Page 80 of Mine

“Why do you care?” I asked him, wanting the fight, picking it.

His head rolled sideways so he could see me.

“I’ve never done anything for you.”

The look in his eyes was hard to read.

“You don’t wanna talk?”

Still nothing, just the stare from his lime-and-gold cat eyes.

“Fine, forget it,” I said, turning away, looking out the window at the black night sky.

“Look at me.”

My head snapped back, my eyes returning to his face.

“Friendship means shit to you?”

“Of course not.”

“But that’s what you’re saying.”

“No,” I told him. “I just—”

“Everyone wants something,” he said softly, leaning closer to me, “except my friends. I have very few, and you’re one of them.”

“Con—”

“You never expect anything without paying. You never ask for favors, you never take us, this, me and you, for granted. Do you know what that makes you?”

I shook my head.

“It makes you one of ten people in the world who give a crap if I live or die.”

His eyes, with the flecks of gold in them, were really the most extraordinary color.

“And then there was Andrade’s.”

I took a deep breath. “That was nothing, and you always bring it up like it was.”

He shrugged. “Because it wasn’t nothing; it was a helluva lot more than that.”

But for me it had never been the extraordinary happening that he thought it was.

IT HAD been a routine collection. Walking into Tajo Andrade’s club to pick up the money he owed me, we had no idea that we were interrupting a robbery. When we walked down the stairs into the main room, the man turned and, with him, the shotgun he was holding. I didn’t even think. I stepped in front of Conrad on instinct, shielding him with my body. Our diversion allowed Tajo the moment he needed to pull his Glock and drop the robber with a shot to the head. The second guy took a bullet from Conrad’s gun, the silencer muffling the sound only a little. In the aftermath, as Tajo passed me an envelope and thanked me for being punctual, then ordered his guys to get rid of the bodies, Conrad turned me around and looked at me like he’d never seen me before.

“You okay?” I asked him.

And he nodded slowly, his eyes staring holes into me.

“IT WAS no big deal,” I told him, back in the present, for what felt like the hundredth time. I patted his thigh before I let my head fall back against the seat. “Any of your friends would have done it.”

“That’s what you’re missing,” he told me. “There aren’t too many of you.”

But I refused to believe that; the man was much too constant not to be beloved by many.

“So you have a new job, huh?” he asked me.