“I’m it,” he said, and suddenly, Ernie’s little tête-à-tête over donuts made perfect sense. There was no “I owe you.”
There was just “We do for each other.”
Those little bits of his soul he felt like he’d bought with those cans of olives fell in place like jigsaw puzzle pieces that had been shaken out of the lid of the box.
He handed Jai his keys, and while the giant ambled off, bearing a full-grown person in his arms liked anybody else would carry a cake box, he positioned himself behind the bench in the cubicle.
He spent the next few hours answering the phone, dealing with customers—there were three incoming, two outgoing, and one of the outgoing was gettingquiteugly about the cost of things.
“Is that what you people do?” the owner of the sports car that had almost been driven dry screamed in Ace’s face. “Just lay here in wait, like predators, hoping some poor motorist is going to need you and you can bleed them dead?”
Ace’s face went flat, like a snake’s, and he cocked his head sideways. At his belt, he kept a sheathed knife, one of the giantserrated folding types that had been, to Eric’s trained eyes, oiled and sharpened andloved.
Ace pulled that out and flipped it open with a click, causing the middle-aged man with the thinning hair to gasp and take a step back.
Then, as Ace proceeded to trim his cuticlesvery carefully, he gazed at the customer and said, using a voice that Eric had never heard before, “Sir, if we were going to bleed you dead, you’d be looking at your blood on the ground.”
The customer let out a shaky breath with a little “whooo” at the end of it.
“Now, you may not be able to afford the repairs you signed for. Youdidsign for them, remember?”
Eric fished the customer’s invoice from the pile of paperwork Ernie had laid out neatly on the counter, and held out the work order.
“Yes,” Kevin J. Walters all but moaned. “I did. But I didn’t expect it toreallycome to?”
“Sonny,” Ace said, with that affectless voice, “please tell this man how much we care about what he expects?”
And then, while Ace carefully folded his highlyillegalknife and replaced it in the sheath at his belt, Sonny Daye launched into one of the mostbeautifultirades Eric had ever heard.
“Mister, you took that piece of machinery and magic and you ran it dry in the fucking desert. I sweartachrist, every time I meet one of you people, I expect God to strike you down and boil your brain in your skull for being fucking morons, but most morons are at least grateful they can drive their fucking vehicle home. Not you, though. You come into my place, and you sign a goddamned work order and then pitch a fit like this? Better men than you are currently rotting out in the fucking desert, you fucking moron, but not you—you’re here givingmegrief for working my ass off for two days, like I don’t got shit I’d rather dothan smell your putrid fucking automobile? My dog took a crap on a dead scorpion this morning, and I care more about that dead scorpion covered in dog shit than I care about your fucking opinion, asshole, and another thing?Stop jerking off in your car!”
“I’ll….” The man swallowed back a sob, and tears were tracking down his florid face, while Eric stared at the slight foxy-faced young man who had kissed Ace like a tender lover, crooned to Eric’s special-needs kittens like they were his beloved children, and had just eviscerated a complete stranger with his vicious knife blade of a tongue, and was stalking to Kevin J. Walters’s red BMW Z4 with a wrench in his hand and some intent in his stride.
“Don’t hurt it!” Kevin J. Walters cried out. “I’ll… I’ll pay. I’ll add a tip. Just… don’t hurt my car. Jesus, I just want to get the hell out of here. I’ll never bother you again. I’ll never drive to Vegas again. I swear to Christ, you’ll never even remember my name!”
There was a surprise splatting sound then, and Ace’s expression actually changed.
“Sonny, leave off his car a minute. Our friend here wet his pants in the dirt outside the cashier stand.”
Sonny turned to stare at the man. “I’m going to go get a shovel,” he said, “and if you don’t pitch that puddle of piss out into the desert, I’m going to beat you to death with the shovel, do you understand?”
“Yessir,” Walters wept. “I understand. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll?”
“Whatever,” Sonny said, looking like his stomach hurt. “Ace, could you get him the shovel? I’ve got to work on another fuckin’ car or he’s gonna tread on my last fuckin’ nerve.”
“I hear ya, Sonny,” Ace said. He already had the shovel in his hand.
It took Walters ten minutes to clean his own mess, still wearing his soiled slacks and squelching in $500 leather shoes. By the time he’d finished, paid—and yes, he added about $1000 as a tip—and driven off, sobbing, it was nearly six o’clock, and the desert was starting to close on itself, a chill setting in the air.
Eric filed the work orders and the receipts in a little folder marked with both before locking the cash, first in a lockbox, then in a safe under the floorboards of the cashier’s cubicle that Ace opened for him.
There were several weapons in the cubicle, one of which looked like a personal military-grade sidearm with a shakySetched into the leather.
Well, Eric had been stepping warily around the little man since that outburst—he could see why maybe locking Sonny’s arms away underground would be a good idea. His tongue alone was dangerous as it was.
“You want to come inside and eat?” Ace asked. “I’m not sure what Sonny had planned for dinner, but—”
“I’ve got food,” Eric heard himself saying. “I could… well, I was going to make bruschetta.”
