Free The Bird Eater by Ania Ahlborn Page A

thing or not.
    The driver screwed up his mouth like he was ready to spit, peering at the house again before turning his attention back to Aaron’s car. “Looks like you got yourself a flat,” he announced.
    Aaron bit the inside of his mouth to keep from grinning like an idiot. If anything should have been recorded for posterity, Mr. Bass was it. “Looks like it,” he said, desperate to keep a straight face.
    “Don’t you got a spare?”
    Aaron released a faint laugh. “I did,” he said, leaving it at that.
    “But not no more,” Mr. Bass finished for him, scratching his head beneath the plastic mesh of his company hat.
    Without saying another word, Mr. Bass climbed back into his truck and threw it into reverse, as though he’d decided to forget the whole thing and go back to the shop without Aaron or the handicapped Toyota. But instead of taking off down Old Mill, he backed the dually into position, climbed out of the truck for the second time, and began to hook the two vehicles together in unholy matrimony.
    Once the hookup was complete, Aaron joined the driver inside the cabin of his gigantic truck. He snapped his seat belt into place and stared down the slight decline of the driveway, ignoring the fact that the inside of the pickup reeked of Corn Nuts and sweat. Par for the course , he thought.
    Mr. Bass spoke again only after the tow truck and its load were safely out on Old Mill Road.
    “Son,” he murmured, shooting Aaron a distrustful glance. “Rumor has it you’re supposed to be dead.”
    There was a shoddy missing dog poster tacked to a corkboard inside Vaughn Mechanical’s lobby. Sitting in a metal folding chair between two racks of tires, Aaron couldn’t look away from it. It hurt to look at, from the way the Xeroxed black-and-white photograph was too dark to make out any distinct features to the handwritten text offering a reward, the writing straight at first only to sadly arch down the page in a hopeless frown.
    Aaron lifted a lidded Styrofoam cup of soda to his chest—a smiling soft-serve cone maniacally grinning from the cup’s curved side—and bowed his head to catch the straw between his lips, his gaze still fixed on that terrible full-page sign. The thing was useless, omitting essential information like breed and distinctive markings. It didn’t even list the animal’s name. The flier spoke volumes about that particular corner of the Ozarks. Rough. Undereducated. Reeking of a weird sort of desperation.
    “Holbrook?” A beefy-looking guy stepped from beyond a double-hinged door and slunk behind the counter. He was a metal head; the kind of guy who wore sleeveless tanks and biker boots and saw GWAR live in concert. Aaron didn’t need to stand next to the mechanic to know the guy would tower over him by a good few inches, at least six foot three, and a hundred pounds heavier than Aaron’s current weight. Aaron wondered if this was the man Cheri Miller had chosen to spend the rest of her life with—a guy so unlike himself it was like night and day. The guy wiped his hands on a rag and swung his rocker hair over his shoulder with a flourish, pulling it back with dirty hands before twisting it into a rope and coiling it at the back of his head—an old lady’s bun, messy, almost immediately unraveling beneath the weak hold of an office-grade rubber band.
    Aaron rose from his seat between the racks of tires and approached the front counter, his soda in tow. After an hour of waiting for his tire to be replaced, he’d marched across the street to Mr. Ice Cream for a drink. Now he was no longer thirsty, and the cup was little more than a watered-down nuisance. But because Vaughn’s lobby didn’t have a trash can, Aaron continued to drink the lukewarm cola out of absentminded boredom. Arriving at the counter, he looked down at a handwritten invoice dotted with greasy fingerprints.
    “Sign here,” the guy said, tapping the bottom margin of the top carbon with a chewed-up blue BIC.
    Aaron