Rick Carter's First Big Adventure (Pete's Barbecue Book 1) (6 page)

   Mr. Ball rose from his seat and grabbed his suit jacket from the little wooden table.” Good!  Our data said you were our man.  And, I assure you there is no leg pulling of any kind.”

    Mr. Tabert moved over to where Mr. Ball stood. “Good, then that’s done.  You’ll start tomorrow night.  Remember, you must be totally at our call from 3 AM to 6 AM.”

   “And please do not have any interactions with the fares.  We prefer you speak to them only if spoken to.  There must be limited interaction.” Mr. Tabert added.  And with that they both moved to the doorway, causing Rick to step out of the way before he realized what he was doing.  They vanished down the hallway toward the front of the building leaving him Rick standing there alone. “We’ll be in touch.” Mr. Ball’s voice echoed back down the hallway as they left the building.  Rick still wasn’t sure what had just happened, but one thing was definite:  life was rolling in the floor laughing now.

  
When Rick finally woke up the next afternoon, he realized he was still in his work clothes, his shorts, and a tropical shirt.  He rolled over in the bed onto his back and stared at the ceiling, watching the slits of sunlight through the window blinds illuminate the heavy dust floating in the air.  Something was terribly wrong.  Something very unkind had happened, and now he was dealing with it like a bad hang over.  His head was hurting, and he could vaguely remember Mel talking to him.  At first, he thought it had all been a dream.  When he sat up, he saw the empty soda bottles lying all around the bed.  This was the reason why his bladder felt like the size of a hot air balloon.   Grape soda was his beverage of choice when the stressful side of life collided with the emotional side, and there was nowhere to run.  He had never been a drinker.  Alcoholism was never a vice he had to worry with.  Instead, he usually kept a few cases of the bubbly grape stuff around for general refreshment and the ever possible binge night.   

     He moved himself to the edge of the bed trying to remember what it was Mel was telling him in the car the night before.  That was Mel, wasn’t it?  Where did he come from?  Blast all that, where had he been?  There were 26 years of explanations waiting out there in the wind, and he suddenly pops up, says hello and then goes running off in the night.  How can that be?  It smacked of fiction, the really bad kind where the author struggles to figure out how to tie a sketchy plot together with a limited vocabulary and a stalled out imagination.

      He rubbed his hair and got up, grunting as he made his way to the toilet down the hall of his apartment to have his morning constitution.  As he stood gratefully over the toilet relieving his over-burdened bladder and yawning, he caught his reflection out of the corner of his eye in the nearby mirror.  Something was wrong. He narrowed his eyes and he turned to look directly in the mirror.  What the..!

      On his head, starting from the forehead and running back to the top of his head, highlighted by his naturally dark brown hair was a silvery white streak of hair about 2 inches wide.  His mouth opened in amazement.  He looked like a skunk, a one-sided skunk.  He stood staring at it, mouth open, unable to say anything.  He didn’t understand why things like this had to happen.  He rubbed his hand through it, reassuring himself that it was his hair and not some nasty brain sucking alien slug that had crawled through his bedroom window during the night.  It was his alright, just white as snow.   He had heard of people having this happen, people who went through dramatic shocks and gray streaks appearing in their hair from the stress.  But, this wasn’t a streak.  It was a swath.  He shook his head in disbelief.  I need food, really good food he thought.  Or I need to hit something.   He decided he would fix something, something he liked, for dinner that was complicated and took a long time to prepare.  It would give him time to think, time to put the night before into perspective.   After all, hadn’t he agreed to a new job too?   Somewhere in that mess of deranged lunacy where he spent last night he remembered accepting a new job.  Maybe I need to start drinking, he thought.   I think I have a good reason to.   He decided to get a shower first then get into the kitchen.

     Culinary art was one of Rick’s real passions in life.  It went well with one of his other passions: eating.  He loved cooking, and he was good at it.  When he stepped into the kitchen and started laying out ingredients, preparing meats, sauces, spices, chopping vegetables, marinating that, pounding on this, glazing something else, angels began to sing in heaven.  And it was practically all self-taught, something he took a lot of pride in.   His dad had passed this love for cooking down to him.  Henry, in his younger days, had owned a fry joint.  His place wasn’t the typical greasy spoon.  It was a place where a cheeseburger took on a whole new experience in your mouth and where even the strictest vegan would have thrown caution to the wind.  Rick grew up under his tutelage.  He eagerly learned all the old man had to teach and then, he moved on to other aspects of plate decorations until he had raised his abilities to almost world class level.  French chefs would tremble at his soufflé.  That is if they knew about it, which they didn’t.  Instead, Rick used his time in the kitchen to think, to prepare for his night, to occupy his time, so he stayed away from the casinos and to hone a craft that he never grew tired off. 

