I’d always loved walking barefoot. Shoes were too confining. Still, I was kicking myself in the asphalt for not wearing them today.
        
[i]Then you shouldn’t have annoyed Bobby.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“I didn’t know! How was I supposed to know?!”
        
[i]Common sense?[/i]
[i]` [/i]
A snarl tore up my throat, but I didn’t let it past my teeth. Marcus was many things, like a crook, a lunatic and a complete pain in my ass, but he wasn’t one thing: wrong, at least right now.
The road felt like liquid acid on my feet. Bobby was petty when it came to vengeance. I didn’t even have socks. Fact was I didn’t have pants either, but that was a separate story unrelated to Bobby and my current walk in the Arizona sunshine. Damn, was I catching a draft.
The road snaked for miles in either direction. I was heading back, away from where I’d been riding with Bobby and her crew of misfits when I’d done the unthinkable and landed myself in this predicament.
        
[i]Us. Landed [/i]us [i]in this predicament.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Can it, Marcus. You certainly didn’t help matters. What, was a little bit of kung-fu too much to ask for?”
        
[i]I was tired. And anyways, I like Bobby. Fighting her on her own tour bus would be rude.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“She kicked our ass!”
        
[i]She kicked [/i]your [i]butt. And don’t curse. You know Charlotte doesn’t like it.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Well, Charlotte should have been there! Her and Lily could have handled things if [i]you[/i] hadn’t insisted they have a spa day in freaking Tucson!”
        
[i]Hey, they’ve worked [/i]hard [i]these past couple weeks. And you got Lily’s arm broken when your fat mouth got us in trouble with Edgar from Accounting. They earned a day off from your rampant idiocy and I’m sorry for having faith that you could last more than three hours without a gimped mother and her little girl here to hold your hand.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Now you listen here you–”
        
That’s when I stepped on the first rock. I bashed an elbow on the way down and got a brainful from Marcus when I mentioned it in the politest way one has after they’ve stepped on the carpet Lego from Hell. While I was down there, sizzling on the black tar road top like a slab of ham, I pryed the stone from the bottom of my instep and sat up so my two eggs could fry for a while. Bobby had a mean kickball leg too. The sun was no more than a quarter of the way up the sky, climbing like a fiery sloth on its way to work at the local diner. I was probably more than ten miles from the nearest gas station, and all the water was still on the tour bus going twenty miles the other way towards Tucson.
        
I sighed and got up, hobbling in the direction of the Pass’nGas. The man there was alright, at least by what I’d glimpsed of him out the window. How he’d react to seeing me, walking back from the busload of undergrads on their way to play in the Battle of the Bands at the Maudlin Arena in only my shirt, was less certain, but I’d wing that when the time came. How he’d have reacted had I told him back then that what the bus was full of was not guitars and basses and champagne but C4, twelve rocket launchers and a daschund with a Napoleonic complex that had taken a chunk from my rump on my way out of the bus would have likely gone a long way in explaining a few things, but sometimes professionalism prevented easy answers.
        
Charlotte was going to be livid when I didn’t show up with the Boom Crew.
        
“Well, this is just fantastic,” I growled, kicking at empty air with my bad foot and hitting a scrub brush for my trouble. I hopped along the road, picking thorns from beneath my toenails as Marcus chuckled.
        
[i]Well, at least we can go out in style, right? Like cowboys in the Old West.[/i]

The countryside around here was beautiful. I couldn’t deny that. Flat and open, just desert and sand and rocks and lifelessness as far as the eye could see, from bushes that looked like the hand of Satan reaching out of the pit to grab you by the ankles to the distant plateau’s you could have housed a city on. It made you really appreciate shoes. And pants, especially when the wind kicked up for a breeze that was brisk on the roasting skin but not too gentle on one’s swollen delicates.
        
“We’re not dying. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
        
Cue the second rock; this one a four-sided dice that dug deep into the soul. This time, when I yanked it out, my hand was damp and red. I tore a bit of shirt off and wrapped it around my already swelling foot and kept limping, which is hard when you have a limp on both legs.        

Charlotte really was going to be furious. But, as a plus side, I wouldn’t be the only one she was mad at this time around. The Boom Crew had taken her contract, had taken [i]money[/i]. Charlotte was very old fashioned when it came to how you acted when you took someone’s money, as well what you did to people who didn’t follow through on their promises. The thought of Bobby and her stupid daschund roasted on coals and thrown into oversized buns kept me going another mile or so.
        
I couldn’t help but wonder what they were doing. The thought of them in a spa was an admittedly fascinating one. What would the staff say when a women who looked like the mauled bear that ate Rocky, after you compressed it’s spine to make it travel-sized, and her little girl dressed in gray sweats and a white kabuki mask that she never took off for anyone or anything? Would they dunk them in mud, talking about how it was good for the skin as they took a belt-sander to the calluses on their hands? Would Lily put cucumber slices on her mask holes?
        
