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  “What, you don’t think it could happen—that a corporation could take this place over and run it right?”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “Think of the advantages. A private correctional facility. The county could save a zillion bucks a year in safety retirement with the sheriffs’ union alone.”

  Harry glances over out of the corner of one eye. By now I’m a cipher, giving him nothing with which to argue.

  “They could put a couple of kiosks around back,” he says. “You drive up and talk into the little speaker, you order a felony and two misdemeanors. Sort of supersize the order. Give ‘em the clients’ names. Oh, yeah, and order me up a deputy DA—you know, one of those new ones, fresh right outta law school. The one you gave me last week was kind of tough, an old bastard who knew what he was doing. You have them repeat it to make sure they got the order straight. After all,” says Harry, “you gotta remember, this is a private business now. And in a private business the customer is always right.”

  He glances at me to make sure that he is getting my easy assent on all of this.

  “If it’s a private business, what makes you the customer? Why not the inmates?” I ask.

  “No. No,” says Harry. “They’re the commodity being bought and sold.”

  “I thought justice was the commodity.”

  “No, that’s just an occasional by-product,” says Harry.

  “You’re the one with the golden arches.” I’m smiling. “So where do you go from there?”

  “You pull around to the side of the building, reserved parking spaces facing this way. You roll down your window and you pick up the phone. A shade goes up on a window at the side of the building and your client’s sitting there with a phone in his hand on the other end just waiting to talk. None of this crap where you have to sit around and wait.” Harry checks his watch again. “Then a shade goes up on another window and you got the DA sitting there waiting on the other line.”

  “You better keep those two lines straight.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “What about the judge?” I ask.

  “What judge?”

  “You’re going to need a judge, otherwise you’re going to have to walk all the way to the courthouse at some point.”

  “Okay, fine,” he says. “We’ll put the judge in a window upstairs so he can look down on us. Make him feel good.”

  “What do you mean, ‘him’?”

  “Him, her, whatever. The thing wearing black robes, we put it in a window upstairs, give it a hammer so it can pound on a piece of wood to work out its aggression and a bullhorn so it can be heard. In the meantime we’re outside in the car with the air running, checking our calendar, making sure we’re not getting behind for our ten o’clock back at the office. I mean, look at the advantages: Don’t have to hoof it into the building. Do your business, slip into drive, and you’re outta here. Save us a lotta time and money,” says Harry.

  “I guess I’m out of touch, but I don’t remember the county standing with any particular zeal on that scale, the one that measures savings in our time and money.”

  “It’s still a good idea,” he says.

  “Oh, I think it’s a hell of an idea. Just think of the retired set. They can come over every morning, set up their folding lawn chairs out in the parking lot, and take up lessons lip-reading with binoculars while you get the story fresh from your client in the little window—or is it the other way around?” I start to laugh.

  Harry gives me a dim look.

  “Either way,” I say, “the audience gets it right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. They can see the whole system at work, right out there in the parking lot. Civics on asphalt.”

  “So it has a few problems. Nothing that can’t be fixed,” he counters.

  “You could just blind everybody over sixty-five,” I say.

  “There’s a thought.” Harry thinks a moment. “Maybe I’ll write it up. The idea, I mean.”

  “Good. Just do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t do it on the firm’s stationery.”

  “There you go,” he gripes, “running a good idea into the ground again.” Within a few seconds Harry’s back to tapping a cadence with his fingers on the table.

  Harry and I have been together for nearly fifteen years, through a marriage—mine—that ended with cancer for my wife, Nikki. He is uncle and godfather to my daughter, Sarah, who is now seventeen going on thirty. A straight-A student, she won’t give me a glimmer as to which college or university she wants to attend until she waxes her snowboard and checks out the slopes in each area. This could take a while, as she seems in no hurry. Nor am I anxious to push her out the door. There are times when Sarah seems to be the last contact I have with life as I knew it in happier days.

  Harry takes his foot off the bench and glances out through the louvered blinds in the window. “Here they come.”

  Outside, I can hear the jangle of chains and the shuffle of feet coming this way. Two guards, one of them I recognize, a brute who once tried out at summer camp with the 49ers. Between them is a smaller guy, seemingly dwarfed by the two giants on either side.

  “What’s this about?” Harry is talking about the security.

  “I don’t know.” I begin to wonder if Ruiz has been trouble in the jail. The jangling metal procession stops outside the door.

  By now most clients under indictment for murder, after having been handed off from one lawyer to another, would be a jittery bag of nerves, on edge and itching for answers. But as I watch him standing outside the door, one of the guards working on the waist chain, disconnecting it from the manacles that bind the prisoner’s hands behind his back, Ruiz appears to be none of these.

  He appears calm, collected, his skin dusky, his face angular and thin, framed by short closely cropped dark hair. In a crowd he would not stand out: the anonymous man. He is of average height—I would say five-ten—well proportioned, with a wiry physique that seems more sinew than muscle. Good-looking, but not enough to be noticeable in a lineup. He appears fit, his arms showing well-veined and -toned biceps and broad shoulders. He is dressed in a jail-issue tank-top T-shirt, baggy cotton sweatpants, and pair of low-top canvas slip-on shoes with rubber soles.

