Page 38 of Shrapnel

“How can you tell?” Jamie asked.

She scoffed and sucked on her bloodied cuticles. “You can smell them. Used to come in sometimes for smokes or for water. Normally they’re fine but recently they’ve been violent. Robbing us, I guess.”

Elijah narrowed his eyes. “You guess?”

“Well,” she looked at Abrams and Jamie quickly. “Everyone knows we pay ya’ll for protection.Everyoneknows that. These guys did too, they seemed real scared and only took a couple dollars each time. Like they wanted to be done quick.”

Jamie didn’t put much stock in eyewitnesses. People lied. Even without meaning to, they lied. Their brains did all sorts of things they didn’t understand—things to protect them, so their memories could fade into something more palatable. Something they could live with.

What he did trust was what he could see with his own eyes, and if this store was under Weaver protection, then it was monitored by video surveillance. The sleek black cameras were mounted in the corners of the store, red LED light obtrusively blinking. Jamie recognized the cameras. They were Owen’s pet project. His obsessiveness with being able to monitor everything from his computer was kind of cute.

Owen was easy. Not easy like Mary Sue sophomore who would kiss anyone who splurged for a Mcflurry at the end of their date, but easy in the way that Jamie didn’t have to fight. He could just relax. Owen had seen him at his worst—seen him kill and still treated him the same. There was comfort in that easiness. And comfort was hard to come by for Jamie.

Jamie had been drawn to Owen from day one. At first, it was because of his rawness. His inability to hide anything, every emotion playing on his face. Under the piercings and the crappy dye job, he was a gentle soul. Owen would deny it. Claim he was morose and sardonic, but he was soft and fluffy. A soul too gentle for the likes of Jamie. Perhaps that was truly why he always wanted to stand so close to him—Jamie’s fractured soul was baffled by the wholeness of Owen’s. And maybe, in a secret part of Jamie, tucked away in the complete darkness of the walls, Jamie was hoping some of that wholeness would rub off on him.

It wouldn’t, of course. If Jackson’s explosiveness couldn’t blow a hole in his walls, then the gentle Owen wouldn’t be able to. But he did find a softness in it. A reprieve in the way Owen ate until his cheeks were stuffed, twitching his nose in delight.

“They used this,” Abrams handed Elijah something and Jamie found his attention pulled back to the conversation.

Elijah clenched his jaw and showed Jamie what was in his palm: a slim pocketknife with a golden cactus inlaid into the handle.

Abrams was staring at the back of Elijah’s head. He knew exactly what that knife meant, and he wanted nothing to do with the implications.

Jamie was far less interested in the knife than he was in Elijah. His partner had gone completely still, hand shaking as he looked down at the knife in his palm. White Sand Mesa members didn’t just ‘lose’ their knives. They were an extension of themselves, as much as Roland and Grant’s tattoos.

On a hunch, he turned back to the bodies while Elijah asked to see the CCTV footage. Roughly, he flipped the first body.

The man’s face was red and swollen, pockmarked with burst red pustules. Jamie dropped him and went to the second man. Thomas said he barely hit him before he coughed up blood. A quick check revealed the second man had the same affliction as the first. Same as Andrews and the other victims.

As Jamie brushed the hair from his face to get a better look at the affliction, pieces of colored paper fell from his hair. They dropped onto his hand and stuck to his skin like little brightly colored freckles. Intrigued, he lifted his hand and looked at the crimped papers.

They reminded him of the Cascarones he used to love in his youth—hollowed eggs filled with confetti. Kids and adults alike would crack them over each other’s heads. It probably had some sort of religious significance, but Jamie just liked the anarchy of it all.

“Watch out!” burbling children’s laughter echoed in his ears moments before a Cascarone smashed over his head. Bits of paper caught in his eyelashes, and he stared back in confusion.

“Why did you do that?” he asked as he plucked bits of eggshell from his hair.

“It’s for good luck! Don’t you feel lucky?”

Shaking his head, Jamie flicked the bits of paper off his hand. The memory left a sour taste in his mouth, and he shuddered as a cold sweat began prickling the back of his neck. Why had the walls let that memory through?

“Elijah,” he called his partner's name, not so much to get his attention but because he needed to be grounded. Needed his presence to center him back in reality.

Hand still grasping the knife, he joined Jamie. His mouth was set in a thin line and his green eyes were stormy.

“I just watched the CCTV. It was like she said—they were rushing and afraid of something.”

“Or someone,” Jamie prompted as he stood and shook the crimped paper off his hand.

“What does this have to do with White Sand Mesa?” Elijah asked aloud, staring down at the deformed victim's face.

“I don’t know,” Jamie answered.

What did White Sand Mesa have to do with the local homeless population? Was Noah hated so much? They didn’t have enough information. The only thing they did have was dead bodies. And they had plenty of those.

8

Tighten the Noose Whenever I’m with You