He hid his face in his hands. I needed to know more, but right then there was no point in pushing it further.
“All right, take it easy. I have to deal with Popo first. It’ll take ten minutes. I’ll ask the judge to pass your case for a little while, so you and I can talk somewhere private. Hopefully that might give Gerry enough time to get down here.”
David didn’t look at me as I spoke. He kept his hands over his eyes.
I left the cage and kept my eyes on him until I’d walked through the security door that led to the upper levels of the courthouse. While I was waiting for the elevator, I took my new cell phone from my jacket pocket, typed a text, hit send.
I’m in. Keep Gerry out of the picture for at least another hour.
By the time the elevator arrived, I’d received a response.
You’ve got forty minutes, max.
My watch read nine fifteen. Not enough time.
Thankfully the elevator was empty. I hit the button for the fifth floor. The doors closed and the elevator rose and began its painfully slow ascent. Twenty-four hours before this my life seemed to be switching back onto the rails. I’d opened up my own firm three months ago. Business began picking up in the last two weeks, and I’d started to feel a little like myself again. Back in the saddle with clients, deadlines, an overdraft, and a secondhand car—a world away from my old firm, yet it felt better; it felt honest.
A year and a half ago I’d quit the law. A case went bad, really bad. I’d gotten someone hurt, not by conning anyone, or doing anything illegal, just by doing my job. And I’d lost everything—my wife, my daughter, my life. After making a pretty decent attempt at killing myself with booze, I checked into rehab, got clean, and got perspective. That was it for me. I’d decided to give up the law: no more clients, no more courtroom tricks. I was done. Then five months ago I’d been forced to represent the head of the Russian Mafia. I came out alive and fell back into the law.
And now here I was, not only about to be involved in the most sensational murder case since O. J. Simpson, but having to con my client to save my wife from a jail sentence. Conning the client to save Christine didn’t bother me too much.
My new client was the forty-fifth-richest man in America.
And from what I’d been told, he was guilty as hell. For a second I thought about Dell. He’d lost someone and he was hurting—that seemed clear enough. That kind of pain can do two things; you want to save others from your pain or you want everyone to suffer the same as you. I couldn’t figure out where Dell fit in that equation. Not yet. He saw David’s arrest as an opportunity. I guessed a plea of guilty was enough to satisfy Dell’s conscience. Then he could use David to get to the firm, to the people he wanted to suffer—Ben Harland and Gerry Sinton. And Dell wanted everything from those two men—their lives, their business, their reputation, and their money.
The money.
It all came down to money.
Estimated at eight billion dollars in illegal transactions. That’s what Kennedy had told me just before I’d left this morning. I had to deliver a guilty plea for David so that Dell could make a deal for a lighter sentence in exchange for the partners, the money. Get the plea or they’ll put Christine away for life. Back in my office, I’d had no qualms about that setup. Now that I’d seen the kid, I began to wonder how he’d managed to pull the trigger on his girlfriend. He didn’t look like he could pull the tab on a soda can without help. An ill feeling grew in the back of my mind. I tried to ignore it.
The elevator clanked to a slow crawl and opened on the fifth floor of the Centre Street courthouse.
Forty minutes to get full representation from the mark.
Then another twenty-four hours to make him take a plea.
I stepped into a grand hall filled with the usual mix of people awaiting a date with a judge. Leaning against a pillar in the corner of the hall, I got my best view of the crowd. There were a few lawyers waiting around, and the ones that I recognized were not from Harland and Sinton; none of the attorneys in the hall wore anything remotely expensive. That firm prided itself on having the best attorneys money could buy, and they all got a two-thousand-dollar-per-month clothing allowance. The female attorneys favored Alexander McQueen, and the men liked Armani. Most of my suits were at the cleaner’s. My office was a little damp, so I had to get them cleaned often to get rid of the smell. The suit I wore that morning cost three hundred dollars and it was pretty much the best suit I owned.
I was about to kick off the pillar and head to court when I saw him.
It wasn’t Gerry Sinton. It wasn’t a Harland and Sinton attorney either.
He looked Hispanic, and he wore a black wool overcoat over a gray sweater, dark pants, and black shoes. He sat on a bench to the right of the central stairwell, maybe thirty feet away from me. His left index finger flicked across the screen of his smartphone. Quite a few court customers were doing the same thing, huddled in corners and on benches, sipping coffee from plastic cups and checking out what was going on in their virtual lives. But the man I saw was different. Even though his finger slashed across the screen in his hand, he paid no attention to it. The smartphone has become the twenty-first-century newspaper for surveillance men.
This guy was paying close attention to who was in the hall, and his gaze passed over me casually. He took a slug from a takeout coffee and eyeballed the room. As he leaned back to take another sip, I could see a tattoo on his neck, but I was too far away to see what it was. Definitely not a fed. I checked the crowd to see if I could identify who he was watching. Nobody stood out.
A sensation, almost like someone running a needle down the back of my neck, drew my attention to the coffee drinker.
He was staring at me.
When I was little my father took me on the Wild Asia Monorail in the Bronx Zoo. As we passed by an enclosure one of the Siberian tigers stopped dead and stared up at my rail car. It was looking straight at me. It didn’t growl, or bare its teeth. Just stared. Even as a ten-year-old kid, I knew from those ferocious eyes that the four-hundred-pound beast below wanted to tear me apart.
I got exactly the same feeling from this guy.
He threw his coffee into the garbage and left by the stairs. I guessed he hadn’t been looking for me, but he’d sensed that I had noticed him. That’s probably why he left. It was only when I started walking toward the courtroom that I realized I was breathing hard.
And my hands were shaking.
Whoever the guy was, I never wanted to see him again.