The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller by J. M. Porup

along my thigh. A bolt of lightning stiffened my back, cracked my neck sideways. I pulled away.
    Down, boy. Down!
    “And in all that time,” she continued, delighting in my torment, “I have never known him to have a friend of any kind.”
    “No?” I struggled to keep my voice steady.
    “Drinking buddies, maybe. Work mates, sure. Fellow students. Roommates.” She observed me from behind her veil, her eyes the inscrutable blue of a Siberian husky. She withdrew her fingernail from my leg, and I sighed, a victim of the Inquisition released momentarily from torment. “But never a friend.”
    I snorted, coughed up a wad of traffic-tasting phlegm. I swallowed it. “We aren’t friends.”
    “But you are. I can tell.”
    “That is,” I said, and held out an open palm, “we aren’t anymore.”
    “I see,” she said. And looked at me.
    I felt compelled to complete the thought. “He used me.”
    “Of course.”
    “He does that, does he?”
    “But here you are, looking for him. Why is that?”
    “I—” The words caught in my throat.
    Why
was
I looking for him? End the guilt, of course. Find out what he meant. And then? Once I find him and we’re standing face to face? Tell him to go to hell. What else was there? This wasn’t about him. It was about me. I was a self-centered bastard and didn’t care who knew it, and this woman’s questions were getting on my nerves.
    She said, “You love him, don’t you.”
    “I
what?”
    “You love him. You love Pitt.”
    “I’m not gay.”
    “I never said you were.”
    Love.
Love was giving your girl the big beefy injection. Cooing over tiny humans caused by said beefy injection. Bald, half-naked cults that meditated on the Ganges. You might as well go catch a fucking cloud.
    “Fuck love,” I said. “You just met me. What do you know.”
    “Where did you meet him?”
    I’d had enough of this game. She didn’t know anything. And even if she did—there had to be some easier way to find Pitt. I got up. “You don’t know where he is, just say so.” I walked toward the door.
    “You didn’t even think to ask?”
    My stride faltered. “So you know where I can find him?”
    She giggled and clasped her knees. “No idea.”
    “Well then.” I made a beeline to the exit.
    She called after me, “No one else is going to care.”
    That struck home. I stopped. Beneath the table, the oldest child was demonstrating to the others how to pick up the cat by the tail. The cat made no complaint.
    “No one likes me,” I said. “I am not a nice man.”
    “I’m sure you’re not.”
    “I’m an asshole. Scum.”
    “If you say so.”
    I sighed. “But Pitt liked me. Or pretended to.”
    Get out of my head!
I wanted to scream. Now who was toying with who?
    “Why would he pretend?” she asked.
    “I have been disappointed too many times by too many people.” I thought of La Paz. What happened to Lili. People I had trusted wrongly. Dozens of them in my past. But for reasons I could not fathom, Horse the Master Cynic got suckered in again and again, and every time the betrayal felt like the first time.
    I ran a hand across my face. “But with Pitt, it was like…” I shrugged, began again. “The one time, the only time I ever—”
    “Loved another human being.”
    “Used
me. I was nothing to him. Nothing.” I paced the room. I raised a clenched fist, nearly crashed it into a mirror hanging from a nearby staircase. “A tool.”
    “Maybe,” she said. “I wouldn’t be too sure.”
    “And you know what the worst thing is?” I rushed on before she could stop me. “I knew it was going to happen. I could see it coming a mile away. It was like watching a train wreck and being unable to stop it. I mean the man told me the day we met, for chrissakes.”
    “Told you what?”
    If she didn’t know, I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. “The kind of man he is.”
    “And now you want to find him.”
    I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yes.”
    “Need
to