James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-10-18 17:28:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | echo bishop, james hutchins |
Engine Trouble
Who: James and Echo
What: Roadside assistance
When: Present, Morning
Where: Between Searchlight and Cottonwood Cove
Rating: Low
Echo had a good night’s sleep after Derek left and she shut the lights out for the night. She’d thought the beds at the El Rey would be uncomfortable given the modest rates they charged, but she’d slept surprisingly well given her uncertain situation. She could still feel the slight weirdness, but even that was at a low enough frequency that she didn’t mind it.
In the morning, she listened to the news while getting dressed, put some of her clothes in the chest of drawers that supported the television. Searchlight didn’t have a newspaper of its own, but she’d found a copy of the Las Vegas Sun that was only a day or two old. She’d marked the classifieds, was considering pricing the rent on a trailer, maybe looking for a job to tide her over as far as money went.
Breakfast in the diner involved eggs and sausage with a large side order of hashbrowns, and the Were decided to drive out to Cottonwood Cove for the day after discovering that there was a laundromat in town. She returned to the room long enough to toss the paper onto the table next to the window and get her keys.
The road was lightly occupied, the day clear and a little cool. Echo fiddled with the radio until she found a country station she liked, rolled the driver’s side window down.
When the vehicle started to make a rattling noise under the hood, she took her foot off of the gas a bit. As an older model, the truck sometimes made noises, and while she had some understanding of engines, she didn’t have enough to work on it herself. She glanced in the rear view mirror, slowed more as the rattling got louder. Echo smacked the dashboard, the noise of flesh against molded plastic louder than the sound of a Brothers Osbourne song.
She managed to ease the vehicle off on to the shoulder, killed the engine. Sat there stewing for a minute before she got out, cell phone in her left hand. She’d seen at least one garage back in Searchlight, and she wasn’t that far past the town limits.
Next item on the list; learn more about vehicle maintenance.
A short while later, Echo’s ears would pick out the distant sigh of another vehicle traveling on Cottonwood Road. The driver of the Chevy C10 had his windows open, the radio on, and the visor down to cut the brilliant, still-too-early light that blazed from the eastern half of the sky. A cup of black coffee from the truck stop nestled in the nearest cupholder. The other pocket held a warm bottle of water he’d forgotten to drink the day prior. James had told his part-timer at the auto shop to keep an ear out for the phone, just in case the woman needed a tow, but based on her description of the noise, he’d narrowed it down to a few suspects and they weren’t that far from Searchlight. They might be able to nurse her truck back onto the road. After getting the make and model of her truck, he put some supplies in his floorboard and went to meet her.
James pulled into the dirt behind her and cut his ignition. Outside the cab, the landscape was a bleached yellow-white. There was nothing to see for miles but spotty vegetation and the low profile of Searchlight’s hills. He adjusted his sunglasses, pushed back unruly hair, and got out, slowly approaching a woman with freckles. “Echo? I’m James, we spoke on the phone.” He gestured over his shoulder, either pointing back to town or a time in the recent past. It was a good idea to identify himself quickly. Anybody could walk up in a charcoal-gray t-shirt and worn jeans, claiming to be useful.
Echo was sitting on the tailgate when the other truck pulled up behind her, sketch pad in her lap. The day was so bright that it threw the cacti and scrub into sharp relief, and she was taking advantage of the clarity to draw a patch while she waited. She was just finishing a group of spines when the male voice called to her, and she put her charcoal down on the thick white paper before looking up.
“Hi, James,” the Were said, and her shoes kicked up dust as she hopped off of the tailgate. Put her sunglasses back on before adding, “The truck’s due for inspection next month, so it’s probably just as well this happened now. Hopefully it’s nothing fatal.”
A broken down vehicle and a brunette with a sketch pad. Not an unfamiliar scene. James wondered if Echo had as much natural suspicion of mechanics as Rhiannon did. “Will it start?” He pointed at the hood. If he could listen to it run, he’d have a better idea if it was something he could fix on the road or if it needed to be towed in for repair. He began walking towards the front of the vehicle, giving the exterior of it a onceover as he went.