     Tonight’s best beef stew had all the hallmarks of complexity and attention to detail that would occupy his over-active mind.  Unfortunately, it was up against some pretty stiff competition, and in the end not even the greatest stew known to man could get Mel off his mind.   The meeting with the two weird government guys was almost an after-thought now.  He knew it happened; he knew it was important and that he had agreed to do something he was very unsure of, but his mind didn’t want to dwell on that.  Instead, his mental processes were consumed with Melvin Thibadeaux, the happy go lucky disappearing jerk that left a town full of people thinking he had been dead for nearly thirty years.    Rick was trying to grasp the sheer randomness of the whole thing and how utterly pointless his twenty-six years of self-imposed survivor’s guilt had been.   How did he do it?  Why did he do it?  Where in the black hole of weird crap has he been all this time?  The more he thought about it the madder he got.   Finally the desire to hit something started to overwhelm his stomach.  He spent the rest of his time with his stew thinking about which part of Mel’s face he was going to hit first if he had a second chance.      

     In the end, he finished his stew, prepared his dinner on a wooden tray in front of the small television and watched some old episodes of a science fiction drama from the sixties.  It wasn’t until ten thirty that he remembered he had a job to do and that he had agreed to run some special fares for the two suits. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to change from a used pair of shorts and tropical shirt to another of the same.  It’s what he did every night.  But even this simple process was hampered when he discovered he had no clean clothes.  He had to search through a pile of dirty laundry to find something that he had only worn once and that he could spritz up with a bit of fabric softener and be on his way.   By eleven thirty he was out the door and for the first time in fifteen years, he was nervous, apprehensive about what this night might bring.

         The slow seething anger Rick felt as he grabbed his lunch, locked his apartment door and headed downstairs to the parking lot was only accentuated by accidently jamming his finger in the car door as he tried to close it.  Several expletives later he was pulling out of the parking lot grimacing from the pain in his finger and prepared for a bitter fight with the enemies of happiness in the night.  He wasn’t disappointed.  It didn’t take long for the battle to begin.  The first two hours of the night found him driving from bar to bar with no takers, and nothing popping up on his computer to bid on.  Business wasn’t just dead, it was cold, stiff and being embalmed.  The only thought that kept him from rolling his window down and screaming bad things to the world was the promise of a lucrative morning by the two suits from last night.  They had better not have been messing with him.  He couldn’t take that now.  He pulled into the empty parking lot of a closed business and parked.  It was 0155, and he was determined to wait out the last few minutes watching the clock tick away.  One by one the minutes went by until at last the digital clock turned 0200.   For a moment, nothing happened.  The worry began to creep into his mind.  Had he been played after all?  He sat holding his breath looking at the clock until a flicker of light caught his attention.  It was his company radio.  The back light flickered off and then back on a second later.  But, this time, the backlight had changed colors to deep green.  That was odd.   It had never done that before.  He reached down and flicked the front of the radio, but nothing happened.  He fiddled with knobs, buttons, and switches.  It seemed to be working, except now it was glowing green, a nasty, unhealthy green that looked like a cross between gamma radiation and swamp gas.  At 0205 the radio squawked to life and nearly gave him a heart attack. He jerked back in his seat, and the big Crown Vic. rocked.  “Mr. Carter?”  The voice was strange, not one of the usual dispatchers.   It sounded old, distinctly feminine and slightly grandmotherly like.  He hadn’t ever had a grandmother, but he had seen enough of them on television to imagine what they would sound like.  Maybe she was on the other end holding a plate of warm cookies and a glass of milk.

    He picked up the mic. and timidly keyed it. “580, over.” It was a force of habit to use his call numbers.

    The phantom voice replied, “Your first job for the night will be waiting for you at the corner of Euclid and First.  You will see a female waiting for you there.  Please take her to the address specified on the note she will hand you.” 

  “Understood.  580 outbound.”  He responded and started the car.  It was time to see what this was all about. 

