Joe was working in his home office, outlining a security analysis proposal for the TSA.
It was pleasant work. He’d written the book on the Transportation Security Administration when he was in Homeland Security, and figuring out the new TSA specs gave him a chance to use comfortable tools that were right at hand.
Julie had left her stuffed cow, Mrs. Mooey Milkington, on his desk to keep him company. Martha was snoozing next to his feet. Bill Evans’s soothing “Peace Piece” was coming through his earbuds, and in about an hour Joe was going to break for the meat loaf sandwich that was chilling in the fridge.
It was while Joe was in this fine-tuned contemplative mood that his phone rang, breaking it all into shards.
Joe glanced at his caller ID, which read, NAPA COUNTY JAIL.
He let the phone ring a few more times as he decided whether or not to pick up, but by the third ring he really had no choice.
“Molinari.”
“Joe. Thank God you’re there.”
“Dave. Please don’t tell me you’re in lockup and that this is your one phone call.”
“You want me to start lying to you now?” Dave said. It was a joke but not a good one.
“What happened? Give me the condensed version so you don’t use up your quarter.”
“Okay. This morning, after I drank my breakfast, I went to Perkins’s office and called him out. His nasty nurse—”
“Atkins?”
“Yeah. Her. She barred the door. So I made a general announcement in the waiting room that Perkins had killed my father, and I was shown the door. I saw Perkins’s Beemer in the parking lot, so I rolled past it and keyed the side of his car. Next thing, cops came, lifted me out of my chair, and carried me into the squad car.”
“What are the charges, Dave?”
“It was vandalism with a side order of defamation.”
“How bad was the scratch?”
“Headlight to taillight. I don’t need a lawyer to tell me it was more than four hundred dollars in damages. I could go to jail for, like, three years.”
A muffled sound coming over the phone was Dave crying, and Joe had to strain to hear the guard tell him, “Say good-bye. Time’s up.” Dave argued with the guard, said that he was talking to his lawyer and that he needed to get bailed out.
“Thirty seconds,” said the guard. “Make it count.”
Joe said, “Dave, what’s the bond?”
“It’s 10K. Look, Joe, I know I have a goddamn lot of nerve, but can you come back and pay the bail? I can repay you as soon as we get to my place. Also, I have a few more documents you’re going to want to read. And, Joe, I gotta be honest. It kills me that you don’t believe me about Perkins.”
Joe thought about all of the sleeping pills Dave had saved up in his medicine cabinet. If he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life blaming himself for Dave’s suicide, he had to see him, try to get him into therapy. At the very least, throw out all the pills he could get his hands on.
“Your bed is all made up,” Dave was saying. “And I have a couple of New York steaks and a bottle of Private Reserve Cab that Ray had been aging for ten years.”
Joe said he had to make arrangements, but he’d try to be at the bail bondsman by 4:00 p.m.
“Thanks, Joe.”
“Take it easy,” he said, but the call had been disconnected and there was a dial tone in his ear.
Over the next couple of hours Joe spoke to Lindsay, made an arrangement with Mrs. Rose, squared away his notes, and wrote a couple of emails. He went to the bank, and then he was on the road, heading north to Napa Valley.
As he picked up speed, Joe was starting to look forward to what would come next. He wanted to see the new documents Dave had mentioned, and more than that, he wanted to have an honest conversation with Dave.
There was a question he’d never asked him, and he wanted to watch Dave’s face when he finally did.