“Hey,” he said, then held the door open and moved aside to let in his visitor. “What took you so long?”
“Lost track of the time, sorry.” The visitor stepped inside quickly.
“You have it all?” the boy asked, wary.
The visitor nodded. The boy smiled and let the door close behind him.
Chapter 1
“Guilty? Already? What’d they do, just walk around the table and hit the buzzer?” Jake said, shaking his head incredulously.
I laughed, nodding. “I know, it’s crazy. Forty-five-minute verdict after a three-month trial,” I said as I shook my head. “I thought the clerk was kidding when she called and told me to come back to court.” I paused. “Now that I think about it, this might be my fastest win ever on a first-degree.”
“Hell, sistah, that’s the fastest win I done heard on anythang,” Toni said as she plopped down into the chair facing my desk. She talked ghetto only as a joke.
“Y’all gotta admit,” I said, “homegirl brought game this time.”
Toni gave me a disdainful look. “Uh-uh, snowflake. You can’t pull it off, so don’t try.” She reached for the mug I kept cleaned and at the ready for her on the windowsill.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got a choice: take that back and have a drink, or enjoy your little put-down and stay dry.”
Toni eyed the bottle of Glenlivet on my desk, her lips firmly pressed together, as she weighed her options. It didn’t take long. “It’s amazing. For a minute there, I thought Sister Souljah was in the room,” she said with no conviction whatsoever. She slammed her mug down on my desk. “Happy?”
I shrugged. “Not your best effort, but they can’t all be gold.” I broke the small ice tray out of my mini-fridge, dumped the cubes into her cup, and poured the equivalent of two generous shots of Glenlivet.
Toni shot me a “don’t push your luck” look and signaled a toast.
I turned to Jake and gestured to the bottle. “Maybe a token?” I asked. He was a nondrinker by nature, but he’d occasionally join in to be sociable.
He nodded and gave me that little-boy smile that could light up a room—the same one that had warmed the hearts of juries across the county. His wire-rim glasses, wavy brown hair, and country-boy, self-effacing style—the dimples didn’t hurt, though they were redundant—made a winning combination. Juries instinctively trusted him. He had a look that was almost angelic, making it hard for anyone to believe he’d even graduated from college, much less done all the backbreaking work required to finish law school and survive into his seventh year in the DA’s office. I poured him a short dog of Glenlivet with a liberal dousing of water, careful not to give him more than he could handle. I was careful not to give myself more than I could handle either: a heavy-handed, undiluted triple shot.
Toni raised her mug. “To Rachel Knight: she put the ‘speed’ in ‘speedy trial.’ ”
Jake lifted his cup. “To that,” he said with a sly grin. “Until I beat her record.”
I rolled my eyes. Jake had just thrown down the gauntlet. “Oh no, here we go,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Toni replied. She narrowed her eyes at Jake. “It’s on now, little man.”
Jake gave her a flinty smile and nodded. They looked each other in the eye as they clinked cups. We all drank, Toni and I in long pulls, Jake in a more modest sip.
Toni turned back to the matter at hand. “Was this the dope-dealer shoot-out at MacArthur Park?” she asked.
I shook my head. Toni, Jake, and I were in Special Trials, the small, elite unit that handled the most complex and high-profile cases. Though Toni was as tough and competitive as anyone in the unit, she didn’t live the job the way Jake and I did. It was one of the many ways Toni and I balanced each other.
Before I could answer, Jake said, “No, this was the one where the defendant poisoned his wife, then dumped the body off the cliff in Palos Verdes.”
Toni thought for a moment. “Oh yeah. Body washed out to sea, right? And they never found a murder weapon.”
I nodded.
Toni shook her head, smiling. “Evidence is for pussies,” she said with a laugh. “You really are my hero.” She raised her mug for another toast.
“I got lucky,” I said with a shrug, raising mine to join her.
Toni made a face. “Oh please. Can you stop with the ‘I’m so humble’ stuff already? I’ve seen you pull these beasts together before. Nobody else drags their ass all over this county the way you do.” She turned to Jake and added, “ ’Cept maybe you.” She took another sip, then sat back. “Both of you are ridiculous, and you know it.”
Jake and I exchanged a look. We couldn’t argue. From the moment Jake had transferred into Special Trials two years ago, we’d found in each other a kindred workaholic spirit. Being a prosecutor was more than a career for us—it was a mission. Every victim’s plight became our own. It was our duty to balance their suffering with some measure of justice. But by an unspoken yet entirely mutual agreement, our passion for the work never led us into personal territory—either physically or verbally. We rarely had lunch outside the building together, and during the long nights after court when we’d bat our cases around, we never even considered going out to dinner; instead we’d raid my desk supply of tiny pretzels, made more palatable by the little packets of mustard Jake snatched from the courthouse snack bar. Not once in all those long nights had we ever discussed our lives outside the office—either before or after becoming prosecutors. I knew that this odd boundary in our relationship went deeper than our shared devotion to the job. It takes one to know one, and I knew that I never asked personal questions because I didn’t want to answer them. Jake played it close to the vest in the same way I did: don’t ask, don’t tell, and if someone does ask—deflect. The silent awareness of that shared sensibility let us relax with each other in a way we seldom could with anyone else.
“Well, she’s not entirely wrong, Tone,” Jake said with a smirk. “She did get lucky—she had Judge Tynan.”
Toni chuckled. “Oh sweet Jesus, you did get lucky. How many times did you slip?”
“Not too bad this time,” I admitted. “I only said ‘asshole’ once.”
“Not bad for you,” Toni remarked, amused. “When?”
“During rebuttal argument. And I was talking about one of my own witnesses.”
My inability to rein in my colorful language once I got going had earned me fines on more than one occasion. You’d think this financial incentive would’ve made me clean up my act. It hadn’t. All it had done was inspire me to keep a slush fund at the ready.
“There is an undeniable symmetry to your contempt citations,” Toni observed. “What did Tynan do?”
“Just said, ‘I’m warning you, Counsel.’ ” I sighed, took another sip of my drink, and stretched my legs out under the desk. “I wish I had all my cases in front of him.”
“Hah!” Jake snorted. “You’d wear out your welcome by your second trial, and you’d be broke by your third.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Jake shrugged. “Hey, I’m just sayin’…”
I laughed and threw a paper clip at him. He caught it easily in an overhand swipe, then looked out at the clock on the Times Building. “Shit, I’ve got to run. Later, guys.” He put down his cup and left. The sound of his footsteps echoed down the hallway.
I turned to Toni. “Refresher?” I said as I held up the bottle of Glenlivet.