with peas?
2
THE LED WAS blinking a steady green over his front porch, the motion detector nearly hidden beneath the old wood doorframe. From inside, he could hear the sound of a dog barking.
All clear.
Not that anyone was going to break into his less than fancy house, but old habits were hard to break. There was no dog, only a pimped out robotic vacuum cleaner with two golden LEDs for eyes and a mechanical tail that wagged. Not the cutest puppy, but Jason Kincaid had invented the only canine in the world that cleaned up after itself.
While Dog wheeled around the floor, Jason put down his keys, pulled on his faded Orioles cap and went outside to work. The missing can of peas didn’t concern him. Jason hated peas, but every Monday he went to the Hinkle’s store to shop. He hated shopping, too, but his father had told him he needed to get out more, so every Tuesday when his dad called, he could tell the old man—with complete honesty—that he’d been out shopping only yesterday.
Outside the house, the flat terrain was exactly the same. The front yard, the backyard, the four storage sheds and even the detached one car garage were filled with lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, small engines, large engines, lumber and scrap metal.
He’d never invited his family to visit because the house looked too much like a junkyard, like the long neglected habitat of a man who needed to live alone.
Which it was.
Jason pulled down the socket wrench from the upright mattress springs that had been recycled into his Wall O’ Tools and got to work.
The current project was a five horsepower lawnmower in desperate need of a new carburetor or a humane burial, but Jason wasn’t ready to give it up for dead. Not yet.
He’d just gotten air to blow clean through the tube when the red LED on the porch began to glow. Motion detectors had been strategically placed across the ten acres of his land, wired to let him know whenever anyone decided to intrude—like now. Jason glanced toward the road and noticed the cloud of dust.
A HAV, or, in layman’s terms, a car still unidentified.
Salesmen didn’t come out this far. He’d never met the neighbors, which were four acres away on either side, so when people showed up at his gate, they were usually lost.
After pulling his cap down a little lower, Jason made his way to the front gate, an eight foot, black, metal monster that he’d rescued from an old sanitarium. It looked exactly like it belonged at the front entrance of a sanitarium, which was why Jason had wanted it, and why the sanitarium didn’t.
From behind the iron bars, he watched the beaten-up Impala approach. The rear door was black, the driver’s side door was red, and the hood was sunshine-yellow. If Henry Ford and Picasso had gone out on a bender, that car was what the hangover would have looked like.
Jason stayed steady and impassive, not angry or unfriendly, but stood and watched as a woman exited the world’s worst excuse for a car.
Her.
She still had the same never-say-die smile, which, considering the state of her transport, was just flat-out stupid. Once she was at the gate, a mere two feet from him, she held up the can of peas.
“You left these.” Her voice was nice, not high and birdlike, but no cigarette smoke, either. Sonya had a low, husky voice. At one point, Jason had thought it was sexy.
“You didn’t have to bring them all the way out here.” He probably should thank her for it, but he was distracted by the beads of sweat on her neck, and the green sweater had to be hot. Judging from the way it was clinging to her curves, the Hell-Car didn’t have air-conditioning. He didn’t like that she was sweating for him. He didn’t like the way his one good eye kept locking on her chest, like some reconnaissance tracking system doped up on Viagra.
“I don’t mind,” she told him, then put the can to the bars, as if she expected the can to slip through. Nope. Jason could have told her that metal didn’t work that way. It took five hundred pounds of force to dislodge metal, or eight hundred degrees of heat. Sometimes both.
However, Jason stayed silent because he had learned that people never liked to work too hard at a conversation. Eventually, they always gave up.
“Are you going to open the gate, or should I toss this sucker over the top?”
His instinctive response was to instruct her to go ahead and throw, but two things kept him from going with the default. The knowledge that he would have crossed the crazy-lonely-man line in his head, and the beat-up sedan. Frankly, that car out-crazied his crazy-line anyway, so while she might not notice, he would.
Those were his reasons. That, and he liked her breasts.
He typed in the combination on the keypad and the gate creaked open. He’d gone through a lot of trouble to get the creak exactly right. A haunted house creak. At the sound, the woman’s eyes grew wide, but not in fear. No, she liked it.
“I bet the kids love this place at Halloween.”
“People don’t drive out this far for a stick of gum.” People didn’t drive out this far for peas, either, but he left that part out.
“If they don’t, they don’t know what they’re missing.” While she talked, her eyes surveyed the yard, the seventy-year-old house, the mountains of scrap, the piles of engines.
Before she could trespass farther, he took the can of peas. “Thank you.” Then he nodded once, held the gate open and politely waited for her to leave.
Leaving didn’t seem to be part of her strategy. She ducked under his arm and wandered inside, looking at one pile, then the next. “What do you do with this stuff?”
Jason shrugged, not about to explain his hobbies to her, and not sure he could. Not that anyone would understand, anyway. Hell, he didn’t even know why.
His gaze followed her as she walked around, moving from one mound to the next, drawing precariously close to the house.
His pulse rate kicked up. Anxiety or lust? She was cute, short, stacked and curious. The clothes were out of place in the September heat, but he was grateful she was covered up, cause he didn’t think his pulse rate could handle any more. He liked her hair though. It was long, dark silk that hung down her back.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to a modified bicycle. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me.”
Not that he would have told her anyway, so he stayed quiet while her fingers traced over the twisted metal hump with the leather seat mounted on top. Crouching down, she inspected the spring-loaded frame with the four iron-spoke wheels. It’d taken him three months to find the wheels, and eventually he’d bought them on eBay. They were perfect.
“It’s an animal?”
Still he waited.
She rose, studied the thing. “First, there are four legs, or wheels. Second, the elongated back is almost like a hill…a hump…” Her finger crept to her mouth, chewing absently. She had a nice mouth. Red lips that spent most of their time open. His mind, always running in a tangential yet somewhat practical direction, began to think of
