Keep Them Close(10)

I suppress a smile as I bring the coffee pots to the conference table. Actually, Brice is my married name—Allison Rankin Brice.

“Any bets on what the ice queen looks like?”

“Judging from that last email,” says another guy, wearing a bow tie, for Christ’s sake, “I’m guessing she’ll have a cape and fangs.”

I place a mug in front of each of the attorneys, then grab the thermos and start pouring.

“She was with the U.S. attorney here, right?” This one, with a bad comb-over and a worse tie, nudges his cup toward me. “That explains the nastiness. Can I get some cream, sweetheart?”

“Absolutely,” I say, because he asked so nicely.

“I hear she’s a big deal here in Chicago,” says the fourth, who I believe is Jack Crawley. “I think she was on the prosecution team that took down Senator Bridges.”

“Yeah, but that’s probably window dressing. Gotta have a girl on the team, right? And I’m sure they threw in a minority, too. God forbid there are any white men. Shit, the prosecution team probably looked like the freakin’ U.N.”

“A girl on the team”? Never mind that I was lead counsel, that I cross-examined a sitting U.S. senator for two days. And delivered the rebuttal summation. And was offered the head of Public Corruption but turned it down, because I want my son to attend the best private school and I’m the only source of income in our family.

I have probably put more juries in a box than all these entitled gasbags combined. Each one of these guys was born on third base but is utterly convinced he hit a triple.

Phyllis, who has finished setting up the plates of brioche, returns with my work bag, which I’d left outside. “Didn’t want you to forget this, Ms. Brice.”

“Thank you, Phyllis.”

The room goes silent as I take the seat at the end of the table. All eye contact broken. All blood drained from four faces. Even the one with the golf tan looks like he swallowed a bug.

“Well, gentlemen, thank you for coming,” I say, slapping my hands down on the table. “I’m Allison Brice. Sorry to be dressed so informally—my cape is at the dry cleaner’s.”





8


Luke

Two hours on the interstate, driving alone, the road relatively quiet mid-morning on a state holiday. What could go wrong?

Well, here’s a start: a state police vehicle, previously headed north on I-57, is idling in the turnaround at the median as I’m approaching southbound.

I slow the car to sixty-five, the speed limit, which is funny because nobody treats it as the limit. Most people think of it as the minimum. They shouldn’t call it the speed limit. They should call it “the optimal speed to stay within a reasonable approximation of,” but that’s a lot to put on a sign and it leaves a dangling preposition, which sends a bad message to our youth.

I pass the cop, going sixty-five, the minimum/maximum, and look in my rearview mirror. I see two things.

One, my sunglasses are crooked on my face, a recurring problem because one of my ears is slightly lower than the other. The human body is not symmetrical. My friend Billy Bauman has one hand that’s notably bigger than the other. We used to call him “Clock.”

Two, the state police vehicle has pulled into southbound traffic behind me. And not for some emergency, either. It’s staying directly behind me.

We drive like that for three, four miles. I keep my speed within a reasonable approximation of sixty-five. Still, I feel that universal dread that accompanies a cop car crawling behind you. It’s not like I’m driving some hot rod. It’s a piece-of-junk Toyota.

We had a Toyota minivan growing up. It always made me nauseated to sit in the back seat. A lot of people use the word nauseous instead of nauseated. Nauseous means inducing nausea; nauseated means experiencing nausea. You don’t feel nauseous. You feel nauseated.

Like when a cop is following you on the highway for a very long time.

Wow, I must be nervous. On a good day, my mind often wanders into irrelevant excursions, but when my blood pressure goes up, that problem kicks into overdrive. As coping mechanisms go, I suppose it beats chewing your nails.

I keep my eyes on the road and the speedometer, making sure my foot doesn’t jerk, my hands hold steady. Staying in my lane and going the speed limit have never felt more challenging. I could use the cruise control, but I’ve never tried it in this car, and the last thing I’m going to do is mess with the controls and have the hazards go off or wiper fluid fly back at the cop—

The rooftop of the trooper’s SUV lights up with dancing colors. Either he’s making a traffic stop or he’s opening a nightclub inside his squad car.

I pull over onto the shoulder and put the car in park, the interior awash in the flickering red-blue lights.

Awash is a funny word. It’s hard to say it without sounding pretentious. It’s one of those words that’s okay to write but not speak. Like octopi. Everyone knows you mean the plural of octopus, but if you say it, you sound like a douchebag. While we were scuba diving, we encountered a number of octopi. Maybe you could pull that off with a British accent. Maybe.

Yeah, I’m nervous.

I reach into the glove compartment for her registration and proof of insurance. A pile of napkins nearly tumbles out when I ease down the hatch. But there they are, among the hand sanitizer and small bag of airplane peanuts and travel tube of Advil and take-out straw still in its wrapping—Trinity’s registration and insurance card, clipped together.