"Regrets? Hell, no!" It was Guy's voice from a corner of the room. There he was, standing at the bar, dropping ice cubes into a Manhattan glass. "We both got skeletons in the closet from way back, so trust me when I tell you to look ahead. Don't look back."
"My life's been devoted to opening those closets, shaking those skeletons," Schein said.
"Spare me the Hippocratic horseshit, okay?"
I strained to get a closer look, pressing my cheek to the glass. Bernhardt walked toward Schein, carrying two drinks. "Will he figure it out? Before the trial, I mean."
"I suspect he will," Schein answered. "Like his buddy said, he's smarter than he looks."
Bernhardt handed one drink to Schein, then sat down on a leather chair that faced the sofa. Though I knew he couldn't see me through the darkened window, from this angle it seemed as if he was looking right at me, and I caught my breath.
"Then what? What the hell will he do?" Bernhardt asked.
"He'll have an ethical dilemma."
"And…?"
A pause before Schein spoke. "Who knows? MacLean says he's honest."
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. And somewhere inside my head, cymbals were clanging. "So we're better off than if she had a top-flight lawyer," Bernhardt said.
I was trying to process the information.
The "he" was definitely me.
The "top-flight lawyer" was definitely not me.
What "ethical dilemma" would I have?
"You know what I was thinking?" Bernhardt again. He didn't wait for an answer. "Pop would be proud of me."
"That is a transparent rationalization, Guy."
"No, hear me out. Pop took Castleberry's money and multiplied it tenfold. What I'm doing… well, it's even bigger."
"Your methods, Guy. What about your methods?"
Bernhardt snorted a mirthless laugh. "They're okay. I checked them out with my inner child."
"Go ahead, mock me."
Bernhardt laughed again.
What the hell were these guys up to? What methods? The dog barked again, and a second later, splat. A clod of mud landed in the bushes, startling me, and giving me a crown of thorns as I leaped backward. Ping, a pebble this time, banging off the window. Shit. I turned around and saw Roberto's silhouette, arms waving madly.
"What was that?" Bernhardt said, from inside the house.
I flattened myself into the soft earth as Guy Bernhardt walked over to the window. My head buried in my arms, I could sense him above me, barely inches away.
The dog barked louder, then stopped. Maybe it was the Hound of the Baskervilles. Or the Bernhardts.
Guy Bernhardt turned away from the window. I lifted my head and saw that Roberto Condom was gone.
"… water."
Bernhardt's voice again.
"Are the permits in order?" Schein asked.
"All the i 's dotted and t 's crossed."
"You're a man ahead of your time."
"You got that right," Bernhardt said. "Twenty years from now, they'll be writing books about me."
Now what the hell were they talking about? Too many questions, too few answers. I didn't have time to think about it, because I heard a husky voice somewhere behind me. "Whoa, girl! Slow down."
Near the corner of the house, not thirty feet away, I caught a glimpse of a man with a German shepherd tugging at a leash. A shotgun was cradled in the man's arms. A radio crackled, and he said, "B-two, I'm at the house. Blossom's got a straw up her ass. Got the scent of something, probably a possum."
Blossom. I liked that way better than Killer.
"Okay." The radio clicked off. "Go on, girl, but don't be bringing back any road kill."
Why did "road kill" sound like a lawyer joke, a dead lawyer joke, just now?
I heard him open the collar latch, and then Blossom headed straight for me, head down, shoulders low, panting hard. Maybe a German shepherd's impression of the high crawl.
I burst out of the bushes, the thorns clawing at me.
"Shit!" the guard cried. "Halt! Freeze!"
I zigzagged away from him, through the rosebushes, giving him a moving target. Yapping loudly. Blossom was at my heels.
The shotgun blast echoed over my head. Way high.
Of course. He wouldn't risk killing his dog. The shot was meant to scare me into stopping. Instead, it sped me up. Maybe all those years of gassers after practice were worth something after all.
I was into the mango grove when the spotlights came on. I was still cutting back and forth, making like Emmitt Smith, when it occurred to me that Blossom was alongside, running in stride. She could have taken me down with a firm crunch to the calf, but there she was, barking loudly. Happily keeping pace with me. Much more fun than being tethered to a guard.
I slowed to a trot, and so did she. I put my hand out and she licked it, then started barking again. In the distance, I saw the headlights of a Jeep, heard men shouting.
"Quiet, Blossom," I told her.
She barked louder.
I reached up, pulled a mango from a tree, and rolled it a few feet away. Blossom trotted over and picked it up in her mouth. No more barking. Then she brought the mango to me, dropped it at my feet, and barked some more.
I picked up the mango and hurled it as far as I could. Barking happily, Blossom took off that way, and I ran the other.
I was nearly to the levee when I heard an engine kick up. A second Jeep was there, waiting. The headlights came on, freezing me. Engine growling, it headed straight for me. I pivoted and ran up the levee, scrambling on all fours in the soft dirt. I heard the Jeep slam to a stop, heard the men yelling behind me.
At the top of the levee, my knee buckled, the one with the railroad track scars, and I tumbled down toward the water. A shotgun blast kicked up mounds of dirt alongside me. With no Blossom running interference, I was in their line of fire now.
I either dived into the water or fell into it. Either way, it was deep enough and fast enough to carry me off. I took a breath and went under, going with the flow. I came up, heard another shotgun blast, and went under again. I held my breath as long as I could and came up again. The shouts were well behind me now. I was gone, body surfing down this channel of clear, fresh water, so recently sucked up from the aquifer.
In a few minutes, the water grew deeper, the current faster. I tried to touch the bottom but couldn't. I slid onto my back and floated farther still. It is not easy to judge the passage of time when your adrenaline is pumping. Maybe it was ten minutes, maybe it was forty, but it wasn't long before the water slowed. A tree branch floated alongside me, and I grabbed it. A black mangrove. Then I caught the scent of brackish water and knew I was nearing the bay.
A mist rose from the moist soil into the night air and then, shining eerily above me, a light. And then another.
I was passing through the orange glow of a string of high-intensity lights, and above me, through the ghostly mist, I saw the silhouette of a building. Or at least the skeleton of one, under construction. Girders and framing a dozen stories high, rising like a spooky dreamscape. Bigger than anything in these parts, power-plant-sized, with a concrete smokestack poised like a missile next to the building.
And then it was gone. The gleam of the lights grew weaker, then disappeared, too. As I floated along, a strange thought worked its way into my consciousness. Had I seen anything at all rising out of the mist, or was it the product of my imagination, my fears, my dreams? Dr. Millie Santiago, where are you when I need you?