  The only visible blemishes are a couple of tiny pockmarks on his forehead and chin, and a small scar over the bridge of his nose at a point where it deviates just slightly to the left, leading me to suspect that his nose might have been broken at one time. There is a tattoo on the bicep of his left arm, what looks like the head of an eagle in profile, its beak sharp and open as if ready to take a bite.

  Behind bars for more than four months now, even with the restraint of the chains, Ruiz still bears himself with a certain confidence. It’s not the slick, false bravado, the cock-of-the-walk pimp roll of the jailhouse crowd, but something different. I’m just about to turn and say something to Harry when Ruiz does something so fast that, had I blinked, I would have missed it. With one of the guards still holding his left arm at the elbow, Ruiz lifts both feet off the ground, knees to his chest, his upper body stationary as if it’s suspended in air, and in a single fluid motion he jumps the manacles so that his hands are now in front of him, feet on the floor again.

  “Did you see that?” Harry cranes his neck as he stares through the window in the door. “You ever see anybody do that before?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve never seen anybody do that.”

  Neither have the guards, from the look on their faces.

  “Guy must be double-jointed,” says Harry. “I tried that, I’d end up with both shoulders out of the sockets and a hernia from the handcuffs wedged in my crotch.”

  Ruiz is not your usual inmate.

  “Maybe that explains the security,” Harry muses.

  “Could be.”

  “Let’s hope he’s not one of those guys needs to be rolled into court strapped to a furniture dolly, wearing a hockey mask to
keep ‘im from sinking his fangs into you.”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies,” I tell him.

  “Fine. You get to roll the dolly in and outta court,” says Harry. “They’re not doing all this shit out there”—he gestures loosely toward the window, turning away just before he finishes his thought in case Ruiz can read lips—“for their health. I take that back. They probably are doing it for their health. So what do we know about this guy?”

  “What are you looking for, references? The man’s charged with murder.”

  “I’m just looking to make sure he’s not gonna eat us both before the guards come back.”

  “He looks normal to me.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.” Harry is a good lawyer. A bit of a worrier at times, but that goes with the trade. He is also very practical. He’s been jumped twice by clients in the courtroom and once during a jail conference when Harry refused to put a psychotic client’s cooked-up alibi witness on the stand.

  Call it an occupational hazard. Get a bad result in a criminal case and an uncollected fee may be the least of your problems. One of Harry’s old law school profs once told him “When you practice on the criminal side, you want to represent your clients vigorously, but you don’t bring them home to meet Mom.” Harry calls it keeping a proper social distance Like he says, “Most of these people have been arrested for a reason.”

  “Actually, he’s clean. No prior criminal record, at least not in civilian life. Military record is a little more clouded.”

  “What, as in My Lai massacre?” Harry’s looking at me.

  “Nothing like that; just a few blank spots we need to fill in. Some of his unit assignments are a little sketchy. According to Kendal, we just need to get copies of the records.”

  When I got the first call in Ruiz’s case, I received a file with some materials. Inside, along with documents was a photograph, an eight-by-ten glossy, black-and-white, a shot of Ruiz in his uniform, garrison cap in hand, standing somewhere on a street, cobblestones and old buildings in the background. He stands there staring directly into the camera lens as if looking right through it. It was as if the figure in that photograph could peer right through me, and could see my soul.

  While he stands outside the door, as one of the guards now works to remove the manacles from his hands, what strikes me besides Ruiz’s composure—his apparent self-possessed lack of fear in the face of a capital charge—is the brooding fix of his lifeless eyes. I could be wrong. The hollow gaze I see staring back at me through the glass could be the look of a cold killer. Anything is possible. But that’s not what I see. What I see is the thousand-yard stare, what I have always remembered as Evo’s eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I introduce myself.

  Ruiz smiles, a little sheepishly, and shakes my hand. But it is his first stated concern that would endear him to most lawyers.

  “One question,” he says. “How the hell am I supposed to pay you guys? You do understand I’m out of a job right now?”

  Except for his Army pension, which isn’t much at present, Ruiz has no means of support.

  “For the moment somebody else is picking up the tab,” I tell him.

  “Who?”

  “An organization of retired military men. People like yourself. Some of them started businesses and have been quite successful. They set up a trust fund some years ago. Our firm has handled criminal cases for them in the past. We got the call on your case.”

  “Kendal told me you would be coming by. You come well recommended.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “So, you’ve done cases like this before?”

  “You mean paid for out of the fund?”

  “I mean a murder case.”

  Though he doesn’t say it, what he means is a death case, a trial in which capital punishment could be the ultimate result.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I hope you won them all.”

  I smile. “I have never had a client executed, except once.”

  He looks at me with a somewhat stark expression.

  “I never took much pleasure in the result.” I change the subject. “This is my partner, Harry Hinds.”

  He shakes Harry’s hand. “Mind if we sit? Ankle chains start to wear on me if I stand too long.”

