Chapter 27

Dan and Tom were seated on the back porch drinking cans of root beer. It was getting close to dark, and the sky was filled with the colors of sunset. It gave the entire area a soft appearance. They were comfortable despite the heat of summer.

Dan turned to Tom and said, “I’ve just about got everything together for Parker’s Perfect Pizza. All I need to do is find a location and start the build out.”

“That’s good,” Tom said.

Dan said, “It’s hard, waiting; but I set up a schedule, and I’m going to follow it.”

“It must be hard to wait,” Tom said looking over at his friend. He thought about the article on taking control of your life. It had talked about there being a proper time to act. He said, “The surest way to miss a goal is to attempt to rush it.”

“I know. I’ve been meeting potential suppliers and a lot of them are pushing me to get started now,” Dan said.

“Which brand of root beer are you going to stock?” Tom asked.

“I’m talking about starting a business and all you want to know about is root beer?” Dan asked with a smile.

“You bet. You may have your priorities all screwed up, but I know what’s important,” Tom said with a crooked smile.

Dan laughed, knowing that Tom was joking about having his priorities all screwed up. He leaned back and crossed his legs. The sudden change in his work schedule had freed a whole lot of his time, and he was enjoying it.

He said, “This is the life. When I get the pizzeria going, I’m going to make sure that I get a couple of evenings every week to spend with friends.”

Tom patted his stomach and said, “As good as your pizza was tonight, I think that a lot of your friends will be coming up to where you work.”

“You liked it?” Dan asked.

He had set up the kitchen to make individual sized pizzas to find out how long it took to make them. Everyone had gone up to the kitchen counter and requested their personal blend of toppings. It hadn’t taken long to prepare their pizzas, cook them, and serve them. Tom and his father had both eaten two of them.

“I liked it a lot. Are you going to do that in your pizzeria?”

“Do what?”

“Prepare their pizza in front of the customer like that,” Tom asked.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Dan answered. It had been fun having his family point out the toppings and then putting them on the pizza. It had reminded him of how people picked the flavor of ice cream they wanted when visiting an ice cream parlor.

“You sure are confident in the kitchen,” Tom said. He was quiet for a minute and then said, “One of the professors at school was making an analogy between cooking, and chemistry. I had never thought about it before, but watching as you worked in the kitchen, it really struck me that he was right.”

“Interesting,” Dan said.

Tom said, “You’re really good at that. I noticed that you were really careful in how much cheese you put on the pizza. You made sure that each topping covered the pizza evenly. I was really impressed.”

“Thanks,” Dan said as a bird flew past. It was a scissor-tailed flycatcher. It looked like it shouldn’t be able to fly with those long feathers sticking out behind it.

Dan pointed at the bird and said, “Hey. I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“That has always been my favorite bird,” Tom said watching it land on the power line. In a few minutes it would be too dark to see it.

The hot sun beat down on the world below. Feeling a little out of shape, Dan groaned as he picked up another bundle of roofing shingles. His back was hurting, but he carried it up the ladder to the roof. The man in charge said, “Don’t bring up any more until I ask for them.”

“No problem,” Dan answered.

He climbed down the ladder and went over to his car. The sweat was pouring off of him. He reached in the open window of his car and picked up the bottle of water. After taking a long drink from it, he put it back on the seat. He opened the little book and wrote the number of bundles he had carried up to the roof.

He went back to stand by the truck to wait for the request for more bundles. As he expected, there weren’t anymore requests. He looked in the back of the truck and saw that there were six bundles left. Yesterday there had been seven and the day before that there had been five. These were the expensive commercial shingles.

Mr. Foreman drove up and parked his truck next to where Dan was standing. Getting out, he stretched and looked around. This particular site was the furthest from his office and the drive over had been a killer. Shaking his head, he walked over to where Dan was standing. He had been looking for Dan all week. Every time he had asked Donna where he was she had answered that he was on a secret mission. That announcement was always accompanied by a wink. Her behavior had confused him.

He asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m doing what you asked me to do,” Dan answered leaning against the truck with the shingles.

One of the men on the roof shouted down, “Start cleaning up this mess. Mr. Foreman isn’t paying you to stand around.”

“Yes, Sir,” Dan shouted back. He looked over at his boss and said, “I’d better get to work. It appears that my talking to you is costing you money.”

Mr. Foreman laughed and looked up at the crew at work on the roof. As he headed off to inspect the interior work, Dan hustled over to where the roofers had dropped the scraps and paper over the side of the apartment building. It took Dan thirty minutes to clean up the area.

