Kendrick "Shade" Sullivan's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Shade called the sister as promised. She came back, paid in cash, and drove the rig off the orange lift plate before the sun dropped. The pad sat empty. Shade stood in the doorway and counted the bills twice. Then he pulled out his notebook and wrote the next job at the top of a clean page: a sand-runner's turbo pump due in nine days. He knew the pump. He did not know where to buy the parts. His vendors sold brake pads for sedans and belts for delivery vans. A racing pump needed a ceramic bearing kit and a magnetic seal, and the wrong seal would blow the housing on the first start. He was still staring at the page when a small man in a turban stepped through the open bay. The man's beard was gray and his vest had four pockets, each one stuffed. He looked at Shade a long moment. "You're Sullivan," he said. "You dropped Boone in the tenth. I was three rows back." Shade set the notebook down. The man held out a hand. "Omar Hassan. I scout for the auction houses out past the ridge. I heard a mechanic on the east side fixed a bike with a mining vent. I wanted to see if it was the same Sullivan." He grinned. "One round, most nights, I still tell people. One round, and he walked out." Shade let him talk. Then he showed Omar the notebook page and the list of parts he could not source. Omar read it once. He named three auction lots coming up that week, one with a sealed ceramic bearing kit from a decommissioned racing team, another with magnetic seals still in factory wrap. He named the prices. He named the sellers. Shade listened and felt the shop tilt back under his feet. "I can't leave the bay," Shade said. "George cuts the new door tomorrow. I've got three rigs booked behind that." Omar shrugged. "Give me a buy list and a budget. I bring back what fits. I take ten percent." Shade thought about it for the length of a breath. He walked Omar around the side of the shop and pulled the tarp off the low hover cart, three shades of red, welded from scrap. "Take this," he said. "It runs clean. It'll hold whatever you can fit in the back." Omar ran a hand along the nose and laughed once, quiet. He climbed in like he'd owned it a year. Shade wrote the buy list on a fresh page, tore it out, and handed it through the window with an envelope of cash. "Ceramic first," he said. "Seal second. Walk away from anything cracked." Omar nodded and eased the cart out of the lot. Shade watched the taillights turn the corner. The pad was empty. His parts problem had a man on it. His only clean-running vehicle was gone, and three rigs were booked before the week was out.