Page 36 of Shrapnel

“Did you just…?”

“Streaks,” Jamie explained. “Don’t change the subject, O Face. You’re bored and you hate your job.”

“I don’t hate it!” Owen immediately protested, but there was no heat in his words. They were flat and automatic. “It’s just…not what I expected.”

“How many times are you going to say that?” Jamie asked as he joined him on the couch, knocking Owen’s feet off so he could sit.

“Any new job takes time to adjust. Haven’t you ever had a job that took a while to get used to?”

Jamie leaned his head back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “Sure. I worked at this pizza place when I was sixteen. Took me forever to get the hang of it. I ruined so many pizzas and shortchanged this guy who ended up throwing ranch in my face.”

Owen sat up. “Seriously?”

“No,” Jamie rolled his head to stare at him flatly. “I spent my sixteenth birthday staring at a cartel leader through the scope of a Barrett M82.”

His mouth went dry—for a moment he had forgotten. Forgotten who and what Jamie was. That was something he was good at, or maybe Owen was just bad at reading him. But when he was with him it felt normal. Like two guys in their early twenties commiserating about bad summer jobs and terrible office furniture. It was easy to forget that he didn’t really know anything about Jamie, and they weren’t close.

Jamie was watching him with something like expectation on his face. Like he knew exactly what Owen was thinking, and he was bracing for it. But Jamie didn’t know. He thought Owen would ask him about the horrors of his birthday. Ask him to elaborate why he was there and the exact sound a .50 caliber round makes as it leaves the chamber.

“I think you’d be good at making pizzas.”

Jamie blinked slowly, his thin lips parted and for the first time since Owen had known him, he looked speechless.

“I mean, pizza is good regardless. But I think we can both agree that good pizza is all about the sauce.”

The surprised look slipped off his face and Jamie’s crooked smile returned. “Wrong. It’s all about the flour. If you use coarse flour the dough will be too crispy. Need something light and airy.”

“What about thin-crust pizza?”

“An abomination and not even worth debating.”

Owen dropped his feet in Jamie’s lap so he could continue lounging on the couch while they debated the merits of pizza—they disagreed about crust but agreed that there was such a thing as too many toppings. At some point Jamie dropped his hand to Owen’s ankle and his thumb began idly tracing the slope of it, running over his Achilles tendon and drifting around that weird lump Owen didn’t know the name of. His fingernail was blunt, more abrasive than tickling but there was something settling about the tiny tendril of discomfort his ragged nail elicited.

Their informal conversation gave Owen some insights into Jamie—he was a picky eater, couldn’t handle his liquor, didn’t like escalators, and had very strong opinions about almost everything. From food to television shows, Jamie had a well thought out and usually controversial opinion. Owen was surprised to find that their interests overlapped quite a bit.

“Look at the man and tell me I’m wrong! They’re identical.”

“Lots of people look alike, you can’t just go off spouting that the Prime Minister of Canada is the son of—”

Owen was interrupted by Jamie’s cell phone ringing. Jamie answered it almost hesitantly. From the guilty look on his face, it was Elijah calling. He made some half-assed apologies about not telling Elijah where he stayed the night before, and then his face grew serious. Business Jamie slipped into place and Owen felt his heart squeeze.

“Be there in twenty,” Jamie promised as he hung up. Sliding Owen’s legs off, he stood up and pocketed his phone.

“Duty calls,” he said apologetically.

“Weaver business?”

Jamie’s shoulders were suddenly stiff, and his smile was beatific and even. “It always is.”

He lingered by the front door, looking over his shoulder at Owen. “You should lock your windows. It’s not safe.”

Then he was gone, taking all the energy out of the room with him. Owen was sitting on the couch, staring at the closed front door. After a moment he got up and locked his window. He already missed the crooked-grinned Jamie.

The cab rolled to a halt outside a grimy-looking convenience store. Far from the newer stations being rebuilt across the city—the kind with homemade food and a cult-like following, this was an older store. The kind that looked like it had been around since the dawn of time and getting the grease stains off the wall would require a stick of dynamite.

Two neglected looking gas pumps stood lonely sentinels beneath a flickering sign. The labels had been rubbed off by a thousand fingers and only the most discerning customer would be able to tell the difference between unleaded and leaded.

As the cab rocked to a complete halt the driver glanced up at Jamie in the rearview mirror. “You sure this is where you want to get off?”