Russ was working the graveyard shift, the one all the guys who had families and girlfriends at home to yell profanity over burned dinners and Memorial Day plans, didn't want. He liked it. He wasn't buddy-buddy with any of the guys at the shop here, no Mexicans to commandeer the radio and to teach him how to cuss a blue streak and who checked out women, long and lazy with a string of chatter no one fucking listened to anyway. He missed it, the way he missed the background noise of the TV when the house was quiet, like he'd shoved up and made room for it and now the space was there whether they were there to fill it or not.
He wasn't working on anything that made the shop money, but the shop paid him for being on the clock and available and the truck was parked outside, the Donovan name picked out in scratched white on dark blue. His bike was, too, but there was a beer bottle on the end of the work bench, dark green glass and red-and-white damp paper label, and Russ was periodically pausing in the clatter of metal and metal on an oiled cloth on the bench and reaching for the bottle instead. The radio was playing old rock, and every time the DJ settled into talk, Russ reached out to flick the channel so the radio was within distance.
He was sat on a stool with his feet hooked around the legs, and he was concentrating on the excavated insides of one of the cars propped open. The light was angled past the back of his head so when he looked up, old-familiar curdle of frisson and fear rolling over his stomach not unpleasantly at the voice interrupting his concentration, it was into the blare of light he couldn't make out, and he put up a hand to block his eyes.
He expected heels and war-paint. Marina pissed, in the calculated, pretty-poison way she chose to draw blood. But he forgot that as he eyed the kid on her hip like a man who'd just completed bomb disposal training might regard the advanced version; with trepidation and a whole lot of dry-mouthed doubt. Russ had been angling to meet the kid for longer than five minutes for months - a little without venom, interrupted and set off kilter by the needs of the business that had him driving out to trade cash for packages that were kept in the garage under the dubious nominer of 'spare parts' for people who turned up looking nothing like mechanics. But he expected to do the McDonalds thing. Show up, buy a cheap meal stuffed full of sugar, feed the kid and return him having had the opportunity to study him at arm's length, see what made him tick outside the sinuous slink of Marina's orbit.
"No," he said immediately now, before Marina crossed the invisible threshold of the outside of the garage to the back with the workbench. "What the fuck are you doing?"