THE EVENING after his fantastic afternoon with Frank, Benjamin was whistling as he checked his various email accounts. He was shadowing the exchange between Sanford and Teague but had not expected much, so ditched that to play around with the video game for a few hours. Frank had headed out around five with a long, lingering kiss in the foyer to go to his shift at LifeFlight, and Benjamin was still wallowing a little. None of that stopped him from turning all his problems over in his mind, something that rarely paused for anything other than really good orgasms or a really bad drunk.
The main stumbling block with entrapping Teague was that it was illegal to capture him on an audio recording without a warrant. Given that Benjamin was not a member of law enforcement and that, for all intents and purposes, Teague had done nothing illegal, that was not going to happen. The fact that Corsak had moved out to the other side of the country, following his wife’s job, worked in their favor, because there was no way Teague could demand to meet in person. Corsak acted like he did not want to talk by phone due to paranoia, and so their communication defaulted to supposedly anonymous email. Which, for Teague, was laughably not anonymous, since the only place he checked it was on his personal phone, and the email service he used was nowhere near as untraceable as they claimed.
Still, it would be important to get him to admit to what he did. Corsak pushed, dropping hints, but Teague was not a complete fool. He was playing hard to get about doing the transfer of money to Corsak’s account, which was really a ghost account Benjamin had set up that had no legal ties to Sanford at all. But the problem was that Teague wanted some kind of guarantee that this would be “the last of it” and he’d never hear from Corsak again once the money dropped. Theoretically, it was an easy promise to make, but Benjamin kept thinking that somehow that could be their leverage to get Teague to break.
Then Rachel called a little after 10:00 p.m.
“Holy shit, Benji, have you looked at the news?” Rachel squeaked breathlessly at him. “Holy shit, holy shit!”
He had not. He quickly booted up his major feed and stared at it, unblinking and uncomprehending. “What.”
“How? How, Benji?” Rachel asked when it was clear they were on the same figurative page.
SHELDON IN BED WITH MUDZNEWZ
The headline screamed at him over a photo of him and Frank making out by the Tesla. It had been taken after their flight, right there in the open in broad daylight. There was no mistaking that it was Frank and Benjamin, which was bad enough, but someone, somehow, was connecting Benjamin to MudzNewz.
“Rachel, where are you?”
“Hiding at Maddox’s. Jane called from work and told me that there is a squadron of reporters hanging out at the salon, hoping to talk to me.” She paused, her voice wavering, and Benjamin could hear her boyfriend in the background making soothing noises. “They are going to drag up my background, aren’t they? And the DUI?”
It was a pittance on what the media was going to do to Benjamin, but he felt like it was worse. It was his baby sister, and he had only started the whole fucking project to get back at the man who hurt her. “Don’t worry about that just yet. I’ve got to figure out how the fuck anyone linked me to the site. Stay where you are until I call you.”
She agreed and as soon as she hung up, he called Corsak, because if the cat was out of the bag already, it didn’t matter if anyone was listening in, and Benjamin needed faster communication than an email.
“Corsak here. Who’s this?” His voice was a lot more southern fried country than Benjamin expected, which threw him.
“Oh. Uh, Sanford Corsak? It’s, uh, MudzNewz. Guy. MudzNewz guy.”
“Dr. Benjamin Kaplan? Yeah, I saw the news this evening. I thought you were going to keep this on the down low.”
“I am!”
“Not if you’re dating Frank Sheldon, you’re not. What the fuck is going on?”
“Hell if I know. No one has been able to link me to the Mudz in the four years people have been trying, including the FBI and the NSA. Suddenly I’m outed? I haven’t a fucking clue.”
There was the sound of Sanford sucking air through his teeth. “It’s Teague, I’ll bet ya money on that. His last few emails were super sketchy; son of a bitch was dragging it out until he got someone to ID you.”
“Theoretically not possible.”
“Theoretically that’s for shit, man. Either someone ratted or you got sloppy.”
“Hey!”
“Dude, I work in IT. I’m not a genius, but I’m telling you, that’s how this shit works. Hacking isn’t half as easy as the movies make it look.”
“I know that!” Benjamin snapped. But he could not fault the logic. He tried to think of how he could have gotten sloppy. He was pretty sure no one ratted on him, because that list would consist of exactly one person: Rachel. Who was now hiding out in terror of having her admittedly sketchy history as a rebellious teen aired in public.
“If this comes back around to you—”
“It won’t because it doesn’t. I got no beef with you, just Teague.”
“Fuck.” Benjamin drew out the word on a long breath. “But you never mentioned Mudz to Teague. So how’d he make the connection?”
“No idea. Maybe he just cast a wide net? Figured I was obviously not on the up-and-up with my superdubious blackmail?” He huffed out a laugh, sounding more sardonic than amused. Benjamin related.