Or, the more likely outcome, would they do whatever they were told to do and damn the inconvenience, because whatever Charlotte decided was right. Always. You could have broken a superhero’s spine on her rightness, even if she told you something as crazy as “blow up the president’s limousine as it drives through Arizona to visit the children’s cancer hospital.”
        
Shut up. You don’t get to judge me. Somebody had to be the villain in the national narrative and there wasn’t exactly a line going out the gate for the job because the line consisted of me and Charlotte standing right behind me with her meat-mitten on my collar.
        
Still, I’d miss them. If it came to that, that is.
        
[i]I suppose I can always hope for another body if we ever find Justine and wring that formula out of his scrawny neck. Maybe they can even pull you along if the buzzards don’t drink out your brain first.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“No,” I snarled. “I’m not dying here.”
        
[i]I admire the spirit. I really do. But[/i]–
        
I stumbled around the third rock. “But nothing. I’m going to get home and I’m going to get you out of my brain if it kills me.”
        
Marcus fell silent at that. And he stayed silent for another couple miles which, for Marcus, was the equivalent of concreting the Hoover Dam shut. It gave me time to think. Think of home, or what was left of it after the firefight with President John and his assorted foot soldiers of Apple Pie and Baseball and Etc. were done trying to vent the world’s most wanted person and his two tiny runners-up.
        
I missed my garden. The patch of grass in the middle would have been perfect sleeping thickness this time of year. I suppose the ashes from the building would make good fertilizer for next year, but the garden had been mine. Or at least the grass had been mine. Everything else from the blueberries for the neighbors downstairs to the apple tree someone had given their grandmother two doors down had been mine only in that they made my grass a lot nicer to sleep on and breathe deeply. Of course, John had reimbursed all of them for the terrible loss from his own pocket. He’d even found them a new home, a lot closer to a police station in case another crook thought it’d be fun to set up shop in their place like some boogidy-boo from beyond the pale.
        
I’d been furious for a while. In fact, it was one of the few times Charlotte and Lily had ever left me alone for more than a couple minutes. That grass was what I’d gotten out of bed at dawn for and went back to bed at midnight for. I’d cared for it when it got a bad case of rust and bled for it when I almost lost it to a horrible infestation of razor grass a few years back. I worked hard because I had someone at home who needed me, even if they never said a word of thanks. Because when no one else was there for me, I always knew I could lay out on the grass and not be judged or told what needed to be done in triplicate or sent threatening emails from some nut-gobbling, unbathed, snaggled-dicked cock-up of a lost cause who was upset I’d shut down his account because calling someone that was not allowed anymore. And now it was gone. The one thing I’d fought for, through snow and rain and rust and dandelions was gone. And it was all my fault.
        
[i]Hey.[/i]
        
“What?”
        
[i]Are you crying?[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“No,” I said, wiping at my eyes with a palm, which later turned out to be the one covered in a mixture of both partially dried blood and lots of sweat. That would be important later, but not now.
        
[i]Do you want to?[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Shut up!”
        
[i]I’m being serious.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Sure you are.”
        
[i]I won’t tell anyone. Promise.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Look, we’ve still got most of the day to walk, so can you keep it canned a while longer? I was just getting used to it.”
[i]        [/i]
[i]Everybody’s lost a few things here and there. Nothing wrong with missing it.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
I tried to think of what he’d lost, but couldn’t think of a thing, and I had no intention of asking him to find out. He’d never stop talking if I did that. I did have a guess what Charlotte and Lily had lost though. Charlotte looked like someone that had been put through a meat grinder and then had the meat grinder dropped on the remains, while Lily had the social charms of someone half her age and three times her insanity. I tried to think of them when they were normal, before Charlotte had become a killer and world crime boss and her daughter my bodyguard in training. My brain shut down before the world could go off-kilter and fall into the Stygian void of empty space.
        
“Yeah, I suppose so. I’m fine though.”
        
[i]You sure? I think I feel some tears being repressed back in here.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Go to hell,” I said. Wished I wasn’t smiling when I said it, but sometimes your body doesn’t listen to your thoughts.
        
I shuffled past my fourth rock and saw the buzzards flapping over me because clichés are clichés for a reason. I sighed, raised my shirt over my head in what I’d hoped was a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ look but later turned out to be “crazy naked man with a lobotomy” look that got buckshot in my calf when the gentlemen at the gas station decided some risks weren’t worth taking. Live and learn, folks, live and learn. As I walked to my preordained peppering, I took another glance behind me to see if maybe Bobby would change her mind and forgive me and let me back on the bus, or at least give me my shoes.

[i]I doubt it. You really let it slip this time.[/i]
[i]        [/i]
“Like I said, it’s not my fault! All I asked was ‘When are you due?’ and she…