Page 186 of Nearly Roadkill
“Sponge.”
“Sternal retractor.”
“Scratch,” Toobe is saying, “I’m scared for Winc.”
“Me too, little buddy. Me too.”
Tick tick tick tick, for about an hour. Open heart massage—for twenty-five minutes. Then comes that sound, that terrible sound we all know when a patient has flatlined.
“Time of death, 12:39.”
A nurse walks slowly down the hallway from the OR to the waiting room.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Scratch,” she says. “The doctors did everything they could, but it wasn’t enough to save her. Winc’s gone. Oh god, I’m sorry, is that Ms. Scratch?”
Long, awkward, heartbroken silence.
Scratch and Toobe sit, slack-jawed.
And that’s that.
Winc, the peoples’ hero, cyber rebel, gorgeous queer, died. I’m so sorry, but you read that correctly. I really wanted this to be a happy ending, romantic that I am. But I’ve got hospital records saying a “Jane Doe of transgender experience” checked in in critical condition with gunshot wounds on March 15, 1995. No other records found, which is still typical today.
So…
Did the feds kill Winc?
Did Scratch ever recover? Is Scratch alive today?
I went round and round on this until I realized: Toobe! He would know! It’s been thirty years since this all went down. Scratch would be sixty-eight today. Winc would have been seventy-five. But Toobe was just a kid back then. What happened to him? It all comes down to Toobe. If he hadn’t been so diligent about documenting every detail—if he hadn’t pulled everyone together the way he did—no one would have had a clue about Scratch and Winc, or their great love story.
Find Toobe, find answers. But I could find nothing current—no trace of him in all my searches. No social media presence at all.
My dad works in tech, and he has connections. I know a lot of his pals, so I asked around, and a friend of a friend of a friend agreed to trace back the IP address of Toobe’s last posts from all those years ago. I ran it, and something went wonky because it came up as my dad’s address. Ha! I got punked. Well, screw that. I asked the guy to be more careful and to run it again.
And guess what? Toobe’s IP traced back to… My. Father’s. House.
What the everloving f—?!?!
“Hey, Siri.”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“Call my dad.”
“Calling Tobias Sparrow.”
Wellthatset off allkindsof bells and whistles in my brain. My dad’s name is Tobias. Tobias.Toobe.
Ring.
Ring.
“Hello?”
“Dad.”
“Hey! My favorite detective inspector!”
