A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,4
the hall, pings and dings came from the video arcade.
“What’s your name?”
Sam shook his head. “No names.”
“Yeah, cool, I just—”
“No talking.”
Red splotched the boy’s neck and chest, visible under the banana tank.
With a shrug, Sam stepped into the shower room.
The kid came through the door a moment later.
Sam didn’t waste any time. He kissed the kid, flipped the lock, and kept on kissing. He maneuvered the kid toward the sink, hard kisses, bruising kisses, and the kid was whimpering. Sam caught him by the throat and squeezed once.
“Be quiet.”
The kid nodded; Sam thought he probably would have nodded if Sam had told him to jump off a bridge.
Sam fucked him, a business fuck, over the sink. After, while he pulled out and tossed the condom, the kid finished himself off with his hand, letting out a loud cry.
“Holy fuck,” the kid kept saying, head on his arm, looking like the sink was the only thing keeping him up. “Holy fuck.”
Sam stripped out of his clothes: jeans, a white tee turned inside out, socks turned inside out. He tossed them in a pile near his ruck.
“Holy fuck,” the kid said again, pushing himself up with shaky arms, looking at Sam in the mirror. “You are one hot fuck.”
“What’d I say about talking?” Sam said, and then he jerked a thumb at the door.
“Hey, you want to shower, maybe grab something to eat before we—”
“No.”
“Cool, but maybe—”
“No.” Another jerk of his thumb. “Out. I want to clean up.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Sam counted down; he started at fifty-seven this time. He had his hands flat against the wall because the shakes were getting going again.
“You don’t have to be an asshole about it,” the kid said. The offended dignity was ruined by the fact that he was trying to pull up his shorts while he talked.
“Apparently,” Sam said, wishing for a smoke, for quiet, for soap and hot water so he couldn’t smell the kid on him anymore, “I do.”
The rest of the bus ride, the kid pouted and shot angry, wounded looks back at Sam. Sam ran through the first two Die Hard movies in his head and watched the whole world go by in high summer, green and gold and brown. Once, a hawk swooped at the bus and swerved at the last minute, tumbling away on an updraft of hot air. Once, they drove for a stretch of twenty-seven miles of soybean fields at dusk, and against the setting sun, the silhouettes of a doe and her fawn. Like paper, Sam thought. Like the targets they hung at the range. Five meters. Fifty. A hundred and fifty. Three hundred. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands against his thighs; the air-conditioning was barely cold enough to keep him from sweating.
At the end of the thirty-six hours and seventeen minutes, New York rose like a blister. That was when Sam started reading the e-mails Jake had sent, every one of them printed on the inside of his skull. Every e-mail since the first time they’d fucked, every e-mail Jake had ever tossed off late at night, drunk, when his guard was down. Even after Jake had left Fort Benning. Even after Jake had gotten out of the Army. Even after Jake joined the NYPD, got a girlfriend, had a whole new life. The e-mails Jake might not even remember sending from inside the blackouts where he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. The last e-mail, the one that had come two days before Jake’s death blipped on the CBS affiliate in Bald Knob, Arkansas. And by the time the Greyhound was pulling up at Port Authority, Sam knew where to start.
CHAPTER THREE
Rufus had been walking the perimeter of Hell’s Kitchen for the last hour. He paced up and down Ninth Avenue between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Street twice, noting the flyers for Leaping Ladies Ballet, Pointe, Barre, Pole Dancing. All Ages and Sizes Welcome. Yes, Ladies, We Mean You! that someone had liberally distributed across the sidewalk and which the rain had partially dissolved and the July sun baked into place. He noted the guy with his dog, jingling coins in a Starbucks cup. German shepherd mix, big tongue lolling because dogs couldn’t sweat and it was fucking July in fucking Hell’s Kitchen and didn’t the guy have any sense of responsibility? He noted the wonky fire hydrant with a RESIST bumper sticker on the ribbed metal. He noted, most of all, Jake’s apartment building: four stories of red