  “Please.”

  Ruiz half steps, dragging the chains on the concrete floor toward the stainless-steel table with its welded benches on each side like a metal picnic table. It is bolted to the floor against one wall in the small conference room on the third floor of the jail.

  As Ruiz angles himself onto one of the benches, Harry taps on the thick acrylic window in the door. The guard opens it and looks at him through the crack.

  “Maybe you could take the ankle chains off our client,” Harry tells him.

  The guard shakes his head. “Sorry. Can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Orders.”

  “We see clients here all the time. This is the first time—”

  “First time for everything.” The guard closes the door in Harry’s face.

  Ruiz laughs. “That’s good, you talk to them. Kendal didn’t have any more luck than you just did. Only time they take the chains off is in court. And then there’s six of ‘em in uniform hanging over me like a dark cloud.”

  “I’ll talk to the sheriff. If I have to, I’ll get a writ.” Harry makes a note.

  “You’re hired.” Ruiz looks at me and smiles. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

  I don’t, but Harry does. My partner’s fallen off the smokeless wagon again. He offers one to Ruiz, then lights it for him.

  Ruiz takes a long drag, sucking the noxious vapor deep into his lungs, then settles back onto the bench seat and blows a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “Startin’ to like you guys already,” he says. “Now, if you could just get me a good-lookin’ woman …” He takes another drag, holds the smoke for a few seconds, then expels it through his nose. “Good-lookin’, hell,” he says. “‘Bout now anything would look good. Four months in this hole. It’s not that I haven’t been in worse places, you understand. It’s just that in those other places, they did things every once in a while to keep you entertained—break the monotony, so to speak.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Different places. Other countries. You know what they say: ‘Join the Army, see the world.’ Or is that the Navy?”

  “What exactly did they do to entertain you? In these other places?” Harry wants to know.

  “Oh. Sometimes they might use your tongue for an ashtray, put out their cigarettes on it. Other times they’d clean your fingernails with a knife.” He holds up his right hand and waves the fingers as if to show us a ring. “Drive it right up in there,” says Ruiz. The nails from the middle two fingers are gone. Just a little cuticle and wrinkled skin remaining. “Then, for a little variation on the theme, they’d wake you in the morning with a good beating, either truncheons or a cane, depending whether they wanted to work on the bottom of your feet or your back and legs. But these assholes”—Ruiz gestures with a slight nod of the head toward the guard outside—“they just leave you in your cell twenty-three hours a day.”

  “Some of my other clients claim they beat the crap out of them over here all the time,” says Harry. “If you like, I can talk to the guards, see what I can do.”

  Ruiz laughs. “No, thanks. But maybe you can see if you can get me out of here. What are the chances of bail?”

  This is not likely. A capital case involving a high-profile victim, a defendant with few contacts in the community, and a penchant for travel … If Ruiz were to disappear, the judge who sprung him would have a lot of questions to answer. We put the issue of bail on the back burner for now.

  He takes another drag, removes the cigarette from his mouth, and looks at it as he inhales the smoke deep into his lungs. “Kendal’s people, none of ‘em smoke,” he says. “Health nuts every one. Gonna live forever, I suppose. Fu
cking humorless bunch to boot. Don’t know why I miss ‘em so. Bit of a mystery, though.”

  “What’s that?” says Harry.

  “Why did Kendal quit the case?” he asks. “He pitched it in right after the preliminary hearing. I thought he did a pretty fair job. I mean, he couldn’t have expected to win there, what with all the evidence they had stacked up against us like that.”

  “You think they’re out to get you?”

  Ruiz is looking at the guard outside the door as I ask the question.

  “What, him? No. He’s just doing his job. Working stiff like me. He’s gonna do whatever they tell him. But Kendal pisses me off. No excuse to cut and run. And I thought we hit it off pretty well. Then he ups and quits on me. I wasn’t mad at him for losing the prelim. Hell, anybody could have done that.”

  “I trust you’ll cut us the same slack if we lose at trial,” says Harry.

  “Your partner’s got a good sense of humor,” he tells me. “You I’m still trying to figure out.”

  “According to what I understand, Mr. Kendal had a conflicted calendar. Two other trials coming up,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, that was the story he told me, too.” Ruiz is busy bending over, sitting on the bench, adjusting the chains on one ankle, cigarette dangling from his lip as he glances up at me from under hooded lids. “Still, it would be nice to know exactly how they got to him.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Harry wants to know.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” says Ruiz. “Who do you think? The government, that’s who.”

  “Why do you think the DA—”

  “I’m not talking about the DA. I said the government. There’s only one government counts in this country, and that’s the federal government, as in U.S.”

  Harry dances his pupils in my direction, the kind of look he normally reserves for clients relegated to a padded cell.

  “Yeah, I know. But if you want to analyze me, at least let me lay on the table.” Ruiz sniffs Harry’s judgment from the ether in the room without even looking up. “We’ll see how long it takes them to reach you.”

  “What makes you think the federal government is on your case?” I ask.