The End Game

It was a week after the race and if Sam’s friend Darleen was to be believed, I’d brought down Christopher Bonaventura and Alex Kyle, saved the Ottone family empire, helped capture the banking information and funds of an international terrorist network and likely imprisoned Nicholas Dinino for life.

Or, as Sam told it, since he didn’t want to involve me too directly, he’d done all of that.

I had to believe what Darleen told Sam because none of this appeared on the news or in the papers, or even on any blogs. Well, except for the photos of Nicholas Dinino and the young girl. She was a minor star now in Europe, probably would have a recording deal within a month and be forgotten in two. Gone. Disappeared.

Just like Nicholas Dinino, a man I’d never actually met, but who probably wishes he never even heard my name on a recording.

There’s a difference, however, between disappearing and being disappeared. You help the FBI with evidence against crime families, you tend to get special treatment, and though Darleen didn’t say so, I was inclined to believe that Nicholas Dinino was probably in a safe house in Phoenix, giving the FBI all the information he could to save his ass.

And the Pax Bellicosa? It came in fifth. On its own, it still lost. And Sam spent twenty-four hours working harder than he had in twenty years. When he came back to America three days later, after some “Sam Time” with what he called “race groupies” he still had blisters on all of his fingers.

All that had been accomplished, and yet I still had to bond with my mother, and it was somehow far more difficult. If things didn’t improve, I thought that it was only a matter of time before I woke up one morning to find Dr. Phil standing in my kitchen, eating my yogurt.

“Tell me, Michael,” Dr. Miyazawa said from somewhere in her office I couldn’t quite pinpoint, “what would you say to your father right now if he were sitting beside you?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said.

“I’d ask him to shoot me.”

“Michael!” my mother said.

“No, no, this is good, Mrs. Westen,” Dr. Miyazawa said. “Go ahead, Michael. Why would you ask him to shoot you?”

I had the vague sense she might actually be beneath her desk. If I’d known this was all going to happen under the cloak of darkness, I would have brought night-vision goggles with me. The week prior, just days after the events of the Hurricane Cup, the three of us actually met out on the beach so the doctor could perform a clarifying ceremony, which involved my mother screaming into the ocean for ten minutes about all of the terrible things I’d ever done to her. Next week there was a field trip scheduled to an ashram in Boynton Beach, where we were to bond over the spiritual revelations.

“Well,” I said, finally answering the question, “the muzzle flash would probably get you to turn on the lights, for one, which would give me an opportunity to look at your diploma a little closer, see where exactly you learned that trick with the marble.”

“Many of my clients find the marble light very comforting,” she said. “You don’t find it comforting?”

“No.”

“What do you find comforting, Michael?”

“Building explosives.”

“Do you often think about dying, Michael? Do you feel obsessed with your own demise? Do you feel that your father has, in some way, killed you before, turned you into a shell of a person?”

I checked my watch. We had about ten more minutes of this. “Yeah,” I said. “It was either him or my unborn twin.”

“Michael,” my mother said, “you know that’s not true. You never had an unborn twin.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m also not a shell of a person, and I’m beginning to strongly doubt Dr. Miyazawa is an actual doctor, so we’re all on an even playing field now.”

Dr. Miyazawa sighed. That was her go-to sound. I still couldn’t really see her. “We haven’t talked about this before, but you two might be perfect candidates for a birth reenactment.”

“I understand why Medicare won’t pay for these appointments,” I said.

“Do you ever get tired of using sarcasm as a defense?” Dr. Miyazawa asked.

“Sarcasm is actually a very advanced brain function,” I said, which was the launching point for my mother to go into an exceptionally involved story about some perceived sarcasm-based injustice done upon her by me when I was six, which led Dr. Miyazawa to ask my mother about her feelings concerning any past lives I might have had and then, well, I just stopped listening completely. When people start arguing past lives, it’s only a matter of time until someone has tarot cards on the table.