Serenity #2
“Sonny,” Ace said. “Baby, you need to go home and wash up. You’re starting to smell.”
“Good,” Sonny grumbled. “If I stink bad enough, maybe you’ll remember not to get hurt again.”
“Or maybe I don’t want to kiss a guy with green teeth,” Ace teased. “You ever think of that?”
Sonny looked stricken, and Ace shushed him, cupping his face with his good hand. “I’m kidding, Sonny. I’ll always want to kiss you. But you need to take care of yourself—for you, not for me.”
Sonny grunted. “Ace, I’m no good without you. You know that. You—you know I fall apart without you. It’s why you gotta be careful on these things, you hear?”
His voice broke, and Ace calmed him again and then said, “I’ll be as careful as I can.
You know that. But you gotta know, Sonny—you’re just fine without me.
You drove the whole lot of us to safety, didn’t you?
Didn’t you save all our lives? You got me in the back of the SUV, shoved Jai over—don’t I remember you squirreling in the fuckin’ window to get behind the wheel of that Tahoe and get it to the gas station? ”
“Yeah,” Sonny muttered. “George had to clean up the scratches on my shoulders.”
“Aw, baby,” Ace murmured. “Now see, I hate that you got hurt.” He let out a pained chuckle. “But you remember us in the air?”
Sonny’s laugh was a little unhinged—but in a good way. “That was better’n Disneyland, Ace. I mean, I’d still rather go to Disneyland, but that ride, that was somethin’!”
“Yeah—if that damned cop hadn’t gotten all trigger happy after I landed, we would have made that free and clear. That really was somethin’.”
Sonny took a shuddering breath. “If you’re gonna be okay, then I guess I can go clean up.” He was obviously unhappy. “I don’t know who’s been taking care of the garage.”
“Well, see?” Ace said. “It needs you. I’ll be there soon enough.”
But he wasn’t. He’d sustained a concussion, traumatic blood loss, and a fractured arm, and George was right—cracked ribs. Eric and Jai were sent home five days before Ace was, and the day before they were set free, Ernie came to Ace with a strange request.
He looked tired, Eric reflected, tired himself from fighting off infection. But Ernie was the pale sort of tired that Eric had seen in migraine sufferers, and Eric would guess that this might be the biggest thing Ernie would do all day.
“Ace,” he said, sitting by Ace’s bed and laying his head down, just like Sonny had. “I gotta thing I gotta ask.”
“Sure,” Ace said, and this was his hour of clarity too, so he didn’t sound as crisp as he usually would.
“We got a request from our friends up north. They’re sending a kid down, with an escort, to keep safe from some folks after him.” Ernie paused. “This kid—he’s got… well, Sonny’s sort of damage, I think. And Sonny… it’s like the more he helps us, the better he gets.”
Ace was quiet for a minute. “I won’t lie,” he mumbled. “It would take a lot off my mind to know Sonny’s brain isn’t back in this hospital room the whole time I’m here. Are you up to it, Ernie?”
“I’ll be better tomorrow, after some sleep,” Ernie mumbled.
“I just….” He grabbed Ace’s hand and sighed.
“I don’t know how you can give me strength when you’re laid up in bed, but you do.
You do it for all of us. You stay here and get better.
Me and Sonny and Cotton will go take care of this kid.
You’ll see. Sonny’ll get stronger with this. ”
“Already stronger,” Ace mumbled. “Drove us to safety, Ernie. He’s like you. Stronger’n you look.”
Burton came to collect him a half hour later, checking with Eric and Jai first. “What’d he say?”
“Said yes,” Jai told him. “Too bad I can’t send George and Amal to Disneyland.”
Burton laughed softly. “We’ll send them in a month or so. All expenses paid. You too.”
Jai wrinkled his nose. “Who needs theme park when you have Ace and Sonny’s garage?”
“I’ve never been,” Eric said in wonder. Definitely not as Charlie Grackle. Never as any of the other names or identities he’d used. “Maybe someday—”
He glanced automatically toward the TV, where the Brady Carnegie show had been going on for three days straight. And there he was, on Rachel Maddow, shy and miserable.
