Page 10 of Roulette

I stopped at the doorway. The kitchen was larger than I’d expected -- commercial range, industrial fridge, a long stainless-steel counter running the length of the far wall. A woman stood at the stove with her back to me, one hand on a cast-iron skillet’s handle, the other reaching for a spatula on the counter beside her. She was maybe forty, maybe older, her dark hair pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, a faded Hades Abyss T-shirt tucked into jeans that had seen better decades. She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of my footsteps, gave me a quick once-over, and turned back to the skillet without missing a beat.

“You’re the one Roulette’s been hiding out at his place. Marcy.” She said it like a fact, not an introduction, though it was both. “Brazil’s mine, for what it’s worth, not that anybody around here bothers with the paperwork on that.” She handled the kitchen like she owned every drawer, every burner, every inch of counter space. I got the sense she’d earned the right to it a long time ago.

At the table by the window, another woman folded dish towels into neat squares, a basket of clean laundry at her feet. Younger than Marcy, or maybe just softer around the edges -- blonde hair cut short, practical, no makeup. She looked up when my shadow fell across the threshold, and her expression didn’t change except for a slight lift at the corner of her mouth.

“Becca,” she said, not looking up again right away, folding the next towel into its square. “I keep this place from falling down around everybody’s ears. You want coffee, it’s on the counter. You want to sit somewhere that isn’t sticky, that chair by Marcy’s your best bet.”

Marcy turned halfway, spatula in hand, and gave me a once-over that lasted about two seconds. “You eaten?”

“No,” I said.

Marcy nodded toward the counter. “Grab a plate.”

I hesitated in the doorway. My hands were still in my pockets. The blanket was gone -- I’d left it on Roulette’s porch -- and without it I felt exposed, like someone had taken away the one thing between me and the morning. The kitchen was warm from the stove, smelled of bacon grease and toast and the yeasty note of bread proofing somewhere under a dish towel. The familiarity of it caught me off guard.

I stepped in. “Can I help?”

Marcy kept her attention on the skillet. She slid the spatula under a row of eggs, flipped them in one clean motion, and reached for a cutting board on the counter beside her. Handed it to me along with a knife and three tomatoes from a bowl near the sink.

“Chop these. Not too small.”

I took the board and the knife and the tomatoes and found a spot at the end of the stainless counter. The knife was sharp -- sharper than any knife in my kitchen had ever been -- and the tomato flesh gave under the blade with a clean, wet sound. I started cutting. Wedges, then smaller, my fingers keeping the tomato steady while the knife did its work.

Becca reached for another towel from the basket. “Titan called this morning. They’re sending someone up from Mississippi next week for the parts run.”

Marcy grunted. “Which one?”

“Didn’t say. Probably Throttle. He likes the drive.”

“Throttle talks too much.”

“Everyone talks too much for you.”

A snort from the stove. I kept chopping. The tomatoes bled juice onto the cutting board, red and slick, and I wiped my fingers on the leg of my jeans and kept going.

“You think somebody should get out to that garden before the weeds take the tomatoes?” Becca asked. “Fox’s wife’s rows are still going, barely, but nobody’s touched it in weeks.”

“It’ll hold. Nobody wants to be the one out there pulling weeds in hundred-degree heat come July.”

“I’d do it.”

“You say that every year.”

The conversation moved around me like water around a stone. I chopped tomatoes.

Nobody asked me anything else. Nobody made a production out of my being there, chopping vegetables in a stranger’s kitchen at eight in the morning in someone else’s borrowed flannel. Becca kept folding towels. Marcy kept working the stove, calling out instructions without turning around -- watch the toast, hand me that bowl, not that one, the blue one -- like I’d been standing at that counter for years instead of twenty minutes. By the time the eggs were plated and the tomatoes were divided into three bowls, something in my shoulders had unclenched that I hadn’t noticed was tight.

It became a routine over the next few mornings without either of us deciding it should. I’d wake up, find whatever note Roulette had left on the counter, and end up at that picnic table outside his house with a cup of coffee, watching the compound come to life, before I wandered over to the clubhouse kitchen to see what Marcy needed chopped that day. Nobody questioned it. I didn’t examine it too closely either.

Chapter Six

Roulette

The wrench fit the bolt head on the third try. I cranked it clockwise and felt the threads bite, the metal giving just enough to tell me it was seated. The garage smelled like it always did -- motor oil and metal and the faint chemical note of parts cleaner. My knuckles were already dark with grease, and I wiped them on the rag hanging from my back pocket while I worked.

Beside me, Hornet was elbow-deep in a carburetor, his fingers moving through the disassembled parts with the confidence of someone who’d done it a thousand times and still enjoyed the puzzle. He hummed under his breath, some country song I didn’t recognize, and dropped a spring into a coffee can with a soft metallic ping. Across the concrete, Gunner was working a chain through a solvent bath, the links clinking against the metal tub until the sound started to sync with Hornet’s humming without either of them noticing.

The garage was one of my favorite places in the compound. Not because it was pretty -- it wasn’t. The concrete floor was stained with twenty years of oil spills and chemical drips, dark patches that no amount of degreaser would ever lift. The tool wall ran the length of the back, every wrench and socket and pry bar mounted in its place, labeled with black marker on masking tape that had yellowed with age. The mini-fridge in the corner hummed, a few crushed beer cans stacked on top of it like trophies. Workbenches along the side wall held parts in various states of assembly -- a cylinder head here, a transmission there, a stack of gaskets waiting to be installed. The air was warm and dense with the smell of work.