“What’s that?”
“I didn’t see him, but I have this foggy memory of a figure crouching down and whispering in my ear.”
Ella feels heat in her face, the world tilting.
“He said, ‘Good night, pretty girl.’”
CHAPTER 5
CHRIS
Chris examines the man sitting across from him in the filthy conference room of the Union County jail. He has an ogre’s teeth and is picking at the scabs on his pale arms. Par for the course for Chris’s public-defender clients.
Most are in for drugs. He pities them more than anything. The low-income kids have it the worst, swept up in disproportionate numbers. But he’s also seen his share of affluent teenage beauty queens turned to balding, pockmarked monsters. College kids holding up CVS pharmacies to get a fix. Their families devastated and confused. We’re not those kinds of people. But you don’t know that until you get your first taste of crystal meth. Or experience the euphoria of painkillers stolen from your mom’s medicine cabinet.
The families usually blame the dealers. But Chris knows better. No one blames the liquor store clerk for your aunt being in AA. And his own brother had been a small-time dealer. Not because he was a bad person, but for the simple reason that they needed food on the table.
“If you agree to go to a treatment center,” Chris says to his client, “I might be able to convince them to avoid any time.”
The genius had tried to pawn a Louis Vuitton handbag that still had the snatching victim’s ID in it. Even the crooked pawnshop owner couldn’t turn a blind eye.
“And who’s gonna pay for that?”
“I can try to get you into a state program.”
His client thinks about this. Debating life without a fix versus a likely short stint at the jail, where drugs are easier to get than toilet paper.
“I want me a real lawyer. Not some public pretender.”
Chris no longer takes offense at this. It’s a common misperception: that a lawyer dumb enough to work for poverty wages and zero respect probably isn’t Clarence Darrow. Maybe not. But Chris passed the bar two years ago and has already first-chaired more jury trials than most private-practice lawyers did during their entire careers. And PDs are the best at working plea deals for lost causes like this one. They know the prosecutors—the hard-asses to avoid, the softies who can be manipulated with sob stories, and the lazy ones you can slip things by.
“You got the money, you can hire any lawyer you want,” Chris says. “But if not, you got me.”
His client’s pupils, saucers even after a night in the can, set on Chris. “Make the deal,” he says.
The guard returns and ushers the twitchy man away, and Chris looks at his phone for the next sad case on his schedule.
On his news feed a headline momentarily causes his heart to trip: TEENAGE EMPLOYEES KILLED AT LINDEN ICE CREAM SHOP, ONLY ONE SURVIVOR.
Chris feels acid crawl up his throat, his head fuzzy, like a contact high from being in close quarters with his client. He reads the opening to the story:
Three employees of a Dairy Creamery in Linden were found brutally slain last night, sending shock waves through the community. The bodies of night manager Beth Ann Hughes, 18, and two other employees, both minors, were found after midnight in the store at 500 Elizabeth Avenue, police said. A fourth victim, a customer, survived the attack and is hospitalized but in stable condition. The crime is reminiscent of a New Year’s Eve attack at the Linden Blockbuster Video fifteen years ago …
Chris stares absently at the marred table as his mind jumps to that night; Chris sitting at their own marred kitchen table, watching his big brother Vince rushing to finish the Hamburger Helper on the stovetop.
“Where you been?” Chris asks his older brother. It’s nearly ten o’clock. Vince has just rushed in and is clanking pans around the kitchen. A block of ground chuck sizzles in the skillet.
Vince turns and cocks an eyebrow.
Chris’s eyes flash. “A girl?” At twelve years old, Chris is both fascinated and perplexed by the opposite sex.
Vince dumps the powder and noodles into the pan.
“Not just any girl.”
“Is she hot?”
Vince whirls around and gives him a hard glare. “What’d I tell you about respect? You wanna be like him or like us?” He says this a lot to Chris. A reminder that neither wants to turn out like their dad. The man who punches first, asks questions later, and who’d driven their mother to flee.
Chris frowns. He doesn’t like to disappoint Vince, who’s filled with teenage wisdom, never mind that he sells dope on the side.