The Gentlemen's Hour Page 0,109

have been very frightening.”

“It was.”

Yeah, he thinks, looking at her, you were so terrified that you found the pistol in your bureau drawer and calmly gunned down a professional hit man. How can I let talent like that walk out my door? “You realize that there are going to be about eight zillion lawsuits coming out of your chart here? And that many of them will be politically difficult for me, and for the firm? Do you know the pressure that’s going to come down on us from on high?”

“Absolutely.”

Alan turns away and looks out at the city again. Maybe, he thinks, it needs shaking to the core, maybe it’s time to take it apart and rebuild it, and maybe there are worse things to do in the last phase of your career.

He turns back to Petra and says, “Okay, start contacting homeowners and signing them up. Do an assets search on Paradise and its related companies with an eye to freezing them, and . . . why aren’t you already moving?”

“I want to be made partner,” she says.

“Or maybe I should just fire you,” Alan answers.

“I’ll require a corner office, of course.”

He trains his plea-bargaining, settlement-negotiating evil stare on her. She doesn’t blink.

Alan laughs. “Okay, gunslinger. Partner. Call maintenance and make it thus. But Petra—”

“Yes?”

“We’d better win.”

“Oh, we’ll win,” she says. “Alan, what about Corey Blasingame?”

“We have a meeting with Mary Lou in thirty,” he says.

“Did she give any hint?”

He shakes his head.

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As does Mary Lou Baker.

At John Kodani.

She looks up from the stack of documents that he dropped on her desk, shakes her head again, sighs, and says, “You’ve been a busy boy, sergeant. First the arrest of Dan Nichols, then a raid that nets Cruz Iglesias, then this . . . dirty bomb. Anything else you want to drop on me today?”

“That ought to do it.”

“Oh, it ought to “do it,” all right.”

Johnny picked Mary Lou Baker to bring the records to because (a) she’d been busting his chops on the Blasingame case and (b) she was the one prosecutor he knew with the integrity and the stones to take this up and start filing charges.

“You do know you’re ruining my career, don’t you?” she asks him as she looks at the papers and winces.

“Or making it,” he says.

“Same for you, chum,” Mary Lou says. “Romero wanted you strung up by the cojones, but he can’t do that now that you’re the hero of a shoot-out, and Iglesias and all. But did you have to save a defense attorney, John? Bad taste.”

“She was the only lawyer in the room,” Johnny answers. “Besides, she pulled me out of the soup.”

“We should recruit her for the good guys team,” Mary Lou says.

“We could do worse,” Johnny says. “What about Corey Blasingame?”

“What about him?”

“What are you going to do?”

Her intercom buzzes. “Alan Burke and partner here for you.”

“I’ll be right out,” Mary Lou says. Then, to Johnny, “I don’t know yet. Let’s go find out.”

Johnny follows her into the conference room.

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Boone, Petra, and Alan are already seated at the table.

Mary Lou and Johnny sit down across from them.

Alan smiles and opens, “I’m taking it to trial.”

“You’ll lose,” Mary Lou says.

“The fuck I will,” Alan answers. “Your first three witnesses are garbage, the next two have recanted, which will make clowns of your investigating officers.”

Boone glances at Johnny. Face set in stone, but his cheeks turn red.

Boone looks away.

“We still have the confession,” Mary Lou says.

“Yeah, go with that,” Alan says. “I can’t wait to feed it piece by piece to Sergeant Kodani here. How do you like your crow, detective? A little salt and pepper?”

Johnny doesn’t say anything. Boone can’t look at him, and Petra stares at the table.

Mary Lou stands up. “If there’s nothing else . . .”

Johnny stands up too.

Looks at Boone with disgust.

“Come on, sit down, Mary Lou,” Alan says. “We don’t want it to end this way.”

Mary Lou sits back down. “Neither Harrington’s borderline subornation of perjury nor Kodani’s assertive interview of the defendants changes the fact that your client, at least partially motivated by racial hatred, at least participated in a beating that cost a human life.”

“Agreed.”

“He has to do some serious time for that, Alan.”

“Also agreed,” Alan says. “But he didn’t throw the fatal punch, Mary Lou. That was Bodin. And he wasn’t the ringleader. That was Bodin too.”

“There are practical reasons why I can’t go after Bodin.”

“That doesn’t mean you should single Corey out for special punishment,” Alan responds. “There’s an issue of