The Next Day

Hardesty dragged into the Vice unit over an hour late, looking very much hung over.

Phil, his sometimes partner of several years, took a critical look at him from across the desks they had shoved against each other so that they could discuss cases and strategies face to face and winked at him. "Quite a night between the sheets, I'm betting," he said, following this up with a popping of his tongue in his cheek and a laugh.

His partner scowled. "Pulled back-to-back shifts, which you damn well know. My turn on the street for a shift last night, and I'm expected to be at work for dayshift today."

"Oh, you're killin' me," Phil said, playing an invisible violin for him. The relations between the two were touch and go, based more on what they had on each other than respect. Several of the men in the unit were gay tops and predators. There were others that did the same on the straight road. It helped the unit, as it put the cops in a good position to work the worlds they were thrown into and to meld with the mindsets. Phil and Hardesty were both gay power tops and they both rode the other with innuendo and sarcasm and covered for the other in exercising their fetishes.

Phil was nearly ten years Hardesty's junior; better looking—which he flaunted—better cut, blond, tall, with a slender waist but a muscular chest, and with soccer-player thighs. He was the nastier of the two in sex, albeit Hardesty was nastier than most. And he was the more ambitious of the two, working hard and not always on the up and up to get ahead and, as a consequence, not moving ahead too fast. He was in the third stint as Hardesty's partner, no one else in the unit wanting to be matched with him. He'd twice transferred with the thought that he'd move faster elsewhere, but elsewhere didn't tolerate his vices like Vice—and Hardesty—did.

He leaned in toward Hardesty's desk. "Tell me. Was it a nice piece last night? Did you fuck him good? Details. Give me details."

Before Hardesty could answer, the chief of the unit, Crane—who knew every vice anyone in his unit had—walked by the desks. "No arrest reports with your name on them, Hardesty. Are the reports late?"

"Not late, boss man. Nonexistent. I spent time convincing a fresh rent-boy that he wanted to go home instead of working the street."

"OK," Crane said. "Not being on the books either now or in the future is better than arrest processing, I guess."

He moved on, and Phil grinned and asked, "So, did he have a sweet ass?"

"Yes," Hardesty asked. "They both did." He was pulling his drawers open, not looking at Phil. "Where's the fucking Tylenol?" He upped the volume for the room. "Who's got the fuckin' Tylenol? I'm dying with terminal headache here."

"First time I've heard the clap referred to as a headache," a voice floated over the room, a remark that was met with a raised middle finger from Hardesty and laughter from the room.

Three bottles of pain killers came through the air and landed on his desk.

"Good, you're here," the unit admin assistant, Larry, said as he approached the desk. Phil leaned over and swatted him on the butt, and Larry shook his ass and turned around and gave Phil a smile. When the guys were hard up, Larry was their go-to lay, always ready and willing for it. He was a miracle worker as an admin assistant too. "Three phone messages for you already this morning, Hardesty. Claims to be one of your informants. Says he has something juicy for you. Gave his name as Drew."

"Yes, that's one of mine," Hardesty said, warily, lifting his hand but keeping his head down. He was screwing off the lid of one of the pain killer bottles and tossing three, dry, down his throat.

"Here, I'll take that call," Phil said, sweeping in and taking the yellow slip from Larry. He didn't pull it away, though. He held Larry's hand long enough to say, "Later, Larry. I'll give it to you hard."

Larry pulled his hand away, smiled, said, "Later, lover," and flounced off.

"Here, give that to me, Phil," Hardesty said. "He's one of my special boys."

"Small, blond, pretty, and well reamed is he? One of your fuck snitches? Don't worry. I'll treat him special. You need to lose that headache. Take a walk down to the graveyard and don't come back until you can smile. I've got this."

Without waiting for Hardesty to claim jurisdiction again, he was standing, grabbing for his suit coat, and on his way toward the door.

"Yeah, he's small, blond, pretty, and well reamed," Hardesty muttered to thin air.

* * * *

Drew was on the floor, supported on his shoulders, his legs flung over his head, his toes digging into the floor in front of him—jackknifed. Phil was bent over him, toes digging into the carpet beyond Drew's toes, Phil's knuckles pressed into the carpet behind Drew's curved back. Drew was crying out, "Oh shit, fuck! Shitshitfuck! Pound me!" as, pistoning in and out of Drew's ass channel, Phil was doing just that—pounding the rent-boy snitch's ass hard. Phil was a "take no prisoners" type of guy, and Drew had asked for it.

