Chapter 12: Old Friend

I could have kissed him then, I really could've. The look on his face was a little hard to read. It seemed he was trying to look angry, but the shock and relief in his eyes made me think he was about to laugh. If memory serves me, this was the first time I had ever successfully surprised Jack.

His face finally broke and we just stood there a minute smirking at each other. Then a gun went off outside and a bullet struck the doorframe over out heads and we both fell into a squat.

"Tell him to cut that out and I WILL kill him," I hissed.

In an instant he was at the window yelling orders down to the man to cease and desist.

I stood up slowly. "We can feed 'im, but then lets get rid of him after that, I have to talk to you."

He turned from the window, looked at me up and down. "Yeah, there's some explanation here I'm more than ready to listen to, and it better be good…."

.

I stood at my window again when he went down to talk to his friend Brody after we'd spent an awkward hour eating from a cook fire in the back courtyard.

They stood in the archway in the outer wall. I caught words as they bounced off of the building. Brody sounded rather angry, but after he was allowed to rant for a minute he ended up sounding more tired than anything else. I watched as Jack steered him artfully around the body of the man he'd shot, who'd been following me since Mexico and I still didn't know the identity of, and out toward the water tower. He had a hand on his friend's back as they climbed the hill, and by the time they reached the top, they were shaking hands. I shook my head. How the hell did he manage to do that sort of thing? He'd dragged his poor man on some mad trip, pissed him off to an obviously high degree, then talked to him for five minutes and all was well again?

Descending the stairs, I unlocked the front doors of the mission and stood there, leaning against the doorframe to await his return.

I had set up the bottom floor of the mission to function as my hideout. The stone and cement walls with their chipping yellow-pink paint were strong, the windows that had no shutters were boarded up. The bottom floor had only two rooms. The place wasn't very accurate to the inside of a real mission, it was too small for one, but the layout worked just fine for my purposes. The smaller of the two rooms I had a sleeping bag rolled out on a ledge that jutted from the wall, with a gas lamp hanging from a hook on the wall, the larger room still had a few chairs that hadn't fallen to complete decay yet and a fairly sturdy wood table over by the only window I had open. On the table I had a few bottles of rum, which I'd brought out when I first moved in, in anticipation of my visitor of course.

As I stood there, waiting for his return, I thought of the reason I had dragged him out here, what I had to tell him, and suddenly I wished he hadn't found me yet. What was I doing? An intervention? And what right did I have, showing up after so long to tell an old friend he isn't what he used to be? Where either of us what we used to be?

I, who'd been involved in over a dozen revolutions, planned on telling a man I'd fought beside that I thought he was living in a way that was going to get him killed? That he was on the wrong side?

We were unnatural. How long until we stopped being human?

I'd thought about this a great deal in the past few years. How can something without end have any value? I watched him appear again, walking up the dirt road toward me, dust floating in the air, the sun pounding down, starting to blur the air just above the ground. Maybe he'd taken the opposite track as I had, maybe he didn't think about it all. It would explain a few things. He stuck to instinct, leaving the philosophy to the aged.

As he came closer, I watched the familiar swaggering gate, the smirk on a know-it-all face. For a minute he did seem like the man I'd known to spring into the rigging just for the fun of it, or crawl out onto the figurehead at night when he didn't think anyone was around and stare out at the horizon. I could see it in there, somewhere, but it was covered with something darker now. It was buried in Sheldon Jeffery Sands.

"Sands," I said, trying the name out as he came into the courtyard through the arch. "Your name's even dry."

He stopped, the smile remained, but it was business-like. "So, Lucia. What is this all about?"

I sighed. "Come in for a drink first," I said.