Eric didn’t have the heart to turn up the volume for this one—by now he knew Brady would be true.
“Maybe,” Burton said softly. “Don’t lose hope, new fish. He never did.”
Eric gave him a sad smile. “Yeah, but he doesn’t know the world like we do.”
“I told you,” Burton said, “we all got blood on our hands. Brady does too, now. Maybe he’s learned the same lesson you did.”
“Maybe,” Eric said, but his chest already ached with loss. He nodded to where Ace and Ernie still slept. “But maybe I need to concentrate on the family I have. If you could send me some specs on the diagnostic equipment Ace and Sonny have, I can step in and help when they cut me loose here.”
He felt Burton’s squeeze of his shoulder in his gut.
It was the right way to go.
And the next two months proved it was the right way to go.
He spent a lot of time in that garage, getting grease under his fingernails.
Jai and Ace were out for a month—hell, Ace wasn’t even allowed to walk from the house to the garage until then—and in the meantime, Eric, Dimitri, Ernie, Sonny, and sometimes George, Amal, and Burton kept the place going.
Sonny was the boss during that time, and Eric watched the little man working hard to adjust to not having Ace and Jai there, both of whom could read his moods and his mind better than even himself.
Baby steps, Eric could see.
Like swallowing his temper and explaining things to Dimitri when the poor man did something wrong or stupid—or more likely crooked, because apparently criming was a thing the man had picked up in the mob and found it hard to leave behind.
Eric had a particularly vivid memory of Burton grabbing a socket wrench from Sonny’s hand when they realized their new recruit had lifted a wallet from a car they’d been working on.
Sonny had glared at him and then—Eric could actually see the tumblers clicking—realized that yes, he had been planning to clock the man across the face with that item, and yes, it was a bad idea.
He’d made Dimitri give the wallet to Ernie in the cashier stand, so Ernie could call up and say it had fallen out of the minivan and to have the family come back for it.
Dimitri had humbly apologized to Sonny then, and had promised to clean up his act.
They hadn’t found any more wallets in his possession, but Eric noticed he had a strange fondness for tiny toys—Legos, Polly Pockets, children’s things that he seemed to pocket without thinking—and Eric ordered a couple of those items so the man could take them to his trailer.
“Thank you,” Dimitri had told him humbly.
“I… I have two children back in Russia. I will never see them again, I don’t think, but I…
I forget, sometimes. I see the item and think, ‘Yes, they will want that back.’ I’ll try to remember these are in the trailer, and someday I will return them.
” He swallowed, and Eric was horrified to see his eyes were red-rimmed.
“They are already ten years too old for them, but it is the only age I know.”
Dimitri had walked away then, leaving Eric standing next to the cashier stand with the weight of absolute regret in his chest, and he heard a sniffle. He looked around the corner and saw Sonny wiping his own eyes on his shoulder.
“You done good, new fish,” he said, having taken the moniker from Burton. “But now I have to feel bad for that fucker, and that made my whole day weird.”
And Eric saw it then, the hope that Ace had always had for Sonny, the growth that seemed to make the others believe even more fiercely in rainfall in the desert.
And he saw it in Ace’s first day back, and Jai’s too, how happy they were to be in their own domain, how much joy they took as Sonny took them around and showed them any changes he and Dimitri had made in the past weeks, how much they both glowed with pride to see the business they’d all worked so hard to sustain was going to make it through another rough patch.
Eric had been part of that. No gun, no bullets, no blood.
He could do an honest man’s job. He felt the same pride Ace and Jai did. Felt worthy of a Sonny Daye.
Maybe it was then, that day, that he began to hope.
Maybe it was that Brady had faded from the news, had even faded from social media.
He was another hero that would be quietly forgotten—Colin Kaepernick, Reality Winner, Brady Carnegie—someone who had shed blood and given up safety for the greater good, and who only had wounds to count in the end.
But who maybe couldn’t have seen any other way to go.
Eric could respect that. And he could also, maybe a little, hope that when all was said and done, Brady would find more reasons to come back to their little corner of the world than to stay away.
Hope. Like rain in the desert, only a little was needed to sustain the life of a heart battered but sound.