Deliverance - Hooch and Matt's Story (12 page)

There was death in those eyes, Mike realized at last. He’d run into some nasty types before, drug dealers and the like, but nothing came close to this. “Look man, you can check anything you like, it’ll all be gone, I promise, and I never saw a thing and I’ll never come near you again and I’ll tell the broad it’s me and not her, and it’ll be as though this never happened. See?” he scrambled desperately, while panting against the pain.

Something deep down inside of Hooch, beyond deadly and above human, wanted to hear a scream tear out of this little piece of shit. “I want a guarantee or I’ll come back”

“Anything!” Mike pleaded, “anything you like.” The first a shout, the second a whisper.

“You will send an email to Mandy, telling her you are a stinking rotten bastard and that you will never bother her life again, and apologize. Then you will hand me the disk and any copy you might have made.” Hooch still wanted a fight, but he needed a worthy opponent. Only the thin tethers of society rules held Hooch back from destruction. “Most importantly, I give you two days to move out of the area and far away. If you are still here after that, I will finish what I’ve started today.”

There was wetness beneath Hooch, and he realized that Mike had wet himself in terror. A defeated, pathetic cur under the gaze of the contemptuous alpha wolf.

Hooch lifted his hips, his face showing his disgust. “Up.” He moved off the body on the floor, made one small hand movement. “Email. Disk.”

Mike scuttled away towards the computer in the corner, as though trying to make himself as small as possible.

Hooch stood close, arms crossed in front of his chest once more. He checked the email over, then nodded once. “Send.” Another economic gesture. “Disk.”

Mike fumbled, handing the small flat square over, and then, in a show of initiative, demonstrated on the nearby camera that the offending photograph was deleted from the camera’s memory.

“Well done.” Pocketing the disk, Hooch turned to walk to the door, unconcerned by showing his back. “Remember,” he opened the door, “two days. I’ll check.”

Mike slumped back into his chair, trembling, staring at the door. After a moment, he got up, went to the bedroom, and started frantically throwing his belongings into a bag. He loaded everything that would fit into his car that very night and headed out on the highway, going west. He could cancel his lease and everything else away from Fayetteville. Very,
very
far away.

* * *

Hooch returned home straight away, while everything inside of him screamed out for a different course of action: to find a way of letting off steam. He needed to find a way to dissolve the tension from a fight that hadn’t been a fight and an opponent that hadn’t been worth it, but he forced himself to ignore the demand.

The gym was closed by the time he got back—it wasn’t worth opening late early in the week—and Matt was upstairs in the apartment. The door opened before Hooch reached the top of the stairs.

“Hey.” Hooch forced himself to remain calm, not allowing the darkness to show. “Here’s the disk.” Holding his hand out with the disk in the palm of it.

Matt took it, turning it over in his hand. Such a small and nasty thing. He looked up at Hooch. “Mike?”

“Broke up with Mandy by email, and is moving out of Fayetteville.” Hooch closed the door behind him. “Probably right now, considering his state. He pissed himself while I talked to him.”

Matt nodded. “Good.” He looked at Hooch, seeing the tension. “Food?” He looked down at Hooch’s groin, momentarily puzzled by the slight dampness visible even on the dark denim, and then remembered Hooch’s last words. “Or bed?”

“Bed.” Thank fuck for Matt and his perceptiveness. “Definitely bed.” Hooch pulled the t-shirt off, before opening the buttons of his denims. “I need…” Damn. He couldn’t say what he really needed. Pain. Anger. Aggression. Fight. “You.” No lie. He needed Matt, always would.

Matt smiled, just a fraction of his normal one, but a genuine one, free from tension. “Come on, then.” He was already halfway into the bedroom, shedding his clothes as he went.
Hooch was like a barely contained force of nature, and only Matt, as strong as Hooch, was able to match him in give and take, and sheer, unrestrained need. It was a side of Hooch that Matt rarely encountered: powerful, demanding and rough, a side of him that Matt knew Hooch consciously kept from him. In the end they were both sore and strained, bruised and battered, but relieved, and they slept soundly that night, knowing they had dodged a bullet.

