Fortunately, John thought to set his alarm clock before going to bed the night before, though when it went off he didn’t want to get up. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep – the implications of the evening before were still with him, and it had led to a troubled and restless night. It would have been good to sleep in, but with Raul coming to change out the garbage disposal he knew he had to get out and get one as soon as he could.

Everybody else in the house still seemed to be asleep when he came out of the bathroom; Mandy was on her back on the couch, snoring loudly – something he remembered well from the old days. She’d always claimed she didn’t snore, but he for damn sure knew better. While her walking out without warning had been painful in many ways, that was one thing he hadn’t missed.

Deciding to let everyone sleep, he walked out into the garage, to see Mandy’s car sitting where the Toyota ought to be; his was outside, he now remembered through his sleepy mind. Getting to the Toyota involved going quietly back through the house, but apparently he didn’t wake anyone in the process. In a couple minutes, he was heading out through the subdivision, wishing he had a cup of coffee. Easily solved; he pulled into a golden arches drive-through for a breakfast sandwich and a disposable cup of eye-opener.

While the coffee may have been hotter than he liked, even the aroma of it served to lever his eyes open a little. He took an uncomfortable sip, set the cup in the cup holder, and worked on the sandwich while he drove to the nearest big-box hardware store.

He carried the coffee with him as he walked into the place. It only took asking two employees where to find the garbage disposals – one of them didn’t have enough English to help someone find the bathroom, as far as he could tell – but when he finally found the display he was a little dismayed. Where he’d expected to find, at the most, three or four garbage disposals, there were over a dozen with little to differentiate one from another but the price tag. Remembering what Raul had said the night before, he picked a mid-range one at random, and not the same brand as the one under his sink. That would about do it, he thought; if he was wrong, well, he’d just have to exchange it. Maybe he could get Raul to do it – he apparently knew what he was talking about, but John was totally clueless.

Fortunately the line at the checkout wasn’t long, and the store was eager to take his plastic; he walked out the door over a hundred bucks poorer, carried the heavy unit to the car, and was soon heading back home, hoping someone would be stirring by the time he got back.

He pulled into the driveway and hit the garage door opener out of habit, only to realize that Mandy’s car was still parked where his car ought to go. It was clear something had to be done about that – while it was all right for one night, considering the potential trouble from the crooks at the tow company, it was clearly going to be a pain in the ass if it went on for even a few days.

There was no telling how long Mandy was going to be there. He hoped it would only be for a little while, but things had a way of happening, and after all, it was his garage – he didn’t want to have to leave his own car parked outside indefinitely.

Easily solved, he thought. The Jag was just taking up space, there’s no reason it has to be here, especially when there was space in the garage down at Suncoast. That was one of the advantages of not only being the boss but owning the company: if he stuck the Jag in there for a few days, nobody was going to gripe about it. The problem was that it had been months since the finicky car had been started, and he didn’t want to bet that it would start at all.

Well, one thing was for sure, he thought. If it didn’t start, he knew damn well which tow company he didn’t plan on calling.

Deciding that since the garage door was open he might as well use it, he walked through it and into the kitchen, finding Mandy busy bustling around making breakfast. “I wondered where you were,” she said.

“Getting this thing,” he replied, setting the box with the garbage disposal down on the floor next to the sink. “I don’t know when Raul is going to be here, but he said he’d be as early as he could make it. If I’m not here, there it is. Tell him to leave me a bill and I’ll get him his money through Annamaria.”

“She still works for you?”

“Actually, there’s some question who works for who,” he shrugged. “I spend most of my time doing what she tells me to.”

“I take it you’re not planning on being here when he comes?”

“No, I’ve got too much that needs to get done at the office,” he said. “I lost a lot of time on things I should have been doing this week. Where’s Sally?”

“She’s in helping Teresa take a sponge bath. Boy, those casts really suck for her. I’ll bet she’s going to be so happy to finally be able to take a shower it won’t be funny.”

“Yeah, no shit,” John agreed, “but there are worse things in this life.”

“Are you going to stick around for breakfast?”

“I guess not,” he replied, “at least if I can get the Jag started. I’m going to stick it in the garage down at the shop to clear out the garage space here. I’ll call here when I get ready to come home and you or Sally can come get me. In fact, it probably ought to be you. Sally has been to the shop, but she may not be able to find it again.”