James stood near the front bumper. The truck had out of state plates, so either she was new in town or on vacation. As the sun beamed onto the back of his neck in the calm morning air, he felt the first stirring of sweat through the cotton shirt. “Pop the hood for me.”
The brunette got back behind the wheel, leaving the door open as she hit the lever to lift the hood. The Ford’s engine made a cranky noise as she twisted the key in the ignition, but it turned over. Echo snagged the water bottle on the passenger’s side, stood next to the truck while James looked and listened.
“There’s a lot of nothing between here and the Cove,” she remarked after a minute. “If it had to happen, better during the day before it gets really hot than at night when the temperature drops. It’s true what they say about the desert, there’s not much in between.”
James propped up the hood and stood off to the side, listening to the whirring of machinery, his left thumb flicking against his ring finger while he took it in. He looked up at Echo through the bug-splattered windshield. “You’d be alright for another month or so,” he said. It didn’t get too cold around there until late November, but how comfortable she was depended on her tolerance for it. He took off his sunglasses, set them on her windshield wipers, and ducked under the hood to inspect what he could from that angle, comparing what he heard to what he saw and what she described on the phone. Then he came out again. “You can cut it,” he said, wanting to turn it off before the engine got too hot. He headed back to the truck to grab his tools, his coffee, and a couple of small, paper boxes, which he set down alongside her front left tire. He spent another couple of minutes looking around under the hood as the car began to cool again.
“Alright.” James wiped his hands on a shop towel. “That popping when you accelerated,” he said, “I think it’s a spark plug. It’s an easy fix, I can change that out here. When you bring it in for inspection, we’ll look at your fuel filter, just to make sure it’s not clogged. Sometimes it can make your engine misfire. The grinding you heard when you turned the key in the ignition? That’s your starter. Depending on how bad it is, we can replace it or rebuild it. We’ll worry about that when you come in. You can see how much it costs, decide what you wanna do. There’s a decent mechanic I know in Henderson if you want a second opinion.”
James picked up his lukewarm coffee and took a couple of gulps. “Want to keep me company while I change this thing out?”
“Sure, okay.”
This time she closed the door, moved around to the front of the vehicle on the other side, away from the road. Put the water bottle on the front fender to look up the highway.
“I bought it because I was tired of the bus,” she said, one hand touching the raised hood. “Even a semi-rust bucket looks good after you’ve had an eight year old in the seat next to you whining his way across Texas.”
James made sure the surface wasn’t too hot to touch, then used a spark plug tool to twist and remove the first of them and inspect it for wear against a gapper. He smiled at Echo’s description. “I don’t have kids and I was an only child,” he said quietly. “I might have made an impulse buy, too.” A smudge of automotive dust and grease dirtied his forearm. James didn’t pay it any mind. “I like old things. Easier to fix. Built solid.” He took a wire brush from his box and cleaned the area before putting the plug back into place.
Another vehicle came up the road, going in the direction of the cove. It was a motorcycle. James straightened to watch it go by, raising two fingers in greeting, the way people did in small towns. The magic user watched the leather jacket shrink down to nothing before he went back to what he was doing, taking a second to calmly wipe his temple on the shoulder of his shirt. “You thinking of sticking around?”
James looked at Echo with open curiosity. He was thinking of Brian’s group text. The werewolf had said something like, ‘OK to add Annie and Echo,’ if anybody knew their numbers. Nobody had. He didn’t know why or how Echo was connected to things, but it had to be the same woman. How many new people named Echo could there be?
“For a little while, anyway. I came out to Nevada to look for somebody, haven’t made much progress.” She returned the scrutiny in kind, the noise of the motorcycle dwindling down to a buzz before fading out altogether. He was probably local, or if not local then he’d lived in town for a while. She lifted the water bottle to her mouth, took a short drink. “You get caught up in all that craziness the other night? Night of the living dead petting zoo.”
