weeks, but she’s okay now, right?”
She didn’t appear to have heard me. “The girlfriend had to have four separate surgeries, but she’s mostly all right. But the client, the shooter, went to jail.”
“You lost the case.”
This time, Abigail heard me, and her face sharpened. She met my eyes for the first time in a number of minutes. “It had a lot to do with the fact that he was really, really guilty,” she said. “When six people see you shoot somebody, it’s hard to say you were actually at the Dairy Queen.”
“Sorry.” I dumped the last of the glass into the bag and put the broom down.
“It’s okay,” she said, dismissing my apology with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, he got six years. But he got himself another lawyer, and he’s appealing the decision. The client—his name is Preston Burke—is out on bail.”
It took me a second. “And you think he’s out to get you for losing his case?”
“I got a letter at the office last week from him, and while the language wasn’t direct enough for me to file a complaint, it was obvious he blamed me for his conviction.”
“Yeah, clearly it was your fault he shot his girlfriend. You shouldn’t have made him do that,” I said. I sat down next to Abby on the stairs and put an arm around her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. You were all caught up in this thing with Ms. Cleavage, and I didn’t. . . I don’t know. . . lawyers get letters like that, but. . .” Abby looked at me, words failing her, and I held her close in my arms.
“It’s okay, baby,” I said. “We’ll deal with it together.”
Chapter
Twenty
The first order of business Saturday morning was to find someone who could repair what was left of our front window. It’s tricky, since the bow window was made of nine separate panes of glass in a tic-tac-toe design, and two of them, plus a piece of the frame, had been destroyed by the rock. I called a few of the names under “glass” in the Yellow Pages, and finally got one guy who agreed to come out and take a look. I almost had to promise him my firstborn male child to get that, but I figured Ethan probably wouldn’t notice the difference until it was time to pay for college.
Once that was out of the way, and I had patched up the window to keep some of the breeze out, I picked up the bag with the offending projectile in it and walked to police headquarters.
Barry Dutton wasn’t in yet, but his only detective, Lt. Gerry Westbrook, was. Just my luck. Westbrook had gotten into the police academy on a scholarship for the mentally challenged, and had conducted his long, undistinguished career on the police force with such excellence that it had taken him more tries to become a detective than it took Susan Lucci to win an Emmy.
I’m no snappy dresser, but Westbrook was wearing an outfit that would make Emmett Kelly blush: his sports jacket had kept Polly and Esther weaving for a week, and was so loud a plaid people shouted at Westbrook to be heard over it. I can’t describe his pants, because there are some things I make it a point never to look at, and the lower half of Gerry Westbrook is one of them. He couldn’t see his feet on his best day. But I know he was wearing shoes because I heard them squeak when he walked into Barry’s office to talk to me,
“What is it now, Tucker?” he said by way of greeting.
“What’s the matter, Gerry?” I asked. “Get up on the wrong side of the sty this morning?” His hand went to his left eye, as he misinterpreted the comment. Gerry is as quick-witted as he is stylish.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked. “Someone’s head?” Westbrook laughed, for reasons known only to him.
I dumped the rock onto Barry’s desk, and Westbrook, who is built a little bit like Lou Costello, only heavier, jumped back for a moment.
“Those lightning-quick cop reflexes at work again, huh, Gerry?” I said. “Don’t worry—it’s not loaded.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Where I come from, we call it a rock,” I offered. “This one came flying through my window at a quarter of two this morning. And look, it’s inscribed.”
Westbrook stared at the rock for a moment as if it were the Rosetta Stone and he was in charge of decoding