Sixty-Eight

My injured ankle crackled as I limped toward St. Botolph Street to grab another Zipcar. A Honda Civic named Buford waited for me on West Newton Street. Bobby caught up with me. “Hold up a minute.”

I limped on. “Can’t stop. I need to save Lucy.”

Bobby grabbed my arm. “Will you wait a second?”

“No.” I kept moving.

“Don’t make me arrest you.”

That stopped me. “You’re gonna arrest me now? After crushing my balls and lying to that guy from Wayland?”

“You committed a fucking crime, Tucker. What are we going to do about that?”

“I’m not going to do anything about it. You are going to do something about it.”

“What am I going to do about it?”

“You’re going to make it go away.”

“Bullshit on that!” said Bobby.

“Fuck you then, Bobby. Arrest me.”

We stood, facing off, my bad ankle complaining about the uneven bricks that made up the sidewalk. Bobby turned away from me and walked in a little circle uttering a mantra of profanity. “Goddammit, motherfucker, shit!”

I crossed my arms, spat my words. “Do you know how happy I was when you called me?”

Bobby stopped swearing. “What?”

“Do you know how happy I was, at that ball game, with Lucy? I was fucking happy.”

Bobby said nothing.

“It was our third date, the Sox were winning, I was with a hot girl who I really liked and who seemed to like me. I was probably even going to go home with her.”

“What’s this—”

“I’ll bet that she would have been my girlfriend. We’d be spending the fall watching the Sox, having dinners. She would probably have had some of her stuff in my house by now.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that you fucked that all up. You, my friend, destroyed it. If you hadn’t called me, I was going to spend the night at Lucy’s house. You guys would have cleaned up my street and the next day I would have never known about JT.”

“I don’t—”

I pulled out my Droid and flipped to Bobby’s picture of JT. “But you had to send me this. You know what I thought this was? A picture of my dad.”

“I know.”

“I thought this was a picture of my dad. My old dad. The guy who was faithful to his wife, who didn’t have another family, and who didn’t have another son who got his name and who was his favorite.”

“Look—”

“That was back when I had a mother—”

“It’s not—”

“So you fucking owe me, Bobby. You fucking owe it to me to go out there and do whatever it is you people fucking do to make these things go away.”

Bobby opened his palms. “It’s not so easy.”

I stepped close to him. Crushing pain radiated from my ankle. “That’s your problem. Not my problem. Go figure it out, because I’m going to try to save my girlfriend before Talevi hacks some other part off of her and sends it to me in a box.”

I turned and limped down the street.

Bobby called out, “Let me help you. We can get him.”

“I’ll call you.”

I rustled the handwritten bill in my pocket, making sure that I had kept this last ticket to saving Lucy. It was a long shot, but it was all I had.