* * *

Afterwards, it seemed that things went back to how they had been, and on the surface it was as though the blackmail attempt had never happened, and that life would continue in their peculiar version of normal.

Except that one afternoon in the last week of August, a young man appeared at the front desk when Mandy was on duty. He introduced himself at Lt. Jeff Sullivan, from the 82
nd
Airborne. He was tall and good looking, just a little shy, and from his accent a Yankee lost and bewildered in the South. He had a shoulder injury, he explained, that had healed but still didn’t feel quite right, and Captain Bozic from the base had suggested that he come to the gym and make an appointment with ex-USMC PTI Mr. Donahue for an alternative PT program to the one he was getting up at Fort Bragg.

The result, perhaps, was predictable. The officer stayed far longer than anticipated, leaving not only with an appointment with Matt the following week, but also with Mandy’s phone number and a lunch date that weekend.

Matt looked suspiciously at Hooch when he came home that evening. “Matchmaker,” he accused him.

Hooch stared at him with a blank, mock-innocent look. “I couldn’t leave things to chance, could I? I’d rather not have a repeat of Mike.”

Matt snorted. “I bet that’s why it’s taken so long. How many did you vet before you decided on him?”

“Seventy-nine.” Hooch retorted. “Number eighty struck lucky.”

“You know, I can well believe that, and if my guess is right, he worships the ground you walk on, so even if he were to guess—and he’s not likely to because he’s got the imagination of a brick—he’d never say a word. I guess he’s the sort who just needs someone to take him in hand and organize his life outside the military as much as it’s organized in, and then he’ll make Colonel.”

“You’re damn right, except for one thing: no one worships any ground I walk on. Crazy idea.” Hooch cracked a grin.

Matt answered it with one of his own. “One good turn, I suppose. You know it’s been ten years since Dan told me to go to the safe house back in Saudi while he was off to Thailand on R&R?”

“Ten years? Fucking hell.” Hooch proceeded to push Matt up the stairs, with the intention to get him into the bedroom. “Celebrations are in order.”

“No re-creating the first date, though,” Matt joked, letting Hooch propel him forwards. “I was so fucking freaked you wouldn’t believe, and that bed was fucking uncomfortable too.”

“You did a damn fine job at hiding your freak-out.” They were upstairs, the door shut. Hooch swiveled Matt round to face him. “Why exactly were you freaked out anyway?” He grinned, a normal, almost sunny grin.

The wide smile was rare enough that Matt couldn’t help returning it. “Twenty-one years old, in the middle of the desert, when it was worse than DADT, fucking a crazy Brit merc on the sly, being sent to meet goodness knows who by crazy Brit merc and having a fucking Delta show up. What do you think?” He shook his head. “How the hell did Dan convince you to go out there?”

Hooch laughed. “Simple. He told me he had something waiting for me in the safe house that was of interest to an opportunist. He said I’d like it unless I had something against Jarheads.”

Matt couldn’t help it, he had to laugh out loud at that. “Fuck,” he said when he could breathe, “what a fucked-up comedy we are, and you know what, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He shucked off his clothes and threw himself on the bed, on his back, the way Hooch preferred, the expression on his face not so much ‘come hither’ but ‘fuck me’.

A demand that Hooch was all too willing to fulfill.

The sex was slower than usual, but no less satisfying. Matt happily fell asleep afterwards, but Hooch lay awake, something itching inside of him, even though his body was replete. A something which raised its ugly head and flexed its razor-sharp claws whenever the silence caught up with him.

September

November 2001, Fayetteville

The mellow season of the end of summer and the beginning of fall in the South was shattered by the crashing of planes in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the ensuring chaos afterwards. In the days and weeks that followed, Fort Bragg was thrumming with nervous energy, as there was a flurry of movement to and from Bragg and Pope Air Force Base, which had all personnel on edge.

