the colors.
These were the ones he wanted.
He followed the trucks—to another warehouse.
Different, this time, though. The warehouse belonged to a furniture moving and storage company. Tredel didn't like that. He didn't approve of their way of handling this. Surely that would be suspicious to anyone.
There was a small bar-and-grill around the corner from the warehouse. Tredel was there at noon, eating a sandwich and drinking beer.
When a burly man wearing a Tiger Moving & Storage apron came in and sat beside him, it wasn't hard to get a conversation going. "Sure, there's a job at Tiger. Plenty of them—Hamburger, Bob."
"I don't want to get into moving heavy stuff," Tredel explained. "My back."
The burly man nodded sympathetically, yet eying the bigness of Tredel's body. "Yeah, if you gotta had back, you gotta watch it all right. Other jobs, though. We do a lot of packing and wrapping. Specialize in it. Plenty of small, too. Sure, that's a big business with us, now. We can do it cheaper than most places can do it themselves. So they give us the business. We pack and wrap. Sometimes address and deliver, too.
"Just about everything. Machinery and electrical stuff and clothes and parts of airplanes. Sometimes whole airplanes—knocked down, of course.
"A lot of stuff, we don't know what it is. We get a lot of stuff that just comes in with color-coding on the cartons. All that stuff gets export-packed. Tropics. Sort of tin foil with cloth backing around the carton. Then Kraft paper. Then a layer of goo. Then wax paper. Then more goo. Then—O, different kinds of goo. Some of it for water-proofing. Some for whatchamacallit fungus protection. Some for other stuff, I guess.
"Then it gets an outside wrapping, and then big numbers are stenciled on it to be like the color-coding. If green-black-red-blue is on the carton we got, then we stencil 5026 on the outside. Then its on its way to South America, or wherever the stuff goes."
That was enough. Tredel didn't lead any further. Thanks, he'd have to go to the employment office and see about a wrapping job.
It wasn't hard to spot the boxes going out. They were all the same size, and had the big numbers stenciled on the sides and ends. Just the numbers were all he could see at the distance.
Higgenson was in the picture. Their trucks made all the pickups. Tredel would have wagered, then, that Higgenson knew as little as Tredel & Morton, or any of the rest.
The trucks picked the boxes up from Tiger, hauled them two-hundred-and-thirty miles, and deposited
