John Lescroart - The First Law

"No. Somebody shoots at you, you fire back at where the shot came from. That, as you know better than anyone, is self-defense. If you happen to kill the shooter, two things, you've proven he was behind the gun, and you get your revenge. But you don't get shot at, decide who it must have been, then go to his house and shoot him back two days later. Because what if it could have been, even should have been your guy, but it wasn't?"

"That didn't happen here."

"No? What's different?" Again she touched his hand. "My only point is you'll hurt yourself, Diz." After a minute of silence, she added, "You've got to find something, that's all. At least for yourself, if not for the law. You've got to know. Really know."

Hardy shook his head and swore under his breath. Another silence built. Broken finally again by Gina. "Here's a terrible thought," she said.

"Terrible is my favorite. What is it?"

"Just that I've got the key to David's apartment." She started running with the fantasy. "If something David owned found its way into Sephia's, say, pocket, and Blanca happened to see it, that might get to probable cause for a search. I can't believe I'm saying this."

"They do a search of his place, they got him," Hardy said, rising to the idea. "The plant would only get them inside. It would take some real evidence after that-say blood splatter on his clothes, and my guess is that there would be plenty-to arrest him."

"Right. We'd just be facilitating a legal search."

They looked at each other with a thrill almost of illicit love, both of them wondering how it would be to play outside the rules. To beat these criminals at their own game.

Finally Hardy pulled out of it. "It's a beautiful idea, Gina, but maybe we won't need it."

"I couldn't do it anyway," she said.

"I don't know if I could either."

"Probably that's a good thing," she said. "It's why they're them and we're us."

"Right," Hardy said. "If we don't do it by the book we're as bad as they are. Does something seem wrong with this picture somehow?"

Hardy and Frannie hadn't had the best night of their lives so far, and now with Glitsky's urgent and atypical call inviting himself and Treya over to talk about their options, it didn't look as though it was going to improve. They were in the kitchen, an hour after a dinner that had featured a meltdown of sorts from the kids, who had finally processed the reality that their father had been shot at and badly hurt in the bargain.

They might not know exactly what it was, but they understood that something truly bad was happening. Uncle Moses and Aunt Susan had been here until late last night, Rebecca and Vincent banished with their younger cousins to the back of the house while the adults drank and argued. This morning, their father and mother had barely spoken- were they getting divorced? Why was someone trying to hurt Dad? Were they actually trying to kill him? What were they going to do about that? What was Dad going to do? He was trying to find who it was, wasn't he? Get them arrested? What were the police doing? Were they in danger?

Hardy found it difficult to finesse these questions, particularly since Frannie wasn't helping much. She was still mad at the situation, mostly at her brother, true, but beyond that she'd been dealing with the kids' blossoming reaction to all this since six o'clock this morning, by which time her hung over husband was already long gone for work. Tears and fears. What was going to happen to them? What if Dad died? What was this all about?

"I don't want to live like this," Frannie said. "I don't know how these people have done this to us." They were keeping their voices abnormally low so that Vincent and Rebecca, doing their homework in the rooms directly behind the kitchen, would not have more cause to worry. To Hardy, the tension in the house twanged with every sound.

He crossed the kitchen and put his arms around his wife. She leaned up against him. "I don't know what to do," she said. "I just feel so helpless."

"That's what Abe and Treya are coming over for," he said. "We'll come up with some plan, the four of us."

"But I don't understand why the police, or Clarence Jackman for that matter, why they don't believe you in the first place. That's the part that's making me crazy. You didn't do anything wrong."

"That's funny. John Holiday seems to think I started the whole thing. Me and David." At Frannie's look of disbelief, he explained. "Going after Panos."

"Hello?" Frannie didn't want to hear this nonsense. "You've got over a dozen clients he's harmed one way or another. That's not you starting it."

"I tried to make that same point myself. Evidently Mr. Panos can do whatever he wants, and if somebody like me calls him on it, I'm at fault."

"John really said that?"

"More or less."

"That really makes me mad."

"You must be a bad person, too. Anyway, I tried to explain that maybe I'm not a moral paragon, but what I'm doing is within the law, whereas everything Panos has done and is doing is against it. Call me delusional, but that's a big difference."

"Did he get it? John?"

"Not really. He's not much into right and wrong. He simply pointed out that I should have been prepared to handle this stuff before I started in on Panos to begin with."

She moved back into his embrace. "It's like this bad dream where you're drowning and calling out the names of everybody who could save you on the shore right around you, but nobody hears."

"I know," Hardy said. "I know." What else could he say? That's exactly what it was like. He and Frannie were having the same nightmare.

Or maybe not exactly the same. She boosted herself up onto the kitchen counter, and she sat with her ankles crossed, her hands clasped between her legs, her head held low. "This has always been my biggest fear, you know that? That somebody was going to take all this law stuff personally and come after you. Or us. Me and the kids. And you always told me that that never happened. Except now it has."

"I know." He rested his own weight against the opposite counter. "What do you want me to say? I never thought it would."

"But now that it has… maybe we should reconsider…"

"What?"

She raised her eyes. "Maybe everything, I guess."

Hardy didn't like the sound of that at all. "Everything takes in a lot, Fran. You're not saying you and me, I hope."

"Not specifically, no… But the life we have. If it's not safe…"

"This is one moment, Fran. It's not our life. Our life has been good. It still is good."

"But not living like this. If we lost the kids…"

Hardy stepped toward her. "That's not going to happen-"

"Don't!" She snapped it out, stopping him. "Don't say it's not going to happen. You don't know what's going to happen. You've always told me that this wouldn't happen."

Hardy backed off, took a breath. "So what are you saying? What do you want to do?"

"I don't know!" Anger flashed in her eyes. Then, after a beat, with some measure of calm, "I don't know. Maybe we should just leave here. Start over someplace else, with you doing something else?"

"And how do we do that exactly? What do we live on, for example?"

"We'd find something."

"Something that's going to support four of us, with two kids in college in a couple of years? I don't know how we're going to do that. And then what? Sell the house?"

"We could."

"Frannie. We can't." He approached again, but more cautiously. "Listen to me. I don't want something else. This is what I do. I'm trained in it and I'm good at it. I may even be doing some good from time to time."

"But your life is threatening all of us, Dismas. Can't you see that?"

He gathered what he felt to be the last of his reserve. He'd come to where she sat and he set his hands on either side of her hips. He felt that it would take all his strength to keep his voice modulated, and when he spoke, it was almost in a whisper. "Can't you see that what's at stake here is exactly that? The way we live, the way we want to live. Some crop of assholes comes in and threatens us, threatens that, what do you want me to do? What do you want us to do? Pack up and move? I don't believe it. Because then what?"