Chapter 12: The Bus Bench

The blood came at six-twenty.

Mickey let it drip onto his jeans.

He didn't have a handkerchief. Vin had all the handkerchiefs.

A woman waiting for the bus looked at him, then moved to the far side of the shelter.

The fever came next, a dry heat behind his eyes, and the streetlights started to swim.

He held on to the edge of the bench and thought about his dad's square capitals.

It wasn't a fall.

At six-forty, a car stopped across North Avenue.

Not the black car. Nonna's old Buick.

Vin got out of the driver's side.

He'd driven himself.

He was in his shirtsleeves in November, and his face was white, and the front of his shirt was red from the collar down.

He'd waited too.

He'd sat in that house for an hour and bled with Mickey, instead of coming after him.

He crossed four lanes without looking and stepped up onto the curb.

He didn't sit beside Mickey.

He sat at the far end of the bench, as far from him as it went.

Six feet, maybe.

Close enough.

The fever started to drain out of Mickey.

Vin's nose stopped. Mickey's stopped.

They sat there, two grown men with blood down their fronts, while a bus came and opened its doors and closed them again.

"I'm not going to ask you anything," Vin said.

"I'm going to tell you, and then you can get up and walk to wherever you want, and I'll follow at a mile."

Mickey didn't say anything.

Vin took that as a yes.

"I was twenty-five," he said. "My uncle called me at two in the morning. He said there'd been an accident behind the restaurant."

He looked at the street, not at Mickey.

"I got there and the ambulance had already taken him. There were police lights all down the alley."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Bound to the Mob Alpha's Baby from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.