Dan got back to the truck in time to watch it drive off. He counted the bundles and saw that there were six of them still in the back. After grabbing his bottle of water from his car, he went over to Mr. Foreman’s truck to wait for him to return. The apartment complex was a huge job with over five hundred units represented in it, and it wasn’t the largest job that Mr. Foreman had under contract to build.

It was about thirty minutes later when Mr. Foreman returned to his truck. Seeing that the roofers had left, he asked, “What in the hell are you doing toting bundles of shingles up to the roof?”

“Well, I noticed something a little odd in the books and decided to check it out for myself,” Dan answered.

“What did you find out?” Mr. Foreman asked.

“Gunter has been cheating you out of several bundles of shingles every day,” Dan answered running his hand through his hair.

Mr. Foreman frowned at that and asked, “How many?”

“It was six today, seven yesterday, and five the day before that. It looks to me like he’s doing the same with the felt. He left with an extra roll of felt yesterday,” Dan answered.

Mr. Foreman rubbed his chin and said, “You’re telling me he’s walking off with six hundred dollars of materials every week.”

“That’s what it looks like to me,” Dan said.

“How is he doing it?” Mr. Foreman asked.

“He picks up a bunch of bundles in the morning from the area where you store them. He then drives out here just like a normal day. They put up roof all day using the shingles off the back of the truck. Rather than return the unused shingles, he takes them home with him,” Dan answered.

“I estimated how many bundles would be required,” Mr. Foreman said. Frowning, he said, “I don’t see how he’s managing to do it without me knowing about it.”

“You round up by a couple of squares depending on how large the job is. For these apartments, you add in some for wastage. He’s walking off with the amount that you round up,” Dan said.

“How did you spot it?” Mr. Foreman asked.

“You order more than enough materials for all of the jobs. At the end of the job, you return the excess and get some money back. I noticed that he never had any materials left over while the other contractors that you have working for you always have some,” Dan answered.

Shaking his head, Mr. Foreman said, “How much do you think he stole?”

“Maybe two thousand dollars worth of materials on this job,” Dan answered. It wasn’t much compared to the overall cost of the job. He added, “I don’t know what he’s done on other jobs.”

Mr. Foreman exhaled loudly as he considered it. He could probably follow another one of Gunter’s crews and find them putting the shingles on a house somewhere.

Frowning, he said, “Let’s go up on the roof and check out the work.”

Dan got the ladder and held it in place while Mr. Foreman climbed up on the roof. Dan followed him up there. Mr. Foreman knelt down and examined the work shaking his head. He said, “It’s just barely up to code. I like a little more overlap on the shingles. There’s nothing worse than having to replace a roof when it starts leaking before the warranty runs out. Not only do you have to replace the roof, but you have to fix the water damage.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Dan said realizing that the crime could actually end up costing Mr. Foreman a significant amount of money.

“He’s cutting corners to get more leftovers,” Mr. Foreman said. He stood up and looked around at the job site. There was a reason why he tried to check every job site every day.

He sighed and said, “I’ve let this company grow beyond my ability to watch over it.”

“What are you going to do?” Dan asked.

He figured that there were contractors that were charging him hours for non-existent employees. That was an old trick and was very difficult to catch unless you counted the number of men showing up for a job and the number leaving every day.

Mr. Foreman said, “I’m going to have to cut back on the number of jobs I take next year.”

“Couldn’t you hire an assistant?” Dan asked.

Mr. Foreman looked at Dan. He’d hire Dan in a New York minute, but Dan wasn’t for hire. Even if he was, it would take a few years for him to learn the ropes. The one thing he knew was that he could trust him.

Sighing, he answered, “I would if I could find one that I could trust.”

“Yeah, I suppose you would,” Dan said nodding his head. He didn’t know who he would trust with a company this size.

Ann and Sally had been busy reading the material that Dan had brought over for them. They hadn’t exchanged a word in almost two hours. Looking up from the page she was reading, Ann said, “That woman is really smart.”

“You finally noticed,” Sally said looking over at her lover. It seemed to her that Ann’s use of ‘that woman’ had become a whole lot less derogatory since the time at the lake.

Ann sighed and said, “She definitely understands Dan.”

“You know, reading this did make me think about our relationship with him. We do tend to think about our needs a whole lot more than we do his needs,” Sally said. She was having a hard time figuring out what he got out of the relationship, other than sex. On the other hand, all they had to do was even hint that they needed something and he would do it.

“I know,” Ann said, “but the only thing he really worries about, is that pizzeria of his. I have no idea what we could do to help him out with that.”