Page 92 of Shrapnel

“What doesn’t?” he asked, voice thick.

“The Cleft. What you told me you found seems like a set up.” Owen tugged at the strings of his hoodie, twisting them around his fingers. “Like we were supposed to find it.”

Jamie hadn’t considered that. In a lot of ways, it did feel staged. Those pictures and the bottles of chemicals had been right in the open, confirmation that their bad guy had used that space.

“What do they call it? A red herring! Someplace we were supposed to find instead of the real one.”

Jamie stopped in the middle of the street. There were no cars here now, only the rustling of garbage caught in the wind. Dusk was rapidly approaching. The time of day when everything was hazy and indistinct.

He tried to think back to The Cleft. What had they found that was actually helpful? Nothing. They already knew the killer used chemicals. They knew that he must hate Noah.

A fucking red herring.

Jamie crinkled the water bottle in an attempt to keep his mind focused. He could feel it fading. Wanting to focus on the failure, on the way Owen was looking at him with his lower lip a little shiny from where he kept licking it. It was so plump.

Unlike those other lips. They were always wet too. From tobacco and alcohol. He would drink the beer with the blue and gold label, bottle clacking against his teeth. It stunk. Beer stunk. It stunk when it was spilled across the carpet and when it was on his breath. Or how it lingered with the stale tang of cigarettes in his mother’s hair. Beer wasn’t safe. The hard stuff made them too drunk to move. He could outrun them when they drank liquor. But beer seemed to have the opposite effect. Always more amped up, more drugs, more men. More people with their loud laughter and scratchy beards and yellowed fingernails.

“Just ignore them, ok? Look! I saw this stuffed fox at the store. It looks like you, doesn’t it? Just hug him, it’ll be over soon.”

Pain radiated up his jaw and he opened his eyes. Clenching his jaw again. That was a bad habit. He didn’t do it when he was awake. When he was awake the walls worked.

“Jamie?” Owen looked worried. His eyes looked darker in this light. Jamie liked them in the sun—like two pools of mossy water. Maybe he could find tadpoles in their depths.

He sucked air into his lungs and released his jaw.He didn’t want to look at Owen. He didn’t want to associate him with what he had just remembered. He glanced up over his head, taking in the buildings that loomed over them.

“The bank,” he said, his thoughts unscrambling and coming to order.

“The…bank? What?”

“Tubes. The bank tubes. The ones that suck up into the bank, you know? So you can do the drive through and the….” Jamie floated his hands around, trying to convey the framework of plastic tubes he had seen at nearly every bank. “There were a ton of them in The Cleft.”

Owen turned around and looked at the building behind him. “United Horizons Bank?”

“Worth a shot.”

Like The Cleft, the bank had been abandoned. Misshapen pieces of wooden boards had been nailed up in an attempt to protect the glass, but someone had smashed the glass door anyway. They crunched across the broken glass, stepping between to boards to get into the bank.

A waiting area was off to the left. The chairs had been toppled, cushions ripped up and stuffing scattered across the big open room. If it weren’t for the sign on the door, it would be impossible to tell this used to be a bank at all. Unlike The Cleft, this place was almost completely barren.

Jamie pushed through the darkness when the smell hit him. It cut through the moldy stench of standing water and fetid air. He pulled his gun, reaching behind him to grab Owen’s shirt. He dragged him close.

“Stay on my ass,” he grunted.

He should send Owen out. But he didn’t want him out of his sight.

“Is that smell…”

Jamie didn’t need to confirm it. Owen was smart enough to know what a rotting human body smelled like. Nothing in the world was comparable. Not even dead animals. Humans had their own pungent way of decaying.

His hair standing on end, Jamie moved through the bank. Save Owen’s harsh breathing, it was silent. Behind the counter, they found a mess of empty cups and a dead body. The person was long dead, skin black with petrification,

Jamie turned, clapping a hand over Owen’s eyes. “Close your eyes, O Face. Keep them closed for me.”

Owen’s eyelashes fluttered against his palm, but he nodded shakily. “Okay.”

Jamie lowered his hand slowly, making sure Owen kept them closed. When he did, he turned back to the body.

Judging by the long stringy hairs, it was probably a woman. But beyond that, he couldn’t see any details. The body had been stripped off all its clothing and shoes. It didn’t take a genius to guess it was a homeless woman used as guinea pig.