Seven Days to Disappear from My Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: The Leak

We were on a plane by six the next morning.

Lucio carried nothing heavier than a paper cup of coffee.

I carried both bags and the flip phone and my father's torch tips wrapped in a sock.

Bunny met us at the curb without a sign.

She looked like she hadn't slept.

"Six tubes," she said, before I'd shut the truck door. "Out of a hundred and forty. Six tubes in the tail won't hold a vacuum. I pump them down and they creep back up overnight."

"Which six?"

"Rings four and five. All the long sweeps."

"Cracked?"

"If they're cracked, I can't see it. And I've got eyes like a hawk."

"You've got eyes like a hawk in rhinestones," Lucio said from the back seat.

"You I'll leave at the airport," Bunny said.

The six tubes lay on the long bench in the shed.

I ran my thumb down every inch of the first one under the bulb.

Nothing.

I held it up to the light and turned it.

Nothing.

I pumped them and watched the gauges for four days before I found it, on the third tube, right where the glass met the electrode.

A crack thinner than a hair.

Heat in the crate, cold at night, heat again.

The glass had breathed until it split.

"They all go," I said. "All six. I'll bend them new."

"By when?" Bunny said.

"They have to be pumped and filled by Thursday. Hung by Friday."

"That's three nights."

"Then it's three nights."

The long sweeps were the hardest bends on the whole comet.

Eight feet of glass each, curved like a tail of fire, with no straight run anywhere to rest your hands.

My father used to say a long sweep was a conversation with the glass.

You can't hurry the other person.

On the first night I bent one and broke one.

Lucio stood at the end of the bench with the new glass laid across his forearms.

He fed me each stick when I held out my hand, without being told which.

Bunny brought us coffee at midnight and chili at two and a cold rag for the back of my neck at four.

"I used to do this for the girls before a show," she said. "Except they wanted gin."

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