Buried Biker by KM Rockwood Page A

hair.”
    That description came uncomfortably close to me. “I don’t have a driver’s license.”
    Jim cast a disgusted look at me. “You think anybody who’d steal a car would be worried about driving it without a license?”
    When he put it like that, I had to say, “No, sir.”
    I wasn’t hungry any more, but I knew I should eat. I drove off and parked the lift back in shipping. I had no sooner poured the coffee into the cup and unwrapped the sandwich when someone slammed a couple of cans of soda and a bag from a takeout burger joint on the table next to me.
    Aaron. He was a kid who worked the packing line. When he showed up for work. He was a drug abuser and often made my life miserable, trying to get me to hook him up with sources of meth or crack. Or both. He thought I was connected because of my record, and I hadn’t been able to convince him I wasn’t a drug user and never had been. He just didn’t believe me.
    He was another skinny white guy with brown hair. Real skinny.
    With his attendance record, he should have been fired. The only explanation I could come up with for why he hadn’t been was because he was a police informant, and the company had been asked to keep him on. Not long ago, a fairly sophisticated drug and fake ID distribution had been uncovered in the plant, with the contraband going out shrink-wrapped and hidden in shipments on the trucks. It had been orchestrated by an executive. The management seemed to discount that little fact and was more interested in what we laborers might be doing in the shop than what might be going on upstairs in the offices.
    “Hey, Jesse,” Aaron said, slipping his pencil-thin legs over the picnic table bench and plopping down beside me.
    I certainly didn’t feel like talking to anybody, much less him, so I just looked at him, then turned back to my lunch and started eating.
    “So what happened to Kelly?” He pulled a cold greasy burger out of the bag and dumped some limp, slimy fries right on the grungy planks of the table top.
    Maybe if I ignored him, he would leave me alone.
    Fat chance. “So now you’re not talking to me?” he said. “Why? ‘Cause she beat you up? Is that what happened to your face?”
    I wanted to get done with my lunch and get back to work, even if I cut my break short. I shoved an entire half of the sandwich in my mouth.
    That’s not a good idea when it’s dry bread with plenty of peanut butter on it. I choked on it and started coughing. Reaching for my coffee, I knocked the cup to the floor.
    “Hey, man. Have this.” Aaron opened one of his cans of soda and shoved it toward me. Then he started pounding me on the back. “You want I should try the Heimlich maneuver?”
    “No!” I managed to gasp out. I coughed again. He stood up. I grabbed the soda and downed a big swallow, washing down the lump stuck in my throat. “I’m okay now. Don’t touch me!”
    “Okay.” Aaron sat down again. “You want the other soda?”
    “No thanks. There’s still some left in this can.” What I had didn’t taste like any soda I’d ever had. I looked at the can. Grape soda. What adult drank grape soda?
    “Want me to get you some water?” he asked, starting to get up again.
    “No. I’m fine.”
    Aaron grinned. “You don’t look fine. But maybe it’s just your face. What did happen to you? Wasn’t Kelly, was it?”
    I sighed. After he’d been willing to help me, I couldn’t continue to just ignore him. “No. Got my face slammed into the hood of a cop car.”
    “Must have been pretty hard.”
    “It was.”
    He laughed. “Did it dent the hood?”
    I had to smile at the thought of leaving a dent in the hood of Montgomery’s otherwise pristine ride. “Didn’t look, so I don’t know.”
    “So it didn’t have anything to do with Kelly?”
    “Nah.”
    “Or when you went to settle with the guy who did her?”
    “I don’t even know who that was. Yet.”
    “What did happen to her?”
    “I dunno. I wasn’t