“Okay.”
“We’re supposed to be together,” I said as much for my benefit as his.
“I know.”
I took a step back and still saw the haunted look in his eyes, like I’d been gone and it had scared the crap out of him. It turned out, from how shaky my knees were, that I felt the same.
We walked Chickie together, and when we got home his phone was ringing. I was anxious for a second that he was being deployed. Ian was Special Forces so whenever they called him up, since he served at the pleasure of the president, he had to get on a plane. But since he didn’t stand at attention as he listened, only swore a little, I knew we were being called back to work.
“What happened?” I asked when he got off the phone.
“Your boss just loaned you, me, White, and Sharpe to the FBI for the night.”
“How come he’s my boss whenever he does something shitty to us?”
“Lemme think,” Ian said, grinning evilly at me.
It was nice to have even a small amount of normalcy restored. We needed a ceasefire between us even if neither of us was sure how long it would hold.
“WHAT WERE you even shooting at?” Chandler White asked from where he sat across the table from me the following night.
“At the guy trying to run you over with his car,” I explained again, since he’d missed it. I should have been on the receiving end of some serious gratitude, but instead all I was getting was grief.
“Yeah, but you missed,” Ethan Sharpe, White’s partner, reminded me.
“I didn’t miss,” I argued. “You missed.”
He scoffed. “In your dreams, Jones. I’m the one who shot the car. I made him swerve and run into the side of his own house!”
“Again with this?” Ian sounded bored as he sat down beside me at the table, having returned from the bathroom. “Just wait for the damn ballistics report to come back. Why’re you even wasting your time arguing?”
After work on Wednesday night, White and Sharpe had invited us to have dinner at Haymarket Pub & Brewery down on Randolph. Since it wasn’t far from work, right there in the West Loop, and since we were both on our second wind—not having slept in a full twenty-four–hour period—we went along. Normally, White went straight home to his wife, but apparently she was out having drinks with her friends, so he had decided to hang with his partner and colleagues. I was wishing Ian and I had begged off, though, if White was going to keep believing his partner instead of me. I got that, the loyalty, but not in the face of overwhelming empirical proof otherwise.
“I shot the car,” I reiterated to Ian, growing more indignant by the second.
“Okay.”
“No, not okay, you have to believe me.”
He shrugged, taking a sip of his beer, the Angry Birds Belgian Rye IPA he liked. He preferred the Mathias Imperial IPA, but that wasn’t always on tap. I was not the beer drinker he was, but I did like The Defender American Stout I was drinking at the moment—on my second glass, feeling better than I had when I came in.
Because we’d all been involved in a shooting that day, our primary weapons were collected for processing, and we were all carrying our backups at the moment. A deputy US marshal had to be strapped at all times. That didn’t mean it had to be the standard issue Glock 20, as long as the gun was approved to carry. It also didn’t need to be in plain sight, which, when we went out, it normally wasn’t. I’d been caught without a weapon on a few occasions, once even by my boss, who’d been good enough not to write me up for it, but since then, I’d never once been in breach of protocol.
“Not from where I was.”
“What?” I was lost, thinking about our guns.
He snickered, pointing at my glass. “How many of those have you had?”
“Two,” I said defensively.
“Try four,” he said with a chuckle, draping his arm around the back of my chair.
“Who cares, not the point,” I flared. “I was in the driveway. How could you even see what I did or didn’t hit when you were in the front yard?”
“Because I ran up behind you.”
“Not before I fired.”
“Yes, I did,” Ian said patronizingly. “It was way before you fired.”
“Obviously not, since you didn’t see me shoot the car.”
“I shot the car from the street,” Sharpe chimed in.
I turned from Ian to him. “How? You were behind me.”
“You don’t think I can shoot from behind you and not hit you?”
“That’s not what I said,” I muttered. “I know you don’t have to hit me, but I also know you didn’t hit shit.”
“No, you’re right, I didn’t hit shit—I hit the car, asshole.”