Jamie considered his current reality as the strange man pulled out a phone and walked away for a moment; whatever was being said wasn’t audible over the sounds of traffic whizzing by ten feet away from where he sat. So far he was late for work, met a pretty girl by, he thought, spilling coffee on her, been shot at and the pretty woman was hit, bleeding plenty on the parking lot next to him. He’d taken a very special chip from her, the apparent reason for the shooting, and promised to deliver it to some unknown man 25 miles away with only a fancy phone for help. Finally, bare minutes after leaving her, he got pulled over on the side of the highway by a cop who wasn’t a cop. This was no reality he’d ever imagined. He wondered if he ought to pull out the fancy phone while his, what, captor? was away.
But that choice was taken away as the man was back, unnoticed in his fog. He looked up to see the other staring straight in his face with sunglasses off.
“You don’t know the first thing about what happened back in that parking lot, do you?”
Jamie tried to think of something snarky to say but the words stuck in his throat. All of a sudden he could feel his heart beating faster and anxiety running through the nerves in his arms. He just moved his head, more of a twitch really, side to side and no more.
“I could shoot you right here and leave your bloody body on the asphalt where no one would bother to stop and look for hours. And that would be real blood, not that ketchup in a plastic blister that–what did she tell you her name was?”
“Lara,” Jamie said softly. She wasn’t shot? He hugged himself for warmth.
“Lara? Well, that doesn’t matter, you’ll never see her again anyway. If you live through this job she’ll be dead. Her bosses don’t tolerate mistakes on this level.”
“What..what’s your name?” He surprised himself with the question. That earned him a crooked half-smile. The man put his hand up to his mouth, as if he were trying to feel the smile, as if it was something unusual.
“You can call me, hmm, call me RL.”
“Earl?”
“No, two letters, R and L. Doesn’t matter, it’s nothing to do with my real name which wouldn’t help you.”
“You don’t work for the CIA, do you?” For reasons unknown his heart was getting back to it’s normal rhythm.
“No and neither does Lara. We both work for…competing private interests.”
“Are you going to take the chip away from me?”
“No. Wouldn’t do me any good. You understand that the driveby before was a put on, a little set play for your benefit?”
“That explains why no one came to see if Lara was still breathing and the job was done. On the other hand, RL, why are we having this conversation?”
BillSaysThis 