Sandbridge Box Set

Chapter 1-2

“I am going to kill Debbie,” Scooter Stahl said, shoving Jeff’s s**t into a duffle bag. This was the third time in two years that Debbie Clark had shown up, flirted a little with Jeff, and suddenly Scooter was short both a renter and an employee. If Jeff wasn’t such a loveable asshole, Scooter wouldn’t have given him his job back the first time. That, and no one else really wanted the damn job in the first place. Washing dishes by hand, sweeping the floor, and bussing tables was not exactly fun, and in a tourist town like Sandbridge, it was hard work, too.

The restaurant was failing, slowly but surely, Scooter knew that, so the wages he could offer weren’t great, either. The only good thing about the job was that it came with meals and a discount on rent for the little apartment over the garage that Scooter used to try to earn a little extra on the side. Scooter had paid Jeff under the table and taken the rent out of it directly, which was a nice arrangement for them both.

At least, it was nice right up until Debbie had showed up flush with cash—she was a professional card cheat—and dragged Jeff off for another of their whirlwind adventures. The two of them would be gone for months. And tourist season was just starting. If Scooter had to bus tables as well as manage Dockside and cook on Jason’s off-shifts, he was going to die of sleep deprivation. “Kill her,” he stressed. She couldn’t have waited until September to steal Jeff again?

“You always say that, and yet, you never do,” Kat said, pulling her red hair back in a ponytail and grabbing the broom. “I’ll take bus-and-sweep today. Maybe Jason can do dishes in between cooking?”

“I don’t do dishes,” Jason yelled from the back. Jason had been Scooter’s best friend since the second grade, and his foster brother for almost as long, but there was no denying that Jason’s skill at avoiding unwanted work was legendary “I’ll bus, but I don’t like cooking when my fingers are all raisin-y.”

Kat brandished the broom threateningly. “You know that s*x you wanted to have, like ever again? Do the damn dishes, Jason.” Kat and Jason had been dating for years; they were the most beautiful couple Scooter had ever seen. Jason was tall and broad-shouldered and blond and tan, while Kat was on the short side, with dark red hair and skin the color of cream that never seemed to burn and curves that even gay-as-a-maypole Scooter could see were amazing. Their relationship seemed to be based on a constant diet of bickering and insults, and never failed to make Scooter green with envy.

“Call D’ante,” Jason suggested. “I heard his transmission is going out. He might need the extra work for a few days?” D’ante had worked full-time at Dockside a few years back, when he’d first come back from that disastrous tour of duty in Afghanistan and had needed something to get him out of the house, away from overbearing, too-sympathetic family. These days, he lived with his sister, helping to keep an eye on her kids, but he could generally be counted on to fill in a shift or two when Dockside was short on hands.

“You call D’ante,” Scooter said. “I’ll put a sign up and call down to the paper.” Who knew, maybe someone in this town had a teenager who needed some work. That wasn’t likely—there wasn’t any public transportation that stopped close to the restaurant, and teens who had cars also had access to better-paying jobs. But who knew? Someday, one day, Scooter’s luck would change. Maybe.

Not today, though. The side door creaked on its busted hinge as Kat went through it to dump the mop water outside, reminding Scooter of all the chores still to do. “And I still need to run into town and get those errands done before we open.” There was still time. Dockside opened at four on weekdays—they wouldn’t switch over to summer hours until Memorial Day weekend—and it wasn’t much past one now.

Scooter went to the supply closet and cussed for a while. Part of Jeff’s job had been keeping that room neat, but of course he hadn’t done it. Mostly he did dishes and flirted with customers and stole food and table scraps for his dog—oh, Christ, that was another thing to check. Had he left Trick, or had he and Debbie remembered to take the dog with them? Jeff wasn’t a bad guy, he was just…directionless.

On the other hand, Jeff was on his way to Nevada with the love of his life and he’d probably come back in four months with a lot of amazing stories, which was more than Scooter had ever done. Dockside had been his parents’ place—a beach restaurant that served greasy burgers, fries, crab cakes, and whatever catch of the day Scooter could buy off the boats before the bigger places crowded him out—and Scooter had never been more than two hundred miles from home in his whole life. So, maybe Jeff had a better life philosophy than Scooter did. It was just inconvenient for the rest of them.

Finally, Scooter found the signs: Help Wanted and Room for Rent. He brushed them off; Jeff had obviously been eating in the closet, since there were crumbs everywhere. Scooter made a mental note to get more insecticide while he was at the hardware store for the door hinges. The last thing he needed at the beginning of tourist season was an infestation of palmetto bugs. Palmetto bugs were enormous, flying cousins to roaches, fully an inch and a half long, and they freaked the tourists right out. Not that Scooter would blame them at all; he’d been known to shriek when one of them scuttered out from under something, too. And then there’d be problems with the local Health Inspector.

Scooter hung the signs in the window, then took the broom from Kat. The porch should be swept, too, even though that was a hopeless task. The beach sand always ended up everywhere. But it gave him a few minutes to be outdoors, breathing in the brackish scent of the sea, combined with a mild odor of seaweed and dead fish. It was home. He couldn’t give up now.

Turned out D’ante had managed to win two hundred dollars on a scratcher, and while he was willing to help Scooter while the Dockside was shorthanded, he didn’t need a second job. Scooter would send Kat out to the S-turn later in the afternoon. The local teens hung out there near the little inlet, and they might know someone who needed the work.