Chapter 46
The buyers would tear the building down the instant the papers cleared and something stupid and mainstream like an Olive Garden would go up in its place. They’d keep the staff on for a while, but eventually they’d be let go, since new people could be paid a lot less. Not that Jason would want to stay; cooking at a box-shop was all reheating stuff that was shipped in. None of it was fresh.
And people who were on vacation deserved to be able to have something new, not the same fucking food they could get around the corner. That was part of the fun of vacation, right? Not that Scooter’d ever really had one, but hey, he understood the theory.
He pulled into the parking lot and sat there in the cab for a long moment, staring at Dockside. They’d all been working like demons for the last three days, and if Scooter went up to Steelman’s tomorrow, they could reopen as early as Thursday. Assuming Steelman’s had an oven he could use, and that they could get it installed and ready—
Scooter broke off that chain of thought. One task at a time. Go inside and find out how the inspection had gone. Kat had sent him out to get the mail while Bethany Kingston, the health inspector, was poking around because he and Bethany got along about as well as Redskins and Dallas fans, and if he was there, she’d find something to fine them for.
He dropped the mail off in his office, then stuck his head in the kitchen.
Kat was standing in front of the grill, scrubbing soot off the wall. And Andy’s legs were sticking out of the oven door. Scooter walked a little further into the kitchen, and yep, for some reason Andy was lying half-inside the broken oven.
“Welcome back,” Kat said. “Did you bring us presents?”
“Brought the insurance check,” Scooter said. “What are you doingin there?” He dropped into a squat. The inside of the oven was still filthy; it couldn’t be healthy for Andy to be breathing that shit in.
Andy craned his neck around and grinned at Scooter. He was nearly as filthy as the oven, covered from the top of his head to his knees in smears of soot and grease. “Hey! Good news; I think I can fix this for, nng, maybe two hundred dollars’ worth of parts?”
Scooter’s legs went out and he found himself unexpectedly on the floor. “What?” That didn’t even come out as a word, more like a rough exhalation of air.
Andy’s eyes widened. “Whoa, you okay?”
Scooter coughed, tried again. “What did you say?”
“I mean, that’s just a rough estimate,” Andy said, “so don’t hold me to it, but most of the oven is fine. The fire only fried some of the wiring, that’s an easy fix, once I take it apart. A couple of the panels will need to be replaced, and I’ll have to replace the interior insulation, but really, there’s no reason why I can’t have it up and running in a day or two if you’ve got a decent hardware store anywhere in the area.”
Two hundred? Two? A new industrial standard would run him almost three grand, twenty-five hundred if he managed to find a scratch-and-dent or someplace that had a floor model to sell. Andy was talking less than a tenththat cost. Scooter scrambled after what was left of his wits. “I could kiss you,” he said, reverent. “Seriously? You…wow, Andy. Thank you.”
Andy squirmed a little. “It’s not—Fixing things is what I do, it’s…I was gonna be a mechanical engineer, this is all piddly easy stuff. Anyway, don’t kiss me now, I’m covered in nasty gunk, seriously.” He managed a grin—the white of his teeth startling in his soot-smeared face—and put his head back down and went back to doing…something…with a screwdriver on the interior top panel.
“It might be easy to you,” Scooter was obligated to point out, “but, Andy, I’m serious. You may have just saved Dockside. If I had to mortgage this place…” The relief was like someone had taken a stone off his chest and he could breathe, a little, for the first time in days.
“Only fair,” Andy said from inside the oven, muffled. “You saved me first.”
Kat beamed down at them, and kicked Andy lightly in the leg. “Gifted child,” she said fondly.
“Shut up now, Kat.”
* * * *
Scooter pushed back from his desk with a sigh. Andy had managed to salvage the oven for two hundred and sixty dollars, and it was stupid how apologetic he’d been over that miscalculation, but the industrial standard wiring was slightly more expensive than the stuff in a regular home appliance. And he’d been doing the math and estimates in his head. On the fly. While Andy had been doing that, the rest of the crew had pitched in on the cleaning and installing the new grill plate, and the re-opening had gone off without a hitch.