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At first he had tried to push her to the back of his mind.
He had acknowledged that both her appearance and her demeanor had been strange, but strange people weren't a rarity in such a rural town. Substance abuse and disenfranchisement paved the roads as much as the sun-warmed asphalt beneath which existed a system of gnarled and oily roots, snaking through the soil like hairline cracks.
But she had not been Spindler-strange, no, her 'brand' seemed something else entirely. The way she had held herself, her manner of speech, a dark flame of antagonism in her eyes offset by the tranquility of the rest of her features. He could have easily imagined her disposition, but his gut told him otherwise.
Clay forced himself to not linger on the memory. White noise was enough to stave off thoughts of her, at least a few hours — the crackle of the radio and the usual trade of verbal blows between Russo and Costa bouncing off of the cement walls of the car shop. He allowed himself to tune into the vein of their conversation as he worked beneath the bonnet of a boxy Jeep.
"—naked as the day he was born, tracking mud against the mantle and stinking of death. Thought I'd never see him again and yet there he was. A vision. I—"
"Fuck me, for the last time, we've heard this one before."
Russo was a squat kernel of a man, bald with blunt features, like God had been in a rush the day he had made him. Costa, conversely, had the anatomy of someone who had had the poor fortune to end up in one of those medieval stretching devices. His limbs a little too long, his neck particularly so, slender beneath a round jaw, hugged by a greyed and wiry beard.
Costa was an adept storyteller, he could talk for hours, weaving rich tapestries in a lilting Portuguese accent. The downside was that none of the men could get much of a word in edgewise once Costa had begun, no matter how many obscenities were thrown his way.
This often made for a contest in how many words each man could throw into the air to drown out the other.
Costa always inevitably won. Russo had the lungs of a pack a day smoker so even if he had not been all bluster, his body inevitably caught up to him. Obasanjo's reasoned approach too, spoken through his gruff yet mild mannered measure, bore little resistance.