Drew hadn't, in fact, asked for it willingly. He read Phil correctly and knew he was going to get it and that it would be in his best interest to give in easily and be enthusiastic about it. These Vice cops were all the same—take, take, take . . . cruelly.

Phil had picked the rent-boy up at Dupont Circle. If Hardesty had pressed him on the matter, he would have said that he was quite willing to just take the information that the snitch had thought to be so important and let him back out of the car at Dupont Circle. But he'd go on to taunt Hardesty by saying that Drew had wanted more than that from him. He'd wanted more than Hardesty gave him. Phil could do more.

"Hardesty gives me attention—and a couple of bills. I think this information is worth five bills."

"You could get it from me. The attention you crave."

"A strapping god of a stud like you?" Drew had said and had flashed goo-goo eyes at Phil. Phil had grabbed the back of Drew's head, forced his face down into Phil's lap, and made Drew give him a gagging deep-throat suck as he drove through Georgetown, across Key Bridge, and to a motel in Rosslyn across from the Iwo Jima Marine memorial that was stuck in the 1950s in style and somewhere in the stratosphere for hourly rates.

Tiring of that position, Phil came off Drew and, holding the whimpering young blond where he was, came around from behind him, crouched over his waving buttocks, sank his cock in deep, and jackhammer fucked the shit out of the little blond.

Afterward, Drew lay on his belly on the floor, panting hard and moaning, while Phil pulled up a desk chair, reversed it, and straddled it right next to where Drew lay.

"You called Hardesty three times this morning. You think you have some shit important enough to tell him that you'd bug him three times before 9:00 a.m. And you think it's worth five bills. What is it?"

"Maybe show me the five bills first."

"Maybe I'll just fuck your lights out again."

Drew smiled at that. Maybe not the best threat, Phil thought. "Maybe you just tell me what you think is worth five bills and I let you leave this room alive." He put on his mean face and took his gun out of the holster that had been draped over the back corner of the desk chair. It must have been convincing.

"It's all over the news."

"What's all over the news?" Phil hissed. "I don't want to play twenty questions here."

"That senator from Pennsylvania. The one who has just been named as a vice president running mate. Hal Etheridge."

"Yeah? What about it?"

"He's gay and he's kinky?"

"And what makes you think that?"

"He does one of my roommates. I live with three other call boys. The senator does one of them. Whips and beats and then fucks him."

"Rent-boys, I think, not call boys," Phil said. "You work the streets. You don't get called. You get picked up off the street. A call boy would make big bucks and live in the Watergate. He'd have 'escort' written in raised letters on his calling card."

"Whatever. The guy I'm talking about gets done by a fuckin' U.S. senator. That's as good as living in the Watergate. You want to hear the rest of my news or not?"

"Yeah sure, but the short version. I don't have the whole day to fuck around here."

"One of my roommates has this Senator Etheridge as a client. The senator is into leather and bondage and whips. And now that he's been tapped to maybe be the vice president, he isn't too fond of my roommate. He tried to have him offed last night. So, the senator's into attempted murder too. My roommate rushed back home, packed, and already is out of town."

"Offed? Isn't that a bit farfetched?"

"My roommate put one of his attackers down for the count. On the twelfth floor of the Downtowner Hotel. You can look for it in the police reports when you go back to the station."

"I will. What's your roommate's name? And where has he gone?"

"I think I should tell Hardesty that. I'm Hardesty's informant."

"And I'm Hardesty's partner. That makes you my snitch too."

"I think maybe I should tell Hardesty."

"That's the way you want it?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Phil gave him a long, hard look. Then he rammed the gun back into its holster, abruptly stood, leaned down, and scooped Drew's body up like it was light as a feather. He tossed the slight rent-boy on the bed, belly at the foot of the bed. Grabbing the young blond's legs, he jerked them wide, causing Drew to cry out in surprise and pain. Mounting Drew's ass and striking his cock home in a long, vicious slide that caused Drew to cry out again, Phil began pounding his ass hard. He reached over and retrieved the belt from his trousers, which he looped around Drew's neck, pulling it taut. Pulling on the end of the belt, he arched Drew's torso up to him, grabbed the blond mop of hair on top of Drew's head, and jerked the young man's head back to him as well. He pounded on with his cock deep in Drew's ass.

