Chapter Nine: Bulk Order

Well, this was troublesome.

With no time to shower or even freshen up, I acquired a fresh set of clothes from the RV’s diminutive closet. It certainly wouldn’t do to appear to the job site wearing the same clothes I’d worn yesterday.

I received another beeping alert on my phone as I was getting dressed. It was another burner phone posting for a Texiera job—a set of directions for a simple gofer job alongside a pickup and delivery time, tomorrow just after noon. Delivering for the mob on my birthday wasn’t my idea of a good time. Still, it was a tomorrow problem, and I codified its status as such with a reminder.

As I charged my phone for as long as conceivably possible, I noted that I never actually got the address for Janae’s apartment. This was almost certainly intentional on her part and the reason why she gave out directions manually. Neither did I get her phone number; hopefully, she really could retrieve her car on her own.

Using my keen navigational senses, I was certain I could find my way back to that inland apartment block. I did have a previous appointment to get to and a desire not to look like a stalker, though, so I left Janae to it and focused on the delivery that had just come through from Yuki’s private account.

Hundreds of tofu rows, some elaborate sushi specifically rolled a mile high, while the flight was en route. Yuki really was ordering for the whole crew.

I briefly considered logistics. Yesterday’s taco Tuesday had barely fit on my Vespa. The two-wheeler sat in its mooring on the back of my RV, where I usually parked it during extended periods of disuse. It always took ten to fifteen minutes to hoist it up or down off the rack each morning and evening, as it was certainly heavier than the average bike.

Wait a minute.

I glanced about my surroundings. The RV had a table, a rough facsimile of a kitchen preparation area. Adequate floorspace.

I would never be able to drag the overlarge order up into the hills on my Vespa. But if I enlist the RV as my delivery vehicle, well…

+++

This wasn’t, strictly speaking, allowed by the delivery app’s rules. The ‘contractors’ were tied to individual vehicles. You could have a contractor with multiple rides, but that was its own involved process, and I hadn’t gone through the trouble of registering my RV. It’s a highly impractical delivery driver in any other circumstance than what I found myself in right now.

Eh. No other option, I was going to have to go with that plan. I hopped into the driver’s compartment of my handy-dandy RV. I still had the slot reserved until the month’s end, so it ought to be here when I return.

The license plate on the Vespa, still hanging off the back of my nomadic home, would serve as an ID.

Traffic was not with me in this early-morning rush hour. Or perhaps the lumbering recreational vehicle simply wasn’t suited for ducking and weaving through the glacially-moving stream. Despite everything being against me, I made it to the airport just a smidge early. So early, that is, that I had to drive the whole unruly thing in a loop and take another approach at the international terminal.

A single Japan Airlines stewardess looked around beside the throughway. She had no carryout containers or bento boxes with her. In fact, she looked rather confused. I’d done airport deliveries enough to know where this was going.

I pulled up, then rolled down my window.

“Uh, Ohio?” I asked.

The stewardess repeated this in kind. At some unseen signal, a half-dozen fellow stewardesses came out carrying a mighty haul. I didn’t speak Japanese, but I got the impression this was just one of multiple loads. I squirmed out of the driver’s seat and opened up the ‘front door’ of the RV.

“Just put it down wherever you can,” I said.

Not one, not two, but three full rounds of stewardesses carried all manner of exquisite, airlifted Japanese food out of the airport and into my domicile. When the table was full up, they placed trays and boxes on my kitchen counter. When that was full, they placed things on every chair, then finally on every spare bit of flooring. Only the bedroom and the driver’s seat were spared.

This is going to cause everything to smell like rice and sushi for days, I thought as I did one last pre-flight check to ensure nothing was going to fall over. Slowly, with about half a flight crew out on the sidewalk watching me, I took off.

+++

The actual price of this order was hidden on the app. That never happened. The cost had to have been in the thousands of dollars. But hey, Yuki was rich, right? Surely she could afford it.

Boxes jiggled about in my cramped RV cabin. I had a whole leaning tower beside me in the passenger's seat, so high I could barely see out the rightmost side-view mirror. I almost considered using the HOV lane, figuring most people would assume the massive lump in the chair next to me was a carpool buddy.

The delivery address led back into the hills and mountains. Past that lookout where they’d been filming previously, and onward to a surprisingly spacious observatory that had been coopted for a long-haul shoot. A regular trailer park was arranged in the parking lot for various actors. Looked more like a Hollywood set than that brownstone façade I’d been rained on during that one delivery.

As it turned out, this was something of a premature wrap shoot for the whole project, though I wouldn’t know that until later. A winding maze of tables was already arranged and ready to take the food. The rest of the crew was, I presumed, doing a shoot deep in the observatory. This meant that the only people around to help offload the cargo were…

“Hey!” I said as I idled. “I saw your car back in the lot. Kind of surprised you’re in a condition to be out this early.”

A visibly hungover Janae squinted in the afternoon sun. She wore the same style professional suit as she did every day. In fact, I kind of assumed she had multiple copies of the same one. How she found her way back to that club to retrieve her SUV remained a mystery. And there beside her, dressed in I’m-not-filming-today casual attire (well, casual for a supermodel…) was a beauty with dark black hair and sort of a wolf-cut that was nonetheless still perfectly symmetrical and well-kept

“Hiiii, Mister Delivery Driver!” Yuki☆ said, waving the RV over.