John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

'Hey, guy. Sorry.' He gave him a scratch between the ears. The dog, tail between his legs, leaned into him for a few seconds, then led him to the kitchen. Wes had to be proud of him – Bart had pulled yesterday's Chronicle onto the floor from the table and used it properly. But Wes could tell he was embarrassed.

He really wasn't in the mood to take Bart for his walk in the trolley tracks that ran down 19th Avenue, but he felt it was his duty. His care for Bart was somehow his psychic life raft – his connection to the person he'd been when there had still been a home, kids, wife, a job – responsibilities that had sustained him and given him some day-to-day meaning. Now there was just Bart, and Wes knew he was just a dumb dog, but he wasn't really ready to give up on taking care of him.

Not that he was especially good at it – as the past hours had proved. But he hadn't been particularly successful at the earlier efforts with his family either.

Bart, turned loose, ran ahead, found a likely spot, took care of business. Shivering, still in his shorts and T-shirt, Wes walked on the black asphalt path along the tracks.

There had been feeble sunlight while he was driving back from where he had parked near the Shamrock last night, but as the earth turned the sun had hidden itself behind a lowering cloud cover. Now no one else was out. There were no shadows because there was no sun. No wind. The place, the normally humming thoroughfare – the whole city, come to think of it – seemed unnaturally, eerily silent. Wes stopped, listening. Bart reappeared from somewhere and sat beside him.

Turning, he caught a flutter of white in the corner of his eye and left the path and went over to it. He tore the makeshift wanted poster down from where it had been tacked to a telephone pole.

Maybe Kevin hadn't intentionally blown him off, after all. Maybe he hadn't had a choice. He stared at the poster – that was Kevin, all right. The boy was in some deep shit.

Back in his apartment, Wes took a hot shower, put on a pair of heavy flannel pajamas and – congratulating himself for his self-control – drank down two large glasses of tabasco-spiked Clamato juice without any vodka. Then poured himself a third.

He was in what he referred to as his living salon, waiting for Morpheus to call him, drinking his Clamato juice, absently petting Bart behind the ears, across his neck. He hated to admit it, but the damn dog gave him a great deal of comfort.

Part of him didn't really want to hear from Kevin. Probably the boy had just been out tying one on, got confused, then figured out what he was going to do all by himself. That was probably it.

But, as of late last night, he was still at large. What if he was not only in trouble but really did need him? Wes looked again at the poster he had brought up with him – there wasn't any doubt Kevin was in big trouble. The only question was whether or not he deserved to be. Wes was reserving judgment, but the fact remained that Kevin's call yesterday wasn't just some youthful confusion, some drunken delusion. The poster was real enough, scary enough. And the young man clearly was under the impression that he might need his services, that Wes might be able to help him…

Well, now…

Wes drank some juice and thought that if that were the case it was a whole different can of worms, wasn't it? Because the little whispering voice inside him had been nagging for weeks now – since the semester had ended in June – that he didn't care all that much about getting a doctorate in history. That had mostly been something to fill up the time while he tried to chart a new direction after his wife's, Lydia 's, departure and his best friend's, Mark Dooher's, betrayal.

Wes and Lydia had been sweethearts when they'd been young, then partners-going-on-strangers through the child-rearing years. And then, after Michelle had moved out, the silences in the big house had lengthened and deepened into trenches that neither of them could easily have crossed even if they had wanted to. And it turned out that they hadn't.

He had been a lawyer for so long, going to court, hanging around the Hall of Justice, occasionally chasing the ambulance, while she had been a mom, a PTA person, then a real-estate broker who had started her own company. In the end there wasn't anything much to talk about. He had put on twenty pounds, she had lost almost thirty. She saw her life as beginning a new phase – exciting, challenging, filled with freedom. And Wes…?

While all this was going on with his wife Lydia, Wes had been consumed with something else altogether removed from his domestic life… the trial of his best friend Mark Dooher, who had been charged with murdering his wife. Wes was Dooher's attorney, and it had been the trial of his life.

He leaned back on the couch. Why the hell wasn't sleep coming? He didn't want to think about this now. Not ever, in fact. Maybe he would go and pour in a shot or two of vodka, take the edge off.

But he didn't move.

The truth was, after everything had shaken down, Wes was left with the bereft conviction that he had lived his life and it just hadn't panned out all that well. The child-rearing years were behind him, and he felt he hadn't been much of a dad, hadn't spent enough time on the personal stuff, and now the kids were gone and he didn't know them and they didn't care to know him and he didn't blame them.

And the law – the god he had worshipped and served for all of his adult life – the law had proved to be a sham.

When Lyd had said she wanted to leave him, what had shocked him the most was that after twenty-seven years he had felt only a mild regret that he'd spent so much time in the charade if the only place it had taken them was to here.

But it was the nature of his best friend Mark Dooher's betrayal that had shaken his faith to its foundations. And he had gradually come to realize that he had just stopped caring. The natural skepticism that he had cultivated as a protective device for working with venal and dishonest clients had turned to a profound cynicism about humanity in general.

It was why he had started to drink and why he kept at it so religiously. To keep himself numb. To keep things on the surface. You move fast enough on thin ice and it won't crack. But he also felt himself slipping further and further out, away from everyone else, away from any sense that anything had meaning.

It was why he'd taken and kept and continued to care for Bart. It was also why he was suddenly so ambivalent about what might well be a stark reality – Kevin Shea could be counting on his legal help.

Potentially, another line to the raft. But also another opportunity to hope, and he was not inclined to listen to its knock, especially where the law was involved. The law – the once sacred beautiful law…

No. He couldn't let himself be drawn back to it. He wasn't going to try to help Kevin Shea or anybody else. Maybe he'd refer him – that was as far as he'd go. He wasn't going to open himself up to getting betrayed again. If that happened, he held no illusions – it would destroy his soul, if he had one, and then there would be nothing at all left to save.

He stood up. A little vodka – tasteless, odorless, colorless – would hit the spot after all, thank you. Hold the Clamato.

A telephone seemed to be ringing somewhere. Underwater. Which proved it was a dream. He didn't have to acknowledge it, do anything. Just roll over and it would stop.

He knew he couldn't have been asleep more than an hour, and for a change of pace he'd made it into his actual bed, under the comforter, before he'd crashed. Pulled down the blinds. It was dark as night in his bedroom, warm and secure. He wasn't moving and that was that. He needed at least six more hours before he could face the day.