Gurgling and gagging, Drew clawed at the belt drawn tight around his throat. His eyes were popping out.

Phil released the tension and leaned over and whispered in Drew's ear. "The roommate's name and where, exactly, has he gone?"

Drew was still gagging and struggling for breath. Phil didn't give him time to recover and answer. Putting him back in the choke hold, he gave him another minute of the cock and then pulled out a thick rubber dildo shaped like a cock, with thick veins on it, and cruelly screwed that into Drew's ass and twisted. Even while choking, Drew was trying to scream from the demanding penetration of the dildo, larger even than Phil's cock had been.

This time when he released the tension, Drew held up his hands in supplication, signaling he'd talk. When he was able to, he croaked, "His name is Jason Stuart. He has a sugar daddy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, from his old days named Ben or Benton something."

Phil tightened the leash and Drew clawed at his neck. When Phil released the pressure, and Drew could talk. "Benton Clark. He owns some stores or something there."

"Is that all?"

"That's all, I swear. Now let me—" The sentence ended in a gagging sound. Phil was cruelly pulling back on the leash again and jerking Drew's head back with a fist in his hair. His cock was going to town, pistoning Drew's channel.

* * * *

Hardesty woke, groggy, but not as drained as when he'd barely gotten to the lower bunk in the graveyard room before he passed out. The headache was gone too. He might have slept on but for the cop who had come in to sack out on the other lower bunk that was foot to head with his and had kicked Hardesty's bed in the process, letting loose with a loud "Shit."

It took Hardesty a couple of minutes to figure out where he was, during which his brain was telling him there was something he should be doing. He finally figured out that he needed to tell Phil he'd take the meet up with his informant, Drew, himself. He was pretty possessive of his snitches—especially the ones he gave special attention to. And he particularly didn't like the idea of letting Phil get at them.

He lifted his arm, looked at his watch, and groaned. He'd been out, what? Three, four hours. That wasn't surprising really. Toby had ridden his cock for more than half an hour and then had left him, telling him that the he'd lied, and that the Oriental guy, his client that night, was still in his bed and would be waking up for more attention.

When Hardesty had gotten up that morning, the signal light by his door wasn't on. That meant Toby and his client were both gone. Either his "date" with the Oriental guy wasn't over yet or Toby had some shopping to do before he flew up to New York. He'd said the client was more than a little rough when they'd gotten into the bedroom, but that Toby could handle him. Hardesty didn't really want to hear what they'd done, even though he'd heard what they were doing through the shared wall of the bedrooms. Toby wasn't going to stop doing it, whatever it was.

Now, when it hit him that Phil had taken off hours ago to meet with his snitch, he felt guilty about Drew and about leaving him to Phil. Phil could be rough too. And it wasn't like Drew to be so insistent about having information to pass. Hardesty usually had to run him down and fuck the information out of him.

He fretted all the way back upstairs to the Vice bullring. He shouldn't have left Drew to Phil. Phil's desk wasn't occupied, though, when Hardesty got upstairs.

"Where's Phil? Anyone seen Phil around?" he asked to the room in general.

"Thankfully no," came the answer from one direction.

"Thought he left with you," said another.

"Who the fuck cares?" rang out a third.

Phil wasn't the favorite cop in the unit. Everyone there thought Hardesty was a martyr for taking him back as a partner each time he tried to bolt only to find that no other unit wanted him either. But all of the other cops were just glad it wasn't them Phil was hooked up with. It wasn't his vice—that he dipped in the goods himself—that put them off. Hardesty did that and the others liked him just fine. It was that he had proved again and again that he was totally without scruples in getting what he wanted and was a schemer on a grand order to boot—and that he grabbed at all of the pats on the back given for group effort.

Hardesty was about to check down in the motor pool for him—there was a mechanic down there who liked Phil's cock well enough—when Crane came out of his cubicle.

"Who's up? We got a body across the river that Arlington Vice says is one of our boys from over here."

"Where and what's the description?" one of the other cops asked.

"Laid out on a Civil War grave in Arlington National Cemetery, all nice and arms crossed. Strangled. Young, blond, the usual cute for that type. Wallet left with him. Someone wanted us to find this one."

