Page 9 of Brother In Arms

Chapter 3

Rush

I didn’t expect her to call the next day. I was pretty much balls deep in putting a new cat on an old Pontiac 6000 when Dray ducked back out of the office and held out the phone yelling, “Hey, Rush! It’s for you, man.”

I looked down from the undercarriage of the car above me and set my socket wrench aside from where I was putting the heat shield back up over the exhaust. I walked over and took the phone from him and turned my back on my older brother Archer’s curious stare.

“This is Rush,” I said into the receiver.

“You’re hired, you can start tomorrow,” a hard female voice that could only be Ms. Bailey Lynn Berling said through the shop’s old land line. I gripped the grease stained beige receiver a little tighter and thought to myself how I’d like to do bad things to her, bad things she begged me to do more of.

“What time?” I asked.

“I thought you’d been in this line of work before,” she said and I wanted to lay a hand on that ass. Pink it right up and knock the condescension right out of her.

“I have,” I said.

“Then don’t be late,” she said tartly and whatever phone she was on clattered and the call ended. She hadn’t answered the question, but she had at the same time.

I swore softly and Dray asked from behind me, “Problem?”

“Nah, I just gotta adjust my schedule… I have to be there early to start work.”

“How early?”

“Stupid early.” My VP raised an eyebrow and I sighed, “There’s the ass crack of dawn early, but this is earlier than that,” I said.

“Go back to the club then, rack out. I can finish up.”

“Naw, I just have to finish bolting on the heatshield and it’ll be good to go. You can call the customer if you want.”

“Right.”

He ducked back into the office and I finished the last few bolts needed to complete the job and brought the car down off the lift. I didn’t hear Archer come up behind me over the hiss of the hydraulics letting the car down and it startled the fuck out of me when he clapped me on the back of my coveralls.

I jumped and cussed him out while he laughed until tears collected at the corners of his eyes.

“What the fuck you want, man?”

“It’s a good thing you’re doin’ for Dragon and Dray’s family,” he said. “Still, I wouldn’t be any kind of brother if I didn’t tell you to be careful,” we said those two particular words in unison and he knocked his fist playfully into my chin as we said the rest in unison too; “and call me if you need a hand.”

“You miserable prick,” he added.

“Not my first rodeo,” I grunted and went around to the driver’s side of the POS I was working on.

“Maybe not, but it is your first horse race, and you know how these rich bastards can get crazy when it comes to money. They ain’t got a lick of sense with it.”

“Yeah, no shit. Should be mandatory each rich fucker comes up like they got nothing so they have some fuckin’ sense when they get it.”

Archer shook his head, “Wouldn’t make a difference, going that road just breeds a whole different set of troubles.”

I frowned and nodded, “Ain’t that the fuckin’ truth?”

“See you around little brother,” he said as I ducked into the crappy cage and pulled it out of my bay. I parked it, left it, and went for the degreaser for my hands. Clean up was a snap once I got my hands clean, just schuck the coveralls and switch out my boots from work to motorcycle and I was good to go. I pulled my cut down off its peg and shrugged into it as I crossed out from under the shaded bay into the full sunlight.

I took a deep breath, and the air outside the shop seemed cleaner and lighter than it had a moment ago, despite the fact that it hadn’t really changed. It was the same old mix of metal, grease, and gasoline that was pretty much a part of any automotive place you went. No, the shop hadn’t changed, I think I had. It felt like I’d just had one of those phone calls that changed my life.

I was always cut out for working with my hands, I just wasn’t cut out for working on cars. I belonged in a natural setting, with wood and growing things. Working with horses was something I’d taken to like a fish to water, and losing that had hurt. It was a stupid ass decision, losing my shit on that asshole, but he’d fuckin’ hit me first and had disrespected me something fierce before it’d even come to blows. He’d started shit, then hadn’t been able to handle it when I’d fuckin’ finished it, but still, it’d been my life that’d ended up in the shitter as a result.

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