Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality by Bill Peters Read Free Book Online

out? I told them: No nickel. The inside of my mouth: There are these bumps. But do these f—ing f—gners care?” she mouths the two words.
    Lip Cheese’s pupils spread, hypnotized by John’s stomach rising and falling under a baby blue blanket. And, when the information makes its way into my brain that he is actually, one hundred percent, in a coma, I kind of say to myself: “Huh.” Then I find myself thinking about how I’m starting to feel something (which is progress, maybe?), like “Huh,” plus one.
    â€œListen, ma’am,” Toby says, posture spring-tensioned. “We’re here to extend our sympathies, and, in addition, to …”
    â€œHe’s not dead yet,” Wicked College John’s mom says, touching Toby’s arm, then jerking her hand back and squeezing some hand sanitizer into her palm. “Sorry, I’m very sensitive toward—sorry. They do jaundice phototherapy one floor down. Those babies—it’s creepy.”
    â€œWe understand this might be hard to take,” Toby says. “But it’s possible there was a domestic attack.”
    Wicked College John’s mom brushes something off her shirt, looks into her lap, and shakes her head: “Don’t tell me this, don’t tell me this, don’t tell me this.”
    Necro, this whole time, leans against the doorjamb, looking out the window at the ventilation shafts on the roof of the neighboring building. He hasn’t said a word so far today. I look at him—to a) see if he’ll make eye contact, and b) to therefore see whether he’s mad at me about what I said to him after he went Tadahito Murakami: Ninja Surgeon onWicked College John, and if he’s mad at me because I didn’t help him with said surgeoning.
    On the walk through the cold back to the car, Necro at least lets me bum a cigarette off him, but he just hands me the pack, without saying, “Sure!” or “Take and be my guest.” Wind spreads Lip Cheese’s hair like a helicopter hovering over a field, and Toby removes his suit jacket, untucks his dress shirt, and squints into the sunlight.
    â€œBuildings don’t just explode,” Toby says, unlocking his car. There’s red all around his eyelids; he keeps taking deep breaths; his lips look way fatter. “They even said they were skirting the authorities. They even said some community organization informed the police about them. Coincidences don’t just happen side by side.”
    Necro, who shrugs.
    â€œYou know who did this, I’ll tell you. Ask me who it is.” Toby says, as if, suddenly, it’s the end of the Clue game, and rain is slobbering down the windows, and the lightning is making the room only black and white. He inhales, the camera narrows in, the violins drop your heart off a cliff.
    But then he hesitates, exhales slowly, and says, like maybe he can’t think of anyone:
    â€œLuckytown Hastings.”
    â€œFucky-Sucky-town Hastings,” Necro says.
    â€œLuckytown Hastings?” I go.
    â€œWait. What are you talking about?” Lip Cheese says.
    Lip Cheese has a point. Maybe it’s actually very, very weird that Toby would bring up Officer Luckytown Hastings, once our Private Enemy No. 1, with parted hair that’s soneat it looks like it snaps on. Because, we haven’t Rioted on Luckytown Hastings in at least six years. Here he was, in a picture from the Democrat and Chronicle , bricks of cocaine on a table, all scrubbed-clean looks, except for his right eye, which has a tiny black dot, a mini-pupil, just below his main pupil, like a moon orbiting a planet. Make a joke about the eye, you’d be carrying your legs home.
    He had all those qualities and yet I’ve forgotten what he looks like. His real name is Tom Hander. All he did was run after us a lot. The more I think about it, the more he just seems like some guy .
    But this is me, going to bed tonight,