“Okay, but you’re the unknown factor here, for me. Just think for a second: did you talk about this to anyone? Email them?”
“Aside from my wife?” There was a long pause. “Aw, shit.”
“What? What!”
“My lawyer from when I got my discharge. He got notice that Sheldon’s petition was being reviewed, and he called me.”
“You told him?”
“Not like straight up! He knew about the whole setup with Teague back then, but we had client confidentiality, you know? So I just mentioned I was getting my pride back about it. Righting wrongs.”
“And?”
“Told him to keep an eye on MudzNewz,” Corsak finished with a heavy sigh.
“Fuckity fuck! Corsak!”
“Hey! I had no idea he was that smart!”
“Let me guess: he was probably hired by Teague to defend you.”
There was a long, damning pause. “Oh. I never thought that. He said he took it pro bono because of the civil rights issue around homosexuality. Gay as fuck himself, if I remember. It was a deal I couldn’t say no to; I mean, I wasn’t being court-martialed, so I had no right to legal defense I did not provide for myself.”
“Pro bono my ass—he was definitely paid off by Teague. And, again, probably in cash. Fuck!” He took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, here’s what we’re going to do—”
“You can’t be serious about going through with this,” Corsak said.
“I am. Because the link between you and MudzNewz isn’t traceable, or at least Teague doesn’t want it known. I’m going to guess they got some dark-web hacker to get to your emails, or your laptop, or something—so to answer your question, looks like we both got sloppy, and we both got ratted out.” Corsak cursed on the other end of the line, but Benjamin cut him off. “If your old lawyer went and told Teague’s people that you were setting Teague up for a sting on behalf of Mudz, that’s not proof. You could have just as well said ‘watch TMZ’ or, hell, Al Jazeera. Teague’s team went fishing, caught me, and are hoping that this reveal will make you back off. So make some noise about the publicity, tell him you want the timetable moved up. Threaten him with going public. Don’t mention anything about me. Make it clear this was all on you, for your own reasons.”
“I’ll try, man, but don’t expect him to respond.”
“Whatever. Do it.” Benjamin hung up.
He stared at his phone. He should call Frank, he knew that, but Frank was only a couple of hours into his twelve-hour shift, and probably (hopefully) not keeping up with the news.
Instead he jumped on Reddit to see what the Mudzies had to say. Most were wondering how accurate the reveal was, and a few troglodytes bitched about the fact that MudzNewz was probably run by a queer, and got into long, boring arguments with others about homophobia and civil rights. The fact that Benjamin was in business with the Sheldons was what everyone was getting angry about, though, which was exactly what Benjamin had expected. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, feeling the ghost of Frank’s fingers there.
Biting the bullet, he pulled up Camila López’s email. He drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment before replying again, this time with a terse, “What’s news?”
It would be enough to either set things off or shut him down, and for the moment it was all he could do. He started crafting a public statement but knew he would have to run it by Frank, if not Alexander Sheldon himself, before releasing it. Anything he did at that point would, oh irony of ironies, affect his business relationship with the Sheldons. Which brought him back to the family side of things.
He called Rachel back. “So. Damage control.”
“Okay?” She sounded so young again, it broke his heart.
“People are going to track back to the start of this, wonder why I went after Lamarque.”
She sucked in a deep breath. “Okay.”
“What? Okay? Are you nuts?”
“Benji, I’ve seen what some trolls say about you, okay? It’s pretty rough. I know they won’t play nice. I know they will drag up my DUI and my black boyfriend and the fact that I’m a ‘slutty’ hairdresser and that we’re Jewish. I know it, you know it, we both know it. So, you know what? Fuck them. Fuck all of them. It’s not like Les can sue me for libel since he’s in jail for, like, ever. Everyone knows the girls they connected to him are a fraction of the number of girls he used up before being caught. If we have to admit that we went after him because of what he did to me, and to my friends? Then so fucking be it. We did the right thing.”
Benjamin blinked back tears for a moment, staring at the wall. “You sound just like Mom, you know that? She’d be so proud of you right now.”
There was a soft sob on the other end of the connection. “Oh.”
“I love you, sis.” Benjamin wiped his eyes. “Stay low, and stay safe. If you go anywhere, Maddox drives, you got that? This is not the time to thumb your nose at the establishment.”
“Yeah. Okay,” she said, trying to get herself under control with a bleak-sounding laugh. “See you soon?”
“See you soon, promise. I gotta go, okay?” He hung up with a heavy heart.
It was still a clusterfuck, but Benjamin hoped he could stay ahead of the tsunami. He sent Frank a very bland text: So hey we should talk maybe? Let’s meet when you get off shift.
He wasn’t sure how Frank would react, but he was fairly certain he would not be happy about the situation.
Benjamin cradled his face in his hands. He had too many plates in the air, and he had run out of sticks—and time—to hold them up.