Russ C (greasemonkey) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-12-07 00:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | !dc comics, *log, russ campbell, sam alexander |
Sam A/Russ C: Gotham
Who: Sam A/Russ C
What: Gotham, burgers, maybe no yelling?
When: Now-ish.
Warnings: It is Russ. So swears from the outset.
Gas-stations the world over were similar places. It didn't matter if you were in a fucking comic-book or you were living someplace real. This one was no different than the others even if it was run by the mob. Russ knew the mob the way everyone in the station knew the mob: by the well-cut suit and the way everything pissed itself into silence when he walked the building. He hadn't shown up, the boss, not since before the Batman had gone nuts and started killing the fucking bottom-feeders but the place was still waiting for him to do it.
It was loud on the inside. Bad music cranked up until it stuttered like static behind the shrill whine of machinery and bounced over bare concrete floor. There was laughter and the occasional jibe shot from one side of the shop to the other, but mostly the new guys - skinny, young, barely out of fucking high school - went to the front to pump the fucking gas and the old guys stayed in back and changed out hot parts for clean ones. Yeah, it wasn't a long-term situation. The money was good: hush-money, Russ figured, but he kept his mouth shut and his hands dirty and no one said a fucking thing and the money in the envelope at the end of the month didn't add up the way the tax man said it did, right? Some of the extra got paid straight into Marina's account and some of it didn't. Machines, bikes, cars: Russ knew this shit. He'd learned when he was young and he wasn't young now and he liked it, knowing the way engines ticked over, the way they purred like house-cats.
He was in the back of the shop, working on a truck that looked like it had gotten into a fight with a wall, ass-down on concrete and with a steady drip of oil down his wrist that was beginning to itch as it dried into the hair on his arm. Dirty denim knees and boots extended from beyond the rusting underside but the kids out front, they'd point the way if you knew one of the embroidered names on a shirt-front.