Page 28 of Parting Shot

“Oh shit.” I grinned even though my lips cracked and my nose hurt, along with the rest of my body. I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.

He moved fluidly to the side of my bed and took hold of my left hand.

“What the fuck, T?” I breathed out, gazing up at Terrence Moss, who I had been friends with since the fifth grade. After we graduated, we had even joined the Army together, but he had gone off and become God knew what else while I just stayed a grunt. I only knew that because he confessed it to me the last time he showed up. He kept most things, especially details about his life, close to the vest, but over time, I could wear him down. It was one of those things you did for your old friends.

“You weren’t where I left you.” The man smiled at me, his eyes glowing.

The contrasts were beautiful on him—his deep umber skin with gold undertones, white teeth, and the bright spring-green eyes. I always mentioned to him he could have done something on a runway instead of shooting people in whatever Third World hellhole he’d found himself.

Interestingly, I knew he’d become a mercenary because he told me, but when I looked, there was no record of him anywhere, not even in the Army. Years ago, I had given up trying to find any trace of him and merely accepted that he was a ghost, and I would see him when I saw him.

“You check on me a lot, do you?”

“I do,” he said frankly, squeezing my hand.

As his gaze ran over me, I got the feeling I looked like absolute crap.

“Oh, it’s not that bad.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, and I saw the furrow of his dark brows.

That fast, it clicked.

“Anonymous tip, my ass.”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save your friends, but the only way to do that was to kill everyone, and that would have meant them as well. Either way … it was a done deal for them.”

“They weren’t my friends, we worked together, but thank you for my life.”

“Course.”

It was his way. He came and imparted some information, we had dinner, I got a hug good-bye, and that would be it for another year or four. It was no different this time. He had come to check on me for whatever reason, maybe even a hunch, not found me, and so searched like only he could. I owed him my life, but he was not there to get an award or be thanked by anyone but me.

“How long was I there?”

“You mean, how long did those thugs have you?”

“Yeah.”

“Five days.”

Huh. “Seemed longer.”

“No doubt.”

He stayed an hour; walked around the hospital room in that fluid, almost-predatory way he had; and finally gave me a number where I could leave a message if I needed him. I laughed because it was so out of character.

“You going soft?”

“What?”

“I mean, really? An actual number?”

He flipped me off, didn’t explain how he’d gotten by the police guard at the door, and then left without even a word. It was always like that. I could turn a corner and there he’d be; I could turn another and be alone. Funny we’d ever even become friends, as different as we were.

He had been a soccer star in high school, a track star as well. I played football—defensive lineman—but only well enough to stay on the team, not enough to be drafted. He had his own drama at home—his father gambled, couldn’t keep a job, and his mother drank. We went to his place one day and found his father on the front steps with a note in his hand. T never saw his mother again. What was good, though, was that after his mother left, Terrence’s father stepped up and changed. He eventually became a bus driver until he was killed, trying to stop a robbery at the corner store close to their home. It was why Terrence joined the Army with me instead of going to school. There was no one home anymore.

I was not a guy who questioned, and I didn’t ask him to stay when he walked out the same way he’d come. I’d see him when he was ready; it wasn’t my place to pin him down. He was my friend. It was really the only thing that mattered.