1/10th of the Law is Common Sense
"Wake up." Jay startled awake with a half-aborted snort as the order was repeated and accompanied by a none-too-gentle poke to the ribs.
"What?" Jay asked blearily, sitting up on the cot he had stretched out on the night before. He had been too tired to make his way home, and Morris, the old, crotchety owner of the scrapyard, didn't mind if the people he employed slept there sometimes; free security, he called it. In reality, Morris himself would have been better security, with his wizened face set in a perpetual bulldog snarl that could have warned off Armageddon all by itself.
"
What the
hell is
that?" Morris ground out, his voice growly with a lifetime of smoking and a generally poor disposition.
Jay followed the line of Morris's pointing arm to the garage bay he had parked the Corvette in the previous night. It looked so much better under the flourescent lights of the garage than it had parked in a dirty street in the dead of night. Some of the other guys were standing around it, talking in low voices and looking between Jay and the Corvette. "That's about a hundred grand in parts, boss. No need to thank me or anything," he said with a smirk.
"
Thank you? I should ********
kill you, you moron!" Morris reached down and grabbed a handful of Jay's shirt, hauling him bodily off the cot and dragging him into the bay. Jay had no choice but to stumble after him. His co-workers scrambled to get out of their way, as if whatever Jay had that made their boss so mad at him was contagious and deadly. "
That!" Morris shouted at him as he dragged Jay around the car. "What the
hell is
that?" Morris repeated, pointing at the open trunk. Like most sports cars, the Corvette had a miniscule trunk that was designed more for looks than function.
However, that hadn't stopped somebody from cramming a dead body into it.
The smirk slid off of Jay's face as he stared at it. "Oh my god," he muttered, his eyes growing wide. "Oh my
god, I slept here all night with a
dead guy right there!" One of the guys barked a laugh, hiding it in a cough as Morris's face darkened further.
"
That's what you're worried about? There's a dead body stuffed in the car that
you stole and you're worried about sleeping next to it? I should put you in there with it!"
"Swear to God, Morris, I had no idea it was there," Jay rushed out, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "Just, I saw the car last night, decided to try my luck, and the keys were
right there--I couldn't not!"
"Yeah, just like you
couldn't not be bothered to check it out when you brought it here. Do you know what that
means?"
"That...that this catch was too good to be true?"
"That someone's gonna be
looking for this car, you dumb s**t! You don't just dump a body in a car this good and forget about it! This thing's been sittin' here for hours, and you can bet your a** the owner's not gonna just write it off as bad luck and let it go."
"So--so what do we do?"
"
We don't do nothin', kid.
You're gonna take this car--and yourself--offa my lot.
Now."
"Aw, c'mon, Morris," Jay wheedled, not willing to give the car--and the payday it could bring--up for something so small as a dead body in the trunk. "I can scrub out the back, we can still break it down for parts--"
"
No. This s**t's risky enough as it is, these parts can be traced back to my yard, and I'm not puttin' my a** on the line so you can make a couple of bucks. You get this thing outta here
now, and as far as I'm concerned, I never saw it." Morris slammed the trunk shut. "Understood?" He asked in a tone that demanded a positive response.
"Yes," Jay grumbled, scowling at the keys Morris pressed into his hand before turning his back on him. What crappy luck. Of
course it had been too good to be true. Avoiding the curious glances and smug smirks of his co-workers, he got into the car and drove it out of the bay.
Halfway to the yard's exit, he put the car in park and turned it off, leaning over the passenger seat to open the glove compartment. If he absolutely
had to ditch the car, he wanted to find out where the owner lived so he could do it on the opposite side of town. Although nobody really bothered keeping up with their registrations these days, Jay knew from past experience that those kinds of things tended to linger, forgotten, in the depths of the glove box: old registrations, expired insurance cards, manuals--and in this case, a handgun and a small leather drawstring pouch. "Jesus," Jay muttered as he caught sight of the gun, recoiling from the glove box. The door gaped open without the support of his hand, and whatever was in the pouch submitted to gravity and rolled out, hitting the floor with a dull
thud. It lay there forgotten as Jay cautiously reached back into the glove box, being careful not to touch the gun as he rifled through the papers beneath it.
Jay grasped the very corner of a registration form and carefully slid it out of the pile, skimming it quickly. It listed the car as belonging to someone on the east side of town--the ritzier part of town, full of what used to be mini-mansions in well-developed gated communities. Figured; this was hardly a cheap car. It was impossible to know whether the owner still lived there, but Jay decided it was better to be safe than sorry.
An hour later, he parked the car into the loading bay of what used to be a shipping company. Now it was just another building, dilapidated and abandoned and as far away from the address on the registration as he could manage. The whole street was full of lots with cars that had been left behind to rot, and only the fact that the Corvette was in such good condition--not to mention cherry red--would mark it as different than any of the others. If nothing else, it was far enough away from the street that passersby wouldn't notice the smell of the body that would soon begin to rot inside the trunk.
Jay sighed as he turned the car off for the last time, reluctant to get out. This was the kind of car he had always wanted: sleek and made with the kind of craftsmanship that newer, mass-produced pieces of crap lost somewhere between concept and marketability. He could fix it up, unleash the beast that lived under the hood, and just take off. He could be unstoppable. It was tempting, even with the body in the trunk. He could dump it, get the car repainted, and drive so far, so fast that no one would be able to catch him. But Morris was right. Someone would be looking for this car, and it wasn't so common a car that its owner would be thrown off by a new coat of paint.
Oh, well. Maybe in another life.
Jay withdrew the keys from the ignition, not wanting to leave them in there and risk having someone else steal the car. As he leaned towards the glove compartment, he caught sight of the pouch that had fallen out the first time he had opened it. After a moment of debate, he tossed the keys in the glove compartment, snatched the pouch, and put it in his pocket before getting out of the car.
If he couldn't keep the Corvette, he may as well have a souvenir of his time with it.