From his bent-over perspective, he watched her take a drink. So she wasn’t prone to selective amnesia. That put her in the bucket of ‘a person in the know.’ The cords and veins in James’ forearms briefly appeared as he met some small resistance, then released as he turned the tool in a steady circle, freeing the object. “Yeah I was around.” He took out the spark plug and examined it. This one was shot. He set it on the ground by his things. “Must've been an interesting way to meet new people.”
James straightened and looked at Echo. She didn’t seem shocked by what she was talking about, not alarmed or incredulous. He turned the circular gapper tool between his fingers. So far as James knew, not a single person who was connected to his world had gotten killed or badly injured in the incident. A few of them had managed to kill things off; others hid people, but there hadn’t been a coordinated effort to link up afterward. “I guess it didn’t chase you off. You used to this kind of thing?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘used to it’, though I haven’t seen anything as weird lately.” If pressed on the subject, Echo would have admitted that her upbringing had done a fair job of preparing her for The Weird. Her pack was close knit enough that they’d passed stories down from one generation to the next; battles won and lost, how the first born wolf had been the only one of his kind and roamed the earth alone until he found his true mate, that magic existed and depended on the intention of the caster. Even if some of the tales were greatly exaggerated, embellished until they bore almost no resemblance to the real events, there was more than enough truth for her taste.
“I was a little shook. I don’t get along with cats to start with, with a normal amount of legs. More than one head? Bad juju.”
James nodded and looked at the disc in his hands. He had witnessed that animal crawling out of the grave, smaller than the rest, but no less grotesque. The animals that he and Fern cobbled together by ritual were melded by proximity rather than intelligent design. “Well, I hate to tell you this, but that’s Clark County for you. Won’t be long before something else rears its head.” His eyes focused on the front fender beyond his hands. “I’ve been here since I was a kid, between Vegas and Searchlight. It’s always something.”
The mechanic took a new spark plug from a box and started the installation process, one that would continue while he checked the rest of them in turn. “Who, um, who are you looking for? You got a name?”
“No, no name. I was thinkin’ there’d be some kind of resemblance, or that I would just...know, or something. Like in here.”
Echo tapped the spot above her stomach, where she believed the soul rested. Her practical side scoffed at the idea of gut instinct, the unspoken knowing. But given the radio-static nature of Searchlight, there was every possibility that could do something to affect things. “Momma had pictures, but she burned ‘em, I think. She’d rather I let sleepin’ dogs lay where they are. I guess I don’t blame her.”
Now that struck him as strange. James came back out of the confines of the truck and watched Echo touching her diaphragm. His father would have called it a spiritual muscle, a place associated with one of the chakras. “Wait. You came to Searchlight looking for somebody, but you don’t have a name or a picture?” Maybe it was her dad she was searching for. He found himself taking a moment to study Echo’s features, searching for familiarity in them, making a mental comparison to the couple hundred people who lived in that small town. In five years, James had laid eyes on them all, either at the auto shop, the diner, the bar, or the general store. He made it a point to know everybody, at least on a surface level.
Again, he caught himself wondering why Brian trusted her to be part of that group text.
“Let me ask you something. How do you feel about magic?” James bent down and set the metal tool in the box.
“Why?”
Echo’s arms folded over her breasts - a little protective, a little defensive - and she returned the new scrutiny just as sharply. Could feel her back wanting to arch, her shoulders trying to pull back, her Alpha genes wanting to assert themselves. She pushed the instinct down. James didn’t seem harmful to her, just inquisitive.
“I believe in witchcraft, if that’s what you’re askin’,” she said after a minute. The day was starting to get hot around them. She drank more water. “Magic can be bad or good, depending on where your heart is. Like...like a dowsing rod for the soul.”
