No one would have mistaken Sammy Cutler and Jason Kolarich for Boy Scouts. We were poor, and we took some liberties with the law. Shop-lifting was our favored method, from candy bars and baseball cards to jewelry and clothes at department stores that we would boost with our friendly neighborhood fence, a drop-out named Ice who paid fifty cents on the dollar. We started smoking dope when we were thirteen and then started selling it, too, which supplemented our jobs at the grocery store. Man, were we punks. We had no respect for anything or anyone. We committed petty offenses just for the hell of it, tossing rocks through windows, spray-painting garage doors, keying nice cars that made the mistake of parking in our neighborhood. We were scraping for whatever we could, causing a little unnecessary ruckus for fun, and surviving life at home.

When I was a freshman at Bonaventure, I was on the road to nowhere. I was able to discern, by that stage of my life, that I had something going for me in the brains department, but I saw no reason to apply myself. College wasn’t a consideration. Maybe I had listened too closely to my father, who didn’t have a favorable opinion of my present or future. It was in gym class, of all places, that my life turned around, a wayward pass thrown in a flag football game that, for some reason, I felt the urge to chase down, ultimately grabbing the ball with one hand outstretched, catching not only the pigskin but the attention of the varsity football coach. It was like something out of a movie. What’s your name, kid? he asked me. I knew who he was. Everyone knew Coach Fox. If you were me, if you were one of the kids who didn’t fit in, who smoked weed off-campus and blew off homework and generally avoided any school-sponsored event, you thought Coach Emory Fox was the Antichrist.

Payton, I told him. Walter Payton.

Yeah, okay, Walter Payton. I want you right here, on the practice field, after school.

I don’t know why I complied. It would have been more in character for a smart guy like me to blow it off. But I showed up, and he put me through the paces. I stood there, with the varsity quarterback, Patrick Gillis, directing me to run patterns and hurling the ball at me while one of the defensive backs tried vainly to shadow me. It felt as natural as breathing, hunting that football through the air, feeling it into my hands, tucking it in and running away from everything.

Sammy laughed when I told him where I’d been. They want me to come out, I told him. He said he wants me to play on varsity. Sammy searched my face, seemingly waiting for the punch line. You’re gonna play on the fucking football team, Koke?

I read something in his eyes, disappointment, in some sense a feeling of betrayal, when I told him that yes, I was going out for the football team.

YOU OWE ME, Koke. Sammy’s words to me a couple of hours ago, words he’d never said back then.

I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I had four weeks to pay my debt. I had four weeks to prove that Griffin Perlini did, in fact, abduct and murder Sammy’s sister, Audrey.

This week, for the first time in twenty years, I would go home.

12

THE PROSECUTOR on the Cutler case was Lester Mapp. I didn’t know him, but I’d looked him up on the Internet last night. He’d been a federal prosecutor for six years and then went into private practice with Howser, Gregg, a predominantly African-American law firm that practiced criminal defense. Two years back, he’d been recruited by the newly elected county attorney, a black alderman named Damien Sands. Sands had elevated a number of African Americans to prominent positions in the office. I’d heard some old-timers around the office throw around words like affirmative action, but I didn’t buy it, personally. I had little doubt that a number of minorities had been denied rightful promotion over the years, and besides, in my mind, to the victor went the spoils. You work in an office run by elected politicos, don’t expect fair. You don’t like it, there’s the door.

Besides, I didn’t have much time for the racial thing. I dislike everyone equally.

The judge on our case was the honorable Kathleen Poker. She’d assumed the bench after a career as a prosecutor—find me a criminal court judge who hadn’t—and was generally considered tough but fair. I’d never had a case in front of her but, based on her reputation, she was a relatively good draw.

I sat in the courtroom among the myriad of criminal defense attorneys waiting for the call. It was not, by and large, an impressive bunch. These are not the lawyers you see on television, the thousand-dollar suits and trendy haircuts, the passionate crusaders. These are guys and gals who work for a living. They take their money up front. If they’re good, they only lose about ninety percent of the time. They don’t like their clients and they have trained themselves not to care too much, else they will never again enjoy a decent night’s sleep. And when the money runs out, so do they, or they’d go broke. They do not have the benefit of an armada of young lawyers performing research and investigation. They have the cards stacked overwhelmingly against them and they know it. They know how to cross-examine a witness but have far less experience in directing their own clients on the stand, because most of their clients take Five. They drink their Maalox from the bottle and tell themselves, every day, that they are playing a necessary role in the criminal justice system.

Other than that, it’s a great job.

We got called near the beginning, because our motion was routine. Judge Poker, looking rather austere with gray-brushed hair, peered over her glasses down at me. “Mr. Kolarich, you are aware of the October 29 trial date? Less than a month away?”

“I am, Judge. We’ll be ready.”

She held her look on me a long moment, then looked over at the prosecutor, Lester Mapp.

“No objection,” Mapp said. He was probably thrilled that I’d be playing catch-up. Presumably, he’d expected me to ask for an additional six months.

She smirked at the prosecutor’s feigned graciousness, delivered a little too eagerly. I decided then that I liked her, and I could make her like me, if I were so inclined. “Granted,” she said, and two minutes later, Mapp and I were leaving the courtroom together.

It was my first chance to size him up. He dressed like a guy who’d spent some time in the high-end private sector, dressed in an Italian suit with a stylish yellow silk tie. All in all, he was an impressive-looking chap and, from the way he carried himself, I figured it might be the one thing that he and I would agree on.

He shook my hand and gave me a wide smile. “Great to see ya,” he said, though we’d never met previously. He was way too polished for my liking, but I suspected he would be formidable in court. “You got everything from the PD?”

“He’s sending it over today,” I said.

We stopped at the elevator.

“Ready for trial, are you?” His tone suggested that he didn’t buy it.

I figured I’d help him down the road he was already traveling. “Hey, I told Cutler, he’s crazy if he’s going to trial on this.”

He smiled again, predatory eyes appraising me. I wanted him to think that I was planning on pleading this out. I wanted him complacent, sure of himself. I wanted to be the farthest thing from a threat to him.

“Well, hey, you always got that black guy running from the building,” he said, palming my arm before heading into the elevator.

YOU DON’T INQUIRE, not when you’re a self-absorbed, seven-year-old kid. Something wakes you up, a familiar noise. Then you pinpoint the sound, a window frame sliding up. A moment of terror, filling your chest with dread, until you open your eyes and look at your own window on the second floor and realize it’s not yours. You look through your own open window, through the screen, and you listen, but you don’t inquire. You hear some more noises, rustling. Maybe you could identify that sound, too, but you don’t try; you just hear things happening. Later you will realize it, of course, the sound of someone crawling through a window. The sounds subside, you’re lost in your own world, suffused with drowsiness, and your face eases back into the cool pillow. Maybe you drift off a moment until you hear it again, those same rustling sounds, but then there is urgency to the movements, and that sound—the sound of footsteps running on grass—you have no trouble identifying.