“You sure you’re okay?” I ask.

But I know the answer. “All good,” we say together.

4.

Jason

Tuesday, June 4

I push away the papers on my desk, transcripts from an ATF overhear on a weapons case the feds brought against my client. It can be painful reading, all the starts and stops, the umms and ahhhs, one talker interrupting the other, and sorting through the nicknames—Combo and Greasy and No-Dope. And best of all, the code words for the product being sold, the automatic weapons. Nobody ever says gun or rifle or ammo over the phone. They think if they code up the whole thing, the ATF agents—and a federal jury—will believe that these gangsters were really talking on their cell phones about the number of tickets they were planning to purchase for the movies that night.

I light the match and hold it upright, the dancing flames inching down the stem to the point where they meet my thumb and ring finger. The fire reaches my fingertips before I can finish the words:

I’ve got tar on my feet and I can’t see.

All the birds look down and laugh at me.

I blow out the flame and toss it into a Styrofoam cup of water, whispers of fleeting smoke curling upward. The flame singed the skin on the tip of my ring finger and turned the corner of the nail black. It hurts more, for some reason, when your eyes are open, when you’re watching it happen.

My intercom buzzes. Marie’s voice comes over the speaker when I tap it.

“Your three o’clock,” she says.

I didn’t know I had an appointment at three o’clock. I didn’t know it was three o’clock, either. It’s three o’clock?

“I reminded you this morning?” she says in a hushed voice.

Whatever. She probably did. “Okay.”

I fish through my e-mails and find the calendar reminder for today at three P.M. James Drinker is his name. Okay. Hooray for James Drinker.

He comes in and reaches to shake my hand. I stand cautiously and reach over the desk. The nausea asserts itself, sending a warning message up my throat to the back of my mouth, but it’s always a false alarm. Sometimes retching, but never vomiting. It doesn’t attack me so much as it stalks me, letting me know it’s lurking out there, but never moving in for the kill.

It’s not the big pains, my mother said to me about a week before she died. They’ve got the medicine for that. It’s the knowing, boy. Knowing that it’s coming and you can’t stop it.

James Drinker is one of the oddest-looking people I’ve ever seen, a walking contradiction: big but awkward, a kid’s head on a grown-up’s developed body. His hair hangs around the sides of his face in tangles, a reddish mop that looks like it doesn’t belong, with matching bushy red eyebrows; he is otherwise clean-cut and has a quizzical expression on his face. He wears thick black eyeglasses. His shoulders, chest, and arms suggest he’s a workout fiend, but a rounded midsection says he favors Big Macs and chili fries.

The eyes are usually the tell, but they’re hard for me to inspect through the thick spectacles. If I were still a prosecutor and he were a suspect in an interview room, I’d make him take them off. My best guess: James Drinker has done some bad things.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” says he.

My mistake. That’s a first for me, a client denying his guilt. A first this afternoon, I mean.

“But I’m afraid I’m going to be accused of doing something wrong,” he says.

“What are you going to be accused of doing wrong?”

He pauses. “This is all confidential, right?”

“Anything you tell me about what happened in the past is confidential,” I say. “The only thing I can’t keep confidential is if you tell me you’re going to commit a crime in the future.”

“I’m not going to commit a crime in the future,” he says.

That’s always nice to hear. I wave a hand.

“Okay. So James, what crime do you expect to be accused of committing?”

“Murder,” he says, without hesitation.

I sit higher in my chair. Homicides don’t walk through the door every day. And here I thought this meeting was going to be boring.

“Two women were killed,” he says. “I didn’t kill them.” Drinker crosses a leg. His sport coat opens as he leans back. Quite the fleshy midsection, this one. Pumps iron and then hits Taco Bell. I raise a fist to my mouth and fight another wave of nausea.

He takes a deep breath. “I knew each of them,” he says. “One was a friend of mine. The other one I dated. Two women I knew, two women murdered.”

He’s right to be worried. That isn’t what the police would call a fanciful coincidence.

“Do the murders appear to be related?” I ask.

He nods, but doesn’t answer at first. His eyes are combing my walls, not that there’s much to see—some diplomas and certificates, a couple of photographs. It’s part of his overall appraisal, checking the schools I attended, equating my stature with the quality of my office.

I pick up a nearby Bic pen, the cap chewed mercilessly, and chew it some more. I hate these cheap pens. I have a fancy Visconti fountain pen my brother, Pete, gave me last Christmas, but it uses replaceable ink cartridges, and I don’t want to waste good ink on this guy. The cheap Bic it is.

“Both women were followed home from where they work,” he says. “And they were both stabbed multiple times.”

The cool deliberation with which he describes the murders sends an icy wave across my back. You can defend all sorts of criminals, but some things you hear, you never get used to. On the bright side, I’m waking up.

“Alicia Corey and Lauren Gibbs,” says Drinker. “Alicia, I dated a couple of times. Nothing serious. Just a couple of dinners.”

I write down those names with my shitty pen. I hate this pen. I should light the pen on fire.

“Is there proof of these dinners?” I ask.

“I . . . I paid for the dinners in cash,” he says.

Interesting. Unusual. Doesn’t make him a killer, but most people pay with credit these days. I draw a couple of dollar signs on the pad. Then a smiley face. Then a knife. My mother always said, You have a flair for art, boy, but she was talking to my brother, Pete.

“I have a lot of cash,” Drinker explains. “I’m a mechanic at Higgins Auto Body—over on Delaney?—and sometimes our boss pays us overtime off the books—y’know, in cash.”

Fair enough. A decent explanation to a jury, but not one his employer would want made public—in fact, one he’d probably deny if he thought Uncle Sam might get wind.

“The dinners were on May twelfth and May nineteenth,” he goes on. “She was murdered the following week. May twenty-second, I think. A Wednesday.”

“You said she was leaving work?”

“She was an exotic dancer,” he says. “A stripper. Place called Knockers?”

This guy was dating a stripper? There’s no accounting for taste, and this guy seems pretty well built, but the goofy red hair down near his shoulders? The fast-food gut? The face made for radio?

“You’re surprised,” he says. “You don’t think a stripper would date me.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Tell you what, James.” I lean forward. Again, the vertigo, the feeling I’m tipping to one side. “I’ll make you a deal. Don’t tell me what I think, and I won’t tell you what you think. Deal?”

“Deal.” He nods. “So she left the club at two in the morning and she was murdered at her house when she got home. She was stabbed six or seven times.”