David Rosenfelt - One Dog Night

“Okay. See you in Vegas.”

“You going to be there?”

Loney smiled. “See you in Vegas.”

“Who are you guys?” Danny asked. “Come on, level with me.”

“Concerned citizens.”

“Connected concerned citizens?”

Loney didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Danny was smart enough to know that these guys were not people to mess with, and he immediately discarded the idea of holding them up for more money. Instead he was going to make himself indispensable to them, until they brought him into the club.

The flight out to Vegas was pretty comfortable, considering Danny was in coach. The seat next to him was empty, and Danny utilized the tray in front of the empty seat to rest his bloody marys. He had six of them, and only stopped when the good-looking flight attendant told him he had had enough.

He could have told her there was never enough.

A driver met Danny at baggage claim. He called Danny “Mr. Butler,” and asked how his flight was, and a lot of other meaningless kind of stuff. Danny kept up his side of the conversation as best he could, but his mind was on the bar at the Mirage.

The driver took Danny’s bags and led him out to the curb. He then spoke into a walkie-talkie kind of device, and Danny realized that this wasn’t the driver, that he was only calling for the car. These guys had their act together.

The car pulled up, and they loaded Danny’s bags into the trunk. Danny half climbed, half fell into the backseat, as the actual driver welcomed “Mr. Butler” to Vegas.

They drove off, and Danny was asleep before they got out of the airport. He woke up a short time later, as the parking attendant at the Mirage opened the door.

Except it wasn’t the parking attendant at the Mirage; it was somebody else, who got into the backseat next to Danny. And Danny barely had time to realize that they weren’t at the hotel at all, they were on a dark street, in front of what looked like a vacant warehouse.

Within three seconds the man had a device around Danny’s neck, but it took almost thirty seconds to make sure he was dead.

After which they drove off again.

I decide to take Hike with me to the jail.

On one level, it seems to make perfect sense. It’s a depressing place, colored grey and filled with people who have for the most part moved past desperate into hopeless. Hike is a depressing person, an incurable pessimist who himself sees the world through grey-colored glasses.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes an offer on a cell, maybe with a watch-tower view.

“So you owned the same dog?” Hike asks, moments after he gets in the car.

“Yes.”

“That’s it?” he asks.

I nod. “That’s it.”

“I’m not missing anything?”

“Nope.”

“Why do you care about that?” he asks.

“Hike, you don’t have a dog, right?”

“No way. I’d wind up with the mange, and I’d break out in rash pimples, filled with pus. I hate pus.”

“Really?” I asked. “I love pus. But the thing is, him owning Tara creates sort of a curiosity, like a bond in some way. It’s like if you were married, and you met your wife’s first husband, you’d be curious, right?”

“No.”

Hike has a law degree from Yale, and an M.B.A. from Harvard, but curiosity is not his thing. He figures that the more he finds out about something, the more depressed it will make him. He’s probably right.

Once we get to the county jail, it takes about twenty minutes to get through security, and we spend another twenty waiting in a small visiting attorneys room for Galloway to be brought in.

I’ve seen him on television a couple of times, but he looks taller and thinner in person. He also wasn’t handcuffed in those TV appearances, but he certainly is now.

“Mr. Carpenter, I’m sorry about this,” is the first thing he says.

“About what?”

“My wife asking you to come down here. I didn’t want her to do that.”

“She’s trying to help you,” I say. “This is my associate, Eddie Lynch.”

“Hike,” is how he corrects me. “How’s the food here?”

Galloway shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“Watch out for bugs in the salad. I accidentally ate a couple of bugs once, I think at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. They wound up taking a stand in my gut; I couldn’t get rid of them. They turned my intestines into the goddamn Alamo.”

“Thanks for sharing that, Hike,” I say, and then turn back to Galloway. “So what can I do for you?”

“Not much.”

“Do you have an attorney?” I ask.

“They assigned the public defender to me for the purposes of the arraignment. He seemed to handle it well enough.”

The sense I get from Galloway is very different from every other recently arrested person I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. Usually they are afraid, especially those who’ve been arrested for the first time. They don’t know what is ahead of them, but they know it’s going to be awful.

Some of them, the more experienced ones, are angry. Angry at themselves for getting caught, and angry at the authorities for catching them.

A lot of people claim to be able to judge someone’s emotional state by looking in their eyes. I don’t make eye contact, so it’s a talent I’ve never perfected. When I talk to people, I generally look at their mouth, so while I can’t judge emotions, I’m pretty good at identifying cavities.

But there is no mistaking the vibes that Noah Galloway is giving off. He is tired, maybe even a little relieved, and wearily resigned to his fate. It’s depressing, and being in a room with Galloway and Hike, in a prison no less, is about as dreary as it gets.

I want to get out of here as fast as possible, so I quickly make a verbal agreement with Galloway that, for the sum of one dollar, Hike and I will serve as his lawyers for the next two hours. I’m hoping that two hours from now I’ll be home walking Tara, but I use it as an outside amount of time. Galloway has no money on him, so I accept his promise to pay. We do all this so that anything he tells us will be covered by attorney-client privilege, though he seems unconcerned by it either way.

Once that’s accomplished, he quickly tells us that he has always known that he set the fire, but that he has no recollection of doing so. It comes as no surprise, since Becky had said the exact same thing. But it still makes very little sense, so I ask him to explain his feelings of guilt.

“I had hit bottom,” he says. “Except I didn’t bounce off the bottom; I stuck to it. My entire world revolved around drugs, pretty much every dollar I had went to pay for them. And I didn’t have many dollars.

“I would have blackout periods, sometimes lasting for a day or more. When I would wake up, I had no idea what I had done, or how I had gotten to the physical place I was in. It was scary, but not as scary as you would think.”

“Why not?” Hike asks.

“Because I really didn’t care that much if I lived or died, so there was nothing to be scared of. And if I did live, dealing with blackouts was not important; getting drugs was the first and only priority.”

Galloway is saying all this in a fairly dispassionate way, with no apparent embarrassment, or emotion. It seems he has long ago come to terms with what he was in those days.

He continues. “So I woke up one day from a two-day binge, in my apartment. The drugs hadn’t worn off, not even close, but it was the pain that brought me out of it.”

“What kind of pain?”

“I had burns on both of my arms. Chemical burns.”

For the first time, I’m seeing emotion in Galloway as he gets closer to talking about the fire that killed all those people. I don’t want to ask him anything yet; I find that when a story is pouring out voluntarily, questions can be a distraction.