As one of my first jobs out of high school in the city that my college was in I started working at the docks. I didn’t do anything major, I never worked with the ships, loading, processing, or anything like that.
I am now aware after being told by friends that the practice at the dock I worked at isn’t really standard. Other than paying for shipping and loading you could also buy a shipping container, fill it with what you wanted, then pay to have it kept and maintained.
It was my job to work the desk at that part of the dock. I had only worked at the docks for about a week when he first came.
It was the first time I had seen him but as I was later told by my colleagues he already had a few containers on the site. He had ordered one and filled it and came to the desk to have it checked in.
As part of the procedure, he would have to provide a list of the items in the container, the sensitivity of the items in the container (essentially how fragile they were, if they were fragile then they would be put on the bottom but stronger items were placed on top of piles to save space), and the way the items would need to be treated.
The list of items only read a single line, “1981 DELOREAN DMC-12.” In the section for sensitivity, there were five boxes, rating from one to five, one being extremely strong, you’d have to completely destroy the container, and five being if it was even dropped six inches everything inside would break, normally for cars, people would say two to three but instead, this man put in his at five. This didn’t really alarm me, maybe it was just a precious car to him, so I just ignored it. And for the treatment procedure section, he simply put “do not open container, keep away from the edge of the dock.”
Once all of his paperwork was confirmed I notified Jim (our crane guy) to bring in the man’s container. Once it was inside but before it was to be sorted and the man could leave I had to open the container for a “confirmation check,” basically just checking to make sure all items listed were there and there weren’t any animals or extra items.
I just swung open the doors, saw that Delorean sitting there, strapped down to the middle tightly, closed it, and gave Jim a thumbs up after attaching the form to the side. I went inside and told the man that his container was being sorted and he was free to go.
It wasn’t till this point that I got a good look at him. Every other time I looked at him I was too busy trying to get forms in order or calling people to just stare at him for a moment.
He was wearing a green turtleneck with a multi-colored sweater over it and a pair of yellowish-khaki corduroys. He had dark hair and a vaguely attractive face but his eyes were something else. They had this piercing gaze to them, when he looks into your face it felt more so he was staring at the wall behind your head as his eyes refused to focus on me.
He was kind of creepy but his polite and kind attitude made me feel bad for reacting mentally that way to him. His voice was kind of mousy and submissive in nature, it gave almost a calming effect as his speech felt so non-threatening.
He would come back again every little bit to drop off a new container, it was always a car, he told me he liked to collect old luxury cars because they reminded him of home. I eventually went through all his files out of curiosity and found out that he had seventeen different containers on the dock. All of the had similar paperwork, five sensitivity, and instructions to not open them, the only difference was that each had a different car listed.
He paid each of the container’s bills separately and all was well until around a month after I started working. He had accrued a total of three thousand dollars or so in missed bills to one of his first containers.
It was the protocol that whenever a container passed that threshold then it would be opened up and contents be sold to make up lost funds. Luckily, like all the others, this container was marked as a five for sensitivity so it was on the bottom of its respective pile.
I took a skeleton key we have for all of our locks and went to go open it up. When I got there and popped open the door a sudden stench hit me like a pound of bricks. I covered my nose and doubled over for a moment.
I wandered in to see where the source of the stench was and it took me to the trunk. I figure something got in there and died but when I clicked it open I didn’t see much of anything. It was a rotted pile of mush, that was until I reached into it with a quivering hand and pulled out a bone, a jaw bone, a human jaw bone.
I ran out dry heaving and called the police. They showed up and I told them everything. I gave them the key and they went through to open every container. In each of the cars was a small pile of bodies, dating back over five years. I sat traumatized in the office as they pulled each body from their metal tombs.
I sat and watched, they pulled twenty-three bodies out that day. It would’ve been twenty-four but I saw as they pulled someone from a container he had bought just a day before. I didn’t bother checking that one as it was like the fifth one I had done so I trusted his word. A woman was still alive in there. If I just looked I could have seen or heard her.
They arrested him just a few hours later, and then I handed in my resignation and moved cities. I’ve had to go to therapy since, I haven’t been able to look at old cars the same since.