Terror Machine by Denison Hatch

Author:Denison Hatch [Hatch, Denison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Calibre
Published: 2019-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MURAD AND OMER AMIN WEREN’T all that different from one another. Both wanted lives quite different from the ones they lived, and both had secrets. One of Murad’s secrets was cigarettes. He was a pious man in almost every aspect, but his sin was the cigarettes that he’d begun smoking when he was fourteen and never stopped.

Murad’s sin, or what Hanafi would call haram, had a side effect—wandering. It was usually walking, but sometimes it was also joyriding in his father’s vans. It all came together to make Murad the eyes and ears of the neighborhood. When he wasn’t at the mosque, the dry-cleaning business, or Best Diner, Murad was wandering around Steinway. He liked to walk and smoke, hiding his cigarette behind his leg or simply throwing it to the ground if he spotted anyone who might disapprove.

Murad enjoyed moving. It made him feel free. He liked to think he could keep going one day, never returning back to his normal surroundings, and end up somewhere other than where he was. He would daydream about this future version of his life, God willing. He would loosely strategize about how to get there. His thoughts always began with criticism of the disgusting regularity that surrounded him before morphing into an imaginative dream of the rich and sumptuous world he might soon occupy halfway across the globe. He would think of himself as a financier in Dubai or an arms dealer in Syria or the owner of an exotic-car dealership in London.

Usually his breaks were quick, but sometimes Murad would walk or drive for hours at a time. The longer he was gone, the more he didn’t like what he saw and the deeper his aspirations would become. However, at the end of every sojourn, with a cigarette or two or three absorbed into his lungs, Murad would always find himself looping back down Steinway again. He knew every crack of the sidewalk and each crooked shopkeeper’s sign. This was his terrain. If a new store was opening up, he’d track its progress on a daily basis. If a bum showed up on the stairs of the mosque, he’d take a mental note. If a trash can had fallen onto the street, he’d call the sanitation department to have it fixed up. It might be ugly, but this was his place and his people. He paid attention, and he took pride in knowing and seeing everything.

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