What Phoebe Wants

5

THE NEXT MORNING, I was waiting at Easy Motors when they opened the doors. A teenage receptionist with allergies greeted me with a smile that soon faltered when I told her I’d bought a car there a few days before and now it needed a repair.

“You’ll have to talk to Frank,” she said, reaching for the phone. “He’s in charge of that.”

In charge of what? I wondered.

“Mr. A-dams,” the receptionist whined into the phone. “We have a customer out here with a prob-lem.”

A few moments later, a man in a rumpled brown suit came into the room, hand extended. His grin was too large for his face, wrapping around his cheeks toward his ears. “You’re the owner of that little Mustang they towed in last night, aren’t you?” he gushed. “Darling car. I can tell by looking it suits you to a tee. Come into my office and we’ll fix you right up.”

He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and steered me toward a glass-fronted cubicle that reeked of stale cigars and onions. Sweeping aside a stack of dog-eared repair manuals, he pushed me into a folding chair and took his own seat behind a green metal desk. “Now, how can we help you?”

I tried a smile of my own. “It’s simple, really. I bought my car here two days ago and last night it broke down. A friend told me it looked like a broken motor mount. So I had it towed here to be fixed.”

Friendly Frank nodded and plucked a multipart form from a stack on his desk. “We can do that. We can do that. Fix you right up.” He began writing furiously on the form, pausing twice to punch numbers into an ancient adding machine at his side. The machine whirred and clacked and unreeled a stream of yellowed paper. Frank added a final figure and pushed the form toward me. “Sign at the bottom and we’ll get right to work.”

Numbers danced down the page in cramped script. My gaze fixed on the figure at the bottom. “Four hundred and seventy-two dollars!” I shoved the paper back toward him, gasping for breath. “I’m sorry. I must not have made myself clear. This repair should be covered under the dealer’s warranty.”

Frank’s smile vanished. “Your car is seven years old, and there’s no such thing as a warranty on a car that old.”

“But I’ve only had it two days.”

He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “I don’t make the rules, lady. I just enforce them. Now, do you want the repair or not?”

“Not!” I stood. “I’ll take the car somewhere else.”

“Fine.” He handed me a second form. “That’ll be eighty-nine, ninety-seven.”

“For what? You haven’t done anything.”

“Storage fees.”

“This is outrageous.”

“Don’t blame me because you bought an older car. You should have opted for one of our premium models.”

“This is not my fault,” I protested.

“What do you know about cars, Mrs. Frame?”

I glared at him, but didn’t answer.

He rose and patted me on the shoulder. “Do yourself a favor. Next time you go shopping for a car, bring a man along.”

I jerked open the door and stormed into the lobby once more. “I want to see the manager,” I told the receptionist.

Her eyes widened. “Mr. Adams is the manager.”

I turned and saw Frank smiling at me. Not the cheery grin with which he’d greeted me, but the look of a sly fox.

I wanted to rip that smile right off his face. I wanted to scream, to throw punches, to do something to make him quit looking at me as if I were a bug and he was about to squash me.

I didn’t have the strength to beat him up or the clout to make him afraid of me, so I did the only thing I knew to do. I gave him the haughtiest look I could manage. “This isn’t the end of this,” I announced, and stomped out the door.

I stalked down the sidewalk, my shoes slapping against the concrete, sending tremors up my legs. My stomach churned and my heart raced. I hated this feeling of helplessness. No matter what Frank said, Easy Motors had cheated me. But there was nothing I could do. They had my car. They had the six thousand dollars I had paid for the car. And unless I gave them more money, I wasn’t going to have the money or the car again.

“Aaaargh!” I yelled in frustration. A man on a bicycle stared at me and swerved across the street to avoid me. I didn’t care.

I took a deep breath and deliberately slowed my steps. “Don’t fall apart, Phoebe,” I muttered. “Think this through. There has to be something you can do.”

I started to feel a little better. I wasn’t going to let Frank Adams and Easy Motors get to me. If they were going to fight dirty, then I would fight dirty, too. I didn’t have much experience, but I was a fast learner.

MY MOOD HADN’T IMPROVED MUCH by the time I arrived at work, but my co-workers’ enthusiastic reaction to my new hair color made me feel a little better. Of course, there’s always a spoilsport in every bunch. Joan Lee made a face when she saw me. “I don’t think it suits you,” she said. “Too flamboyant.”

“I can be flamboyant,” I protested.

“Transcriptionists are not flamboyant,” Joan announced, as if this was a fact obvious to everyone but an idiot.

“Maybe red hair is just a start.” I tossed my head in what I hoped was a confident, flamboyant manner. “Maybe I’m thinking of changing careers.”

Joan shook her head and walked away. I could see my next job evaluation. Hair color not suited to job description.

I filled my coffee mug and headed toward my cubicle. Jeff met me in the hallway. He grinned. “I think there’s a flamboyant Phoebe underneath your mild-mannered guise as an ordinary transcriptionist,” he said.

The idea pleased me, but I wasn’t about to let him know it. I was still a little miffed about the way he’d walked away from me last night. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you eavesdropping will get you into trouble?”

He lifted one eyebrow in that sexy way of his. “Maybe I’m a man who likes trouble.”

I bit back a smile and hurried past him, to my office. He followed. “Did you get everything settled with your car?”

I tightened my grip on the coffee mug. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?” He intercepted me in the doorway. “What do you mean, not exactly?”

“The manager at Easy Motors says I don’t have a warranty. They want almost five hundred dollars to fix the car, or ninety dollars to release it so I can take it somewhere else.”

Jeff frowned. “Want me to go talk to them?”

“No!” Just what I needed, a man getting me out of this fix. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

He shrugged. “Just thought I’d offer.”

I pushed past him and sat at my desk. I dug the phone book out of the drawer and flipped through it. “What are you looking for?” Jeff asked.

“Are you always so nosy?” I punched in a number and waited while it rang.

“Houston Banner. Bringing you the news first.”