Crazy Like Fox by Michael P. Thomas

Author:Michael P. Thomas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Ryan was clanging around in the kitchen at the crack of dawn, guzzling coffee like it was his job. Using every pot and pan in Tennessee, he whipped up a hangover-smashing breakfast that would have shamed even the Sunday buffet at any hotel in Vegas. Bacon, sausage, potatoes, eggs, and grits swimming in cheese, biscuits, waffles, even fried chicken, and we were still on the road—with a Cambro travel thermos of coffee and a “doggie bag” that barely fit in the trunk—by nine.

We drove Ryan the mile across town to work at the Shell station, where he convinced Thumper to pop the hood for a quick check-up.

“Didn’t you hear that clunk-clunk?” he kept asking us. We shrugged, Thumper apparently as savvy about cars as I. Our combined knowledge wouldn’t fill a thimble, and Ryan lamented as much.

“Really? You two are driving across the country together and you don’t even know how to check your oil?”

“I mean, I guess I know how,” I felt compelled to defend myself.

“Well, it looks okay under there,” he conceded, letting the hood drop into place. “I put some water in your radiator. You didn’t smell that?”

“Smell what?” Thumper asked, setting Ryan’s eyes to rolling.

“But everything’s fine, right?” I asked. “It’s a rental. All we really care about is getting it to Seattle, preferably in one piece. If it’s tore up when we get there, we’ll let Enterprise worry about it.”

He rolled his eyes again, but he laughed. “It looks alright. Just promise me that if flames start shooting out from under the hood, you’ll pull over.”

“Is that what we should do?”

We passed another round of laughs, kisses, heart-felt vows to keep in touch. “Thanks for everything,” I said, slamming my door.

“We’ll do it again next time you’re in Alyson Forest,” he said with a wink, and Thumper hit the gas.

We swerved our way back onto the highway with a pert little honk at Ryan’s hulking, waving silhouette, and set our sights firmly on Sioux Falls, nine hundred miles thence. An ambitious driving day, but we were fed like farmhands, hopped up on caffeine, and Thumper was riding high on the memory of his coronation as King of the Strippers the night before, which had netted the gas money to drive a lot farther than Seattle. Sioux Falls was still a fur-piece, as John had said, but at least it was on a quadrant of the map that included references to Washington, and I told Thumper that if we couldn’t avoid Iowa altogether, we needed to fly through it in as close to a straight shot as possible. If he insisted on driving me through it, I’d follow along, but I’d gone to lengths to avoid anything like a return to Iowa, and the only way I’d sleep there would be if someone hit me over the head with a baseball bat.

“That was fun last night,” Thumper said as we settled in, shooting down a straightaway towards the horizon.

“Yeah, it was,” I said. “Sure looked like you had a good time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.