Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“Honey, this is no puppy.”
“It’ll be a puppy to me.”
He’d give her that.
“Letting you go. No girlie placemats,” he warned.
“As if,” she replied.
He was grinning at his windshield again.
“Later,” he said.
“Bye, Riggs,” she replied.
He disconnected and drove the rest of the way to the hospital.
NINETEEN
Winning
Riggs
Harry was outside Bubbles’s door when Riggs got there.
“Yo, brother,” Riggs greeted, and they clasped hands and bumped forearms.
All forgiven, because if you had a brain in your head, you didn’t hold onto a beef with a good friend if it started with the best of intentions.
“How we gonna play this?” Riggs asked when they broke.
“Doctor says he woke up last night. He was groggy, but lucid. Report is, he’s more lucid today. They’re gonna run some tests, but from the ones they can do without shit that’s plugged into a wall and costs your insurance company five grand, if you’re lucky enough to have insurance, they say he’s doing good.”
“Thank fuck for that,” Riggs muttered.
“Yeah,” Harry agreed. “They also gave me the all-clear to talk to him. Which is why I called you. So I’m thinking, you go in alone. You can tell him I’m here. You can tell him what he says you’re gonna tell me. Or you can not mention me at all. I’m not gonna coach you or call the shots. I want to know why he was assaulted, and I want to know what he knows, and right now, I don’t care how I come about that information.”
“He could tell me, and not want to go on the record later,” Riggs noted.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t give a fuck, Riggs. I gotta know which way to steer this investigation.”
“Right then, I got an appointment with a man about a dog, so this needs to get done.”
“A dog?”
“Hutch has a cane corso ready, and in a week, it’s going home with Nadia,” Riggs told him.
Harry did a slow smile. “They always said you were a genius.”
“They didn’t lie,” Riggs joked, flicked up his chin, then moved the five steps that took him to Bubbles’s door and through it.
Bubbles’s attention came right to him, his body jumped in bed like he wanted to jump out of it, then he winced. After that, he smiled huge and winced again.
Riggs understood the wincing, his friend was fucked right the hell up, bruised, battered, swollen, near on unrecognizable. Even without the bandaging around his left eye.
Christ.
He came to a stop by the side of the bed, but closer to the foot, planted his feet and crossed his arms.
“Hey, bro!” Bubbles slurred.
“I’ll start by saying, I’m glad you weren’t beat to death. I’ll move on to share the news that someone did a number on my neighbor’s back door in order to take one thing. That bottle of wine you sold me to give to her.”
Bubbles’s lips turned down at the sides and his eyes moved over Riggs’s shoulder.
“Eyes to me, Bubbles.” When he got them, though it took a while, he asked, “What the fuck?”
“I owed you a marker,” he said, still slurring, and Riggs figured it was partly drugs and partly that his mouth was fucked up from getting his face bashed in.
“Bubbles—”
“I tried to tell them that. They didn’t give two shits.”
His said “shits” like “shitsh,” which normally Riggs would razz him about.
Riggs was in no mood to razz Bubbles.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Riggs suggested.
“I’m just gonna say, I did go to Sonoma.”
“You just didn’t buy that wine there,” Riggs surmised.
“Trust me, all I said is all you want me to say.”
“Because whoever you got that wine from is worse than the normal dipshits you deal with.”
“Doc—”
“She wasn’t home. If she was home, I might be moved to add to the pain whatever they’ve jacked you up with is keeping at bay right now.”
Bubbles threw up both his hands, including the casted one.
And winced.
Then he said, “I fucked up. Okay. Big news. Bubbles fucks up.”
“There’s a way to stop doing that. It starts and ends with not fucking up.”
Bubbles’s eyes turned to slits, and Riggs had to admit, it threw him. He’d never seen Bubbles look that way.
“Not everyone has an IQ of two thousand.”
Riggs didn’t think it would be cool at this juncture to share such a number didn’t exist.
Instead, he noted tightly, “I don’t hold myself above you, and you know that, so don’t give me that shit.”
“Tall. Good-looking. Smartest guy in every room. You ate more pussy in high school than I have my whole life.”
“How is you selling me what was apparently a very important bottle of wine you never should have sold me, that clearly wasn’t yours to sell, suddenly about me?”
It was like he didn’t speak.
“Knock some bitch up, get a great kid outta it,” Bubbles complained.
“She and me aren’t tight, but I’m not down with you calling my son’s mother a bitch.”