“Why do you need to take it apart to learn to shoot it, Memphis?”
“Why do you need to go to New Jersey for a crime committed years ago against someone you say you dislike?”
“I don’t think I ever said Idislikehim.”
I shifted to sit on the edge of her bed and just stared at her for a moment. Memphis was crazy about New Jersey. I wasn’t about to sit here and talk myself into a hole just because I wanted to hit him in the mouth every single time he opened it.
But even a man whodeservedto get hit in the mouth every time he opened it didn’t deserve what had been done to his family. To his child. I could consider him the King of Pricks and still do something to settle that score the way it should’ve been done from the beginning.
She was still staring at me, waiting for an answer about the New Jersey trip.
“You can come with me,” I said, in the least well-thought-out sentence to ever leave my mouth.
“I can what?” she asked and laughed.
“Why not?” I asked, because I couldn’t fucking control my thoughts in her presence. “Get out of here for a while. Go somewhere else. Do something else.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Why couldn’t I stop talking?
Indy was right. I was trying too hard.
But she hesitated. She didn’t have a good answer for why shecouldn’tgo with me.
“It’s alright, angel. Think about it. You’ve got time. I’m not leaving until next week. If you’re really that worried about what I’ll do, come keep an eye on me.” I got up to hand the slide back to her and turned for the door. “Let me know if you want help with any of this,” I offered and motioned to the strewn-about weapon pieces.
CHAPTER THREE
memphis
Ihad a grand total of zero explanations for why I stayed up most of the night wondering why Iwantedto go to New Jersey with Utah. The possible explanations for why I’d pulled up the picture of Utah that Indy sent me from earlier in the day were somehow even less than zero. Deep into the negatives.
But there I was, staring at my phone the moment that he’d closed the door behind him. I couldn’t even see his face in it. Indy had taken it from behind Utah while he was firing the gun in his hands.
We started this game several weeks ago. We’d catch Utah doing something so absurdly Utah-esque that we’d sneak a picture of whatever it was and send it in the group chat with Triss, along with a brief description of why it was being added to what we’d deemedThe Utah Bible. Indy’s additions were usually for the sole purpose of making fun of him, but Indy knew Utah better than I did and I rather enjoyed the little insights that each one provided into who Utah was.The Utah Bibleentry that came with the picture of him shooting that gun still made me smile every time I reread it.
Indy
If one wisheth to find out, one needst only first to fuck around.
Telling him that some of those weren’t actually real words wouldn’t achieve anything. Indy lived in his own world with his own language and a general lack of concern for how anyone anywhere else felt about it.
Despite the grammatical atrocities that had been committed, the meaning to that addition was clear and accurate and did weird things inside me. Utah was calm and reserved. He kept to himself a lot, and he wasn’t reactive to most things. Then when he decided that something was worth reacting to, he reacted with every fiber of his being, and everyone around to witness it knew why he felt the way that he did about it after the fact.
I was convinced Utah possessed the level of tranquility that came from just knowing exactly how powerful he was, because he wasn’t even remotely interested in showing it off. He simply used it when it was necessary.
Regardless of the inexplicable desire to go to New Jersey with him, I had no business doing anything other than the work that was necessary to start taking our President’s organization apart from the inside. Indy and I had compiled a giant list of names over the last several weeks. We ended up finding teams that neither of us had previously known about; teams that did things that we’d never even known our own employer was involved in. Some of it was frightening. All of it was deeply unsettling.
Everyone involved in this business had done things that very clearly landed them on the wrong side of the law. We all committed crimes, we all played a part in people getting hurt, we all did questionable things. We all seemed to have different reasons for those things. For some, it was just about the money. For others, it was simply because they had no other choice. For a handful, it was a lifeline. Something to cling to because everything else in their world seemed to have fallen apart. No matter the reason for taking the job, convincing any of these people that the pretenses under which they’d joined the organization were fucked up beyond any measurable means was not going to make for a pleasant time.
Our only option was to use Utah to achieve that task. Indy and I had never done the work that took place in the outside world. Neither of us were comfortable with, nor even remotely prepared, to face those Executioners. We’d be even less than useless if it meant facing those Executioners once they were undoubtedly made angry by revealing the nature in which they were deceived by our organization. Utah’s calm and collected existence would be most useful for a task like that. He didn’t get worked up easily. Indy was under the impression that he was the best to have ever been employed for the sketchy kinds of jobs that we all did. More than once, he’d referred to Utah asbulletproof.I’d never worked up the nerve to ask if that was because he always got caught where he wasn’t supposed to be and was shot at that often for it, or if it was because he moved around entirely undetected.
I really hadn’t ever gone digging into the pasts of either of my housemates. I probably should have back when I’d called Indy to ask for his help in getting Jersey back, but I felt like such an asshole for putting him in that position in the first place, I couldn’t make myself add insult to injury by dragging up things that neither of them would really want me to know. The more time I spent around the mostly silent mountain of a being that was Utah though, the more I wanted to know what was happening behind those brown eyes.
I’d looked into Jersey’s world within hours of being assigned as his Judge. I needed to know who I was working with if I was expected to guide him every second of every day in potentially dangerous situations. I had to know who he was and why he was the way that he was. I didn’t have any of that information about Utah, and we were about to start on a brand new endeavor that was way more dangerous than anything I’d ever been involved in before.
