“Brian...” Nick spoke into the quiet of the car.

The older man turned in surprise, not having expected to see him there. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t reply. He wasn’t alone in the car and didn’t want to rouse any suspicion while talking to his imaginary friend.

That was, of course, how Nick wanted it. He selfishly wanted to be able to get away without things getting too emotional.

“I need to go now,” Nick told him and Brian nodded his head as if it were something he had been expecting to hear.

“I really don’t want to, but I have to. I’m going to be grateful to you forever, I hope you know that. Thank you so much for getting justice for me. I learned a lot while I was here, and I’m glad we got to do this one last thing together. I’m really sorry Brian for the way things turned out. I’m sorry I’m not here right now, flesh and blood. I’m sorry I’m not going to get to see Baylee grow old. Most of all, I’m sorry that it took me dying to find out you’re the best friend anyone could ever ask for. I wish I had listened to you more. Like that time when you told me Toni was no good for me,” he chuckled nervously.

At this point Brian was welling up, tears beginning to spill down his cheeks but not for the obvious reasons. Though Nick’s words moved him, it was more heartbreaking to watch as his friend started to fade away. The more Nick gave closure to their time together the fainter he became and Brian realized he really was losing him all over again. The FBI Agents sitting in the front of the vehicle chalked it up to the excitement of the day. Brian, after all, had been through an awful lot.

“I want you to promise me that you’re done now. No more chasing after ghosts. It’s time to let me go.”

Brian nodded, “Promise...” he whispered under his breath.

“You need to get rid of my stuff, I don’t need it. Give it away, or something. Just be careful if you’re gonna give it to like, a children’s charity or something, I’m sure there’s a tonne of porn in there,” Nick chuckled then eyed the door as soon as he heard the engine of the SUV start.

Brian put his hand over his heart and that was enough for Nick to understand what he meant, “I love you too, man. I’ll see ya. Not too soon I hope.”

Looking towards the two men in the front who were engaged in conversation Brian quickly turned back to his friend who was becoming more and more faint before his eyes, “Bye Nicky,” he whispered and with his final parting words he was gone.  

~*~

His living room was a flurry of activity as soon as he walked through the door and Brian sighed. He knew that every one of his friends would have come over as soon as they’d heard about the adventure he’d been on all day, but he just didn’t expected it to be so loud.

“Brian!” Kevin announced as soon as he saw his cousin walk through the door and he moved to pull him into an embrace.

“Bri, what’s going on?” Howie asked, “First we hear that you’ve been in some kind of police shootout then you want us to come over...”

“I’ll fill you in,” Brian told them, moving away from his friends to take a seat next to his wife on the couch.

“Most importantly,” AJ interrupted, “Are you okay?”

“Honestly?” Brian asked rhetorically, chewing his bottom lip, “I haven’t been this good in a long while.”

“Glad to hear it,” AJ smiled slightly then grabbed a seat so he would be comfortable for Brian’s story.

“Let me start from the beginning,” he began by taking a deep breath, “You guys are going to be terribly confused at first but trust me this will all make sense in the end. I met a man today, his name is Sam Taylor. He works for the FBI. For the past seven years he’s been working undercover as a mob enforcer trying to bring down a huge drug ring. The drugs were coming into the country on container ships, hidden in bottles of olive oil...”

“Wouldn’t it be wet?” AJ asked.

Brian rolled his eyes, “Let me finish the story, and no it was in the bottom bit.”

“Like in one of those wicker baskets like you see at the gift shops?”

“Like that,” Brian chuckled then picked up where he left off, “The shipments were mixed. Some of them were clean, and some of them weren’t. But both of them went to restaurants, they were the middle men. They paid for the olive oil and got kickbacks for passing along the drugs. The shipping numbers for the drug shipments were written on the inside of a matchbook. It was so the middle men would know which shipments they needed to pick up and when. The first restaurant owner would pick up the first number and pass it on to the next one, and so on. One of the restaurant guys, Santino Antonio, lost the matchbook with the numbers. His girlfriend took it. She knew what was going down and was going to use it against him for one reason or another but she decided to back out at the last minute and passed the matchbook off to Nick.”

“What?” Howie gasped, “Nicky was involved?”

“He didn’t know it,” Brian clarified, “You’ll see this on the news later but the cops were involved in this too. The FBI had a mole, Agent Taylor, and some information had slipped out that someone was working on the inside. The Chief of Police, this Tom Cane guy, wanted the mole gone and offered up big money for it to happen. Unfortunately for Nick, he ended up the fall guy. They made it out to look like Nick was the one leaking information, that he was the one with the list of shipping containers.”

Howie couldn’t help but interrupt again, “But if he wasn’t involved, why wouldn’t they put two and two together?”

“Toni,” Brian answered, “This Santino guy legitimately thought that Toni was the insider, but she was his girlfriend so he wasn’t going to kill her. He didn’t realize she was just being spiteful, he thought she was passing the list off to Nick for him to go to the cops. So they killed him, dumped his body, and the cop assigned to his case, Sid Bromwell, did everything he could to cover the whole thing up. After a while everything had been so quiet that they thought it had to have been Nick who was leaking the information so they picked up right where they left off, a big mistake on their part. That’s kind of where I came in. I met a really helpful police officer, who filled in a lot of the blanks for me and helped me answer some questions. Then I ended up at this warehouse... I finally found the place where Nick was killed. I didn’t know it but there was supposed to be a big drug shipment that day, and a raid by the FBI.”

Leighanne was rubbing Brian’s knee consolingly, having heard most of the story on the phone earlier in the day.

“Are you hurt? I can’t believe you were stuck in the middle of all of this. Did anything happen to you?” Kevin asked with concern in his voice.

Brian nodded, “No, I’m okay. I’m not going to lie... I almost got shot and I’ve never been so scared in my life. I’ve also never been so thankful for everything that I have.”

“And are you finally done with the witch hunt? Can Nick just be our friend who died now instead of our friend who was killed?” AJ asked bluntly, not sure what the protocol was going to be.

“I spent the last year of my life searching for answers and now that I have them I don’t know if I’m any more satisfied,” Brian admitted, “I’m not going to just stop thinking about him or talking about him, even. But I am ready to put Nick to rest and live my life for a while. I’ll spend one day a year, at the beach with you guys, letting Nick be top priority. That’s all.”

“Apart from the obvious,” Howie carefully broached the question, “What changed? You spent so much time on this...”

Brian smiled and looked to Leighanne, making them all think he was referring to something he’d told his wife instead of his dead best friend, “I made a promise that I would move on. No more chasing after ghosts.”