Hardesty wasn't in the best of moods when he got to the precinct, and the guys and gals there didn't help it any—as he knew they wouldn't.
"Had a hard night?" he was greeted at the door, accompanied by a snigger.
"Found it hard to get to work today, Hardesty?" boomed a voice from one end of the vice squad room.
"Hard morning, Hardesty?" another voice chimed in from the other side.
They all knew Hardesty fucked men, and they also knew that any day he dragged in after noon was likely to mean he had been on such a binge the night before—that he'd been hard and pumping most of the night. Some of them had seen what he was packing and the rest had heard about it. What they didn't think, though, was that he was out screwing a target rather than dragging him in for prosecution. They didn't think this because that was strictly taboo.
That's how far Hardesty had gone off the reservation with Todd—or Toby—or whoever the little blond piece's name was. Hardesty was OK in going to the bar. That's what he did, and the fact that he was gay himself made him far more useful to the department on male-on-male sex crimes. He looked for illegal activity; that was his job. That included underage prostitution. And it included solicitation itself if there was a campaign against it going on. They couldn't always put the screws on it; there weren't enough vice cops on the whole East Coast to close down prostitution—female or male—in this city.
What he wasn't OK with was, first, not backing out once there was more evidence the target was of age than there was that he was underage. Second, if he was going to pursue the point, he coulda/shoulda brought Todd in on the solicitation charges—before actually engaging in a sexual act. That's what the recording was all about. He didn't. But where he mostly wasn't OK was that he fucked the target and didn't do any of the above. He could have brought him in, even on suspicion. What he shouldn't have done was fucked him three times in the same night first—and would have done it twice more the next morning if he'd had the opportunity to.
Hardesty was too good a cop for this. And he knew he was. He spent the better part of the afternoon trying to figure out for himself why he'd done it. He came up with two possibilities: He increasingly was lonely and wanted just one guy to be coming home to and Todd had all the attributes of a guy Hardesty would want to come home to, with the dangerous edge being that Hardesty was aroused by young-looking guys that he could feel like he was overpowering.
And if it wasn't one or two of those, or both, Hardesty thought he should get out of vice and go to another unit. If he started getting soft on these guys or using his advantages over them to get laid, it probably was time for him to move on.
The thought that he was looking for someone more permanent—and someone like Todd to boot—scared him, though. By the end of the afternoon he'd convinced himself that he just saw something in Todd that he wanted to save before it was too late—not just that he looked for young-looking men, but also that he looked innocent and vulnerable young men. He thought back to when he got angry. It was when he thought it was already too late to turn Todd. He didn't know what had happened after that to change his mind, if he had. All he knew was that he went gaga at the prospect of fucking Todd. That gecko tattoo business was something else. He'd known guys who had erogenous zones, but Todd lost all control at the mere touch of his. Hardesty had found that very, very arousing.
That evening and the next found him at the bar where he'd picked up Todd. He didn't see Todd again, and he didn't see anything else illegal going on there either. But he told himself he was doing his job by going there. Todd looked underage. What if the manager had taken him on without checking?
But the manager was vociferous in claiming he had checked Todd out. And, if presented with a subpoena, he said he'd be happy to give Hardesty a look see at the evidence he had that Todd was eighteen, and thus legal. Hardesty did a little double-take. What the manager's evidence was put Todd even closer to the illegal edge than either what Todd said or what his own ID showed—but it still didn't put him below the level. The last thing Hardesty wanted, though, was to create evidence that he was checking Todd out. He still hoped to find Todd again, and . . . yes . . . to fuck him again (and again).
It wasn't professional now; it was personal. And there were things he could do with Todd on a personal level that he would hold back from if it was professional. He'd be going crazy thinking about what he could do with Todd now until he found him again.
The club manager backed what Todd had told Hardesty on one point. He did regret that Todd wasn't working there permanently—indeed that he hadn't completed the gig he'd contracted for.
When Hardesty pressed for information on where Todd might be, suggesting that he could make scrutiny hard or easy for the club, the manager just gave him a sardonic look and said, "You might try the movies."
Hardesty didn't think—at least at that time—that this was very helpful information.
He didn't just check in at that club. He went to others as well and fit in doing his job while also looking for Todd. He also checked the streets in the gay male tenderloin district. It was during such a check that he found Todd again.
Hardesty was out on patrol with one of his partners, Phil, three evenings later when he next saw Todd. The young man was working the streets. He was leaning on a wall under a lamppost with a couple of other guys when Hardesty and Phil pulled up by the curb beside them. Todd, wearing his open green plaid flannel shirt, his tight faded jeans, and his thin-soled sandals, wasn't looking out at the street. He was talking to another guy who wasn't looking at the street either.
Thus, when Hardesty and Phil had gotten out of the car, with Hardesty saying, "Let's ruffle these guys," Todd and the guy he was talking to, a young black guy not much bigger than Todd, just stayed in place and continued talking. The others sauntered away as quickly as they could without showing the panic they were in.
The young black guy saw the two vice cops first and pulled off the wall and started to walk quickly away.
"You get that one," Hardesty told Phil. "I'll talk to the other."
"Saving the chocolate for me," Phil muttered, as he took off after the black guy at a fast walk. "Nice. Don't wait up."
There really wasn't anything you could do with these guys unless you caught them making an offer for money. But the vice cops did what they called "rousting" them every once in a while just to let them know they were being watched.
"You," Todd said, accusingly, when he turned and saw Hardesty approach him. "You're a cop."
Phil already was out of earshot, walking briskly down the street behind the guy Todd had been talking to. Phil was gay too, and Hardesty knew that he had even fewer scruples about taking advantage of that than Hardesty did. The little black guy had been cute. Hardesty figured he had some time to talk to Todd.
"Yeah, I'm a cop. A cop with a soft spot and a hard dick for you. I could have arrested you and brought you in back in the motel room. You solicited me; I got it on tape. You're not very good with this solicitation business, are you?"
