Page 88 of The Woman By the Lake

“How we gonna play this?” Riggs asked when they broke.

“Doctor says he woke up last night. He was groggy, but lucid. Report is, he’s more lucid today. They’re gonna run some tests, but from the ones they can do without shit that’s plugged into a wall and costs your insurance company five grand, if you’re lucky enough to have insurance, they say he’s doing good.”

“Thank fuck for that,” Riggs muttered.

“Yeah,” Harry agreed. “They also gave me the all-clear to talk to him. Which is why I called you. So I’m thinking, you go in alone. You can tell him I’m here. You can tell him what he says you’re gonna tell me. Or you can not mention me at all. I’m not gonna coach you or call the shots. I want to know why he was assaulted, and I want to know what he knows, and right now, I don’t care how I come about that information.”

“He could tell me, and not want to go on the record later,” Riggs noted.

Harry shook his head. “I don’t give a fuck, Riggs. I gotta know which way to steer this investigation.”

“Right then, I got an appointment with a man about a dog, so this needs to get done.”

“A dog?”

“Hutch has a cane corso ready, and in a week, it’s going home with Nadia,” Riggs told him.

Harry did a slow smile. “They always said you were a genius.”

“They didn’t lie,” Riggs joked, flicked up his chin, then moved the five steps that took him to Bubbles’s door and through it.

Bubbles’s attention came right to him, his body jumped in bed like he wanted to jump out of it, then he winced. After that, he smiled huge and winced again.

Riggs understood the wincing, his friend was fucked right the hell up, bruised, battered, swollen, near on unrecognizable. Even without the bandaging around his left eye.

Christ.

He came to a stop by the side of the bed, but closer to the foot, planted his feet and crossed his arms.

“Hey, bro!” Bubbles slurred.

“I’ll start by saying, I’m glad you weren’t beat to death. I’ll move on to share the news that someone did a number on my neighbor’s back door in order to take one thing. That bottle of wine you sold me to give to her.”

Bubbles’s lips turned down at the sides and his eyes moved over Riggs’s shoulder.

“Eyes to me, Bubbles.” When he got them, though it took a while, he asked, “What the fuck?”

“I owed you a marker,” he said, still slurring, and Riggs figured it was partly drugs and partly that his mouth was fucked up from getting his face bashed in.

“Bubbles—”

“I tried to tell them that. They didn’t give two shits.”

His said “shits” like “shitsh,” which normally Riggs would razz him about.

Riggs was in no mood to razz Bubbles.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Riggs suggested.

“I’m just gonna say, I did go to Sonoma.”

“You just didn’t buy that wine there,” Riggs surmised.

“Trust me, all I said is all you want me to say.”

“Because whoever you got that wine from is worse than the normal dipshits you deal with.”

“Doc—”

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