Johnny Pemberton laughed heartily—so heartily that I held the phone away from my ear a bit, feeling glum. That laugh was answer enough.

“On one of these babies? You got to be kidding. Why? Can’t you run a manual shift?”

“Yes, that’s what I learned on,” I said.

“Sure! So you got no problems, right?”

“I guess not,” I said, thinking of my left leg, which would be running the clutch—or trying to. Simply shifting it around a little tonight had made it ache like hell, I hoped that Arnie would wait a few days before taking his trip out of town, but somehow I didn’t think that was on the cards. It would be tomorrow, over the weekend at the latest, and my left leg would simply have to bear up as best it could. “Well, good night, Mr Pomberton. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure. Thanks for calling, kid. I got one all picked out in my mind for you. You’ll like her, see if you don’t. And if you don’t start calling me Johnny, I’m gonna double the price.”

“Sure,” I said, and hung up on his laughter.

You’ll like her. See if you don’t.

Her again—I was becoming morbidly aware of that casual form of referral… and getting damned sick of it.

Then I made my last preparatory call. There were four Sykeses in the phone book. I got the one I wanted on my second try; Jimmy himself answered the phone. I introduced myself as Arnie Cunningham’s friend, and Jimmy’s voice brightened. He liked Arnie, who hardly ever teased him and never “punched on him” as Buddy Repperton had done when Buddy worked for Will. He wanted to know how Arnie was, and, lying again, I told him Arnie was fine.

“Jeez, that’s good,” he said. “He really had his butt in a sling there for a while. I knew them fireworks and cigarettes was no good for him.”

“It’s Arnie I’m calling for,” I said. “You remember when Will got arrested and they shut down the garage, Jimmy?”

“Sure do.” Jimmy sighed. “Now poor old Will’s dead and I’m out of a job. My ma keeps sayin I got to go to the vocational-technical school, but I wouldn’t be no good at that. I guess I’ll go for bein a janitor, or somethin like that. My Uncle Fred’s a janitor up at the college, and he says there’s an op-nin, because this other Janitor, he disappeared, just took off or somethin, and—”

“Arnie says when they closed down the garage, he lost his whole socket-wrench kit,” I broke in. “It was up behind some of those old tyres, you know, on the overhead racks. He put them up there so no one would rip him off.”

“Still there?” Jimmy asked.

“I guess so.”

“What a bummer!”

“You know it. That set of boltfuckers was worth a hundred dollars.”

“Holy crow! I bet they ain’t there anymore anyway, though. I bet one of them cops got it.”

“Arnie thinks they might still be there. But he’s not supposed to go near the garage because of the trouble he’s in.” This was a lie, but I didn’t think Jimmy would catch it and he didn’t. Putting one over on a fellow who was borderline retarded didn’t add a thing to my self-esteem, however.

“Aw, shit! Well, listen—I’ll go down and look for ’em. Yessir! Tomorrow morning, first thing. I still got my keys.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Arnie’s mythical set of socket wrenches that I wanted; I wanted Jimmy’s keys.

“I’d like to get them, Jimmy, that’s the thing. As a surprise. And I know right where he put them. You might hunt around all day and still not find them.”

“Oh, yeah, for sure. I was never no good at finding things, that’s what Will said. He always said I couldn’t find my own bee-hind with both hands and a flashlight.”

“Aw, man, he was just putting you down. But really—I’d like to do it.”

“Well, sure.”

“I thought I’d come by tomorrow and borrow your keys. I could get that set of wrenches and have your keys back to you before dark.”

“Gee, I dunno. Will said to never loan out my keys—”

“Sure, before, but the place is empty now except for Arnie’s tools and a bunch of junk out back. The estate will be putting it up for sale pretty soon, contents complete, and if I take them after that, it would like stealing.”

“Oh! Well, I guess it’d be okay. If you bring my keys back.” And then he said an absurdly touching thing: “See, they’re all I got to remember Will by.”

“It’s a promise.”

“Okay,” he said. “If it’s for Arnie, I guess it’s okay.”

Just before bed, now downstairs, I made one final call—to a very sleepy-sounding Leigh.

“One of these next few nights we’re going to end it. You game?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am. I think I am. What have you got planned, Dennis?”

So I told her, going through it step by step, half-expecting her to poke a dozen holes in my idea. But when I was done, she simply said, “What if it doesn’t work?”

“You make the honour roll. I don’t think you need me to draw you a picture.”

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“I’d keep you out of it if I could, I said. “But LeBay is going to suspect a trap, so the bait has to be good.”

“I wouldn’t let you leave me out of it,” she said. Her voice was steady. “This is my business too. I loved him. I really did. And once you start loving someone… I don’t think you ever really get over it completely. Do you, Dennis?”

I thought of the years. The summers of reading and swimming and playing games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Chinese checkers. The ant farms. The times I had kept him from getting killed in all the ways kids like to kill the outsider, the one who’s a little bit strange, a little bit off the beat. There had been times when I had gotten pretty fucking sick of keeping him from getting killed, times when I had wondered if my life wouldn’t be easier, better, if I simply let Arnie go, let him drown. But it wouldn’t have been better. I had needed Arnie to make me better, and he had. We had traded fair all the way down the line, and oh shit, this was very bitter, very fucking bitter indeed.

“No,” I said, and I suddenly had to put my hand over my eyes. “I don’t think you ever do. I loved him too. And maybe it isn’t too late for him, even now. That’s what I would have prayed: Dear God, let me keep Arnie from getting killed just one more time. Just this one last time.

“It’s not him I hate,” she said, her voice low. “It’s that man LeBay… did we really see that thing this afternoon, Dennis? In the car?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think we did.”

“Him and that bitch Christine,” she said. “Will it be soon?”

“Soon, yeah. I think so.

“All right. I love you, Dennis.”

“I love you too.”

As it turned out, it ended the next day— Friday the 19th of January.

I began that long, terrible day by driving over to Jimmy Sykes’s house in my Duster. I had expected there might be some trouble from Jimmy’s mother, but that turned out to be okay. She was, if anything, mentally slower than her son. She invited me in for bacon and eggs (I declined—my stomach was tied in miserable knots) and clucked over my crutches while Jimmy hunted around in his room for his keyring. I made small-talk with Mrs Sykes, who was roughly the size of Mount Etna, while time passed and a dismal certainty rose inside me: Jimmy had lost his keys somewhere and the whole thing was off the rails before it could really begin.

He came back shaking his head. “Can’t find em,” he said, “Jeez, I guess I must have lost em somewhere. What a bummer.”