House Revenge by Mike Lawson Page A

you what,” DeMarco said. “Let’s just walk around and see what you can spot.”
    â€œOkay, but I need to get a couple things out of my truck first.”
    They walked a block to Boyer’s truck—a Ford F-150 with a crew cab—and from the backseat, Boyer removed two hard hats, one white and one orange. “You wear the white one,” he said, “since you’re the guy in the suit. The bosses typically wear white hard hats.” The other thing Boyer took from the truck was a rolled-up blueprint.
    â€œThe workers see a couple of guys walking around in hard hats, holding plans, they’ll think we belong,” Boyer said. “If anybody asks what we’re doing, let me do the talking.”
    They started touring the development, walking first over to where the commercial buildings—the corporate headquarters for the solar energy company, the hotel, and the office buildings—were being erected and in various phases of construction. There’d apparently been no Elinore Dobbs to slow down the other parts of Callahan’s project. Boyer was completely at ease walking around the construction site; DeMarco was worried about getting run over by a cement truck.
    â€œYou see those two guys up there, on the scaffolding?” Boyer said, pointing skyward.
    â€œYeah,” DeMarco said.
    â€œThe most common safety violation you’ll find on any construction site has to do with fall protection. You see that section of scaffolding there at the end? There’s supposed to be a safety rail on it, but there isn’t. And that one guy, he’s got fall protection, that cable coming off the harness he’s wearing. But the other guy should be wearing fall protection, too. OSHA makes it almost impossible to work these days as they require fall protection anytime you’re more than about four inches off the ground, and you can come out here any day of the week and find a dozen fall protection violations. A month ago, a construction company over in Everett got a three-hundred-thousand-dollar fine for repeated violations.”
    DeMarco smiled. “That had to sting,” he said.
    â€œWell, yeah, but you gotta remember that that was the fine the company got. It doesn’t mean they paid the fine after their lawyers got involved.”
    Boyer stopped again. “And all these cranes,” he said, pointing upward at the yellow construction cranes looming over the site. “Two, three times a year, you’ll hear about one of those things toppling over and killing someone because it wasn’t assembled or operated correctly.”
    â€œA couple years ago,” DeMarco said, “a crane working on the National Cathedral in Washington collapsed, and crushed a bunch of cars in a parking lot. But nobody got killed.”
    â€œ That time, nobody got killed,” Boyer said. “Which is why there are about a million rules these guys are supposed to follow when it comes to cranes, and about half the time they don’t follow them. They’re supposed to use load charts to figure out the crane’s boom angle. The crane’s not supposed to lift things greater than a certain percentage of its rated capacity. They’re supposed to conduct trial lifts before hoisting people up in a box. And on and on and on. A company I used to work with over in Framingham got a seventy-thousand-dollar fine for operating a crane too close to energized power lines. If I was to spend a couple days out here just watching the cranes I know I’d come up with violations because experienced operators think they’re too smart to have to follow all the nitpicky rules.”
    Boyer watched a crane swing a pallet loaded with bags of cement over a couple guys standing beneath it, then said, “Let’s go back over to Elinore’s building. I want to take a look at those three-deckers they haven’t torn down yet.”
    On the way back to Elinore’s,