Page 3 of Hush
Mike waited for the right moment, in-between Stan’s kicks and right when he started up another screeching curse at the police below. Lunging, he wrapped his arms around Stan’s waist and yanked, pulling Stan’s legs down as he ripped him free from the window. Flopping forward, Stan’s forehead clipped the window’s metal rail, and he roared, cursing Mike as he started to fight.
Spinning, Mike hefted Stan over his shoulder and slammed him face first onto the tile floor. Stan’s breath whooshed out of him, like a bag full of air slapped too hard and bursting. He went limp, his arms and legs starfishing out, and his mouth gaped, a fish out of water.
Mike kneeled on his back, digging his knee into Stan’s kidney as he cuffed him. “Stan Coffey, you are under arrest.”
Stan’s breath was starting to come back to him. “Fuck you, you motherfucker.” He spat, but only managed to spray his own cheek.
“Yeah, right back at you.” He grabbed Stan’s handcuffs and hauled him up. “Get up. You’ve just turned this into a very long day.”
Stan sat in the back seat of one of the Fairfax police cruisers, glaring at the headrest. Once, he’d started kicking at the door with his bare feet until the officer hollered at him and threatened to taze him if he didn’t quit that shit.
Police crawled over Stan’s apartment. The three women, his three girlfriends, were huddling on the curb in handcuffs, still high on their meth hit. So far, they’d found enough meth to put Stan away for averylong time, a handful of unregistered handguns in the kitchen cupboards, and, of all places, the fridge.
Neighbors stared down at the scene, hanging out of open windows and glaring, crossing their arms as they watched the police and the marshals like their beady eyes were weapons, lasers that would banish them from the block.
Silver leaned against the hood of his SUV, crossing his arms as Mike read off the list of what the police found. He whistled. “Not his day, is it?”
“Nope. Serves him right. What the hell did he think was going to happen, shooting his mouth off online about wanting to kill Judge Brewer and then running when we came knocking?”
Judge Tom Brewer, the newest judge to the Washington DC Federal District Court, had just handed down a stiff sentence to the owner of a web hosting server on the dark web, and a ringleader of the dark web community. Clownface, his online moniker, was responsible for curating the massive online black-market trading boards and facilitating transactions of everything from child pornography to illegal weapons to drugs. The trial had been awful, filled with gut-churning testimony about the truly horrific and obscene happenings deep in the twisted bowels of the dark web.
When Clownface was sentenced to life in prison—the maximum sentence Judge Brewer could impose, though few thought that a baby federal judge would go to such lengths—online outcry reached a fever pitch. The usual gamut of crazies, trolls, and civil rights extremists stormed the internet, but they were joined by hordes from the Sovereign Rights movement. White supremacists, tax protestors, secessionists, and others who rejected the federal government and screamed about the overreach and abuse of federal authority.
Mike had had enough of dealing with Sovereign Rights groups for five lifetimes.
A large portion of the Sovereign Rights groups’ infrastructure and funding had come from the dark web, with significant transactions running through the very site Clownface had managed.
And Stan Coffey, Sovereign Rights nobody, wannabe white supremacist, professional methhead and troublemaker extraordinaire, had run his mouth off on an internet forum, saying that Judge Brewer should be dragged out of the courthouse and shot on the steps. In the ensuing back-and-forth with his fellow nutjobs, they all decided a wood chipper would be a better means of dispatching Judge Brewer, again, on the steps of the courthouse.
A subpoena later, the marshals had the IP addresses and emails of the users making the postings, their physical addresses, phone numbers, and all billing information for those accounts and any other connected social media accounts, cell phones, and laptops.
Whether the online postings were a “true threat”, pursuant to Chapter 18 of the U.S. Code, was up to an investigation and the United States Attorney. Mike, deputy marshal and deputy judicial security inspector assigned to the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse, the DC federal courthouse, and to Judge Brewer’s court security, only planned on banging on Stan’s door to talk him down from his threats. Most of the time, that’s how the bluster ended up shaking out. An apology and urgent insistence that someone was just blowing their mouth off, followed by a quick search of their apartment to confirm they didn’t have any weapons.
Mike would have been out of there in half an hour.
Now, one of the Assistant United States Attorneys, AUSA Cassandra Solórzano, would have to bring charges. Stan had threatened a federal judge, and he had the means to carry it out—a stack of unregistered firearms. He’d threatened Mike, a marshal. It was five years for each threat against a federal official, so Stan was starting at ten years minimum. And that was before the drugs and the guns.
Stan Coffey was having a shitty day, and it was only going to get shittier.
“Let’s get him booked. Fairfax PD can finish processing this scene.” Mike called the officer guarding Stan over and told him they were headed for the jail. The officer seemed relieved to be leaving. To get out of the heat—late DC spring was turning into summer with a vengeance—or to get away from the slit-eyed glares of the neighbors and the hostile tension choking the humid air.
The ride to the jail was easy as they followed behind the patrol car. Silver drove and quizzed Gordon on the afternoon, on what went down, and the arrest. Gordon answered with a sheen to his eyes, the come-down of an adrenaline-soaked arrest.
Stan was sullen and silent through the booking, glaring at the camera for his mugshots and sneering and cursing through the body search. Mike and the others waited until the paperwork was processed, and then watched Stan parade past them into the lockup, decked out in Virginia’s finest shade of neon orange.
It was almost four PM. Mike scrunched up his face. Gordon and Silver were close to their office in Arlington—U.S. Marshals Service headquarters—but he was at least an hour and a half away from his in the Prettyman Courthouse, right in the heart of DC. Maybe two hours, what with rush hour traffic.
It wasn’t worth fighting back to the office this late in the day. Time to head home. “Thanks, guys.” Mike shook Gordon and Silver’s hands. “I’ll call you both again anytime I need backup.”
They smiled, thanked him, and left together, heading out to Silver’s SUV. They were marshals assigned to fugitive tracking and criminal investigations. The glitzy, glamorized duties that all the TV shows were about. They were what Mike had been, once. He’d been a member of a fugitive task force, a deputy marshal scouring his district for escaped prisoners, for wanted felons, for dangerous men and women evading the reach of the law.
Not anymore. He was still a deputy marshal, but he’d moved into the judicial security division, the part of the marshals exclusively dedicated to protecting federal judges, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and all prosecutors, all juries, and the courthouses. Threats against judges and prosecutors, not to mention juries, had skyrocketed over the past fifty years. Congress had charged the marshals with the job of protecting the entire judiciary.
They were given the job with allocations for 110 judicial security inspectors, JSIs, and told to put “one to three” in each of the 94 federal judicial districts in the United States. With an average of eighteen judges and fifteen prosecutors—and thousands of jurors each year—in each district, “one to three” inspectors had their work cut out for them.
Investigating and responding to threats, providing security for the judges and the prosecutors inside and outside the courthouse, devising security strategies for high-risk trials, and even, sometimes, providing personal protection for judges under high-threat risk. It was enough to keep him and his fellow JSIs busy for three hundred hours a week. He couldn’t imagine what working alone would be like. He and the other two JSIs in DC didn’t see eye to eye all the time—or ever—but at least they were there, and they had each other’s backs. Like New York and Los Angeles, DC had three JSIs for the entire federal judicial district. Chicago had two. The rest of the ninety federal districts had one.
Mike got a ride from a Fairfax patrol officer to the Metro and squeezed his way onto the orange train heading into DC. He bumped and rocked for forty-five minutes and then hopped off at McPherson Square. He turned up 15thand walked to Logan Circle, heading home.