     The thought that no one would be standing on the corner of Euclid and First when he got there never left his mind as he made the meandering trek over to that area of St. Petersburg.   But, he was happily disappointed when he arrived and saw the silhouette of the woman standing alone, waiting patiently.  Her face was darkened by the shadows and her thin figure cloaked in the same.  But, he could still make out some detail, especially from her strange clothing.  It, too, was dark colored, earth tones.  She was in a long plain dress with a white shawl over her shoulders.  It looked to him, in the darkness, as if she had a bonnet of some kind on her head and she was holding a basket.  He was alarmed at first, his imagination driving his paranoia further then he had realized.  But, it wasn’t just the sight of someone dressed in what appeared to be a colonial outfit on a street alone at night that rang his panic bell.  No, his panic came from the fact that it wasn’t something
more
unusual than that.  This part of town was notorious for very strange things.  It wasn’t unusual to pick someone up in the middle of the night, liquored up from some party nearby and have them wearing anything from an astronaut’s suit to a dancing monkey outfit.  He was very accustomed to seeing these strange things.  He was so accustomed to it that he felt a slight pang of disappointment.  Is this it?  Is this the big deal?  Then he thought; I better get paid.

     The fare went smoothly and without a hitch.  She didn’t say anything to him. She just handed him a piece of paper with an address to a place across town, toward New Port Richey. Her destination, oddly, was another dark lonely street.  He felt a little touch of worry about dropping her off in such an unsavory area; fearful something might happen to her.  But, without a word, she exited the cab, closed the door and disappeared into the night.  He waited for a few moments as he lost sight of her, watching to see if she was alright.  Then he twisted his butt to the right and pulled his phone from his pocket.  The driver’s seat complained from the shift in his weight.  He quickly dialed the automated number to his checking account to see if anything had happened yet.  It’s too soon, he thought.  But, when he accessed the account there was a nice new figure shining up at him with three zeroes trailing from it. He was stunned.  That’s all there was to it?  No big show, no trying to hide a drug transaction or someone trying to pick up a prostitute?  He sat alone on the street for another ten minutes before he pulled away. 

        Rick’s previous ill and foreboding feeling was quickly replaced by one of exhilaration and satisfaction.  The fear of criminal involvement was put to rest, and he began to relax, realizing that this was just as simple as picking a person up at one place and dropping them off at another, with the bonus of his bank account expanding like a Wall Street financier’s waistline. He could practically hear the collective gasp of bank employees everywhere as Rick Carter’s checking account actually had money in it, real money, not the transient kind that so often slid threw his account like a chipotle chicken bean burrito from the Mexican food truck.  He drove silently down the empty streets anxious to have another crack at this new job.  The next fare was only moments away.  Before he could make it through two lights, he was already being hailed by the same aged and soft voice as before.  He listened closely to the instructions and typed the address into his phone’s GPS.  Seconds later he was on his way to another rendezvous with beautiful capitalism.  If this kept up all night his bank manager, the obnoxious guy that drove the old BMW, was going to be a happy man when he went over the books in the morning. 

      He maintained the same rules of engagement as before and never varied from the established pattern.  The next one turned out to be a guy dressed in a suit that looked like it came from a 1920s swingers club.  He was a quick drop off several blocks away.  Rick followed that up with another check on the bank records and another satisfied grin.   Then the call came again.  They came fast and easy.  As soon as he dropped one off, another call came.  Each acted the same as the one before, strangely dressed and perfectly silent.  He didn’t know if he was making runs for a Shriner’s convention or a Cosplay party.   One fare was a young man in a soldier’s uniform, gray, like a Confederate infantryman.  It was well made, very authentic looking and made of wool.  It was even dirty and torn like it was in real combat. The boy looked young, and he had blood streaming down his face, or fake blood as Rick hoped.   But, there was a strange vacant expression in his eyes.  Rick found he wanted to say something to this fare as if he were drawn to a sudden sense of sadness and lose that he couldn’t explain, but he adhered to the conditions of the agreement. Several times during many of the fares he had to fight the urge to speak.  It was perfectly natural, after all.  He was a talker by habit and by nature and driving a cab had nurtured that aspect of his character.  Not speaking to fares was like a salmon swimming the opposite direction.   But he fought it and instead he just took their notes, drove them to where they wanted to go and let them out.  Nothing more was said or done.  Each time he delivered his fare, he checked his account.  And each time there was another thousand dollars deposited there.  Suddenly he wasn’t a poor struggling cab driver anymore.  A couple more nights of this, a week maybe, would see him entering a new tax bracket.