Hooch spent more and more time on base, only rarely returning home, and when he did, he was tight lipped and grey with exhaustion. Even more silent, and even more obnoxious and difficult than usual. Matt could do nothing but watch, helpless as time went by, as Hooch withdrew further and further into himself.

It got even worse when the first planes carrying the coffins with his boys started coming back.

They tried to wage a war against an enemy that had no clear battle lines nor visible targets. It wasn’t the long hours, the lack of rest, the fact that he had to stay behind, not even the sheer futility of it all, but the utter idiocy from those in charge, which poisoned Hooch’s very self.

No one was listening to the guys on the ground, and as a result men were killed. His men. The young men he’d trained and who were being sent into impossible situations. It was like fine-tuning high spec weapons, only to waste them in suicide missions.

The itch inside of Hooch, which had never vanished since the blackmail attempt, had become an ever consuming presence that ate him up from the inside out. He knew he had no choice but to capitulate to the darkness eventually. The restless energy that gnawed at his guts, and the ever increasing tension that threatened to impede his ability to function, had to be silenced somehow.

He had to let off steam, the only way out he knew, before he imploded and destroyed what remained of his sanity.

* * *

They’d insisted that he took a few days off in November, marked it clearly into his diary, told him well in advance, warned him that everyone he worked with had been told and he was barred from the base. The first evening of his enforced leave, when Matt was downstairs in his office, Hooch made a mental calculation of the time difference, and called New Zealand.

The phone rang at least a dozen times before it was picked up.

“Aye?” Dan’s slightly breathless voice was at the other end.

“Hooch here,” he paused. “How are you?” going through the pleasantries.

“Fine, fine.” The sound of a cigarette being lit. “You want him, aye?”

“Yes.” Always direct, that was what he liked about Dan.

“Sorry, mate, he’s bloody drugged out of his mind. Slipped a disk, now flat on his back floating on cloud nine.” Another inhale, “I’m doing butler duties.”

“Shit. How long’s he out for?”

“Doc said at least a couple of weeks, but reckons he mustn’t do anything physical for a hell of a lot longer. It’s the same disk, he really has to take it easy now.” A dry chuckle, “as if. You want him to call back when he’s off his cloud?”

“Yeah.” The veneer of civility, while the darkness clawed up his insides. Weeks at least; possibly months. No way he could wait that long. “Send him my regards, okay? I gotta go now.” Hooch ended the call before Dan could reply. This was it. No other way out.

The sound of steps coming up the stairs, then Matt opened the door, yawning. He stopped in mid-movement when he looked at Hooch. Something in the expression on Hooch’s face. “Anything I can do?”

“No.” Not a lie. Nothing Matt could do. “Sorry. I just…” Hooch shook his head. “I’m going out for a bit. Don’t wait up.” He was on his way to the door quicker than Matt could grab his arm.

“Shit, what the fuck’s up?” Matt skidded towards the door, blocking Hooch’s path with his body.

“I need to go.” This was not the Hooch Matt knew, but an extreme version of the man. “I just need to go!” Hooch gave Matt a push, far harder than necessary, to get him out of the way.

“Not until you tell me what’s got into you!” Matt was caught off-balance, and his attempt to grab Hooch met with thin air as Hooch wrenched open the door and ran down the stairs. Thankfully, there was no-one in the gym as Hooch passed the reception area and went out into the icy chill of the parking lot towards the garage.

* * *

Hooch drove for while, until he was out of Fayetteville, stopping at a nondescript building in a run-down area. It had been years since he’d been here, and he hoped it was still what it used to be.

He got out, looking around and listening for anything suspicious, but there was nothing but crumbling buildings and a few cars discreetly parked in the shadows.

The place looked like it had three years ago, only shabbier. The clientele seemed the same, too, or at least similar. Hooch made his way through the people, a black clad hard-faced man with haunted eyes and a tense jaw, on the prowl for something he couldn’t hope to find, yet so desperately needed.