Delirious over the Roachmobile's keys as the gunfight brews below

pivotal · 11-12 Nov YDAU (~midnight)

• When: 11-12 Nov YDAU, ~2340h to just past midnight — minutes before Gately is shot.
• What: Glynn is "upstairs in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with diverticulitis" — an illness the narration glosses with Pat's etiology, that it's intestinal and "alcoholics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends," and that retires Staff's old suspicion he was playing sick to dodge the job hunt. His illegally parked, specialty-disembowelled black Bug forces Gately upstairs for permission to have Green move it, and the sickroom exchange is the record's one sustained Glynn dialogue: face gray and waxy with pain, lips yellow-crusted, "the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow's eye," softly singing a Choosy Mothers song to the wrong tune. He answers "'Don Doon the witch is dead,'" then delivers a delirious valediction to the car — "'My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater's wheels.'" — pressing it on Gately as his "One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers and a Fizz," asking that the exposed engine be Simonized weekly. Gately is still at the bunk asking whether he needs St. E.'s ("Hoits, Don") when the brakes and screaming start outside; as Gately sprints down, Glynn manages a sotto "Mother." In the melee around his own car, a shout of support comes from "either McDade or Glynn says, but it can't be Glynn, for some reason he tries to bring up inside him" — the reason being that Glynn is flat on his back upstairs while the Nucks and Gately bleed around his Bug.