“Same place?”

“Some things never change,” he said. “It’s adequate for our needs, maybe a little larger than it needs to be, but not ridiculously so.”

“You want to take a cup of coffee with you?”

“That I can be talked into,” he admitted.

A few minutes later he was back in the garage, taking the cover off the dark green sports car. He hadn’t had it out since back in the fall sometime, and then had spent more time polishing it than he had driving it. It still looked pretty good, and he liked to drive it, even though having it made less than no sense. If he actually drove it once in a while, or got some good out of it, well, that was one thing, but most of the time it just sat under its fitted canvas cover. He figured he probably would be money ahead if he sold it, but if he did it would only be money. Jesus, John, he thought, your life is fucking bleak sometimes.

He folded the cover neatly and put it in the trunk – well, the boot in an English car, after all. He’d still want to cover the car when he got it to the shop. He got behind the wheel, crossed the fingers on his left hand and turned the key with his right. Not to his surprise, the engine turned over – it had an American battery, so that had to have helped. It ground a couple of times, coughed, farted, and then as if a miracle had happened it came to life. Not cleanly; it was running rough, like not every cylinder was firing every time, but it was running, and for an engine that hadn’t been run in a while, not too badly. My God, he thought, is something actually going to go right?

He just sat in the car and let it warm up for a couple minutes, with the engine sounding better and better as it went along. No putting off the inevitable, he thought as he put it into reverse and let up on the clutch.

Out on the street, he began to remember why he still had the car. It may have come to him as a deal, but the rumble of the engine and the feeling of being in a top-down convertible began to get to him. Once he was out of the subdivision and onto Tuttle he winged it a little, just to hear that V-12 power. I really need to do something with this car sometime, go someplace just to enjoy owning it, he thought.

It was tempting to take it out on the freeway and blow the carbon out of it a little, but he decided he’d better not do it. The way his luck was running recently the place would probably be alive with cops. Besides, he had other things he needed to do today, and at the head of the list was getting the Tomtucknee Regional bid done. Still, it was nice to be out driving his neat car and wishing that he dared to take the day off. It was a nice day, warm and bright, a good ragtop day. He could remember what Michigan was like in the middle of March, and it sure wasn’t like this. It was probably cold and there could still be snow on the ground; the odds were the sky would be gray and dank.

He was only a couple of miles or so from the office and starting to feel pretty good in spite of everything when the engine burped a couple times, then died.

“Oh, fuck!” he said out loud. “Now what the hell?”

The car didn’t say anything back, but just stayed silent. Fortunately he was going fast enough to be able to roll into the parking lot of a mattress store. As it rolled to a stop, he glanced at the gas gauge: maybe half a tank, if the gauge wasn’t lying to him, and with an English car as old as this one was, he knew that was a possibility. It was tempting to get out and look under the hood to see if he could see anything obvious, but he knew it would be a pointless exercise – he wouldn’t be able to identify it no matter how obvious it was.

There was only one thing to do. He pulled out his cell phone and called home.

Sally picked up the phone. “Sally,” he said, “the Jag just crapped out on me. I need the number of a towing place, and not those sons of bitches we’ve been dealing with. Grab the phone book and find one for me, would you?”

It took a few minutes, since Mandy got in on the exercise, trying to pick out something that was reasonably close. “Got one for you,” Mandy said. “Fred’s Towing. That’s not far away.” She gave him the number.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll give them a call.”

“John, do you need me to come pick you up?”

“Better not,” he said. “It would be all too easy for this Jag to just disappear. I’ll stay with it, at least for now. I may need a ride after the tow truck gets here.”

That left John wondering what he was going to do about the car when a tow truck came. It was Saturday, after all, and he knew the shop that had worked on the Jag more than he wanted to think about was closed on Saturdays. He could have the car towed there, of course, but it would have to sit outside all weekend, and that wasn’t a bright idea with a car like this one. Realistically, he thought he might as well have it towed to the Suncoast office, like he’d originally planned; he could have it picked up there the first of the week and towed to the auto shop. More money out of his pocket; it seemed like he’d been spending it like water the past few days. It would take even more to get the car fixed, and the shop was not exactly the fastest place in town, not by a long shot.

He called the towing service Mandy had told him about. “We don’t have anyone available right now,” a pleasant-sounding girl on the other end of the line told him, “but I should be able to have someone over there in half an hour or so.”

