Of course, at the same time, she was quick to point out that in ninety percent of all cases the deaf married their own kind and when they did get attached to the hearing, the divorce rate was stratospheric, and then, needless to say, there was the problem of children. One deaf couple she knew had agonized when the wife became pregnant-“All they could talk about was “'Will it be deaf, will it be deaf?'”” And they had a girl, slick and red and fat and with all her fingers and toes in the expected places, and the parents clapped their hands in her face and shouted till the nurse came running and the whole place was in an uproar, but the child never reacted. “'Thank God,' they said, 'she's one of us.'”
“And what do you mean by that?” Bridger had asked.
She dropped her eyes and her face became immobile. “Nothing.”
They were in her apartment at the time, working on their second bottle of wine after she'd whipped up her special crab salad and he'd pitched in with its perfect complement, a bag of Lay's barbecue potato chips. It took him a moment, struggling to decode what she was trying to tell him, and then he reached across the table and took her hands in his till she lifted her eyes again. “But that isn't you,” he said, fumbling around the issue. “I mean, you're not like that.”
“I don't understand.”
“You're not-I mean, you weren't born like that. Right?”
She'd looked as if she were going to cry, but now she forced a smile. “Born like what?”
“Deaf.”
She'd gotten up then and left the room. When she came back a moment later she was wearing a T-shirt she'd preserved from her student days at Gallaudet, one he'd seen before, one she wore when the mood took her, when she felt conflicted or defiant. It featured an upraised fist, reminiscent of the old Black Panther logo, and above it the legend DEAF POWER.
At the age of four and a half she'd been stricken with spinal meningitis and barely survived it, her temperature as high as 105 degrees for three days running. The doctors explained to her parents that her aural nerves had been irreparably damaged, that she was now and always would be profoundly deaf. But she was lucky, she insisted, because she was post-lingually deaf, which made it a thousand times easier for her to learn to speak and read and function in the hearing world. What did she remember from that brief period before the fever set in? Words. Stories. Voices. And her father taking her to see “Yellow Submarine” at a revival house.
“Yes,” she told him, reaching to bury her hand in the bag of potato chips as if to hide it from him, as if she were afraid of what it might say otherwise, “that's not me.” And then, in the flattest tuneless disconnected echo of a voice, she began to sing: “We all live in a yellow sum-marine, yellow summarine…”
He didn't leave the police station till they told him she'd been transferred to the county jail in Thompsonville, and by then it was past nine. Earlier, from his cell phone, he'd called the only lawyer he knew, a friend from college who was practicing entertainment law with a firm in Las Vegas. “Steve,” he'd crooned into the phone, “it's me, Bridger,” and Steve had instantly begun schmoozing and catching up and pouring the syrup of his top-drawer voice into the receiver until they'd exhausted the trivia and he cleared his throat in a way that indicated that the ticker was running, or should have been running, and Bridger said, “Well, really, the reason I called is I've got a problem.” He explained the situation.
“Not good,” Steve said. “Not good at all.”
“It's not her. She didn't do it. She ran a stop sign, that's all-you understand that, right?”
"You look into identity theft?
“I don't know: mistaken identity, identity theft-what's the difference?”
Bridger could hear someone else talking in the background. “Yeah, yeah,” Steve was saying, “I'll make it short.” And then: “Bridger? Yeah, well, the difference is money, big money, because if it's ID theft, you've got to clear the records in whatever jurisdiction this other woman's been committing fraud, and then you've got to go to the CRAs and it can be a real hassle, believe me.”
“I hear you,” Bridger said, “but what do I do right now? I mean, I can't just leave her in jail.”
“You need to call a lawyer.”
“I thought that was what I was doing.”
“A “criminal” lawyer. Somebody local. You don't know anybody who knows anybody?”
“Nope.”
“All right, so you go to the yellow pages, start making calls. But I got to warn you, once they hear the charges they're going to want in the neighborhood of fifty thousand as a retainer and probably ten just to talk to her, and that guarantees nothing, especially with extradition to Nevada and these no-bail holds. But you give them the money and they'll promise you anything.”
“But I don't-I mean, I'm doing okay, but…”
“What “is” paint and roto, anyway?”
“Hey, it would take too long to explain-it's special effects, that's all. I'll show you next time you're in town, promise. And I like the job, the money's good, but what I'm saying is I don't really have a whole lot in the bank and there's no way I could, well, you know, come up with anywhere near that figure…”
There was the voice in the background again, a wash of voices now. Steve shifted from honey to vinegar. “She's in jail for the weekend, nothing anybody can do about that. Monday they'll arraign her and assign a public defender, some troll out of a cave in a cheap suit with a cheap briefcase and a look of terminal harassment, and then you just hope for the best. But hey, listen, great talking to you. Luck, huh?”
On Monday morning, he called in sick (Radko: “Pliss liv a message)” and drove down to the county courthouse, a showcase building erected in the twenties to resemble something out of the Alhambra. It was all stone, stucco and tile with a monumental clock tower and an observation deck on the roof that gave tourists a view of downtown San Roque, from the blue rug of the ocean to the hazy arras of the mountains. At the information kiosk, a beaming old lady with a long flaring nose and the trace of a British accent told him to consult the daily calendar at the far end of the hall, and he saw Dana's name listed there with some eighty or a hundred others. Her arraignment on charges was scheduled for eight-thirty a.m. in Courtroom 2.
The courtroom was the sort of place that inspired confidence in the legal system: vaulted ceilings, dark pews with the rich grain of history worked into them, the elevated jury box to the left, the judge's buffed and burnished high-flown bench in the center under the great seal of the state of California, and a long file of lesser furniture-desks for the court recorders and clerks-tucked in along the right-hand wall, everything very hushed and efficient-looking at five past eight in the morning. Bridger took a seat in the last row. Aside from the bailiff-a tall, muscular, eager-looking cop in a tan cop's shirt with some sort of walkie-talkie pinned to the collar-there were only two other people present, a young couple who might have been college students huddled in the front row over the comics page from the morning newspaper. For his part, Bridger was exhausted. He'd worked all weekend trying to catch up, fueled exclusively by Red Bull, coffee and pizza, The Kade's face so bleakly familiar to him it was like a hallucination, the too-small eyes and the ape-like bone structure of the skull visible to him even when he wasn't staring at the screen. It was a good thing the work didn't require even the smallest modicum of thought, because his mind was as far from Drex III as it possibly could be. All weekend he'd thought of nothing but Dana, Dana locked away in a cell, Dana scared and vulnerable, Dana eating some slop out of a bucket, harassed, put upon, unable to explain herself.