Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

Might as well wait there as here, he thought.

He’d closed the door to his office and turned to lock it, and he was standing with his keys in one hand and a beer in the other when he heard the car pull in.

Son of a bitch. There was business after all.

He left the keys in the door, set the beer down on the step, and walked toward the gate as a young guy stepped out of a Jeep and gazed at the place. That wasn’t uncommon; teenagers were always coming around. They were young enough to still have an interest in working on their own cars, and they didn’t have the money for new parts.

“Come on in, but don’t forget it’s gettin’ on toward closing time,” Sam hollered.

“It’s not even four thirty.” The kid said this in an amused voice, not confrontational, but still, it riled Sam. Who gave a damn what a kid thought closing time should be?

“Like I said,” Sam told him drily as he picked up the PBR can. The kid watched him and then smiled, like he’d just learned something that pleased him.

“I don’t want to impose on you, sir. I can tell you’ve got better things to do.” This was smart-ass, but he plowed on past it so fast that Sam didn’t have a chance to retort. “I’m just doing my job, which requires hassling you about a couple of cars that you towed in here from up by Hammel College a few days ago.”

“Shit.” Sam drank more of the beer. He was tired of those cars from the college. They were costing him more in headaches than they were worth in dollars. “They send you to take the pictures?”

The kid cocked his head. “Did who send me?”

“The gal I gave the phones to, she said she was coming back for pictures.”

The kid didn’t move his head, didn’t change expression, didn’t so much as blink, and yet Sam felt a strangeness come off him like an electric pulse.

“Who was this?”

“I don’t remember,” Sam said, and that wasn’t a lie. He was always awful with names and even worse when he wasn’t interested.

“Police?”

“Insurance, I think. She gave me a card.”

Sam drained the beer and shook the empty can with regret, and he was just about to tell the kid that he had an appointment with a slice of pepperoni pizza when the kid said, “You like whiskey?”

Did Savage Sam Jones like whiskey? He almost laughed aloud. It had been a number of years since he’d heard that question. He was about to shout back, Does Hugh Hefner like big tits? but then he recalled his business decorum. That and the fact that Hugh was dead and this kid might not have the faintest idea who the man was or why glossy magazines had ever been needed. The damned internet had spoiled these kids.

“Does the pope shit in a funny hat?” Sam asked instead, figuring even a youngster could follow that old gem, and the kid grinned as he approached. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder and he didn’t look like any trouble. Just lazy, that was all. You could tell that by the way he dressed, way he moved, everything. All these damned kids were lazy now, though. If he was here looking for car parts and asking about whiskey, why, he couldn’t be as bad as most of them.

“I’ve got a bottle I might share with you, then,” he said, and Sam squinted at him. This was more intriguing — and concerning. Was he some sort of street preacher? Was the whiskey a ruse entirely? If the kid got to carrying on about the spirit and the soul, that was not going to go well. It would go even worse if he was trying to sell some homebrew small-batch bullshit.

What he produced, though, was good old-fashioned American Jack Daniel’s. It was hard to argue with that. Granted, it was a higher-dollar version, something called Gentleman Jack, but Sam had seen it at Walmart and so he knew it could be trusted.

“What do you want, son?” he said. He didn’t mind the kid, and he surely wouldn’t mind the whiskey, but he also didn’t drink with strangers who showed up at five — well, close to five, anyhow — on a workday.

“Just a bit of your time. I can pour you a drink if you listen to me for a few minutes.”

Sam looked at him and then at the bottle, and then he pictured the pizza slices spinning their slow dance in the warming oven on the corner store’s counter. It would be twenty minutes at least until there were fresh slices in there.

“Who’d you say you worked for?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” the kid said, and smiled. “But I promise I’ll be less trouble than any of the rest of them.”

“Rest of who?”

“The people who are asking about those cars and the phones.”

“Son, I only towed ’em in here. I didn’t witness the damn wreck, and I don’t have the damn phone.”

“But there was a phone in the car?”

Sam wasn’t sure whether he liked this kid or not. He smiled an awful lot, but the smile seemed to belong to an inside joke, which was strange considering it was only the two of them here and Sam didn’t get the joke. “I don’t know,” Sam said. “Go call the cop who called me and ask him—”

“I don’t think we should call the cops,” the kid said. “I think we should have a drink and talk. Because you made a mistake, Mr. Jones. You shouldn’t have given that phone away to anyone who didn’t have a badge. She had to have been aware of the trouble she was getting you into, and you’re telling me she didn’t warn you?”

“Shit, no!” Sam was uneasy now, thinking of the number of phones he’d entrusted to the blond gal.

The kid made a disappointed sound and shook his head. “I know her type, all friendly talk, winking at you and then somehow leaving with property she doesn’t have any right to, and when the cops show — and they will — the cops will have heard an entirely different story than the one you were told. There’ll be petty charges, maybe, but what’s petty when it’s your own life and your business?”

Shit, shit, shit, Sam thought. Sam did not want to appear in court, and he said as much now.

The kid nodded sympathetically and said, “I think we can keep it from going that way.”

“You can? What’re you, my Boy Scout representative?”

The kid smiled. “You know, that’s not far off, really. I was raised to know what to do in the woods, that’s for sure. I can still start a fire in the rain.”

“All due respect, but I wouldn’t mind seeing your boss. Just to talk to somebody at the top, you know?”

“I’ve been involved in my father’s business since I was very young,” the kid said. “It’s a tricky line of work, and training starts early. I worked with my father, worked with my uncle. I know I look young, sir, but I assure you I know how to handle a situation like this.”

Sam thought he’d probably just heard gospel. Immature and lazy as the kid looked, he talked a mighty fine game, said the right things and said them firmly. And, hell, he was a worker. That mattered. Most kids these days didn’t show any ambition at all.

“More I listen to you, and the more I think on it, you’re right, it could get pretty bad,” Sam said. “Got one dead and one with no more brain activity than a head of lettuce, and you just know there’s going to be lawsuits coming out of that. Don’t matter that the Mexican hit them, he ain’t got no money, so they’ll find—”

“The Mexican—” the kid began, and Sam interrupted hastily.

“I don’t want you thinking I’m racist or nothing, it’s just, my understanding was that he was some kind of Mexican.”

“Correct,” the kid said with the barest hint of a smile, most of it lost to the shadows his black baseball cap cast over his face. “He was indeed some kind of Mexican, and now he’s the dead kind. He was murdered outside of Boston, I’m told.”