Joel Goldman - Deadlocked

Mason didn't argue with her. He called his knack for getting in over his head diving into dark water. He used to rationalize that it was a by-product of trying to find the kind of law he wanted to practice-big firm, small firm, good pay, or good works. That was part of it, but not the part that drove him to take chances they didn't prepare you for in law school.

Something was missing in his existence and he kept looking for it in close encounters between life and death. With Gina Davenport's case, he'd come as close to the line as he dared, risking not only his life, but also Abby's, chips he vowed not to play again. This case, he told her, would be different. It was only about money and memories.

"It's still murder," she told him. Mason didn't argue or complain when she held him so tight he thought his scar might tear open. He didn't tell her about Sonni Efron or the stone on his parents' graves, two wild cards he didn't have a grasp on. "Are you going to sue Whitney King?" she asked.

"If I don't fire my client first. I chewed Nick out about the e-mails he sent to King and I told him that he was on his own if he didn't stop."

"How did Nick take that?" Abby asked.

"About as well as any eighteen-year-old takes getting yelled at by an adult, but he got the point. He's not a bad kid and he hasn't had it easy, so I cut him some slack."

"So, are you going to file the lawsuit?"

"Sandra Connelly didn't give me much choice. If I don't file in the next couple of weeks, Nick's case will be barred by the statute of limitations. He's got a good enough case against King that I can't take that chance."

"What about Mary Kowalczyk? Can you get a pardon for her son?"

Mason flopped back on his pillow. "The case against King is tough enough. Finding witnesses fifteen years later won't be easy. Even if I find them, their memories may not stand up under Sandra's cross-examination. Plus the two investigating detectives are my closest friends. Sandra will make us look like coconspirators. That's a cakewalk compared to the pardon. All I have to do is convince a governor running for reelection to admit that he ordered the execution of an innocent man."

"Will you make it dangerous?" she asked, rolling away from him.

"No," he promised, stroking her side, feeling her muscles tense at his touch, both of them wanting to believe him. He wanted to tell her that it wasn't all up to him, but he knew Abby believed in a different kind of free will.

Abby got up, closing the bathroom door behind her. Mason slipped on a pair of boxers and stepped over his dog, Tuffy, a German Shepherd-Collie mixed breed, sleeping on a pillow under the window. He padded down the hardwood hall from the bedroom on bare feet to turn on the attic fan, stopping at a window on the front of the house, raising it open. A full-bodied oak tree, its leaves an early brown from lack of water, rustled in the thin current of air passing through its limbs. The branches fragmented his view of the street. A moonless sky had dropped a black curtain on the city.

A car crept down the block. An expensive sedan. Japanese or German, Mason guessed. The driver doused the headlights, slowing to a crawl when it reached Mason's house. The passenger window slid down. A sharp flash exploded from inside the car, the spit of a bullet barely heard. The first floor window directly beneath where he stood shattered along with his promise to Abby, setting off his house alarm.

Abby burst from the bedroom, clutching a towel over her body with one hand, her other hand clamped over her scar. Mason wanted to tell her that it was nothing, that it wasn't his fault, and that he was sorry. He stood in the hall looking at her shake, not saying a word because he knew it wouldn't matter.

The alarm company sent the cops. Mason and Abby were just getting dressed when they arrived, Mason in gym shorts and a T-shirt, no shoes. Abby marched down the stairs, past the cops toward her car parked on the street as she tucked her sleeveless turtleneck into her cargo shorts. Mason followed her, his bare feet slapping the concrete walk. Tuffy trailed both of them, her tail on high alert.

"Don't go," he said, catching her arm as she reached the curb.

"I'm not doing this again, Lou! I told you that."

"It was probably just some kids. There's no proof it has anything to do with this case."

"Are you delusional?" she demanded. "You're hired to prove Whitney King murdered two people, his lawyer tells you to back off, and someone tries to kill you. All in less than twenty-four hours. If it's not connected, you're the king of bad luck!"

"No one tried to kill me, Abby," Mason pled. "The house was dark. It was the middle of the night. The shooter was counting on no one being on the first floor of the house."

"Fine," she said, pulling her car door open. "Whoever did it wasn't trying to kill you. It was just their way of saying hello. You can live that kind of life, Lou. People killing and getting killed. You and Blues pretending it's all water off a duck's back. Well, it's not water. It's blood. I know. I killed somebody and the blood didn't wash off my back. It stuck. I can't do this any more," she added, her hands raised in protest. "I can't."

Abby drove away, her parking spot taken by an unmarked police car, two detectives joining the four uniformed cops already securing his house. Mason tugged at the rough growth on his chin, clawing heat-stunted grass with his toes as Tuffy rubbed against his thigh. The dome light came on as the detectives opened the door. Samantha Greer stepped out from the passenger side.

"My luck," Samantha said. "I come out here at two o'clock in the morning for a busted window. You're not even shot."

Mason and Samantha had dated intermittently, for hormonal reasons as far as Mason was concerned. He broke it off when Samantha said she wanted something more and Mason told her he was fresh out of anything else. Mason met Abby shortly after that. Samantha gave up any hope of getting him back.

Samantha had shoulder-length blonde hair, green eyes, and a compact body that he hadn't thought about in months. Facing her in the dark, flush from the heat and sex, his memories of her surfaced like the twitch of an involuntary muscle, compounding his guilt about Abby.

"You get paid the same whether or not I got shot, so don't complain," he told her.

"That Abby?" she asked, pointing to the car disappearing at the end of Mason's long block.

"Yeah. Shootings make her jumpy. She went home. You can talk to her tomorrow if you need to, but she didn't see anything. She was in the bathroom."

Samantha asked him, "How about you? What did you see?"

Mason told her, Samantha writing it down. Her partner, a rumpled, overweight, middle-age guy with a bad comb-over stood back, letting her handle the interview.

"What's it all about, Lou?" she asked him.

Mason ran both hands through his hair, shaking his head. "Beats the hell out of me, Sam."

"It usually does, Counselor. Go after any bad guys lately? Piss off any good guys with bad tempers?"

Mason grinned, one reaction Samantha could count on from him. She understood him and didn't try to change him. Then again, they weren't sleeping together anymore. Maybe, Mason thought, she'd be less casual about his capacity to find trouble if they were.

"You remember the King and Kowalczyk case, the two high school kids convicted of killing that couple, Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes?"

"Sure," Samantha said. "That was Harry's and Blues's case. I was just out of the academy. Ryan Kowalczyk was executed the other day, wasn't he?"

"That he was."

"What's that got to do with you?" she asked. As Mason told her, Samantha listened. This time her partner was taking notes. When he finished she said, "Are you telling me Whitney King was using your front window for target practice?"