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 sortof 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 towalkfrom 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 likelycrooked, 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, hehadbeen planning toclock the man across the face with that item, and yes, itwasa 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.”
