19. 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."

Bubbles flicked out a hand, winced again, then said, "There it is. True blue Doc Riggs. Wake up, eat a bitch out so she comes so hard she's walking on air all day. Even knowing she'll be one and done, she'll brag she got tagged by Doc Riggs. Then spend the day making art that sells for a whack, running electrical wire while your clients slobber all over you that you picked them to receive the great work of Riggs Contracting. And then maybe saving a kid from drowning. Go to bed after banging another bitch, whose only hope and dream is you'll let her stay the night so you'll go down on her in the morning. Must be tough bein' you."

Riggs was so blown away by the garbage coming out of his friend's mouth, he had nothing to say.

Bubbles did, though.

"Got my face literally fuckin' caved in, they gotta put me in a coma, I get out of it, you stroll in and give me shit about a bottle of fuckin' wine? You asked what the fuck, that's my question too, man."

"I came on strong because, with the state of you, and this being about those bottles, I had to sleep on the couch with my gun on my coffee table, my kid in his bed upstairs, and my neighbor in the guest room because her home is no longer secure."

"Poor you. I been in a coma for two days."

"What I'm trying to impress on you is that you put yourself in a coma, Bubs. And you had a place in my heart, so I also had to deal with that. And just to say, the five hours I spent in this hospital with your mom and Lucille after it went down was not a good time for any of us. I also gotta deal with the understanding a friend of mine put me, my kid and my neighbor out there for fuck knows who to target."

"They got their wine back. They won't give a shit about you."

"She and I drank a bottle."

"She," he hissed.

"Yeah, she. So if this wine is so fuckin' important, they're one short in a way they're not getting that back."

"Seems you gone blind, seeing as you could just look at me and see, you mighta shelled out a few hundred bucks, but I paid for that precious, fucking bottle."

"What I see is you got a comment about my earlier remark, and it's that you don't know how not to fuck up."

"I got my own problems, Doc. You said we're square I didn't do a pool on your neighbor. I didn't do a pool. We're square."

"I'm not as smart as you think I am, Bubs, because I didn't get it until now. How you hung on to that when I told you what I did for you was because I was your friend, and it ended there. But you kept up with that marker bullshit, and I didn't see it. But I see it now. You don't understand what being a friend means."

He watched Bubbles wince again, but this was more like a flinch, and it came from a different kind of pain.

But Riggs was beyond caring.

"Not sure this will get through the drugs and you processing what happened to you, or your thick fuckin' skull," Riggs continued. "So it might be a waste of breath, but when I walked into this room, I gave a shit about you, and after listening to you spout your damage, I've got about a half an inch of that shit left. So I'll use the rest of it by sharing, a friend doesn't hold markers when he's doing something for a buddy in need. He also doesn't sell him a bottle of wine that's gonna swing his bud's ass out there. He sure as shit doesn't lay his damage on him. You got a problem being this version of Bubbles Novak, don't foist that on me. Seek change. Now I'll leave you with this. I hope you get better. I really fuckin' do. Like I said, I've been worried about you, and seeing you, I can see you went through hell. But lose my number, man. We're done."

"Doc—" Bubbles called.

But Riggs was out of there.

Harry was studying his boots, but when Riggs came out of the room, his head came up, and he looked expectantly at Riggs.

Then his eyes narrowed a nanosecond before his expression turned concerned.

"Jesus, what went on in there?" Harry asked when Riggs stopped at him.

"I probably should have eased into it, but Bubbles would have known something was up if I was all about apologizing I didn't bring him a get well card. But we can just say, I got a crystal-clear understanding of what Bubbles thinks about me, and it's too much, and not in a good way."

"What does that mean?"

"It sounds arrogant, but he's jealous as fuck."

Harry swayed back, and said quietly, "Can't be the first time you faced that, Doc."

"Not that ugly, and not from someone I'd call a friend."

"He's not in a good place right now," Harry noted.

"With what came out of his mouth, I don't care if that fucker was on his death bed."

Harry gave him a long, hard look before he said, "Shit, brother, I shouldn't have sent you in there."

"You didn't know."

"It was a bad call."

"Harry, you didn't know. One thing I learned the hard way, and it wasn't an epiphany, my old man spent about twenty-three years teaching me this lesson, people do what they do. We wanna make it about us. With my dad, I actually wanted it to be about me, because, even if it was in a jacked way, something with him would be about me. But it's never about you. Especially if it's filth they got that they want to get rid of. That's not about you at all. You can take that on, but that's them winning."

Riggs let out a long breath.

And then he finished it.

"This is saying, I didn't get dick. He admitted he didn't get that wine in Sonoma and said that's all I'd wanna know about it. He also referred to whoever did that to him as ‘they.' I don't know if he was being cagey and that ‘they' was singular. But the state of him, we both can guess there was more than one of them. So your hunch that this is something else, and it's big, I reckon is right. But that's all I got for you, brother."

"It shits me you came all the way out here to do me a favor, and you're leaving with the look you got on your face right now."

Riggs shook his head. "Let that go too. I wish I'd learned this when I was a freshman in high school, and I first met Bubbles. At the very least, it would have saved Nadia her back door and a lot of anxiety. But I know now. And that's also winning."

"You're about as fucked up as you are adjusted, and that fucked-up part is only what we talked about last night."

"Takes one to know one," Riggs retorted.

Harry grinned at him.

Riggs cuffed him on the arm.

Then he walked out of the hospital and put that scene and his friendship with Bubbles where it belonged.

In his overflowing shitcan of memories.