Page 89 of The Woman By the Lake

“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.

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