Moving past Tom who was still in the doorway, Logan straightened to his full height and glared down at Bill. “You saw them yesterday, I’m thinking before you and your friend decided to rip up the road with a safe, leave it embedded in the road with chains still attached to it and part of y’all’s cars. Am I right?”
Shaking his head, Bill went straight into denial. “Nope, nuh unh. I’m seventy-six, Hurst’s seventy-three, we’re too old to do that. I mean, where’d we get the chains? We’re living on our pensions, which means Ramen noodles and bread for dinner.”
“From the barn,” Ren clipped. “And don’t give me that shit about pensions and Ramen noodles. Both y’all eat just fine and worked hard enough not to have to rely on your pensions to survive.”
Nodding his head like the source he’d gotten the chains from was plausible and ignoring the comment about his pension, Bill then retorted, “Ok, where’d we get the stuff to attach them to the safe and cars then?”
Leaning into the open trunk of one of the vehicles, Cole pulled out the welding machine that Ren had bought for the garage two months previously. I knew it was the same one because it had the label he’d printed out for it that read: This cost a fucking whack. You break it, you replace it. RT. And it had cost a whack, roughly four thousand whacks.
Seeing something else, Cole let out a frustrated growl and reached in for it, coming back out with a pair of Oakley’s dangling from his finger.
“You used these to protect your eyes? Seriously? You only just gave me these last week for my birthday.”
My eyes flicked to Logan when he looked back at his own grandpa and growled, “Is that why you borrowed my Ray-Bans?”
Totally unsympathetic to the misuse of their sunglasses, Ren ground out, “You stole my welding machine to attach a safe to your car?”
“Yeah, but I followed the what you put on the label and didn’t break it. In fact, we looked after it and kept it on us the whole time,” Hurst replied with an innocent smile on his face.
Jesus take the wheel. In fact, take all four of the wheels on both cars so they’d never drive them again.
Taking a step closer to his grandad, Ren growled, “You did that by putting it in the back of your car which was attached to a safe - a safe you dragged for half a mile behind those cars until it got stuck in the road and ripped your cars apart.”
“But it was still safe,” Hurst pointed out. “No pun intended.”
That was when Ren lost his shit. “The trunk of the fucking car doesn’t even close because half of what it needs to do that is still attached to the fucking safe.” Hurst wisely didn’t respond to that verbally, although the blush on his cheeks said it all. “And it’s not about the welding machine, it’s about the danger you put yourselves and anyone driving along that road in.”
Leaning around his grandson, Bill offered, “We weren’t in any danger, Ren. We welded roll bars in the car like in the movie.” All of our heads snapped to look back at the cars, not seeing any of the bars mentioned. “They came off when we got loose from the safe, but Hurst said that was ‘cos the welding machine was shit, not ‘cos…” he stopped when Ren turned the full force of his glare on him. “Shutting up now.”
Figuring now was the best time to leave the men to deal with their grandfathers, I shifted away from them and toward the stairs that led to the office. After this, I needed coffee, preferably with rum in it. Lots of rum.
Opening the door, I shut it softly behind me, not wanting to scare Katy who was standing at the coffee machine herself, staring at something on the wall in front of her. “Yo!”
It wasn’t yelled, it wasn’t snapped, it sounded like I’d said it gently to my ears, but she jumped and then let out a noise like a yelpy squeak as she looked over her shoulder at me. Katy Crew, aka Katarianne Crew, was the quintessential ‘sweet girl’ as my mom called them. That didn’t mean she was boring, homely, or anything like that – it meant that she was so damn pretty that you’d never expect her to have the beautiful personality that she had. Katy would give you the shirt off her back if you needed it, and everything she did let you know this. My mom calling it the ‘sweet girl syndrome’ purely meant that she was as sweet on the outside as she was on the inside. I was of the mind that it should be ‘fucking awesome girl’ syndrome, but my ma wasn’t big on cussing, so I kept that one to myself.