The image widened still more, into a meaningless checkerboard of pixels.
Lights out.
CHAPTER
4
“Come on, you geek freak son of a bitch. It’s me, Bruno. Not that Osterman turd, so don’t try a fucking stress flashback when you open your eyes, or I’ll rip your throat out. This bullshit is pissing me off!”
Bruno yelled the words, leaning over Kev’s hospital bed, but there was no response. Kev looked like a marble statue. It made Bruno’s stomach hurt. Over twenty-four hours, and no sign of waking. Another coma, or something like it. The doctors were baffled.
Fuck this shit. Fuck it in every orifice.
Tony grunted from the other side of the bed. “Ain’t you just a charmer,” he said. “Whisperin’ sweet nothings in his ear.”
Bruno blew out an explosive breath and sprawled back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the plastic table. “We tried nice last time he woke up,” he said sourly. “He didn’t respond well. He liquefied Patil’s face. It’s safer to be rude. That way, there’s no mistake about who’s busting his balls.” He leaned over Kev again. “Not the Osterman motherfucker, hear me? It’s that pain in the ass, Bruno! Anybody home in there?” He tweaked Kev’s nose. “Hey! Butthead! Hello! Anybody?”
Kev’s face did not change. Bruno flung himself back into the chair, muttering. Tony sat on the other side, like a stone monolith, his slablike face grim. But Tony’s default expression was always grim. He was a Marine, an ex-drill sergeant, a Vietnam vet. Habitually pissed off. Most of what Uncle Tony saw around him annoyed the living shit out of him. Bruno and Kev impartially included, for the most part.
Kev in a coma again? That pissed old Uncle Tony off bigtime.
Kev looked so pale and still. Like Mamma, in her coffin. The funeral parlor guys had been creative in covering up the damage Rudy had done to her face. She’d looked weirdly peaceful, lying there.
But unlike Mamma, Kev genuinely was weirdly peaceful. Even before he relearned how to talk, Kev was super mellow. He never lost his temper. Unless someone fucked with him, of course, at which point, he morphed into a demon dervish, and kicked that unlucky someone’s ass to hell and back. Karate, kung fu, judo, aikido, jujitsu, all of them were mixed into in Kev’s unique fighting style. He was un-fucking-beatable.
In fact, his fighting skills had inspired Kev’s chosen surname. After the incident at the diner, Tony started calling him Kevlar. It stuck. And when Kev was talking well enough to want a surname, he went with Kev Larsen. It was Kev’s weird, quirky idea of a joke, though it was also a bland, under-the-radar nordic name that fit him well enough. He could be a Swede, or a Dane. Tall, sinewey, lots of dirt-blond hair. A yellowish cast to his skin, rather than nordic skim-milk white, but with that stoic expression, he was a classic, battle-scarred Viking warrior. All he needed were braids, a horned helmet, and a mantle of shaggy fur.
So Kev Larsen it was, though Bruno took pains to point out that only a narcissistic pussy would tattoo his own name on his own leg. He’d once tried to bust Kev’s balls by insisting that Kev had been a gay boy before Tony found him, and Kev was actually the name of his lover.
But Kev never responded appropriately to ball busting. His grin pulled weirdly at the scars on his cheek as he grabbed Bruno’s ass and made smooching sounds til Bruno ran for cover.
Teasing about Kev’s gayness had ended abruptly there.
Bruno lifted the hospital sheet, stared at Kev’s leg. His calf was furred with dark blond hair, sinewy and bulging with hard muscle. The tattoo was very small. The three irregular letters were a crooked, blurry bluish smudge beneath his body hair. It looked like a bruise.
He flung the sheet down. It made him twitchy and rattled. His own vulnerability, staring him down, scaring him shitless. Kev was the pillar in the center that held up the roof of his whole life. More so than Uncle Tony, more so than Aunt Rosa. Kev had saved Bruno’s ass. Kev had given payback for what Rudy had done to Mamma. Some, anyway. It could never be enough. But it was a shitload better than nothing.
Kev couldn’t die. Life would be unthinkable without him. Bruno didn’t usually think in those squishy emotional terms, but seeing how similar Kev looked right now to the way Mamma had looked in her coffin, after Rudy got through with her—it got to him, deep inside, in places he preferred to ignore. And being aware of it made him aware of his other stupid, irrelevant feelings, too. Like, for instance, how jealous he was of this hypothetical fucking family that Kev might or might not find. No, amend that. Would find. If they were out there, Kevlar would find them. The guy was as focused as a freight train.
Kev’s real family. Bruno could never be part of that, if it existed. This perfect family would enfold Kev to their bosoms and overwhelm him with their wonderfulness, at which point Kev would forget that the wiseass pain in the ass punk Bruno Ranieri ever existed. There would be a pie-baking mamma, wielding a wooden spoon, a benevolent dad with a pot belly. Brothers and sisters who looked like him, understood him, knew things about him that Bruno would never know.
Take a fucking pill. Families like that didn’t exist, except on TV. Families were, by definition, fucked up. But blood was blood.
It was a stupid thing to be worrying about, though, since Kev hadn’t even woken up yet. He still looked like a goddamn corpse. In fact, Kev’s blood family was the least of Bruno’s current worries.
He hadn’t felt like such hammered shit since Mamma’s death. Every muscle hurt. He had a headache, from grinding his teeth. He hadn’t gone into Lost Boys since Kev’s episode, yesterday morning. They were managing fine without him, thank God. He’d be useless anyhow. All he would do was snap, growl, and criticize.
Truth was, he was not terribly surprised by the recent series of events. There had always been something precarious about Kev’s very existence. A sense of lurking danger. The unknowns, the questions, the bizarre violence wreaked upon him. Bruno had been waiting for the other shoe to drop since he’d met the guy. It had finally dropped, over a three-hundred-foot waterfall. And the sky was coming down along with it.
Even Kev’s inexplicable flashes of genius were unnerving. Just when Bruno thought he knew the guy front and back, whammo, he’d discover that Kev had some new freakishly overdeveloped skill, or rocket scientist body of knowledge. Kevlar, International Man Of Mystery, strikes again. Maybe the guy was actually a stranded space alien.
Huh. Actually, that hypothesis would explain a whole lot.
Too bad that trip over the waterfall hadn’t knocked some plain old common sense into his head. It was the one thing Kev lacked. So far, Bruno filled the gap, but only because Kev didn’t care enough to stop him. Like with money. Kev sincerely didn’t give a flying fuck about it. He’d invent some ingenious marketable thing on some sleepless night, play with it for a few hours, toss it in the closet and forget about it.
Kev’s gizmos had given Bruno the idea for Lost Boys Flywear. They’d opened seven years ago as a stunt kite outfit, to exploit some of Kev’s kite designs, and branched out from there into quirky educational toys. Kev provided the brilliant ideas, artistic designs, manufacturing plans. Bruno took care of the business, the marketing. The scut work. Everybody had his gift. His was for making money.
The venture worked. He’d arranged for Kev’s designs to be patented, to significant profit. Lost Boys was going strong. Neither of them was hurting for dough, or had any reason
