James Grippando - Last to die

“I’d take him over your client any day, Gerry.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Jack watched as Colletti walked up the aisle to the main exit in the back of the courtroom, pushing his way through the crowd, as if he were determined to lead the pack of coyotes from the courthouse.

It was an hour before sunset and just minutes before tip-off as Jack threw together a tray of beer, chips, and salsa for the Knicks-Heat game on the tube. The stakes were high. If the Heat lost again, Jack would get a flood of calls and e-mails from friends in New York. Knicks rule, Heat suck, na, na, na-na, na. But it was one of those magical Miami nights when Jack would fall asleep to the soothing sounds and smells of Biscayne Bay right outside his open bedroom window, while his buddies up North had just one more day to decide which pair of long johns to wear under their Halloween costumes, so who were the real losers anyway?

“I got good news and bad news,” said Theo. He was peering through binoculars and standing on Jack’s patio beside the portable television he’d wheeled outside for the game. Jack adjusted the rabbit ears, then set up the goodies on the table beneath the umbrella. Nothing like beer, your best friend, and basketball under the stars.

“What now?” asked Jack.

Theo lowered the binoculars. “The good news is, your neighbor likes to prance around the house naked as a jaybird.”

“My neighbor is a seventy-eight-year-old man,” said Jack, wincing.

“Yeah. That’s, uh, kind of the bad news.” Jack chuckled as he grabbed a beer and fell into the chaise. Theo plopped down beside him and put the whole bowl of chips in his lap.

“You gonna leave some for me?” asked Jack.

“Get your own.” Theo reached for the remote control, but Jack snatched it away.

“That’s where I draw the line, buddy,” said Jack.

“I just wanted to see if Sally Fenning’s in the news again.”

“What makes you think she would be?”

“The name of the sixth beneficiary is out there now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the media finds this Alan Sirap before the lawyers do.”

“You got a point.”

“Course I got a point. I always got a point. I don’t open my mouth unless I got a point. Unless I gotta burp.” He belched like a foghorn.

“Could you possibly be any more disgusting?”

“Only on a good day.” He put the bowl of chips aside and asked, “So, what are you gonna do about Tatum? You gonna represent him?”

“I already do.”

“I don’t mean this hourly bullshit you’re doing as a favor to me. Are you gonna jump in this case for the long haul or not?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Come on. Like the judge said, there’ll be plenty of legal back-stabbing to go around, with each of these beneficiaries trying to pick off the other ones. And it’s high profile, too. When’s the last time you had a case that was in the news like this?”

Jack shot him a wicked glare.

Theo coughed, as if suddenly recalling that the last high-profile case had nearly gotten Jack, himself, indicted. “Okay, forget the publicity angle. Let’s talk dollars and sense. You got pretty beat up in the divorce. The only thing Cindy didn’t take was your car and your best friend, and she probably could’ve had that too. Imagine me wearing a fucking cap and driving Miss Daisy all around Coral Gables in a Mustang convertible.”

“It wasn’t worth the fight. I just wanted to move on.”

“That doesn’t change the facts. You got a nice house here, Jack, but you don’t own it, and we’re sitting outside watching TV not because it’s such a beautiful night, but because you don’t even have an air conditioner.”

“What’s your point?”

“One third of forty-six million dollars-that’s my point.”

“You think I should sign on as Tatum’s lawyer?”

“If you don’t, someone else will. Why shouldn’t it be you? All the other beneficiaries are hiring topflight lawyers.”

“The other lawyers have the comfort of knowing that their client didn’t kill Sally Fenning.”

“So do you.”

Jack drank his beer, didn’t say anything.

Theo said, “I can’t give you a hundred percent proof Tatum didn’t kill her. But he gave me his word, brother to brother, in the boxing ring, and there’s probably no place more sacred to the Knight brothers than the ring. There’s no sure thing in life, especially when you’re talking about a shot at a one-third contingency fee on a take of forty-six million bucks.”

“I know what you’re saying.”

“I don’t think you do. I’m talking about more than just money. It’s who you are, and who you’re going to be the rest of your pathetic life.”

“Let’s not get carried away here.”

“This is no bullshit. Tatum and I used to have this saying. There’s two kinds of people in this world, risk takers and shit takers.”

Jack laughed, but Theo was serious.

Theo said, “Tatum might not be your ideal version of a client, but he’s giving you the chance to answer a very important question. So think real hard before you spit out an answer: What do you want to be the rest of your life, Jack Swyteck? A risk taker? Or a shit taker?”

They locked eyes, and then Jack looked away, letting his gaze drift toward the water and a distant sailboat running wing-and-wing toward the mainland. “Tell your brother to stop by the office tomorrow. We’ll sign a contingency fee agreement.”

The Harmattan winds were blowing right on schedule.

It was Rene’s third autumn in West Africa, and no one had to tell her that the dusty winds had returned in full force. Her dry eyes and stinging nostrils didn’t lie. The winds blew from the deserts of the north, starting as early as October, typically lasting through February. With the dust, however, came occasionally cooler temperatures at night, though cooler was indeed a relative concept in a place where a typical daytime high was ninety-five degrees and the weather on the whole was best described as gaspingly hot. In the next five months they’d have just five days with rainfall, but at least there would be no raging rivers of mud to wash livestock, children, or entire hillside villages into the valley. Life in West Africa was a trade-off, and Rene had learned to accept that. For the foreseeable future, she’d live with dust in her hair, dust on her clothes, dust on her toothbrush, and it was just too damn bad if her friends back home just couldn’t understand why the snapshots she sent them had such a flat lifelessness about them. Even under the best of circumstances, it was hard to do photographic justice to the endless grasslands of northern Côte d’Ivoire, unless you were a professional, and Rene was anything but that.

Rene was a pediatrician who had volunteered for a three-year stint with Children First, a human rights organization that was fighting against the forced servitude of children in the cocoa fields. The inspiration had struck her in her last year of residency at Boston Children’s Hospital. One night in the lounge, while wolfing down her typical dinner of a diet soda and a candy bar, she read an article about the reemergence of slavery. Studies by the United Nations and the State Department confirmed that approximately fifteen thousand children, aged nine to twelve, had been sold into forced labor on cotton, coffee, and cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire. The situation was only predicted to get worse, as prices for cocoa continued to fall, and almost half of the world’s cocoa came from the very region that had stooped to child labor to boost profitability. Her candy bar suddenly didn’t taste quite as sweet. It just so happened that she was at one of those “Why did I go to med school?” junctures. Was it time to move to Brookline and wipe snot from the noses of kids who came to checkups in the company of their nannies, or did she yearn for something more? Before she had time to reconsider, she was on a plane to Abidjan, her ultimate destination being Korhogo, capital of the Senoufo country, a nine-hour bus ride north.