But whenever you go outside, it’s a wall of heat. And we’re out there a lot, chasing leads on the Grayson thing. Working overtime to hunt those assholes.
I think about Brooke all the while, thinking about that day at the park. Mostly I remember how perfect she felt in my hands, the way her belly felt when I pressed my rock-hard cock against her, pinning her like a butterfly against her cherry-red car door. It was fucking heaven—the kind of heaven I have no right to. Which is always the best kind.
Even the way she tasted was perfect—its own entire category of taste, not mint or berries or whatever bullshit, but pure, warm, soft, breathy Brooke.
She was stiff at first, like she was surprised, but then she softened. That’s the thing that churns in my mind the most—churning like the angry fucking sea—that moment she went from stiff to soft. The moment her little body let me notch right into her.
She’s fragile as a bird, but she let me hold her, like a sickening little token of trust. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into with me. She has no fucking idea.
Her skin is so soft. She’s just so pure. It’s fucked up how pure she is. It’s fucked up how much she doesn’t know and how untouched she is. Her skin is literally like silk. It makes me want to drive my fist into a brick wall over and over and over.
I churn on her silky, untouched skin while we lurk around in the heat, loitering in dark service alleys. I think about her while we linger outside expensive restaurants, in the shadows of the courthouse, cock hard, mind racing.
The whole train of thought is just dangerous, because when you’re lurking around places and dealing with the kind of people we’re dealing with, you can’t be wanting to smash things or grabbing random guys and driving their faces onto a wall just because you’re in a fucked up place.
But I need to keep an eye on Brooke. Make sure she’s not talking to the cops. The secrets we share are my private leash on her. I let her live, and now she’s mine.
We follow different men around Franklin City. Sometimes we follow Governor Dorman himself. We didn’t know his name back then, but we remember his face. Because trust me, young and drugged as we were, we remember the face of each and every one of the men and women who paid good money to perv out on us over the years.
I’d love nothing more than to show Dorman the end of my blade, and I’m sure we could get him alone without a lot of trouble, but we have to be smart. We have to think about freeing Grayson.
So we track guys. We’ve been hurting a lot of guys to get information. Like the one we ran through the wood chipper. The nicknames he gave us—Jimmy Brass, Johnson, Keeper—don’t mean much. Yet.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I head out into the streets in the middle of the night, driving around.
More often than not, I find myself in East Franklin City, outside her big brick mansion with the circular drive and rows of pine trees like soldiers guarding the estate. I look up at her dark window and imagine her sleeping peacefully. Dark lashes resting on her pretty cheekbones. Light brown hair with those angel-bright highlights splayed all messy on her pillow.
It’s her birthday in a week, and this is stupid, but I’m making her a present. A carved hummingbird. I probably won’t give it to her, but I started making it, and I knew it was for her, even though I didn’t say it to anyone. I didn’t even say it to myself at first. I just grabbed a blunt serrated knife and a block of wood and started carving.
I taught myself how to carve in the basement. We never got real knives, for obvious reasons, but a butter knife or two would make its way down there, and if you scrape the shit out of a piece of wood, you can make something. If you do it for hours and hours over many days and weeks, you can make something fucking amazing.
I work on it on stakeouts. I work on it sitting in gloomy alleys. I keep it wrapped in a cloth in my pocket, though its spindly legs are getting fragile enough that I should probably put the thing in a box.
It’s on a Tuesday, the day before her birthday, that I get a break. One of the clubbing guys we pay for information tells me he heard from the grapevine about some rich guy who was asking around about a hitter who’d take a job to kill a cop last year. Said that the guy plays high-stakes poker in the back of a midtown bar on Tuesdays. Limo and everything.
I get the location and go by myself. Partly because Calder and the rest of the guys are out following up on some other lead. Mostly because something about it smells off, almost as if it’s too easy. I decide just to have a look at who this is. If I decide he’s somebody who needs to talk, or maybe somebody who needs to hurt, I can do the hurting, too.
It’s almost better this way—I don’t always like my guys seeing what I do. And the things I’ve been doing, let’s just say they’re not getting rosier.
Grayson’s been inside a few months, and I’m feeling desperate. Whenever there’s something gruesome to do, I make sure I’m the one to do it.
The way I figure, every time that it’s me, it doesn’t have to be one of them.
That’s how I end up behind a sleazy midtown bar. There’s a faded pub sign out front and piles of moldy crates in the back. It could be any old bar, any illegal poker game.
I watch a customer get out of a taxi, his movements cautious, his gaze wary as it darts around the street. He doesn’t match the description I got. I’ll kill a lot of guys if I have to—I need answers. If I don’t get answers, I’m not sure that I can control myself. Maybe that’s a sign that I should bring in the guys.
But I don’t.
Better if only one person has to see. One person to hurt people.
I raise my fist. The knock echoes through the alley.
A man opens the door. Greasy wife-beater. Big scowl. “The fuck you want?”
“The game. I want to play.”
“You know the secret word?”
A secret word? Like this was some fucking exclusive nightclub. I resist the urge to pull out my Glock to prove a point. Instead I pull out my wallet and give him a glimpse of the thick wad of green inside. “Yeah, I know it.”
He snorts. “Good enough. Game starts in two hours, strictly speaking.”
“And less strictly?”
“High rollers don’t show up until midnight.”
That means I have some time to kill. I give the fucker at the door enough money to keep him silent, at least for tonight. He assumes I want to hustle at the game, take them unaware, and that’s fine. No one needs to know my real purpose until it’s too late for them to do anything.
There’s a park down the block, the kind with statues and gardens. The statues are covered in graffiti from the neighborhood gangs. The gardens dried up a decade ago.
Now there’s only a network of bums and drug dealers. They give me hard looks but don’t come close. It isn’t the fact that I’m carrying that keeps them away. They can see that I’m like them. Made hard and merciless by years at the bottom of this city. Everyone here was made in a basement of their own.
I find an unoccupied bench with a plaque, unreadable from the rust. Someone once built this park with care. Someone loved it. I kick away a used needle with my boot before sitting down.
This spot gives me a good view of the side entrance, but I don’t need it yet.
The men I’m interested in, the ones high enough to matter, they’ve got more money than God. I’m done dicking around with the grunt workers, the men desperate enough to take cash for dirty work.