Shamelessness!
“This,” Pedro said, “is what the old Americans called a 1974 Dodge Monaco sedan. It’s got its original motor, over four hundred cubic inches in size. It has restored tires, reproduced suspensions, rejuvenated shocks. The engine has been converted, so it’ll run fine on vegetable oil.”
“Nice,” I said. “Does it have anything wrong with it?”
Pedro shrugged. “The cigarette lighter does not work.”
Look, I didn’t say I wanted Pedro’s gate keys. If I was going to get downtown in time, I needed something with more speed than a running man. And that meant… the car in the King’s stable he’d be least likely to mourn. Pedro had walked me past the Jaguar without losing a step, but this one he’d let me sign out, since the Hermosa did give me that note.
This sounds very familiar….. if I had a heart, its’ cockles would be toasty warm.
I do, however, feel bad for what that poor Dodge is about to endure, though.
Mew
This… really doesn’t feel plausible. Not by itself. Sorry.
– it’s a 1974 Dodge Monaco.
– This is set post-post-post apocalypse. We’re starting with current day, then hopping a fairly big chunk of time into the future (losing basically everyone who’d have specific personal nostalgic thoughts about cars from the 70s along the way), then having a magical apocalypse (which basically wipes out our ability to manufacture things like replacement parts, at least for a while, and causes a near-total breakdown in society), then jumping forward *another* large chunk of time.
I mean, if you have people who have personal magic that lends itself to car restoration, then you could argue that someone might have gotten lucky in an archaeological expedition into Old Hollywood or something, and that at the time of collapse there might have been some crazy collector who kept cars from that far back, but just tossing it in there and saying “we have this thing” without any sort of justification rings *really* false.
Counterpoint: it’s the Bluesmobile. 🙂
I’m only being mildly facetious: I do have a bit of text planned about how the king’s grandfather *was* a car collector of just the sort to find automobiles from New California’s equivalent of the Scriptures, and restore them by any means necessary and basically ethical. But that same text is going to describe how Tom even knows how to drive the damn thing, and it’s going to be just as ‘moving right along’ as this*. As will the flying monkey… ah, I say too much.
But thanks for pointing it out; I wasn’t sure if I should add said bit of explanatory text, but obviously it should be in there.
*There’s an ancient electronic machine in the basement of the Billy that can be used to teach Shamuses how to drive. It works. Tom got a whole ten hours on it during his training. They even have the coin-like tokens the Old Americans used to operate it…