Page 14 of I Will Ruin You
“You gonna say thank you?”
She shot him a middle finger over her shoulder. Seconds later she was behind the wheel of her Kia and gone.
He had the hood up on the Camaro, looking at the engine like it was the Sphinx. The air cleaner had been removed and was sitting on a nearby bench, exposing the carburetor. Billy, guided by a handbook on this particular model, had taken it apart and cleaned it more than once. He’d installed a new battery, changed the points and plugs, but still hadn’t been able to get the damn engine to turn over.
He heard tires crunching on gravel. Maybe Lucy’d come back, wanting more money so she could get some of that soy milk shit she liked or God forbid a pack of cut-up veggie sticks. He hoped it wasn’t Stuart. He needed a break from his friend today. Stuart was starting to be like that tiny dog Chester in the Looney Tunes cartoons, the one always running in front of the big dog, Spike, asking: “What do you want to do now, Spike? You wanna play ball? You wanna chase cars?” And Spike takes a swipe at him, knocking him off his paws.
There were times Billy wondered if Stuart’s parents dropped him on his head a lot when he was little. He spent half his time laughing at online videos of people walking into poles, stepping out into traffic, getting bit in the nuts by pit bulls.
The side door opened before he could get to it and it wasn’t Lucy or Stuart, although it was a man and a woman, standing there, silhouetted in the afternoon sun.
Andrea and Gerhard. Or better known, at least in Billy’s head, as Psycho Bitch and Butthead.
Gerhard, thirtyish, short and stocky and bald, looked like he would be the tougher of the two, coming in at two hundred and fifty pounds, with a hint of a snake tattoo coming up from under his shirt collar, big beefy arms under a shirt that was a size too small for him, but it was the woman who always set Billy’s teeth on edge.
Thin and wiry, probably close to forty, black eyes set against a dry, wrinkled face, with stringy hair that hung down below her shoulders, she struck Billy as someone who’d spent too much time catching rays on a beach or a prison workout yard. She had a small scar on her right cheek and one eye never seemed to open the whole way, like she was squinting.
This was not a scheduled pickup day. They’d been here this past Monday, so he had nothing for them today. He’d be taking their next shipment off the plane in three days.
“Hey, guys,” he said, moving toward them and extending a hand. “Sup? This is kind of unexpected. Want a beer or something?” Billy pointed a thumb over his shoulder at a mini-fridge resting atop the workbench. “Corona?”
“Not a social call, Billy,” said Gerhard.
Like it ever was. These two had always been pure business. Where’s our stuff, here’s your money, now fuck off.
Andrea was looking at him with those dead eyes, Billy half expecting them to blink vertically like some half-human, half-reptile thing in a horror movie. She said simply, “Billy.”
He nodded.
She asked, “You ever eat Raisin Bran?”
“What?”
“You know. Raisin Bran. Those flakes, they got raisins in them. You ever eat them for breakfast?”
The fuck, he thought. There was a reason he thought of her as Psycho Bitch. Asking shit that made no sense.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I guess I’ve eaten it.”
“Remember the song? A jingle, like.” She sang it. “Two scoops of juicy raisins in every box of Kellogg’s Raisin Brain.”
Billy just looked at her. Andrea took a step closer as she continued with her story. Gerhard smiled.
“When I was like fourteen I thought, is there really two scoops in every box? So I buy one, empty it out on the kitchen table, and pick out all the raisins. Every last fucking one.” Andrea grinned. “Guess what I found.”
Billy shook his head.
“There was like one and three-quarters scoops. What do you think of that?”
Billy shrugged and said, “I guess it would depend on how they define a scoop. Like, what’s a scoop? A cup? Half a cup, or—”
“I know what a fucking scoop is,” Andrea said. “It’s a scoop. Like those little shovel-like things at the bargain-bin store. And this didn’t have two of them. So I put all that shit back in the box and take it back the store and tell them I want my money back because they ripped me off and this dipshit store manager basically tells me to fuck off so what did I do?”
She turned her head, posing the question to her partner.
Gerhard put his index finger to his temple. “Tire iron.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Billy asked.