The smell of oil and hydraulic fluid and the particular metallic scent of machines being cared for. Garrett saw her first. He was a large man with a full beard going gray at the edges. and he looked at her with the expression of someone who knows exactly who she is and has a considered opinion about her already. Miss Whitmore, he said, not hostile, just factual. Mr. Okafor, she said, is Caleb here?
He's in the back. Garrett didn't move. Can I ask what this is about? I have a problem with an aircraft, she said. An intermittent electrical fault my engineering team can't locate.
We have a delivery deadline in 6 days. Garrett studied her for a moment. His expression said that he was weighing something. Not whether she deserved help exactly, but whether Caleb should be the one to give it to her, and whether that was Garrett's call to make. "He's his own person," Garrett said finally.
"You can ask him yourself." He led her through the workshop to the rear where a door opened into a smaller secondary bay. B. Caleb was on his back on a wheeled creeper underneath the elevated twin engine aircraft, visible from the knees down. His boots were the same worn pair from the hangar 4 months ago. There was a work light positioned beside him and she could hear him doing something involving a ratchet.
"You've got a visitor," Garrett said. The ratchet stopped, a pause. Then the creeper rolled out from under the aircraft, and Caleb looked up at her from the floor, which was, she recognized with a sharp and uncomfortable clarity, almost exactly the position she had first seen him in. She didn't laugh. Hey, he said.
Hey," she said. He sat up and looked at her without moving to stand immediately. There was no anger in his face. He just looked like a man deciding how to understand the situation he was in. "This is a work visit," he said.
It came out as neither a question nor an accusation, just a category he was establishing. "Yes," she said. "I'm not here about anything else." He nodded and got to his feet, wiping his hands on a rag from his pocket. "Okay, tell me." She described the fault. She was precise about it because she had spent the drive over going through the technical notes Howell had sent her.