“That’ll be fine,” he told her with resignation. It was clear that it was going to take longer than that, and it would leave him in a fine mood when he finally got to the office. At least he wouldn’t have to watch his temper, since Annamaria wouldn’t be there.

There wasn’t much he could do but just sit in the car and wait. People came and went from the mattress store, but the traffic wasn’t brisk. They weren’t exactly doing a land-office business, but he suspected that in a high-markup business like that, it didn’t take a lot of sales each day to carry the nut. It was the same sort of thing he dealt with at Suncoast, after all, but he didn’t have to depend on people coming in off the street.

He sat in the car and waited some more. A couple times people came over to talk with him, to admire the cool car, but he told them that while it looked cool and was neat to drive when it was running, it didn’t run far too much of the time, like right now.

After what seemed to be an eternity, he saw a tow truck turning in off the street. Finally! For an instant he thought he might still be able to get some work done, but then he saw the name on the side of the truck, Greenleaf Towing. It was the same sons of bitches that had been causing him trouble all week. What the fuck were they doing here, he thought?

“Hey buddy,” the driver yelled from the cab window. To John, it looked like the same guy that had caused him the trouble at the police impound yard. “You need a tow?”

“Yeah, but not from you,” John yelled back. “Beat it. I’ve got someone coming, and I’ll sit here all goddamn day before I’ll take a tow from you.”

“Hey, all I know is my boss said to come over here and give you a tow,” the guy said. “That means I got to give you a tow. I don’t need him pissed at me again!”

“I said, get lost,” John said. “I’ve dealt with you turkeys enough. There’s no way in hell you’re towing this car. Now, get out of here.”

“There ain’t no way in hell I can go back to the office and tell my boss I didn’t tow the car,” the guy said. “He said I gotta give you a tow, so I gotta give you a tow.”

“Tough shit,” John replied, getting angrier. “You can go back to your office and tell your boss I told him to stick his head straight up his ass. Now get the fuck out of here. You’re not towing this car.”

“I don’t have to listen to that kind of fucking talk from you,” he said. “Now get the hell out of the way so I can get this thing hooked up.”

“Like fuck you will,” John said. He’d had enough of this inbreed; he reached for his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. “I’m calling the cops,” he said. “I don’t want you guys ripping me off again.”

“Sarasota 9-1-1, how can I help you?” a voice on the other end of the line said.

“I’ve got a guy here trying to rip me off,” John told her, giving her the address. “He looks like he’s going to get violent. I need an officer here, right now.”

“I should have someone there in a couple minutes,” she said. “Try to not get confrontational.”

“We’re well past that,” John told her, then looked up at the driver. “Beat it,” he told him, making sure he didn’t click the phone off in the process. “The cops are on the way. I don’t need any more abuse from you, and you are not towing this car. I never called you. If someone did, it wasn’t me. Now get out of here.”

“What was that?” the woman at the 9-1-1 dispatch center said. “Someone is trying to tow off your car? Is it illegally parked?”

“No, it’s broke down,” he told her. “There aren’t any no parking zones around here I can see. I called Fred’s Towing to come pick it up, and this bozo insists his boss sent him to do it instead. I’ve already had trouble with this outfit and I don’t need more.”

“I done told you buddy,” the driver said. “My boss done told me to come pick up this car and I’m going to fucking pick up this car no matter what you say. I do what my boss tells me to do, not what some dumb fucker out on the street says.”

“I told you to beat it,” John said, hearing a siren coming up the street. Hopefully that was the cops. “The cops are on the way. You lay a finger on this car and I’ll swear out a complaint for auto theft.”

“I told you, my boss done told me to tow this car in. I ain’t gonna go back and have to tell him you wouldn’t let me tow it.”

For an instant it looked like fists were going to fly. John’s fingers were itching for the tire iron he’d had in his hand the last time he’d had to deal with this bozo. Fortunately, at that moment a police car slid to a stop beside them, and an officer John knew from any number of car wrecks got out. Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with the cop’s name just then, but it didn’t matter; he was a cop, and this might get settled soon.

“Morning, John,” the officer said. “Haven’t seen you around much recently. What seems to be the problem?”

