Bobby on a stick - Chapter I

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John was the best I'd ever seen with a blowtorch. He wielded it like Da Vinci wielded a god-damn paintbrush. He could do things with it that in many places were certainly illegal and could even be considered deranged, with the possible exception of Japan.

There was this thing about John and the blue-hot propane flames that bordered - nay, even surpassed - the realm of wonder. If

Jesus could come down and visit from the Heavens and work with a blowtorch next to John, he'd look like some kind of a pyromaniac hobo with a messiah complex and a background in carpentry, while

John would just shine with a bright white light emanating from within, being able to turn water into beer and beer into piss with just a look. John was just that good.

So it was a fucking bummer when I learned that his last words actually were: "Don't be a pussy, oxygen tanks do that hissing sound all the time."

As far as classifying bummers goes, this was a triple-A class bummer, the kind of showstopper that had only been theorised up to John's untimely and gruesome death. The kind of bummer that could have made Jim Carey's face look flat and emotionless. It ranked way far above the A-plus bummer of being recently divorced, fired, being fired upon and being set on fire at the same time.

Which was bad in and of itself, but not as bad as John getting blown up a day before the 'job'. That was a sad state of affairs that meant I was now a very sorry son of a bitch with a life expectancy that made the term "lifetime warranty" an almost moot point.

So here I was, melting away in a decrepit diner on route 72, at a swampy nowhere with some supposedly native American though actually gibberish name like 'Alatanoosa' or 'Whahananoka'. It was between Alabama and Tennessee, which to me was pretty much the same. The coffee tasted like imported dirt; the kind of dirt you read about being very fashionable and exaggeratedly overpriced but at the end of the day, was just plain old dirt anyway you looked at it.

The fried eggs looked like fried eggs, but only in the most rudimentary way: there was an orange bit with some sort of white substance with the mechanical properties of rubber all around it.

I guess my flair for adventure was wearing out so it just sat there, while I happily failed to ingest it.

It didn't take me much time to realise I really didn't feel like eating at all. Maybe it was the god-damn heat, the stale humid air and the fact that about the same time the next day, I would be probably looking at the wrong end of more than a couple of gun barrels because I had been forced into something I couldn't deliver by some very single-minded people with a propensity for shooting, rather than having coffee and biscuits and sympathizing with the occasional bad card life dealt you.

The reason I couldn't deliver was I couldn't do the 'job'. And I couldn't do the 'job' without John, because John, the flamboyant blowtorch virtuoso with an unmatched record of ninety-two safes, safe-rooms, and bank vaults; an average time of three point three minutes, clean as a germ-obsessed placebo-munching single old lady right before kidney stone surgery and a no-smoking-on-the-job policy that kept my cigarette budget intact, had gone and killed himself in his brother's-in-law chop shop.

I stopped and asked myself at that point whether that unfortunate death, at such a bad time, right before what would probably prove to be the last gig in my career was a sign from God to stop doing what I did best: stealing. In a rare know-thyself moment I reminded myself I wasn't half as good at it as those folks in

Wall Street, most politicians and the let-me-lend-you-your-own-money cutthroats that roamed the street unabashed, calling themselves bankers.

Logic would then imply that if there was going to be any smiting and all that holier-than-thou business, any God with a sense of perspective, morality and justice wouldn't start dishing it out on my end. And in any case, I decided that if God really had something to tell me, he'd better make a really good point with lots of compelling arguments, like saving my ass, pronto.

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