Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"Uh-huh, and I bet your mom will be making just that argument in front of a judge and a contingency-fee lawyer who's already picking out the color of the Rolls. Why did she call you and not me?"

"Sheer mortification, since you were always going on about something like this happening and ruining us. Also, she wanted me to collect Gog. I'll be watching both of them at Dan's place with the boys. The boys are in paradise. We're going huntin' 'n' fishin' this afternoon. I figured you didn't need to worry about them while you're involved here."

Karp raised an eyebrow. "You're, um, planning on staying there, huh? Setting up light housekeeping?"

"Yes, and what you mean by that is, are you sleeping with him? What do you think?"

He studied the ceiling tiles. "Your mom thinks it's unbridled teen lust out there."

"Yes, I know. It's sort of gross when your mom leers at you, nudgenudge, wink-wink, and I wish she'd cut it out. The problem is she's been preparing practically her whole life to be the understanding and helpful mom of a gorgeous lust bucket like she was when she was my age, and what she gets is virginal me, floating slightly above the ground. It must be quite vexing." Lucy paused and gave him one of her deep looks. "You really don't want the details of my-ha ha!-sex life, do you?"

"No. As long as you're okay."

"I'm okay." She smiled. He recalled that she was smiling a lot more nowadays, not the dry and sardonic smile she had formerly affected, but a real grin, from which light flared. "I'm actually real good."

Karp watched her walk out. Floating, yes. She had a bounce in her step that he had not noticed before. He hoped it was love, although personally he thought that Dan Heeney was not fit to tie the laces of her shoe. After he thought this, he had the good sense to laugh at himself.

He stuffed a number of documents and scrawled-upon legal pads into a cardboard folder and walked over to the courthouse. There for the next several hours he consulted with Stan Hawes about their strategy for the Wayne Cade trial, which amounted to teaching the younger man how to prevail in a high-profile homicide prosecution without seeming to teach him anything. It was subtle and tiring work. Hawes was bright enough to understand he needed help, but he was also a competitive and politically ambitious young lawyer, and his mind was at least partially on the greasy pole rather than totally devoted to the case at hand. Karp had observed this in such lawyers before this. It pissed him off, and he could not afford to be pissed off just then.

At three, they both went down to the courtroom to answer motions before Judge Bledsoe. Wayne Cade had a public defender, a man named Rob Sawyer. Sawyer had a new blue suit, a law degree nearly as old, and a light trace of acne on his cheeks. The motions were the usual pro formas: exclusion of evidence, deficiencies in the warrant, quash the indictment. Hawes answered them well enough, and Karp thought that Bledsoe would have no problem in deciding all of them in the state's favor. While Hawes was up arguing, Karp noted that young Sawyer was having difficulty attracting his client's attention. His client was more interested, seemingly, in Karp. Karp met his stare, which was predictably malevolent. Then Cade made a choking gesture and bared his teeth in a nasty grin. This was actually quite unusual. Karp had tried people who could eat Wayne Cade for lunch, and typically the really hard boys had no personal animus at all against the people whose job it was to put them in jail. Things were apparently different among the Cades. Karp rolled his eyes and looked somewhere else. He felt embarrassed for young Sawyer.

After court, Hawes and Karp went back to Hawes's office. Bledsoe had promised to rule the next day and had announced that, without objection, he wanted jury selection to begin the day after. He expected a speedy trial, with no obstructionism.

At 5:32, they were just about to knock off and go get a bite to eat when they heard a series of popping noises coming from below.

"Someone's got firecrackers left over from the Fourth," Hawes observed, and was startled when Karp leaped up and ran headlong from the room.

Dan Heeney had Emmylou Harris playing out of his computer speakers, "Sweet Dreams" the song. He was lying on his bed watching Lucy Karp lip-synch the song and play air-guitar accompaniment. That Lucy liked Emmylou Harris seemed to him the final benediction on the relationship. For her part, Lucy was not conscious of ever having heard Ms. Harris before arriving in West Virginia, being in the main a world-music sort of girl. She had decided, however, that country was actually world music from the United States. And she actually spent a good deal of time gyrating and lip-synching, in a dozen tongues, in the privacy of her room. That she was now doing it in front of a boy was to her mind a greater intimacy, almost, than getting naked.

The song ended; he applauded; she took a modest bow.

"Can you actually play anything?"

"No, not a thing. My mom tried to teach me guitar-she's good at it-but I could barely get through the first two bars of 'Go Tell Aunt Rhody.' I have perfect pitch, of course, but I could never figure out how to read music. A tragedy, huh?"

"I can play the banjo."

"You can? Oh, play something!"

"I might later, if you're good. You know, you look a little like Emmylou Harris used to."

She sputtered out a startled laugh. "Oh, yeah, I get that all the time. People stop me in the street. Except for…" She grabbed up the CD and consulted the face thereon. "She has shining, perfectly straight raven locks and I have curly brown fuzz not unlike pubic hair. She has razorsharp cheekbones; mine are barely visible. She has a cute little absolutely straight nose; I have a hideous contorted bassoon; she has lush red lips; I have thin pale objects that resemble stretched rubber bands reaching nearly to my ears. She has a broad, noble brow; mine slopes backward like that of early man. She has huge, lustrous dark eyes; mine are tiny and resemble dog poo in color. Aside from that, we could be twin sisters." She grinned at him, put a hand on her hip, cocked it, and said, "You must be in love, me bucko."

He slid away from that one, saying, "I hate it when you dis yourself like that. You have unbelievably beautiful eyes."

She nodded and batted the mentioned units ostentatiously. "Yes, I do. It's my pathetic one good feature, and I'm proud as Lucifer of them, God forgive me." She flopped next to him on the bed.

"Do you always tell the truth like that?" he asked.

"Uh-huh. I never lie, but the truth is not for everyone. My mom says that a lot, when lying. But I think I'm beginning to see what she means."

"I like your mouth, too."

"Unfashionably slitlike though it is?"

He was demonstrating how much he liked it when a sound came from just outside the door, from where the two mastiffs had been lying, facing away from each other like a pair of bookends. It came from both dogs, a kind of growling whine. Lucy jumped up, cold sweat breaking out on her face. Another sound now, tires on gravel, the roar of an engine.

"Get the boys, Dan!"

He got off the bed. "Why, what's wrong?"

She ran out of the room, out the front door, confirming what she had feared.

She ran back to Dan's doorway. "Get the boys! Go, now! Get them and hide in the woods!"

"What are you talking about?"

"It's the Cades, a bunch of them. Go out the back!"

"But what about-"

"I have the dogs. Oh, please, just don't stand there, for the love of Christ, go!"

He found himself running out the back. Lucy said something to Magog, who dashed out after him. Lucy and Gog went out onto the porch. She sat in the rocker and placed the dog next to her, talking to him gently. He was whining continuously and his back hairs bristled.