Free The Return: A Novel by Michael Gruber

minimum expenditure of emotional energy. Someday she would reset the program so as to enable marriage and children, but not just yet. It puzzled her when she heard women say there were no good men left, because she’d found plenty. She thought that what women of the educated classes meant when they said this was that there were no good upper-middle-class men making six figures who were not metrosexual wimps or work-obsessed assholes or gay persons. Possibly true, but Statch did not require her lovers to hold a degree from a good college, or even one from high school, or to work at high-status, big-bucks jobs. She demanded only a sense of humor, a nice body, a certain edge, a competence in the physical world, and that they liked her. Recent guys had included a chef, a stock-car racer, the stock-car racer’s chief mechanic, a Boston police detective, and a boatbuilder.
    She told her machine, “Call Mick.” This was the cop.
    *   *   *
    Marder decided to stop in Baton Rouge, believing that the Louisiana city might host craftsmen skilled at repairing bullet holes in vehicles, and so it proved. At Bob’s Body, out on Airline Highway, he waved thick wads of cash in the greasy little office, until the eponymous Bob got the idea: no insurance, no records, no taxes, double pay for a one-day job starting this minute.
    When that was settled, he dodged across the highway to a McDonald’s. The day was warm and would get warmer, the dense, white-skied sticky heat of the gulf south, a climate Marder particularly disliked. He didn’t mind heat as long as it was dry; he liked to bake, but boiling annoyed him. He felt he’d boiled enough in his life, in both Vietnam and New York summers.
    He paused outside the restaurant and looked through the glass. Skelly always sat strategically in public places, and here had chosen a booth in a corner, with a good view of the street, back to the wall, close to the rear exit. Marder hung for a moment, slightly outside Skelly’s angle of view, and watched—silly, really, but being with Skelly tended to make one conspiratorial.
    Skelly was drinking iced tea and writing with a cheap ballpoint in a small notebook. Despite the heat, he was wearing a tan cotton jacket over his T-shirt, and he had his old Red Sox cap pulled down over his eyes, which were obscured by Vuarnet sunglasses. Holding the notebook with one hand, Skelly reached into an inside jacket pocket and, to Marder’s surprise, pulled out a telephone, a thick black thing with a pencil antenna. Marder walked in. Until he started this trip, he had not been in a fast-food joint since his kids were grown, and now, in the chill of the A/C, smelling the familiar slightly sickening odor of cheap food, he resolved not to do so again. He slid into the seat before Skelly could slip the phone back into his pocket.
    “I thought you didn’t own a cell phone, Skelly.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Then what was that thing you just stuck in your pocket, a bagel? Your personal vibrator?”
    “That’s a sat phone.”
    “Really. Who were you talking to on it?”
    “A guy. What’s with Bubba across the way? He going to fix your truck? Not that I thought it needed fixing. I thought the bullet holes took some of the respectable old-fart asshole shine off the thing, added a little street cred.”
    “We don’t need street cred where we’re going. We want to be invisible.”
    “Yeah, I sort of got that part. You mind telling me why?”
    “Asks the most invisible man in America. It’s simple. I don’t want to be bothered. I want time for peaceful contemplation in my Mexican hideaway. Why is that hard for you to understand?”
    “Because it’s complete bullshit. You’re armed to the teeth, you’re paying cash, you got your cell switched off. This tells me you’re on the run from something. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help.”
    “I appreciate that, Patrick, and let me assure you, in all sincerity, that there is nothing I am fleeing from