Hardesty's antenna went up and his heart sank to his stomach. His mind went directly to Toby—in the guise of Todd. He spent half of his life warning Toby about his chosen profession and the other half worrying that Toby would wind up as a good many of them with that description did. National Cemetery was within sight of their apartment in Crystal City.

"I'll take it," he said. "Maybe Dan can go with me. Phil doesn't seem to be around."

The scene was on the western side of the cemetery—it was a very large cemetery—not the eastern side near where Hardesty's apartment was. The gate they entered to reach the dip in the landscape where lower-ranked Union soldiers from the Civil War were buried, the generals being planted up the hill around Arlington House, which had been grabbed from Robert E. Lee for commanding the southern army, was reached by a drive off the circle around the Iwo Jima memorial, the distinctive, flag-raising Marine group statue memorial from World War Two.

Still, Hardesty's heart didn't return to place until he'd hopped out of the Impala sedan even as the engine was turned off and rushed over to the grave where other cops were standing around watching a medical examiner do his work and Hardesty saw that it wasn't Toby.

It was, however the rent-boy snitch who Hardesty knew as Drew Dunston.

An Arlington Vice detective Hardesty knew came out to meet Hardesty several yards from the grave. One of the oldest burial sections, the marble tombstones here were grayer and not as regimentally spaced as they were in the sections for soldiers from wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

"Think this must be one of yours," he said when he'd reached Hardesty. "The ID is for a Washington, D.C., address. The name's Drew Dunston. Your card was in his wallet."

"Yeah, he's a D.C. rent-boy," Hardesty said. "Works out of the Logan Circle area. How did you guess he was a prostitute, though?"

"Other than your card, with your specialty, being naked, being a pretty boy of the type, and having a dildo stuck in his ass when we found him, the ME said his ass was built for sex and he'd had sex before he died—or, more likely, while he was dying. No semen, though. His last trick wore a rubber."

"He was coming to see me," Hardesty said, his voice a little distant, sad. "He said he had something explosive to tell me."

"He's not going to be telling you whatever that was now," the Arlington detective said.

"No, he's not," Hardesty agreed. But maybe Phil had gotten to him first and gotten the information. And maybe he hadn't been blowing smoke. Maybe his information was explosive—explosive enough to get him killed.

Which raised the question—where the fuck was Phil?

"Any other bodies found around on graves?" he asked.

"No, but we didn't look for them. Should we?"

"It's just a 'maybe might' thought," Hardesty answered.

* * * *

"There you are, Hardesty," Larry called out. "You have a visitor upstairs. Gotta be one of your rent-boy snitches and he's hyperventilated. Won't see or talk to anyone but you. He's got your card in his hot little hand. And I must say he's pretty hot himself."

"Is Phil back yet?"

"Nope."

The unit admin assistant had seen Hardesty arriving back at police headquarters from a window in the Vice unit and had come downstairs to hustle Hardesty back to the unit.

Raul, the Hispanic rent-boy Hardesty had tried to scare off the street the day before and a roommate of the dead Drew Dunston Hardesty had just watched being zipped into a body bag in Arlington, was standing just inside the unit and hyperventilating.

"What's wrong, Raul?" Hardesty asked as he approached the young man. "I can't say I'm glad to see you. I'd hoped you'd given the city up and gone home."

"He's dead. Someone broke in. I came back to the apartment. Wasn't gone for more than an hour and he was just laying there on the floor, dead."

"Who's dead, Raul?" Hardesty asked, putting his hands on Raul's arms with the thought that he'd have to hold the young man up. "It's OK, you're safe. Show me." He gestured to some of the others who already were rising from their desks and pulling their jackets on.

The outer door of the seventh-floor walk up on 14th Street had been busted open. The body of Lyle, the black rent-boy who lived with Raul, Drew, and Jason, was lying on the floor between the two sets of bunk beds in the small bedroom. His legs were spread and bent and his head was lolled over to the side, his eyes were bugged out, his tongue was hanging out of his mouth, and there was a cord pulled tight around his throat. There were bruises on his naked body, but there was no telling how long ago he'd received those.

While soothing Raul off to the side as other cops looked around the apartment and the medical examiner examined the body, Hardesty murmured, "I told you there was a danger of this happening, Raul. This isn't the life for you. It wasn't the life for your friend here either."

"I don't think it was a john," Raul murmured.