Thunder Road Read Free Page A

from Midnight Autos.” Because that’s exactly what he does. He goes out at midnight and rips them off parked cars. The Taylors hang with him a lot now. I reckon they’re in on it too. He hardly ever drives himself – well, not during the day time, anyway.’
    ‘Lost his licence?’
    ‘Yeah, for about sixty years. He reckons by the time he gets it back, we’ll all be cruising around in space craft.’
    I had to laugh. Devon had such an easy way with him, he seemed to be able to talk to anyone. Crims and cops, back to back. Made them all seem like cool guys.
     
    Back at the boarding house Mrs Jacques was in watching TV, really loud. Sergei was in his room making freaky sounds on the piano.
    ‘Listen Trace,’ Devon stopped me in the hallway outside his room, hand cupped behind his ear, ‘sounds like Beethoven … decomposing.’
    After a few hours with Devon it was like I had always known him. Dev came from the East Coast. His great grandfather, DiegoSantos, jumped ship a hundred years ago and began the Santos dynasty. Devon was really proud of the Spanish thing and claimed he would go back there some day… back to the old hacienda. Drink Bull’s Blood and eat paella. He made it sound like it was just around the corner, and I was invited.
    We clicked. Held nothing back, there was no point. I’ve always been a bit of a fatalist. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. Devon showed up in my life at just the right time. He was what I needed, and as it turned out, I was what he needed too.

Chapter three
    I GUESS THE NEXT big thing that happened was Karen. Bob Bryant asked me to work weekends until five. He had this trainee/manager angle that he dangled in front of me. Seven days straight was tough going but I needed all the money I could get. The good thing was that most of the usual staff didn’t come in. A different bunch did the weekends. They were a cool change from the weekday stiffs. The old, burnt out guys. The nightmare mums.
    Three of them were about my age: at last, I thought, people I can relate to. Two guys and a girl. The guys were university students: Jason, who was tall and thin with a crew cut and glasses, and Richard, who had long brown hair, and an annoying way of not looking at you when he spoke to you. They’d gone to some private school together, and they were always talking about their teachers, what marks they had got in the school exams, and most of all, which of their mates were dicks. There were big dicks, dumb dicks, fat dicks, sad dicks and total dicks. I had never heard the word dick used so often. Where I came from, anyone called Richard was always called Dick but this Richard didn’t seem so keen.
    The girl, Karen, was quiet, shy I guess, and still at school. Pretty though. Even with her hair tied back and wearing the company smock. One of those girls who played down her looks. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
    They all came to work in a mint old Jaguar: Jason’s father’s.‘Dad uses the work car.’ The three of them had all known each other, like, forever.
    I was looking for a chance to break through with Karen, but casually, so it didn’t look like I was hitting on her. You’ve got to let girls think that they’re the ones in control. Their guard always goes up when they think that you’re coming onto them.
    The two guys just stuck together and made smart comments about people and ideas I had never heard of. They had their own way of talking: accent, lingo, it all left me on the outer, like a loser. Seemed deliberate. Karen worked on the cash register so she was pretty much on her own. The two guys were stocktaking at the back of the store, my end. Whenever I had to talk to one of them, they exchanged looks after I had finished: some sort of code. It didn’t take a genius to work out that I was in the dick category … if I was lucky. I probably didn’t even rate.
    Most of the time I was stuck in my paint-mixing bay. I needed a reason to leave it. Richard and Jason