UN LUCKY

CHAPTER 5. TREY AND JULIAN

AT FIRST SIGHT:
It was a large buzzing factory. It had seen better days but it was still a place to be reckoned with  . It had one job, and it did it with excellence and pride.
'Rome and Whiters Seafood', was the largest crabmeat  producing factory in Virginia.  The  amounts of crab that were taken,still fighting, off of  oversized boats and steamed til bright orange, right there on the docks was unimaginable.   A lot of the process was done inside, where the fragrant seafood was gutted , salted, and canned by little old Asian women. Women who spoke barely enough English to communicate but plenty to produce millions of  dollars for the owners of the company. 

With a waded up kleenex Julian nichols mopped at  the large beads of sweat,  as they cruised down his forehead. He wanted to make his rounds quick like so that he could go back in side of his air conditioned office.
It was nearing 10 pm and the  night air was a peppery hot 98 degrees.
He had his list of duties down so deeply embedded that he could do it with blindfolds on. 
During the day his routine wasn't that complicated:
Make sure that the quality of the crabs being unloaded from the boats were up to their high standards.
Keep a record of amounts and numbers...boring, but necessary.
Make sure that the huge electric steamers pots weren't jamming or stalling.
Inside, at the back of the building was  the canning room where the ancient canning machine was.  There he had the  duty of quality control. Meaning the 30 or so people ,mostly women, weighed and canned the still warm meat. 
Assistant manager was his title but it was just fancy words for doing the shit that the actual manager didn't want to be bothered with.

On the nights when he had to stay late, which was often, he mostly just stayed in his office doing paper work.
Tonight was one such night.
"Max!", Julian yelled out over the hum of the steamers.
Max was  walking around on the docks overseeing  a small crew of 5.  The night shift just unloaded crabs from the boats, steamed them and put them in the freezer for the morning help.
Max was the supervisor and he took his job very seriously. Hell, the man had been working there since it opened 30 years ago. The short old Latino man had hair down to his butt which he always had fashioned into a braid down his back. Max was a man of few words and aged so gently that
no one knew just how old he really was. 
"Si.", he answered and lumbered over to Julian, leaning into him .  His peppermint breath wrestling with the cooked crab aroma that perfumed the dock. "What is problem?" he asked in his sketchy  English.
"No problem just need you to stay over like an hour because one of our boats is coming in late. Can you record the order and cooler it down?" Julian knew that Max was a bit of a power hog and would gladly oversee it.
"Of course I do".he smiled. His perfect white teeth glistened through the semi darkness.
Julian patted his back, in a 'good boy', kind of manner.
  That settled Julian went to his office to catch up on some paper work. 
This time of the night was usually pretty quiet. Since all of the laborers left at 6 pm after cleaning and shutting down the place for the night.
It was semi dark as most of the lights were off.
The area where the offices were was the exception. There was a room off to the side of the front entrance where some people sat on tall stools around a table that was several feet high littered with crab carcasses.  With the help of a sharp little tool they hand picked lump crab meat  for most of the night. Usually it was experienced workers that could produce well over a hundred pounds of pure shell meat each. The task was hard and tedious and if thick gloves weren't worn a splattering of cuts would make hands look like they had been run through a meat grinder.

As Julian neared his office he paused .
A light was spill out from under his closed door.
He frowned, certain that he had turned it off.  Bringing his key up to the lock he felt a chill run down his spine. It wasn't locked. Okay, he knew damned well that he had locked it.  He always did.
'ROBBERY!',  was the first thing that screamed out in his head. Instantly his head was pounding and heart skipping in basicly because he was in charge of the petty cash, which actually was far from petty.
  The company of course paid by checks but not the lump crab pickers. They got paid cash per pound at the end of each night. And that meant that there was a pretty penny kept in the safe.
Jules blood ran cold.
There was some one in there. Someone who wasn't supposed to be there.