James wasn’t going to touch that with a ten foot pole. He picked up a rag and wiped the gray smudges off his hands and forearms. “Because the right spell can locate just about anybody,” he told her, working at a stubborn spot on the inside of his wrist. “Especially if you use a drop of your blood, but even that’s not a requirement.” He reached around the hood to retrieve his sunglasses but he didn’t put them on yet. “A small amount of magic can pin down someone’s location on a map. Compare it to the internet and you might come up with a name. Go a little deeper, channel the right thing, and you could probably come up with an image. Just depends on how far you want to go.”
He noticed the crossed arms.
“I say you, but I mean a magic user. Which is what I am.” James picked up his cup and drank some of it.
Her expression blanked, was wiped clean of expression for a moment, and then an odd little half-smile touched her mouth. And maybe she should think about it. The only information she had so far was that her unknown sister was no longer in Oregon, and she didn’t really want to explain to James about her Wolf self. Not standing on the side of the highway with her truck being semi-resurrected. Maybe later.
“That’s probably not a bad idea,” she said, and her arms unfolded so that she could tuck her hands into her pockets. “I did kind of come out here without a plan, and with all the general weirdness I lost even more of the plot. Gut instinct is fine when you have some kind of direction, but I really…..don’t.”
“I can help you, if you want. I’m better at magic than I am at cars, and I’m not bad at cars.” James put on his sunglasses. He didn’t like to break eye contact when he was trying to establish trust, but the light coming off the landscape was intensifying. “Full disclosure, I’m offering because Brian mentioned the name Echo. I know him from the bar. Otherwise I wouldn’t bring up magic in the middle of a service call.” James smiled.
“Oh, right.”
Her posture relaxed several notches at once, and she said, “Yeah, Brian seems like a good guy. We met after that whole mess with the animals, exchanged numbers.” That meant he was probably already clued in about Brian’s status, so even if he didn’t suspect her, they’d have to clear the air sooner rather than later. Echo held her water bottle up to eye level, checked how much she had left.
“Since it looks like I won’t need to get a tow truck here, we could set a time when I get back from Cottonwood Cove. At least if you think it’ll make it there and back.”
James nodded. “Yeah, let’s do that. You’ve got me curious, now. I’ll give you my number. It’s not a bad idea to know who you can call out here.” It was like Shimmer said in the bar: it was past time to use magic for something good. Besides, he had a vested interest in figuring out the way things connected in this town and why.
He went into his back pocket for his wallet and dug through it for a business card from Curiosities, the street address one in downtown Las Vegas. He used a ballpoint pen to write his number on the back of it. James held it out for Echo. “Want to start it up, see how it runs?”
She took the card and put it in her pocket with the loose change and the folding money she’d brought along before setting out. Jogged around the other side of the truck to climb behind the wheel to turn the key where it was still in the ignition. And while it didn’t exactly purr, there was no annoyed sound before the engine turned over. She gave James a thumbs-up through the windshield, shut the Ford off.
“How much do I owe you?” she asked through the open window.
James quoted her the price for the spark plug and the gas it took to get out there and back. If she ended up having to replace the fuel filter or starter, she’d be digging deep enough in her pockets. He lowered her hood and let it snap into place.
“Shoot me a text when you want to find your family,” he said, talking to her through the open window after he gathered his supplies and shut the toolbox. “If you’re nervous, you can ask around. Most people around here know me.” He had used a spell to locate every white hat in Clark County, without so much as a name. This ritual didn’t seem like a stretch.
James looked into the empty contents of his coffee cup, thinking he ought to try a bottle of water and some food for a change.
She handed him some cash, put the empty water bottle in the plastic bag she used for trash. She would have to try and get online, look for the garage he’d mentioned. Just in case.
“I’ll drop you a text when I get back. Thank you, James. For the help and the offer.”
Was she nervous? A little, if only because of the blood that would be involved. But nothing good could come from a bad heart, and James didn’t seem to have one of those. She gave him a wave and a beep of her horn as she pulled the truck back onto the highway. Reminded herself to fill her bottle for the trip back when she got to the Cove, maybe even check into the possibility of renting a boat for the day.
It probably couldn’t be much more expensive than auto repairs, right?