No Alternative: Day 7

Word Count: 42,050

Summary of Events:

Drake arrived at the restaurant for work and was soon tasked with serving a family he was sure had never been at the restaurant before; they kept him running back and forth between the kitchen to deal with a myriad of issues relating to their food that assured Drake they wouldn't be back anytime soon. He made arrangements with a junk collector to pick up his car, seeing as it wasn't repairable, and met him at the restaurant parking lot where the car still stood . . . 

Excerpt of the Day:

There was no mistaking the arrival of the junk collector. He drove up in a semi-type truck with a permanently attached flatbed that already had another car secured to it, the name of his company emblazoned on the side. The truck looked quite new and clean.

Drake slid out of Calder’s Jeep and walked over to where the guy was getting out of his truck.

“You Drake?” the tanned, powerfully-built man asked.

“Yes,” Drake replied.

“Gary,” the man held out a hand that looked like it wouldn’t get clean easily and Drake slid his hand into the grasp, nearly getting thrown to the pavement by the power of Gary’s handshake.

“So that’s the car?” Gary asked, pointing to the sorry-looking Cavalier — which Drake had gotten Rhys to help him take the license plate off of on Wednesday so that he could use the plate on his new car.

“Yeah,” Drake replied.

“Talk about a beater,” Gary said.

“It’s what you get for less than a thousand bucks,” Drake replied.

“You can’t by an effective used car for that kind of money,” Gary said. “You’ve got to at least shell out two grand.”

“I wasn’t allowed to pick it,” Drake replied. “A week after I got my license I was called outside and told this was my car. I was lucky it got me anywhere for the entire year and a half.”

“Wouldn’t your parents rather you not be needing money out of them for the car all the time?” Gary asked as he walked around the car.

“I don’t know,” Drake replied. “I think Dad would’ve loved to have bought me a brand new Model T, except that we’re over a century too late for those.”

“Only just,” Gary replied sarcastically. “Could you pop the hood open please?”

Drake obliged and went to look at the tangle of tubes, and wires that connected the engine to the car and helped it perform all its functions.

“This isn’t going to be much of a parts car,” Gary said. “Mostly just melting it all down and reforming it into something else.”

“I’m not surprised,” Drake admitted.

“How’d the airbag go off?” Gary asked, closing the hood and nodding toward the windshield.

“It wouldn’t start so I punched the steering wheel,” Drake replied.

“Oh,” Gary said, the word coming out as a truncated laugh.

Drake felt a little bit of irritation, but when Gary lapsed into silence instead of continuing to chuckle he felt grateful.

“That could reduce the amount of parts then,” Gary said.

He led the way down the driver’s side of the Cavalier, finishing his circumnavigation of it, and climbed into his truck, where he did something on is phone screen; Drake guessed he was making calculations.

“I can give you about two hundred for it,” Gary said.

“That works,” Drake said. “It’s better than paying a towing company to haul it away.”