Page 21 of Hush
Well, maybe that other guy could link up with this orgy. He clicked out of the chat and logged off the app.
Etta Mae snored at the end of his bed. She ran in her sleep, her short legs and stubby paws scuffling against his comforter. Soft, sleepy barks rumbled out of her, her dreams too good to stay contained in her mind.
He tossed his phone on the bed next to him and slid down, lying on his back against the pillows. Okay.GrindMewasn’t a good option. Almost perfect did come with a catch. The guys there were forward—shockingly forward—and… very into sex. Which wasn’t a bad thing. God, how confident was a man to plainly state that he was “only into twinks”? How much sex was a man his age getting? Going by the smile on his face, he was pretty damn fulfilled.
All these men, living their lives fearlessly. And him, alone and pathetic and cut off from seemingly the whole world. He was an alien to their culture, an outsider with his face pressed to the window as they lived and loved.
He rolled over, bunching his pillow under his head. What was Mike doing? What did he do on the weekends? How much fun did he have, with friends who loved him, supported him? He was probably the center of the party somewhere, laughing, having a great time. Finding another lover. Surrounded by life. Surrounded by happiness.
He stayed awake, watching headlights shiver over his walls, crisscross his ceiling, until he fell asleep hours before dawn.
Chapter 5
Washington DC was despicable in the heat.
Ever since he’d gotten the call, and had gotten on the plane to come to DC, he’d been miserable. Americans were insufferable, taking up too much room in the world, in their cities, and on the streets. Too loud by half, too fat by whole. The whole nation disgusted him.
He slammed the brakes on his rented sedan and barely squealed to a stop before plowing into the back of a minivan. Traffic on I-395 was a nightmare, as always. DC traffic was the worst, even worse than Moscow’s Garden Ring.
He just wanted to get out to the country, get out to the plot of land he’d been given access to. He could shoot out there, put together his Dragunov and sling hot lead down the homemade range. Shred a few paper targets. Maybe something else as well.
He had a place inside DC, a hole-in-the-wall above a pizza shop that always smelled like garlic. He kept a sleeping bag in the corner and a cooler full of water, and of course, his rifle. He could steal three different neighbors’ Wi-Fi.
The voice had also given him access to this piece of property far outside of DC. If he didn’t get out of the city, he’d let loose early, blow five people’s heads off before he even laid eyes on his target.
He hated these times most of all. The waiting. The living on another person’s timetable. Shadowing a target successfully took time, though, and especially a target of this caliber. He couldn’t just appear out of the blue. He had to establish himself in DC, put in the time to lessen the suspicion around him when the inevitable happened. He had to be just another neighbor, just another man people saw buying bananas and deodorant and milk.
He still charged quadruple his rates, for this idle time. Wasted time.
He was a hostage to time, chained to its slowness, the march of days and hours that moved for other people.
Soon, the voice tried to assuage him.Soon, it will be time. Just a little while longer.
Chapter 6
May 19th
Lincoln’s case ended, not with a bang, but a whimper, as the poem said. The jury convicted him on all counts. Tom, like always, visited the jurors privately after the verdict was read and the trial concluded. They didn’t have any questions for him, just a general expression of sadness mixed with anger that gangs and drugs were taking so many lives away.
Federal judges heard the full gamut of cases, but he had another drug case lined up after Lincoln’s, this time a smuggler caught flying cocaine in through Dulles airport. She was a permanent resident, laid off from her job and desperate for money. She’d swallowed thirty little balloons, but was caught after landing at Dulles.
Her first offense, and she was only a green card holder. He sentenced her to the minimum time he could, and looked down when she started crying after she was told she would be deported at the end of her sentence.
A two-defendant, eight-count financial crimes case was up next. White-collar crime, conspiracy, and embezzlement. His eyeballs bled every night as he read over the five-inch-thickFederal Rules of Evidenceand fell asleep with the massive tome across his lap, his reading glasses sliding down his nose. He started dreaming in evidentiary rules, dream jurors, shirtless men watching a parade of evidence and testimony delivered by other mostly-naked men who made him stutter, made him stumble. One dream attorney gave an imaginary lap dance in the center of the courtroom while the proceedings droned on and on. Mike would appear, wearing just his lime-green tie and a pair of itty-bitty briefs, and he’d rescue Tom from the circus in his courtroom, pull him into his chambers, push him back across his desk—
He needed double sugar meltdown coffees to get through each morning.
By day, both the AUSA and the defense attorney practically shouted over each other, objections right and left. He had to rule on their outbursts every twenty minutes.
Mike waved hello to him each morning and poked his head in to say goodbye each evening. Tom had started growing a stack of law books on his desk, flagged with sticky notes and crammed with notepapers, at the start of the case. Every day he added more books, more research, and the stack grew higher and higher until he could barely see over it.
One day he heard Mike’s footsteps, but when he looked up, law books were all he saw.
He spent his lunch hour moving every book to new stacks against the wall and ended up sprawled on his carpet while he read case precedent and reviewed legal opinions. He sat cross-legged through the late afternoon with his back against his desk, chewing on a pencil.
Knocking broke his focus, his deep dive into a decision upheld by the second circuit in the last decade regarding evidence admissibility for embezzlement cases, testimony brought up in a former trial that ended with an acquittal. Words swam on the page, tiny font on onion-skin paper, flimsy like an old Bible. He blinked and looked up.
Mike stood in the doorway, grinning.
