Chapter Text
The night air was still, and a fair 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the New Mexico summer. Howard Hamlin turned off his vehicle with a twist of his key in the ignition, looking up through the windshield at the dim, warm light peeking through the curtains of the apartment on the top floor of Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler’s building. He felt like he was straining for a view at the world from a dark casket.
Howard looked in the mirror of his lit sun visor, and saw a sight he would have flinched at any other night. His blonde hair a disheveled mess, his skin retaining a sheen from the sweat he hadn’t bothered to wash off, and his cheeks flushed from the whiskey that danced through his blood stream. He wondered what people would say if they saw him like this.
“Is that supposed to be me?” Judge Casimiro was both indignant and utterly bewildered. Howard could feel the warmth of the blood further filling the vessels of his cheeks. He wished he could crawl in the back of his car and let the dark night permanently shroud him.
“Mr. Hamlin, are you okay? Your eyes.” Erin Brill’s shock still rang in his ears. His mind flashed to the wet photographs, the heat that radiated through his body as he entered the conference room. His hands clenched the wheel. They drugged him. They were willing to drug him.
“Then I’m obligated to go to the partners and explain everything I’ve seen. All of it.” Howard didn’t have to look at Cliff Main’s exacerbated, agitated expression to know he truly meant everything. The cocaine he supposedly snorted, the prostitutes whose services he supposedly enjoyed, the meltdown he’d just had in front of a dozen people. He had the distinct impression that Jimmy McGill’s goal was to ensure everyone in the world, everyone who knew him, would scream to the top of their lungs inches from his face. He might scream back, might tear his vocal cords, but he could never make them listen to him.
Snakes. They were both treacherous fucking snakes. The man unzipped the bag in the passenger seat and gently picked up the tall glass bottle, reading and re-reading the stylized words “The Macallan” and “18 Years Old” displayed proudly on its label. Howard Hamlin was nothing if he didn’t consider how he conducted himself, at all times. The man scoffed and shook his head.
“Only the best.”
And with that, he swung open the door and entered into the world of the parking lot and the apartment buildings that surrounded it, the soft noises of insects and the passing of cars lulling its residents to sleep about now. He stood for a moment to look up towards their apartment balcony once more, and thought he could catch a glimpse of shadows against the curtains. He felt like a python, cornered and ready to bite.
By the time the blonde man had carefully scaled the stairs to arrive at the designated door in the lit hallway, vintage Scotch whiskey in hand, he was desperate for catharsis, and had to stop himself from banging on it so loud that the entire building could hear. Howard took a slow, deep breath, and gave a few polite raps on its wooden surface. There was no response. He knocked again. Something pulled at his senses in front of him, a feeling that something ever slightly stirred on the opposite side of the door.
“Uh…,” Howard started off, “sorry to interrupt your night, but I brought you two a gift.” Yet again, there was no response. Howard slammed his white-knuckled fist against the door in lieu of pelting the damn bottle against it.
“Neither of you have the right to ignore me!” The soft sounds of crickets seemed deafening to the man now, his only companions in this world being their incessant chirping noises. The door in front of Howard stood motionless, mocking him and his pathetic outburst. His blue eyes fixated on the peephole placed in the middle of its panels. Within the glass appeared a swirl of black that seemed to bore a hole into Howard’s own being. There was breathing, his own or that of whoever he could not see, and suddenly the distorted image of the pupil vanished from sight. Howard took a step back in preparation. The white door stood motionless. He glanced at the flies relentlessly bumping into the yellowish lights attached to the corridor ceiling. He then looked at the bottle of Macallan in his hand, and shook his head.
“That’s too bad,” he said loudly, more to himself than to anyone else. The blonde man glanced at the two stairwells that concluded both ends of the hallway. No one but him was there, except for the shadows at both ends of the corridor. He started towards the farther end that would lead to his car. A door from behind him had slowly opened, but he stiffly looked ahead. He breathed out upon passing through the innocent entry to the stairs, and wobbled and skipped steps despite grappling onto the railing. Just as he got off the stairway, he ran right into a man.
“Sorry,” Howard instinctively threw his hand to his face in embarrassment, “been havin' too much to drink tonight.”
“It’s no problem,” said the man, a pudgy, bespectacled man with a red beard with a bag of trash in both hands. Howard gave a small nod at the man and shuffled away from the entry to finally be met with the sight of his emerald-colored Jaguar. He hadn’t expected the wave of relief seated behind the wheel of his vehicle, shrouded in its dark interior. He hadn’t expected the desire to lock the car doors immediately upon entering, either.
Howard scanned the grounds of the complex as he settled into the driver’s seat. He spotted the man he just ran into, entering a small enclosure to fling his bags of garbage into one of the dumpsters. His eyes then fell on the appearance of a dark-haired man exiting out of the same stairwell Howard had come from. He sported a mustache and jean jacket, monotonously throwing his car keys up and catching them in his hand. Howard gave a small chuckle to himself. Why so jumpy this evening?
He turned the vehicle on again, greeted by the warm embrace of the low humming of the engine. He looked into the curtains of the couple’s apartment, and saw no light emanating from them. Of course.
Howard scoffed as he loosened his knitted blue tie from his neck. He withdrew the BlackBerry from his pocket and let the bluish light emit into the car with a single tap of a button. He resisted the desire to turn this device into a very unique stress ball as he browsed through the list of contacts on it and settled on a single name. He had always thought better of Kim Wexler, despite her… interesting decisions. He had to admit it broke his heart. He hovered this thumb over the send button on the top of the keyboard, and pressed it firmly.
“Hello, Kim.”
Howard heard breathing, heavy breathing, on the other end of the line. The air suddenly felt as still inside the Jaguar as it was outside.
“Kim?” The man’s eyes could detect the cell phone’s screen illuminated against the side of his face before the cut in the breathing. On it was the list of contacts yet again. Howard’s heart felt as if it were out of place before the thought of Kim instantly hanging up on him arrived. Oh, of course. Of fucking course. The man dialed again and waited as the line agonizingly rang out. On the other end was the prerecorded voice of the woman.
“Kim,” he uttered into the phone with a husky, exasperated voice.
“Since you two are pretending you aren’t home,” he took on an authoritative tone, “And you’d rather just breathe into your phone than act like an adult, I guess the gift I have for you will have to wait...”
After about a minute or two after having to restrain himself from yelling into his cellphone, he ended the call and allowed himself to relax into the seat as he removed his blue suit jacket and chucked it to the passenger seat, placing the cellphone into one of its pockets. He started the Jaguar, and backed out of the sloppy position he had parked it in.
Howard pulled into the dark, leafy driveway of the spacious house he called “home.” A single dim light illuminated the living room of the main house. The man narrowed his eyes, and clenched his jaw as he turned his head to look towards the guesthouse to the left of his car.
As Howard made his way into the guesthouse and flopped onto the bed, an image popped in the his head. It was the bottle of Macallan, seated in a wooden basket and cushioned with wrapping paper with a card to its side, the phrase “Enjoy it for now” smugly scratched onto it outside of the door he’d abandoned earlier. He knew he had lost on this day, but he also knew he had been through worse. Howard Hamlin would be fine. Better than ever before, in fact. And everyone would know that, Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler especially. He’d make sure of it.