“Car broke down,” John said, trying to be casual in spite of his increasing anger. “I called Fred’s Towing to come pick it up, and this bozo from Greenleaf showed up instead. I’ve had dealings with them in the past and there’s no way I’m going to let them touch anything of mine.”

“That true?” the officer smiled, and turned to the driver. “What’s your side of the story?”

“My boss done told me to come out and tow in this car,” the driver said. “But this fuckwad doesn’t want to let me tow him in. There ain’t no way I can go back to the shop and tell the boss I got turned down on a call.”

“I don’t know who called these bastards,” John said, his anger starting to come through now, “but it sure as hell wasn’t me. I’d fucking burn the car where it sits before I’d let them touch it.”

“Now come on,” the cop smiled. “You don’t really mean that, do you?”

“Got a match?” John snorted. “I’ve about had it with the way I can’t drive the fucking thing five miles without it breaking down.”

“I don’t know what your problem with this guy is,” the cop said. “This is a reputable outfit, they do a lot of towing.”

“Shit, you don’t know the other side of the story, then,” John snorted. “There’s no way they’re towing this car. I can damn well sit here all day until the guy I called shows up.”

“I’m pretty sure the guy that owns this place doesn’t want you blocking things up all day.”

“That’s goddamn right,” the tow truck driver said. “Look, buddy, I don’t know what the problem you have with us is, but I’m here and I’m willing to tow your car. You don’t know when the fuck Fred’s is going to show up.”

By now, John was hardly less pissed with the officer than he was with the tow truck driver. “I’m not letting him tow this vehicle,” he said, “and that’s final. These fuckwads are rip-off artists of the first order, and now they’re trying to rip off a tow from the guy I called. That’s a bunch of horse shit, and you know it as well as I do.”

There was no way of telling where it might have come out, except for the fact that John glanced up and saw a tow truck with “Fred’s Towing” lettered on the side turning into the parking lot. “The guy I called is here, now,” he said to the inbred tow truck driver. “There’s no need for you to be here, and you’re not getting this tow. Now beat it, dumbass.”

“You don’t fucking call me a dumbass,” the guy sneered. “I don’t have to take that kind of shit from no fuckin’ body. My boss fucking told me to tow this car and I’m fucking towing it whether that asshole is here or not.”

“I just fucking called you a dumbass, and it’s true. Now get on your fucking horse and go tell your boss I told him to cram his head up his ass sideways.”

“John, cool it a little,” the cop said. He turned to the driver, who looked about ready to hit someone, except for the fact he couldn’t make up what little mind he had who to hit. “Look,” the cop said, “you just better get out of here. This guy obviously doesn’t want you to tow his car, and that’s that. All you’re doing is causing unnecessary trouble.”

“Fuck you. I ain’t going to go back to my boss and have to tell him some fucking cop wouldn’t let me tow this car.”

“Then maybe you’d better think about telling your boss to come down to the jail and bail you out,” the cop replied, obviously getting a little tired of this nonsense; John was already well past being more than a little tired of it.

“Fuck you,” the guy said. “I don’t have to take that shit from no fucking cop.”

“Get on your pony and ride, buddy,” the cop told him. “This guy is paying the bill, and he’s not in a mood to pay you. If you don’t settle down and get out of here, you’re taking a trip downtown.”

The driver reared back and took a swing at the cop – never a good idea in the best of circumstances. In an instant, he was on the ground and being handcuffed. In another instant, he was being stuffed into the back of the police car, while the driver from Fred’s Towing sat in his truck with a big grin on his face. While the cop was going through the technicalities, John walked over to the newly-arrived truck. “Glad to see you,” John smiled.

“Hell, just seeing that made it worth the trip,” the guy grinned. “I take it you wanted a tow?”

“Yeah, down to my office, a couple miles away. The thing crapped out on me again. Then, the first of the week, I’ll need a tow from there to wherever I’m going to send it to be worked on.”

“We can do that,” the driver said. “What happened here, anyway?”

“This guy showed up out of nowhere and insisted he was called to tow the car,” John said. “I sure as hell didn’t call him.”

“I don’t doubt it,” the Fred’s Towing driver said. “Every now and then they somehow manage to show up at a scene and bully their way in when someone else has been called. I don’t know how they do it, but it sure is a pain in the ass.”

“Bunch of goddamn crooks, if you ask me,” John shook his head.

The driver got a big grin on his face. “You wouldn’t be the only one to think that,” he said.

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