Trial Junkies

— 28 -

He caught the train back to the courthouse district, needing time to decompress, not wanting to take the direct route home. He stood on the platform waiting for his connection, and thought about heading down the steps, stopping in one of the nearby bars and ordering himself a single malt. Preferably Jameson.

He wasn't sure why he suddenly felt the urge. Maybe it was seeing Nadine well on her way to that special place where everything in the world seemed so crystal clear, even as it swirled around you. Where the doubts melted away with each sip, and the instinctive being took over-the one without fear, the one who knew right from wrong, fact from fiction, and didn't hesitate to express himself.

The invincible drunk.

But Hutch had seen that guy immortalized on video enough times to know that, beneath the cocky exterior, he was pretty much an inbred idiot. Their friendship had been brief, fruitless, and often destructive, and Hutch had no desire to revisit it.

So he resisted the urge and quietly waited for his train. Fished a cigarette out of the crumpled pack in his pocket and lit up, thinking it wasn't much of a substitute for booze, but it would do.

He stood there wondering why Nadine hated Ronnie so much. She had always been fiercely protective of Jenny, but there seemed to be more to it than that-and the incident with the air gun was complete bullshit. Not even worth considering.

Had something else happened between them back in college? Something only the girls had known about?

Jenny certainly had never talked about it. But then Hutch and Jenny hadn't spent a lot of time discussing the other people in the house. Especially not in their first year or so together. They were too caught up in the excitement of a new and blossoming relationship, and external conflicts rarely caught their attention.

And when Hutch thought about it, if Nadine had a problem with anyone, you'd think it would be Jenny herself. They had been best friends when Hutch came along, and Nadine had been promptly relegated to third wheel. Not intentionally, of course, but that was just the way things worked.

Still do.

If anything, Nadine and Ronnie should have bonded at that point. Because Ronnie had been Hutch's friend and had suffered a similar fate. Why they hadn't immediately become BFFs was a mystery to him.

A clash of personalities, he supposed. Although it seemed to have worked for Matt and Andy.

As he stood there, wondering about all of this, these thoughts were forcefully wrenched from his brain when two things happened simultaneously:

First, his train, the green line, came roaring to a stop in front of him, its doors hissing open. And at that very same moment, he saw a familiar figure scurrying up the steps to the train platform.

It was the creepy guy with the crew cut and thick black glasses, his ever present book bag slung over a shoulder as he made a beeline for the opening doors.

He was in a hurry, but didn't seem stressed, his black eyes showing about as much emotion as the battered Chatty Cathy doll that Jenny had inherited from her aunt. The thing had sat atop her dresser in the room she and Hutch shared, staring blankly at them as they made love, looking like something spawned in hell.

Funny he should think of that now.

He pulled back as the creep swept past him and found a seat in the nearly empty car.

Ditching his cigarette, Hutch stepped aboard and moved down the narrow aisle as the doors closed behind him and the train lurched into motion. He nodded politely to the guy as he passed, but the creep merely blinked at him behind those glasses, then opened the bag and pulled his book onto his lap, dropping his gaze to it.

Hutch glanced at the title, but most of it was obscured by the guy's left hand. The word DEATH was clearly visible, however, and the thing had the plain, dry look of a textbook without its dust cover, an old-fashioned tome like the ones you'd find in the archives section of the UIC library.

Whatever it was, Hutch doubted he'd be able to buy a copy at his local Barnes and Noble, and that one word-DEATH-summoned up an irrational sense of dread that was hard to ignore. Hutch wasn't sure why he felt this way, but it was strong enough to compel him to take the seat directly behind the guy, in hopes of getting a closer look at that book.

The creep was sitting close to the aisle, so Hutch slid all the way over to the right side of the seat, then glanced around quickly before leaning forward an inch or so to peer over the guy's shoulder. He was trying like hell not to be obvious about it, but the creep was so absorbed in what he was reading it probably didn't matter.

And what Hutch saw made him wish he hadn't been so goddamn curious.

His stomach lurched, the beef sandwich he'd eaten earlier doing a quick and nasty three-sixty before worming its way up toward his esophagus.

He stared at the pages just long enough to see two images that could never again be unseen. The kind that take the direct route from eye to brain, burn themselves onto the cerebral cortex and remain there like scar tissue for the rest of your natural life. On those pages were two of the most gruesome photographs he had ever laid eyes on, each rendered in a stark, clinical black and white-which only intensified the horror.

The first was a photo of a blond woman who must have been in a devastating car accident, because there was a steering wheel embedded in her face-so deep that it looked as if her flesh was growing around it.

And if this wasn't enough to get the upchuck express on the move, the photo on the page facing it featured a corpse of indeterminate origin whose body was half eaten away by maggots, several of which had nested in what was left of the victim's right nostril.

Hutch slammed back in his seat, squeezing his eyes shut, feeling his gorge rise, the acidy burn of bile in his throat. But closing his eyes was a bad idea, because the imprint of what he'd just seen was still floating in the darkness behind his lids. He immediately opened them again and looked out the window at the night rushing by, trying to focus on the lights in the distance.

Jesus H. Christ and all his disciples.

He sat there, trying to purge himself of this optic assault, when something unexpected happened-even more unexpected than the sight of those horrific photographs.

Beneath the clatter of the wheels on the tracks, he heard a faint, high-pitched mewling sound. A quiet keening whimper that wasn't truly a keen or a whimper. A sound not fueled by pain, but by…

…Well… by joy. That was the only way he could describe it.

What. The fuck?

Realizing it was coming from the creep, Hutch once again gave into his curiosity and turned from the window, taking another look over the guy's shoulder. He knew he shouldn't do it, but couldn't help himself.

What he saw this time made him shudder with revulsion. Made him want to jump to his feet and run screaming from the train car.

All of the creep's attention was focused on a new page, a new photograph-this one in garish, living color. And Hutch had been wrong about black and white upping the intensity of the images.

Color was worse.

Much, much worse.

The page was filled with a shot of a naked woman lying face up in an alleyway, her eyes glazed, her throat slit, her bloodied body covered with raw, gaping knife wounds, two of which had been judiciously placed where her nipples should have been.

And as he made that strange, joyful mewling sound, the creep carefully ran his fingertips over the image as if he were caressing the body of a willing and beautiful lover.