Ghosts, Matt Rogers [reading the story of the .txt] 📗

Kerr said. ‘You’ll make sure whichever judge is responsible for her sentencing plays by the rules. Put her away for as long as the law allows. And put her somewhere bad. I’m talking a hellhole prison. Somewhere that will break her. If she gets out — a long, long time from now — her wires will be too scrambled to be of any use to society. Nothing she claims happened years and years ago will be believed. By then we’ll all be long gone anyway. Happily enjoying retirement.’

‘And in return?’ Icke said.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘Everyone in this room knows what you like to do in your downtime. We’re not in a position to judge. But Keith here can keep that ball rolling.’

Now it was Keith Ray’s turn to sit forward, silently entering the conversation.

Icke said, ‘Keith, is this true?’

Ray drummed his meaty fingers on the tabletop, unable to hide a smirk. ‘You’re a dirty bastard, Mr. Icke. Yeah, I can help you.’

Icke didn’t outwardly react, but he was taken aback.

Keeping his expression cool, he said, ‘If I were you, I’d watch how you—’

‘I’ll speak however the fuck I want to speak,’ Ray said. ‘I’m not officially here. I don’t even need to be here. And I’d say everyone else in this room — including you, Alistair — has a hell of a lot more to lose than I do.’

‘If we go down,’ Icke said, ‘you go down, too.’

‘Maybe,’ Ray said. ‘Maybe not. Want to roll the dice? I’m retired. I’ve got all the time in the world to play this game.’

‘You’re not retired,’ Icke said. ‘You’re working with Gates. Don’t think I haven’t been keeping track.’

‘You’re switched on. Good. My business relationship with Armando Gates is exactly how I’m going to make you happy. So take it or leave it.’

‘I have my own product.’

‘It’s not the same as mine. And a little birdie told me you never touch your product. Rules are rules.’

Icke checked his watch and stood up. ‘Lunch is over. Court must resume.’

Kerr looked up at him. ‘We’ve barely started.’

‘This will have to do,’ Icke said. He stared daggers at Gloria Kerr. Then said, ‘I’ll make sure that she gets the max.’

Kerr sat back in her chair, bemused. ‘Good.’

‘There’s just one thing,’ Icke said. ‘A special request. Part of the package you’re going to put together to keep me happy.’

Kerr raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s that?’

‘I want Melanie for a night.’

Kerr barely reacted, and in that moment Icke knew she was a special kind of sick. The steady downward slope of corruption was something that Gloria Kerr had never experienced. She’d been rotten to the core from the very start. It was the only explanation.

Kerr said, ‘Sure.’

Icke nodded.

He sensed the intoxicating feeling stirring deep within him.

Power.

Control.

He nodded to each of them, collected his coattails, and hustled out of the room.

Thinking nothing of the fact he was about to hand down a decade-plus of incarceration for a crime he knew full well someone didn’t commit.

Such is life.

1

Earlier that same day, Jason King stepped out of a luxury estate chiselled into the mountains west of Las Vegas.

A hot afternoon signalled its arrival. Already the air was warm — he could feel it in his lungs — but what might have sent most morning runners back to bed barely registered on his radar. He kept to the shade, loitering in the shadow cast by the façade to his rear as he started his fitness watch. The façade was part of the estate, a double-storey lookout with uneven brick columns and a cascading water feature streaming from the ground floor ceiling. The rows of droplets fell into a shallow pond, adding ambience to the quiet of the mountains.

He’d already stretched. Half a dozen sun salutations did the trick. Vinyasa yoga kept him supple, ensuring his muscle fascia didn’t tighten beyond salvation. He needed it to counterbalance the wear-and-tear.

For most of the last fifteen years he’d honed the process.

Now it was a matter of going through the motions.

He started running. Nothing more to it. Overthinking achieved nothing, and it also conveniently went hand in hand with his profession. Well, it wasn’t his profession anymore, just a side gig, but the same principle applied. You sit around thinking of a million ways to improve your skillset so you don’t get shot in the face on your next outing, and you end up caught in a thought loop, doing nothing at all.

Inactivity wasn’t in King’s vocabulary.

So he ran down Promontory Ridge onto Marble Ridge, two streets in “The Ridges,” the private gated community to the south-west of Summerlin that had served as home for the better part of a month. Enough time had passed to consider himself settled, but not enough for the new beginnings to have lost their shine. Heavy metal blared in his wireless earbuds, so he didn’t hear the distant drone of the morning rush hour on the Bruce Woodbury Beltway, but he knew it was there. The beltway was far enough away from “The Ridges” to avoid being an annoyance and instead served as a pleasant background murmur.

He ran north up Red Rock Ranch Road, past rows of houses and flat sandy stretches populated by groves of tamarisk trees, rocks, cacti and mesquite bushes. It was four miles on foot to the shooting range skewered into the desert on the other side of the mountains. He couldn’t run through the mountains, so he ran around them. An eight mile round trip, complete with the added stressor of the arid heat — enough of a daily calorie burn to keep his body fat in the single digits no matter what he ate.

But he ate healthy regardless, each and every day, without fail.

Lots of grass fed meat, lots of vegetables. Whole foods. No processed crap.

He followed a powerlifting routine on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and hit pads or sparred live bodies at the premier mixed martial arts gym in the county the other four days. The result was a physique sculpted out