“No,” Grace muttered. “Why?”
“It’s a good thing. You got Josh and Felix and Julia in your third pull, and me in your fourth, and apparently that very good-looking young bouncer on your fifth. You have won the slots, the lottery, and poker, young man. Now it’s time to spend some of your winnings.”
Danny found a parking spot in a structure that looked like it had been battered to death by Lake Michigan.
“I’d give a lot of that shit back if we never had to see Josh here again,” he mumbled.
“Yes, well, can’t argue that,” Danny said. “Let’s go see what’s doing.”
FELIX AND Julia looked red-eyed and exhausted, and Danny greeted them both with a hug. While the grown-ups went off to talk grown-up stuff, Grace slipped into Josh’s room, where Josh was playing disconsolately on his tablet.
Grace wasn’t even surprised a little bit to recognize the same floor plans Danny had given them the night before featured large on the tablet’s screen.
“Stop,” Grace said. “I already have a plan. Don’t worry about it.”
Josh glared at him. “You have a plan? How do I know it’s not shitty?”
“Because if I bothered to put my mind to a plan, it needs to not be shitty,” Grace told him. Duh! He sketched the plan out quickly, and Josh blew out a breath.
“This,” Josh said, pointing to his tablet, where he’d taken notes. “This is why you need to be at meetings. Oh my God. You said to tell you what to steal and that’s the end of it. Isn’t that what you said? Don’t be stupid.”
“This whole conversation is stupid,” Grace muttered. “Why are we having it here?”
“Because I have leukemia, and this is where they diagnose that bullshit,” Josh said bluntly, and Grace’s entire world exploded.
He stared at Josh for a lost moment or two, and Josh sighed.
“It’s very treatable,” he said quietly. “I start my first round of chemo tomorrow. If you guys keep me up-to-date, I might be able to work the gala from the back.”
“The gala?” Grace asked, his voice cracking. On the other side of the cubicle wall, he heard Danny’s voice crack too and wondered if they were cracking over the exact same thing.
“Yes, the gala,” Josh said. “I’m not dying! At least not in the next two weeks. We’ve worked damned hard for this. No. Fuck that. We’re proceeding as normal—”
“This isn’t normal!” Grace stood up and waved his arms. “Why would you think this is normal! Who’s going to be Josh when Josh is sick?”
“Josh is going to be Josh, you random freak! Sit down. Danny and Felix can run what I can’t. But dammit, I was having fun!”
“Having fun?” Grace pirouetted midpace. “You were puking blood! How long have you been feeling like crap and trying to run this job?”
Josh rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. A month. Whatever. My point is—”
The last time Grace had seen fireworks behind his eyes, he’d fallen on his head while fixing a light fixture in the theater.
“Waitaminute.”
“What? I’m trying to say that’s a dynamite plan and—”
“A month! And I’m the freak? Jesus fucking Christ—”
“Grace!” Josh snapped. “If you don’t shut it down and stop screaming, they’re going to kick you out of here and….” He let out a breath, and suddenly he looked really young and really ill, and Grace wanted to cry.
“And what?” Grace asked, minding his voice this time because Josh asked him to.
“And I… I really wanted you here. My folks are trying not to lose their shit, and their eyebrows are at their hairlines, and I think their faces are going to crack.” Josh’s smile went crooked. “You always make me laugh. I was, you know, sort of hoping we could do that tonight, since I have to be here. You could, you know?”
“Be me,” Grace said in surprise.
“Well, yeah. That’s why we love you. You’re, well, you.”
Grace sank into the uncomfortable chair and grabbed Josh’s hand. The other hand was all taken up with tubes and stuff, but this one was free.
“If you die, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Even if I do,” Josh said, “there’s a lot of months in between now and then. I think I can negotiate out of that.”
“I don’t think so,” Grace said, not having it. “I think you’d have to run a scam from heaven to get me to even open my mouth.”
“Think that’s what ghosts are?” Josh asked curiously. “A scam from heaven?”
Grace’s brain lit up like a pinball machine. “Yeah. So, like, when you die, in seventy years, way, way after I’ve gone out—”
“Ha!”
“No, no—I’m going to go out like those guys in the movie. I’m going to fly my plane upside down through a barn.”
Josh snorted. “You won’t make it off the ground. Hunter would have to fly the plane. You could steer it upside down. Or, you know, failed bungee jump off the plane would be good.”
Grace smiled dreamily. “I could do one successfully first, you think?”
“No,” Josh said seriously. “Save that one for when you’re ninety.”
“All my bones would crack. Like Rice Krispies.”
Josh shook his head. “No,” he said. “Because we’ll have super calcium supplements, and you’ll be one of those ninety-genarians running marathons because you still can’t find your wallet, and you squirrel around the house that much in the morning anyway.”
“Ninety-generians?” Grace couldn’t think of the word either.
“It’s whatever comes after septa and octa—and before genarian.”
Grace nodded and sobered. “Whatever it is, you’re going to live that long with me. Hunter is good, you know. He gets me. But you need to be there too.”
Josh’s smile was more self-assured this time. More Josh. “I will be. But I think the next time I say stop feeding me, you guys need to not feed me.”
Grace shuddered. “Yeah. Wasn’t pretty. Live and learn.”
He leaned his head against Josh’s pillow, thinking about Hunter’s strength and about how Hunter had promised he’d be there in the morning. And how Grace expected him to keep that promise.
“So that plan you came up with,” Josh said softly, “did you count on a staging area? Like a green room for bad guys? Because they’ll probably keep the infogem there.”
“No,” he said in annoyance.
“And how about videotaping the auction—hidden cameras not in the floorplan. You’d be responsible for placing those. Did you think of that?”
Grace grunted. “No, no we did not. That’s why you need to get better, of course.”
“I will,” Josh said, and ordinarily it would be such a Josh thing to say, Grace wouldn’t have doubted him at all. But maybe Grace really had grown up, and maybe knowing Hunter—who was definitely a grown-up—loved him, made Grace realize what being young sounded like. But he heard the quaver of uncertainty Josh was trying to hide and realized it was his job to make that go away.