Chapter 2: Chapter 2
Five minutes passed, and Andy forced himself to stand and go to the closet. He considered the expensive travel luggage, but no—it would be too hard to lug around, and too conspicuous. He dug past it and found his old backpack, from when he’d been a student. (Nick had promised that he would go back to school someday. But those had been empty promises, hadn’t they?)
He pushed that aside; he didn’t have time to list all of Nick’s wrongs against him. Andy had to pack. Underwear and T-shirts. One extra pair of jeans. Socks. A hoodie. A minimal tool kit: multitool, some coiled wire, duct tape. He didn’t want to keep any of the things Nick had given him, and the things that might be worth pawning were engraved. Recognizable. He didn’t have time for it, anyway. He considered his books, but books were heavy.
Andy glanced at the clock. Fuck, he’d wasted too much time to the shock. He had maybe an hour left before Nick finished his presentation and called to check on Andy, and he needed to be long gone before then. He tossed his phone onto the bed—his account was attached to Nick’s, of course—then fished his wallet out of his pocket and rifled through it. The credit and bank cards followed the phone as being too easy to track. Driver’s licenses had RFID chips in them now, too, didn’t they? His Metrocard was trackable, but it would get him as far as Grand Central, at least. He wouldn’t need his Kung Pao Takeout loyalty card, or half-a-dozen old receipts, or…Christ, there was a lot of junk in his wallet. Hurriedly, he dumped it all out and counted the cash; he had about fifty dollars. Shit
One last time check—Shit, he’d have to runto catch the next train—and he was out the door. He left it standing open; if he was lucky, some opportunistic robber would come in and help themselves to Nick’s things and confuse the trail.
* * * *
Grand Central Station was a madhouse this close to rush hour. Andy clutched his backpack tightly and twisted through the crowds, making sure to drop his Metrocard in the crush. Someone would find it and use it, and if Nick had it tracked, it would go…somewhere that Andy wasn’t.
It was about a mile from Grand Central to Penn Station. The clock ticked in Andy’s ears like a bomb counting down, and he jogged the whole way.
Andy squinted at the bus destination board. No big cities, that was too obvious. No one-cow towns, either; there was no way to blend in. What he needed was a nice, middling-to-small city, with a bus leaving in the next fifteen minutes. And a ticket that, preferably, wouldn’t use up allhis cash.
Virginia Beach stood out. Beaches were nice, Andy thought, though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything like a vacation. Beaches were full of tourists, where Andy’s accent wouldn’t be remarkable, where people lost their IDs and credit cards all the time and so lots of places accepted cash that wouldn’t, otherwise. They were coming up on summer, so he might be able to find work doing odd jobs. And a transient population meant that it would be easier to not only blend in with the crowds, but to move around.
The ticket was only thirty-five dollars. And the bus was a red-eye due to arrive around dawn the next morning, which meant Andy had a place to sleep for the night, even if it was a seat on a bus.
Right. Virginia Beach it was.
* * * *
“I am going to kill Debbie,” Scooter Stahl said, shoving Jeff’s shit into a duffle bag. This was the third time in two years that Debbie Clark had shown up, flirted a little with Jeff, and suddenly Scooter was short both a renter and an employee. If Jeff wasn’t such a loveable asshole, Scooter wouldn’t have given him his job back the first time. That, and no one else really wanted the damn job in the first place. Washing dishes by hand, sweeping the floor, and bussing tables was not exactly fun, and in a tourist town like Sandbridge, it was hard work, too.
The restaurant was failing, slowly but surely, Scooter knew that, so the wages he could offer weren’t great, either. The only good thing about the job was that it came with meals and a discount on rent for the little apartment over the garage that Scooter used to try to earn a little extra on the side. Scooter had paid Jeff under the table and taken the rent out of it directly, which was a nice arrangement for them both.
At least, it was nice right up until Debbie had showed up flush with cash—she was a professional card cheat—and dragged Jeff off for another of their whirlwind adventures. The two of them would be gone for months. And tourist season was just starting. If Scooter had to bus tables as well as manage Dockside and cook on Jason’s off-shifts, he was going to die of sleep deprivation. “Killher,” he stressed. She couldn’t have waited until September to steal Jeff again?
“You always say that, and yet, you never do,” Kat said, pulling her red hair back in a ponytail and grabbing the broom. “I’ll take bus-and-sweep today. Maybe Jason can do dishes in between cooking?”
“I don’t do dishes,” Jason yelled from the back. Jason had been Scooter’s best friend since the second grade, and his foster brother for almost as long, but there was no denying that Jason’s skill at avoiding unwanted work was legendary “I’ll bus, but I don’t like cooking when my fingers are all raisin-y.”
Kat brandished the broom threateningly. “You know that sex you wanted to have, like ever again? Do the damn dishes, Jason.” Kat and Jason had been dating for years; they were the most beautiful couple Scooter had ever seen. Jason was tall and broad-shouldered and blond and tan, while Kat was on the short side, with dark red hair and skin the color of cream that never seemed to burn and curves that even gay-as-a-maypole Scooter could see were amazing. Their relationship seemed to be based on a constant diet of bickering and insults, and never failed to make Scooter green with envy
“Call D’ante,” Jason suggested. “I heard his transmission is going out. He might need the extra work for a few days?” D’ante had worked full-time at Dockside a few years back, when he’d first come back from that disastrous tour of duty in Afghanistan and had needed something to get him out of the house, away from overbearing, too-sympathetic family. These days, he lived with his sister, helping to keep an eye on her kids, but he could generally be counted on to fill in a shift or two when Dockside was short on hands.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone