Intersections

Every doorway, every intersection has a story. - Katherine Dunn

Sometimes people intersect with your life and make it better, sometimes worse. But either way, it can change your life, and theirs, forever. – Unknown

I don't own these characters. I just like to spend time with them. No other profit to be had than that.

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"Shane?" A bleached blonde head popped out of the shack doorway and regarded the tall man with questioning green eyes. "When ya gonna have that car fixed? We ain't making no money stuck in this place, ya know."

Shane Carmichael's dark blonde head peeked out from under the hood of the rusted Chevy and regarded the voluptuous girl with something less than appreciation. He had been attracted to her at her first, not only to her hot body but her backwoods way of talking. It was so different than the bluebloods he'd been brought up around.

But now, after six weeks together, she was getting damn annoying.

When he'd first met her, he'd just held up a gas station and needed a getaway car, as the one he'd stolen that morning had been blocked by a large truck. Rita, dressed in short shorts and a halter top, was leaning provocatively against her rag top Chevy Camaro, filling her car with gas and looking at him with unabashed interest.

"Want to go for a ride?" He'd asked her as he ran to her car and jumped, uninvited, into the driver's seat.

Rita hadn't questioned or protested the stranger taking over her car. Instead, she jerked the pump from her car, jumped into the passenger seat beside him and hollered, "Go!"

He didn't have to be coaxed.

They had held up two more gas stations and a pizza place and slept together before they had actually gotten down to formal introductions.

He was Shane Carmichael. Tall, dark blonde hair, chiseled good looks with deep piercing blue eyes and dimples that totally distracted any woman he happened to smile at. Of course his well-honed physique didn't hurt either. He had been a star athlete in school and still had the muscle and posture of an Adonis.

His parents were rich attorneys from Boston who didn't understand their less-than-perfect, college dropout son who absolutely hated stiff suits and stiff people and had taken off one day to have, as he called it, a little fun.

Of course his idea of fun was different than others.

He liked fast cars and fast women and easy money. His parents didn't agree with him and absolutely refused to fund his exploits, telling him it was their way or the highway. He chose the highway. And although there were times, like now, that he questioned his judgment in the matter, he was determined he would never go back.

Of course that meant that he had to rob a gas station from time to time or a store or any place else where he thought he could score quickly and with not too much risk. He'd had a couple of close calls, but so far, he hadn't been caught and no one knew his name. He wanted to keep it that way. As a matter of fact, he'd just about kill to keep it that way.

She was Rita Conwell, poor daughter of inpoverished parents who had dropped out of school in her junior year because she was 'bored'. Of course, truth be told, it wasn't so much boredom as it was confusion, irritation and even a touch of fear that drove her out.

She wasn't the smartest of kids and certainly not one of the richest. Those facts alone put her at odds with some of the more popular girls. But there was also the fact that Rita was prettier than a lot of those girls and certainly attracted more boys than those girls and that made them hate her and consequently they made high school hard for her.

As a consequence she hated school. She only stayed in as long as she did because her parents would drag her, sometimes literally, kicking and screaming to the two story brick building which housed the final 4 grades of the Pea Ridge school district. Pea Ridge, population 4794 in the northwest corner of Arkansas was best known for having the most intact Civil War battlefield in the United States, if you cared for that sort of thing.

But Rita didn't care in the slightest. She hated her home town, considering it too small and backwards for her. When her boyfriend of the time, lanky Rodney Stovall with the hard body and ear rings, took off to 'see the world', she went with him.

Of course, she didn't stay with him. They had made it all the way to Washington DC and living in a one way motel when she came home after work at a pizza joint to find him in bed with another girl. Rita didn't have a high IQ, but she knew when she was being cheated on.

Striking out on her own, she realized quickly that she wasn't going to make it on her smarts. But she had other assets, assets that certain rich men were quite willing to pay some serious money to use. Sometimes the requests made of her, were kind of disgusting and some downright painful, but those times she charged extra. To her way of thinking, everyone won in those situations.

The day she'd literally ran away with Shane Carmichael, she'd just left a nearby motel where she'd earned herself one of those extra-large paydays. When the tall, beautiful man jumped into her car and asked if she wanted to ride, she remembered silently laughing at the fact that she'd already done that. But as he was taking her car, she'd figured she might as well take another.

Now here they were, six weeks later, stuck in a shack in the backwoods of Virginia with a rusty Chevy Nova that refused to start. Her car had gotten a load of buckshot at the last place they'd robbed, a week ago, and they'd had to abandon it. They came upon this decrepit hulk of tin when the owner had neglectfully left it idling while he ran into a burger joint for the latest combo meal.

It had gotten them away from the area they were in and out here to this deserted shack, but it didn't appear that it was going to get them much further. The money they'd taken last week was still sitting in a little sack. But they couldn't use it because they couldn't go anywhere to use it, besides it had been a very small haul.

"Shane!" Rita was demanding his attention again and it was getting on his last nerve. "Is that thang gonna run or not?"

Shane took a deep breath and threw the wrench, he'd found in the trunk, to the ground, giving her an angry scowl. "I'm doing the best I can, Rita." He said sternly. "If you think you're so smart, why you come out here and fix this 'thang'?"

Rita wasn't too bright, but she was smart enough to know when she'd made him mad. "I was only askin'." She muttered as she turned and went back inside the abandoned house.

Shane took a deep breathe, stretched his back and then bent down and reclaimed the wrench. He didn't know a lot about mechanics, other than helping his high school buddies work on their hot rods, but he figured he could get this rattletrap started and running enough to least them somewhere closer to civilization. Unless he was mistaken, Arlington wasn't too far away. Surely he could find something there.

TBC