Well, neither option was appealing.
Early mornings to the group were like a poisonous fog to sleep through. The only guy in the group who routinely woke up before eight a.m. was, ironically, the youngest of us. Zack, because he sometimes had classes around eight-thirty, would often wake up and have to make coffee and breakfast as quietly as possible. I’d heard the bitching about him grinding coffee so early; the thought always crossed my head was,“Then get your own damn place where you don’t have to worry about it.”
Unfortunately, such a statement, while perhaps true, failed to account for the fact that most of the boys didn’t feel financially secure making such a decision. Steele was one of them. When dating Tara, he’d worked as a bartender at one of the local watering holes. When she dumped him, it took about a month before he got fired for not showing up or having a piss-poor attitude when he did.
Maybe the remote possibility, however improbable, that he might get Tara back would be enough to make him show up and get his financial shit together.
And sure enough, about five minutes past seven, with the sun a finger or two’s width above the horizon, the sound of a motorcycle came closer and closer. As flat as New Mexico and its roads were, one could sometimes see someone coming far earlier than they would anywhere else in the country. But at the moment, I couldn’t see if it was Steele or not.
If it wasn’t?
Then either I had a Bandit on my hand or I had another fortuitous encounter with another biker. Maybe that guy with the Black Reapers cut.Once in a year type of deal. He’d have no reason to come back here. Not if he came from Albuquerque.
Fortunately, sure enough, when the bike pulled around, it was Steele.
He had shaved off his “Tom Hanks in Castaway” beard. I recognized him because of the tattoos on his forearms, not because of his face, which hadn’t been clean shaven in months.
“Shit, you really are getting it together,” I said with a chuckle.
“As if I couldn’t,” Steele said.
“This place doesn’t require much—”
“I didn’t shave so I could impress the Santa Maria gas customers.”
And Steele is in some mood this morning. Guess I would be too if I woke up four hours before I normally did.
“Come in,” I said.
I unlocked the store, opened the door, let Steele inside, and placed the key firmly on the mat where customers placed items to purchase.
“That, right there, that is your life for the next week at least,” I said. “If that gets lost, I get fired, and I kick your ass. Don’t lose track of it.”
Steele grunted at me, pocketed the key, and looked around.
“Everything you see here is really best thought of as just barcodes,” I said. “The only thing that really matters is to make sure you ID people who are not twenty-one, but honestly, as long as you’re not a fucking idiot about it, it won’t come back to bite you in the ass.”
“You have that much faith in me?” Steele said.
“Faith?” I said with a cocked eyebrow. “Or fear?”
Steele snorted and shoved me with one arm.
“Here, let me show you how to activate pumps. That’s the only other real tricky part of this. That, and, obviously, making sure you keep the peace.”
I took Steele behind the counter and showed him where things were when I heard it.
A motorcycle.
At first, it was just background noise, what was of no more notice to me than the sound of an eighteen-wheeler approaching. I paid attention, but I didn’t do so at the exclusion of training Steele.
And then the bike not only pulled up to the gas station—it parked right outside the shop.
“Bandit,” Steele growled.
“Unlikely,” I said with some naïve hope. “They hate early mornings like us.”
Still, I wished I’d brought a gun now.
