He refined the “message from the grave,” as I called it, over the years and beers in between. April Fools’ Day was added as a second joke on the person or persons who might hurt him and then try to befriend me.

It’s such a long shot, I used to tell him. It’s like placing a single land mine in the Sahara Desert and expecting a particular guy to step on it. One guy, one land mine, a desert three and a half million square miles.

“I’ll take the odds,” he said. “Might be a long shot, but that land mine goes off, people are going to be able to see it for miles. Just remember that second brain of mine, buddy. When the rest of me’s in the ground, that second brain might just send you a message. You make sure you’re there to hear it.”

And I was.

“Take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way,” he’d asked me all those years ago.

Okay, Jay. No problem. My pleasure.

33

“Get up. Come on. Get up.” I threw back the curtains and the hard sunlight poured into the room, filled the bed.

Angie had somehow managed to turn herself completely sideways on the bed while I’d been gone. She’d kicked the covers off her legs, and just a slim triangle of white sheet covered her bottom as she looked up at me through bleary eyes, her hair hanging in her face like a tangle of black moss.

“Ain’t you just the Romeo in the morning?” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.” I grabbed my gym bag, started stuffing it with my clothes.

“Let me guess,” she said. “There’s money on the dresser, it was swell, but don’t let the door hit my butt on the way out.”

I dropped to my knees and kissed her. “Something like that. Come on. We’re in a rush.”

She rose to her knees and the covers dropped away and her arms slid over my shoulders. Her body, soft and warm with sleep, crushed against my own.

“We sleep together for the first time in seventeen years, and you wake me up like this?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “yes.”

“This better be good.”

“It’s better than good. Come on. I’ll tell you on the way to the airport.”

“The airport.”

“The airport.”

“The airport,” she said with a yawn and stumbled out of bed and went into the bathroom.

The forest greens and coral whites, pale blues and burnt yellows dropped away and turned to square quilted patches as we rose into the clouds and headed north.

“Run this by me again,” Angie said. “The half-naked part.”

“She was wearing a bikini,” I said.

“In a dark room. With you in it,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you felt how?”

“Nervous,” I said.

“Whoo,” she said. “Wrong, wrong answer.”