Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(25)
He kept walking through town. The last building was an old cinderblock structure with a simple fa?ade, a rusty steel roll-up door, and a tin roof. Another crisp hand-painted sign in the same green: ALBERTO’S REPAIR AND REBUILD. As Peter limped closer, he saw a small gravel parking lot with a half-dozen cars in a neat row with prices written on notecards taped to the inside of their windshields.
Inventory ran to Detroit steel from the sixties and seventies. He saw a ’71 Plymouth Barracuda with an aggressive green flake paint job parked beside a beautiful red ’68 Mustang that looked like a hundred miles an hour standing still. A GTO, a Charger, a Galaxie 500, all of them classic muscle cars and together probably worth half a million dollars if they were mostly original and fully restored. He ran his hand over the silky flank of a sky-blue Chevelle SS with a white hood stripe. Peter was generally more of a truck guy, but for a moment, he wanted them all.
This was what you could do with a few million dollars, he thought. Buy a lot of cool cars.
Then you’d need a garage to hold them. And someone to maintain them. And a lawyer to handle your speeding tickets. Before you knew it, your cars had employees, which didn’t sound like much fun. Not at all the same as finding an old car in a barn and restoring it yourself.
And none of these muscle machines were what he needed, anyway. He needed something less sexy, something invisible and reliable. He limped past the cars to another roll-up door set into the cinderblock side of the shop, this one open. Whitewashed walls, a raft of good bright lighting overhead, six repair bays with lifts, three of them occupied. Celia Cruz’s distinctive contralto purred from speakers in the back corner. He stood in the doorway but didn’t see anyone.
The white static crackled up his brainstem. He didn’t want to go inside. “Anybody home?”
“Gimme a minute,” a voice called out. Then a brown-skinned man with a long black and gray ponytail walked out, peeling thin blue gloves from his hands. Somewhere in his fifties, he had thick, hairy arms and a few days of stubble. He wore mechanic’s blues and steel-toed welder’s boots and wire-rimmed glasses with full-round earpieces hooked around big ears. “If you’re in a hurry, I prob’ly can’t help. I got about twenty good repairs ahead of you.”
“I don’t need a repair, I need a car.”
The mechanic’s face opened up in a broad smile. “Now you’re talking,” he said. “Those are my babies.” He put out his hand. “I’m Al. What do you like?”
He had the long fingers of a piano player, but the strong raspy grip of a plumber. The word “HERMANOS” was spelled out with crude blue tattoos on his knuckles, one faded letter each. Hermanos was Spanish for brothers. It was a word Peter had heard a lot in the Marines.
“I’m Peter, and I like all of them. They’re truly gorgeous. But I need something different.”
The mechanic looked startled at this radical thought. Who’d want to drive anything but a vintage muscle car?
Then he looked past Peter. “Hi, I’m Al,” he said, and put out his hand. “Are you with this guy?”
June had come up behind Peter so quietly he hadn’t heard her. But she didn’t shake his hand, and she didn’t say anything.
“This is June,” said Peter, before it could get completely awkward. “We had an accident.” Her fat lip had swollen further, and looked painful. She’d cleaned the blood off her elbow, but the many small cuts were vivid and pink at their edges. Her freckles stood out like reverse constellations in her pale face.
Al looked from June to Peter, and back to June. She was half turned toward the highway, waiting like Peter for the next black SUV. Then Peter felt a tickle at his hairline. His head was starting to bleed again. Al looked back as the first warm drop trickled down Peter’s forehead.
“Hell, you people look like shit,” he said. “Let me get EMS on the horn. We got a volunteer outfit in Redway, only take them a half hour or so.”
“No,” said Peter. “Please don’t. We’re fine. We just need a car.”
“Seriously?” Then the implications caught up to him, and he put his hand on the door. “Listen, go bleed on somebody else. I don’t need your trouble. Get out of here before I call the cops.”
“We won’t be any trouble,” Peter said, thinking of the Python .357 at the top of his pack. “We just want to buy a car. We can pay you. Cash.”
Al turned to June. She cleared her throat. She looked at the highway, then back to Al. “Please,” she said quietly. Just one word, but it held a lot.
The mechanic looked back at Peter. There was something substantial there behind the wire rims of his glasses. He was a serious man. Then he shook his head and sighed.
“I have one rule,” he said. “I learned it from my abuelito. Be honest, that was his rule. Always honest. And I expect the same from the people I do business with. Or I don’t do business. So tell me the truth. Who are you and what are you doing here?”
June was staring at the highway now. Peter looked, too, and saw a pair of black Ford Explorers, shiny and new and driving in close formation, turn off the two-lane to the secondary road, heading into the mountains.
Peter said, “Can we go inside? I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“You first, then her.” Al stepped back to hold the door as they passed, and closed it behind them. The shop was bright and open, but Peter’s chest tightened anyway. As the static began to rise, his muscles would begin to cramp up. Then he’d start to sweat.