"Park along here," Ness said while they were still on Broadway, the smokestacks of the steel mill well in sight, smudging the black sky with gray smoke; a block or so down was the Dille intersection. At least several hundred strikers were gathered at the intersection, in the minimal glow of two lamp posts, blocking the way, banners and placards and flags in hand; cars were parked along Broadway, but not many. Most of these people had been brought in by truck or bus; others came on foot.

Ness, his natty brown suit looking freshly pressed despite the long day its wearer had put in, got out of the sedan and stood, keeping watch. Curry and Chamberlin got out as well; the sound of the strikers milling about was constant, like restless waves crashing up onto a beach, and screeches and crashes and metallic whines-like calls from strange birds circling that beach-drifted from the crippled but still functioning steel mill.

The mill was in a pocket of the Flats; to one side was the bluff, while on the other, the rocky, debris-strewn landscape was shared by train tracks and the winding, oily Cuyahoga and rotting, half-collapsed docks. An acrid, sooty smell mingled with the Cuyahoga's sickly bouquet. This was a clear if dark night made foggy by the mill's towering smokestacks.

Around a quarter till eleven, close to shift change, cars and several buses bearing nonstrikers began to make their way down Broadway to the turnoff; Ness stood out in the street a block and a half away, watching the activity, as the rumble of strikers' discontent rose into a roar, shouts and curses hurled like bricks at the vehicles.

But no literal bricks, Curry noted.

And the vehicles, though moving like a child through wet sand, did make it through the clogged intersection. The protesters made their point, but did not completely block passage.