John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

She didn't laugh, didn't even smile. Her body continued to tremble against his. He didn't know what to say.

Melanie was in one of the overstuffed chairs, hands folded stiffly on her lap, staring straight ahead. She had continued to cry for a while – she still held a handkerchief tightly.

Kevin came into the living room carrying two glasses in one hand and in the other a large pitcher of liquid with a head on it.

'This,' he said, 'is going to elevate the good time quotient on what I must admit has been a somewhat disheartening evening.'

'What is this?'

' "What is it?" she asks. But, I notice, without a really convincing show of interest. When at her very elbow is the very first rendition of a drink that may be to the nineties what the Margarita was to the eighties.'

'I'm tired, Kevin. I'm scared. This isn't going to work.'

He pointed to the pitcher. 'Whatever else may transpire on the roads of our lives,' he told her, ' this will work.' He poured into one of the glasses and handed it to Melanie.

She took a sip. 'I don't really need a drink anymore. I want to know what we're going to do.'

'When?'

She slapped the arm of the chair, the new drink overflowing. 'Damn it, Kevin! Now! What are we going to do now ?'

Back on his heels, Kevin pondered. 'You're right,' he said seriously. 'We're going to have to think about this for a while. I propose we don't say a word for fifteen minutes.'

He drank from his glass, refilled the top inch of hers. She wasn't really thinking about it at all – she was too scared, angry, upset. She took a drink.

'This isn't bad, what is it?'

The pitcher was half-gone, three glasses each.

Pouring again for himself, Kevin was on the floor, legs crossed. 'You've put your finger on the one problem we face – a name. Every great drink needs a name.'

She took another sip. 'Fred,' she said.

'Fred, the drink?'

'Yep. Fred.' She took a bigger sip. 'It's pretty good,' she said, 'what's in a Fred?'

'Fred, hmm. It can't be a guy's name.'

'Why not?'

'I don't know. You just don't name drinks after guys. I mean, look at all the drinks with girls' names – Margarita, Tia Maria, Bloody Mary…'

Melanie was holding her glass out. 'Kahlua, Manhattan, Rusty Nail… in fact, Rusty Nail…'

Kevin pointed a finger. 'Watch it…'

'Besides, it's a guy's kind of drink, it ought to have a guy's name. A Fred. What's in it?'

'Well, aside from the obvious beer, orange juice, vodka, cranberry juice, Coke – '

'Coke?'

'Diet Coke, actually.'

'Okay.'

'And port. And some brandy.'

She took another sip. 'Fred. It could be colder.'

'See,' he said. 'Now we're into the marketing campaign. No, listen, this could be really big. Fred, it could be colder. Fred, it could be sweeter. Fred, it couldn't be bolder . I like it. I love it.'

'Kevin,' she said, 'he couldn't be a bigger horse's ass.'

'Where was this Melanie Sinclair when we were dating?'

'You weren't smart enough to handle the real me back then.'

It set him back a beat. 'You know, I think you're absolutely right – '

She softened it, coming forward, kissing him.

They were both on the floor, blankets under and over them, pillows piled about, Melanie's head on his chest. The pitcher was empty. The television on low.

The news had aired. Again and again, every channel until they got too sick to watch anymore. The increased reward on Kevin, the appointment of Alan Reston, the night's new fires and disturbances, the continuing problems in Detroit, DC, Los Angeles, the Mohandas call for the solidarity march on Saturday, and now, just an hour before, the riot at the Hall of Justice. All of it, and no hint of Kevin Shea's videotape.

Nothing but what he had started and now he would have to pay.

He stared blankly at the screen. Melanie breathed evenly on his chest, her arms thrown over him. Pulling the blankets up around her – the room had become cold – he had come around to believing his best chance, finally, was to run. He could never take the chance of a trial in which even Wes thought that the best result might be some degree of murder.

He would have to run.

But to where? And how? And could he take Melanie with him?

Ever since he had been a child Glitsky had taken a perverse pleasure in keeping an eye on water as it heated, giving the lie to the old adage that a watched pot never boils. He stood over the stove now and waited, eyes trained on the simmering liquid – any second now it was going to begin to roll and he intended to be there to see it.

The house felt strange with no one else in it. He had given Rita the weekend off after Nat had absconded with the boys. She had a sister – Glitsky suspected perhaps even a child, although she hadn't mentioned one when she'd come to work for him – somewhere else in town and she would always disappear when Glitsky made the offer. She had moved the screen in the living room aside, and when he had first walked out in the morning he had almost felt he was in the wrong house. It wasn't that there was so much room, but that there was so much more of it.

Gotcha! The water was boiling and he'd seen it.

He made his tea – Earl Grey Morning Blend – in a pot with an old-fashioned silver-plated tea bulb. He poured the water in, covered the pot and took it two steps across to his kitchen table – there was no 'dining room.' He often felt lucky they could fit five chairs around the table in what space they did have.

There were two hard-boiled eggs on a small plate in front of him and he absently cracked the first one while he opened the folder he had brought home the previous night – Chris Locke.

The first problem was going to be to determine exactly what street corner they had been at when the attack had occurred. If he didn't know that, he was going to have a hard time locating trace-evidence there. Loretta knew the city well enough, but he wanted to keep her out of it as much as he could – the experience had been traumatic enough without bringing her back to the scene.

When she had told him the story she'd said that she and Locke had been driving out near Dolores Park, the site of the dual, segregated tent cities. But what route had they taken from downtown to get there?

Reading through Lanier's questions and Loretta's responses he was beginning to doubt that he could get any real answers without Loretta. He flipped some more pages of text, scanning. The officers in the squad car she had pulled over near Mission and 19th Street – already some blocks from the murder scene… If the uniforms who had filed their report had been doing their jobs, one of the first things they should have done was drive back with Loretta to pinpoint where the shooting had occurred, but they had evidently been unnerved, shaken out of their routine – as everyone else had been – by the state of siege the city was in, the sight of the fatally wounded District Attorney, and the presence of a U.S. senator.

So the ambulance had been called out to Mission Street, forensics had come there and begun their process of going over the car. Marcel Lanier's primary concern had been protecting Loretta, getting her out of harm's way as quickly as he could. In this Lanier had been successful but he hadn't done squat-all about moving the investigation forward. Nor, Glitsky reflected ruefully, had he.

Checking the clock on his kitchen wall – it was six-forty – he decided it was still too early to call Wes Farrell, which he had intended to do as his first order of business this morning. Get that out of the way, or at least moved to the front burner. Enough was enough. He had given Farrell plenty of time to make the first move, to beep him wherever he might have been all of last night, but once in a while you had to make your own timetable. He'd get some action on this; he had the leverage – something to offer Kevin Shea as an inducement to come in – so long as Elaine had been able to convince Reston, which he was sure she had.