3. Memphis

CHAPTER THREE

memphis

I had a grand total of zero explanations for why I stayed up most of the night wondering why I wanted to 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 deemed The 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 Bible entry 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 as bulletproof. 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.

I almost laughed out loud at myself while I sorted through all the racing thoughts on my walk out to where Utah was waiting faithfully to continue our firearm lesson from yesterday. I was rationalizing my desire to go on a fucking trip to New Jersey with him. Essentially calling it research to get to know the person I would be working with. And I knew that was what I was doing.

I was fascinated by the man who acted like he was fascinated by me. And I had absolutely no explanation for it.

“Did the Internet make you an expert?” Utah asked from where he sat on the tailgate of his truck.

“I’d be willing to bet that I know everything there is to know about this particular gun,” I said and looked down at the one I was carrying. “Firing it is probably a different story though.”

The way he was smiling at me when I looked back at him suggested that his question was facetious in nature. I suddenly found myself wondering how far I’d make it if I just threw the gun at his face and turned to run.

Probably not far.

He looked like he could play professional football.

And I was about as frail as a flamingo.

Though, the thought of him chasing me did something inside me that I preferred to ignore entirely for the moment because that would be a dangerous box to open.

“Are we waiting on Indy?” I asked before the weight of his silent smile suffocated me. Much to the detriment of the rising panic inside me, his smile only widened.

“Indy stayed out here all day yesterday to learn.”

It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees outside, but I definitely started sweating.

“Just you and me, huh?” I asked with what was probably a noticeable gulp.

“Just you and me, angel.”

He took the gun from me to run back through everything he’d shown me when we started yesterday. How to load the magazine, how to chamber a round, how to release the chambered round, what to do when the magazine was emptied. I’d watched ninety-seven videos that covered all these topics because I already knew watching Utah’s hands do these things would be distracting all over again. I had the information from the Internet this time though, so it didn’t feel horribly overwhelming when he looked back at me like he was expecting me to mimic the things he’d shown me. Once he was satisfied that I knew how to do all these smaller tasks, he fired every round in the magazine while I watched. Once again, I found myself staring at the ripples that coursed through the muscles in his shoulders and his back in response to each shot, rather than what I was supposed to be watching. But getting to see the way his body moved to absorb the energy of the recoil was…a sight.

“You’re up, sugar.”

He handed the gun back to me and had me load it another time to make sure I had to go through all the steps from the very beginning by myself. He stepped right in front of me as soon as I was standing where he’d been while he was doing the shooting.

“Put the tips of your shoes right against mine,” he said and nodded toward the ground between our feet. I looked down, too, and inched forward until the toes of my shoes just barely touched both of his boots. I held my breath before I ever looked back up at him because, holy shitballs, he was close enough for me to realize that he smelled like an odd combination of cedar and leather.

“Don’t move your feet,” he instructed and stepped off to the side of me. “Raise it.”

He waited until I had the gun raised, and then he placed the outrageously large protective ear contraption on my head. I watched him put his own tiny little earplugs in and considered asking him if he made me wear the giant Mickey Mouse ear thing just for laughs, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. He wasn’t laughing or smirking now. He walked around behind me for just a brief moment and stopped at my other shoulder to look down the barrel. He used two whole fingers just underneath my hands to raise the gun ever so slightly, and then he backed up again and nodded at me.

We repeated that process several times until I’d wasted an absolute ton of ammunition. I kept waiting for him to bring up the New Jersey trip again, but by the time he was packing everything away on the tailgate of his truck, I was trying not to feel disappointed about his silence on the matter.

“You think you’ll be able to use one to defend yourself if it was really necessary?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t be able to stay calm enough to trust myself to touch one. I imagine if I needed to suddenly defend myself, it’d be because things got really bad really fast again. I don’t perform well under that kind of pressure if it’s in person. I’m top fucking tier in control if the danger is on the other end of a phone and in some other location though.”

Utah laughed and hung his head for a few seconds before he looked at me again. “Well, like you said, Kyle is always here. Indy’s itching for the chance to try out his newfound weapon skills too. I imagine you’ll be alright with the two of them here. I’ll just sleep better knowing you have the knowledge. I hope you don’t ever actually need to do anything with it.”

“If I just stay wherever you are, you could know that I wouldn’t need to do anything with it.”

There it was.

Shot that shot.

Nothing smooth or clever about it.

Just tossed that shit right out there and I was about to find out if it worked.

He paused in the middle of locking the gun away in some briefcase-looking thing and stood perfectly still to toy with my panic for that much longer.