"It's one thing to help someone once they're in a jam. I like the idea of helping people avoid it in the first place."

That, I thought, was my best sales pitch. If I was in simply because I was Hector's friend, then I had this job as long as I didn't pull my dick out during the interview. But if he was actually evaluating me, then here I was, a former prosecutor and current defense attorney, with no experience in government bureaucracy, no time spent dispensing legal advice on how to do this or that, really very little to offer other than my charm and good looks-except that, if I knew how to charge people with crimes and how to get them off those charges, then I could probably also help steer people from crimes at the outset. As far as I knew, that's what non-litigator lawyers did-steer clients through the legal land mines. Who better than someone who'd been there when the mines exploded?

Cimino nodded slowly. He didn't speak for a long time. Sometimes people do that as a test to see if the other guy will fill in the dead air by babbling. I used to do that in interrogations all the time. I once got a confession on a B-and-E just by shooting looks at the suspect. "The contract would pay you three hundred an hour," he said. "No limit. Bill every hour you work. You'll make a lot of money."

Wow. Three hundred an hour, no cap, for government work sounded awfully generous. It was the first time that morning that I had been surprised.

"You'll need to raise twenty-five thousand for the governor by the end of next year," he said.

And that was the second time. I met his eyes. He was wondering how I would respond. So was I. I couldn't find the words to best express how I felt about having my wallet picked. A couple of expletives might have found their way into my response, along with general suggestions of where the demand for money could be inserted-certain bodily orifices leapt to mind.

Cimino seemed amused by my reaction. "You've never raised money before. You'll learn. It will be worth it to you, believe me. You do your part, you'll get a lot more back. A lot more. Understand?"

I nodded.

"You prove yourself to us, you'll be rewarded."

"Fair enough."

"You fuck me, I'll fuck you harder. Understand that?"

Jesus, this guy. I've never had much time for people telling me what bucket to piss in, but I wanted this contract. I wanted in. The more time I spent in this office, the more I knew that this had something to do with Ernesto Ramirez's death.

It seemed to me that the entire reason for meeting with Cimino was these last exchanges: the money, the promise, and the threat. Hector had already greased the wheels for me. This guy just wanted to see whether I was willing to kiss the ring.

"Then I better not fuck you," I said.

And that was it. One request to an acquaintance, ten minutes with this stroke-job of an egomaniac who made me feel like taking a shower after I departed, and I had a contract for legal services with the state's Procurement and Construction Board. My radar was buzzing, but that was the point. I was, in a very real sense, looking for trouble. Something told me that it wouldn't take me very long to find it.

17.

"HOW UNCHARACTERISTICALLY ENTERPRISING OF YOU, young man." Shauna, my law partner and probably best friend, if I thought about it, seemed genuinely surprised. She took a healthy drink of wine from the bottle and passed it to me. "It's almost like you want to have a legal career, after all."

Shauna had been on me to pick things up at the firm, starting with showing up on a daily basis and using my celebrity as Hector Almundo's lawyer to drum up business. Technically, I was just renting space from Shauna and she had no financial connection to my success. But she was hoping that jumping back into the pool would help me recover from whatever it was she had diagnosed as ailing me.

Maybe I was, too. I was taking this gig because I wanted to look into what happened to Adalbert Wozniak and, by extension, Ernesto Ramirez. But I couldn't deny that I was intrigued. It always seemed like a dark and murky world, this backroom political thing, and if it had escalated to a murder or two, so much the more enticing. It was reckless of me, sure. Nothing that I would have done, had I still been married to Talia and a father to Emily Jane.

Then again, it could have been the wine emboldening me. Shauna and I were camped out on her living room floor, listening to old R.E.M. music on the iPod hooked up to her stereo and splitting a bottle of red wine with our spinach and garlic pizza. This was basically how we spent our junior and senior years at State, only back then we had about a dozen other roommates, and if you wanted to lie on the floor, you needed a tetanus shot. Shauna now had a condo in a high-rise on the near west side, which was pretty small (about a thousand feet) but with a terrific view west that made the place seem twice as large.

We'd fallen back into this routine of late, hanging together the majority of evenings and listening to music or watching the rare show worth viewing on television-a list that grew smaller each year-or sometimes clicking on one of the inane shows that passed for entertainment just so we could ridicule it. Some nights, I'd just slept on her couch rather than make it home. It was always her place, never mine; there was something haunted and unspoken about my townhouse.

Shauna, with her short blond hair, blue eyes, and small frame, had a bit of an angelic look about her, but she could dissect me like a frog in biology class. "So what's the catch?" she asked, leaning back in the chair behind her desk. "Why this government thing?"

"Steady work between high-profile murder cases."

"I see." She wasn't buying it, and the tone of her voice was her way of saying so. "But this is just a contract, right? Just a client? You're not becoming a state employee."

"And leave behind this dynamic private practice I've built up?"

"Hey, listen." She pulled her oversized sweatshirt over her knees. "Christmas. What do you have going on?" She always did this, since Talia's death, asking after me but in a casual way that tried to deflect her concern.

"I might go down to see Pete. Otherwise, I don't know. You?" I passed her the bottle.

"My family's coming. My parents and my brother's family. I think it's more an intervention than Christmas dinner."

"Ah," I said. "You're over thirty, and not even a boyfriend, Ms. Tasker." Shauna grew up on the city's south side, like me, though we didn't meet until college. I couldn't even call myself Catholic compared to her. Her parents were outfitting her for a nun's habit when she informed them she was heading to law school. She never told them that I was her roommate in college. They wouldn't have survived it-dual coronaries within minutes of each other.

"Anyway, I could use a lawyer for the interrogation," she offered.

"I'll pretend to be your boyfriend. We'll say we're living together."

She laughed, but the offer still stood and I hadn't answered. "Maybe," I said. "Thanks."

She let it go, nodding toward the iPod resting on her stereo system. "You can't group them by twos the way you're saying."

"Sure you can. Murmur and Reckoning, obviously. Fables and Pageant, when Michael started feeling confident in his voice."

"He wasn't confident in his voice during Reckoning? Ever heard 'South Central Rain'?"

"An anomaly." I took the wine from her. We'd had this debate over R.E.M.'s music since State. She had trouble admitting she was wrong. I was fortunate not to have that problem, because I was always right.

"You know, Lynette asked about you the other day," she said.

"Lynette from law school? Jewish girl with the nice rack?"

Her head fell back, resting on her shoulders. "Why are men such single-cell organisms?"

"You like us that way, Tasker. You can manipulate us and turn us into groveling dogs."

She smiled, still looking up at the ceiling. "That's true. We can."

She didn't move, but I felt her eyes fall on me. She was constantly poking around with this kind of stuff, gauging my progress. She wasn't lying, I suspect; Lynette from law school probably had made a comment, but Shauna chose her words carefully and wouldn't have mentioned it unless she'd had a reason.

I loved Shauna. The way she watched over me, while challenging or insulting me in the same breath, was downright touching. But sometimes her protectiveness landed the wrong way, like an off-color comment made in mixed company. The slow unraveling of my senses, as the second bottle of Cabernet lay empty on the carpet, on this particular evening put me into the early stages of edgy belligerence.

"Next topic," I suggested.

"I'm drunk is the next topic." Shauna eased herself down to the carpet. "On a weeknight."

"There, there, pet." I stroked her hair. I played some of my early favorites-"Harborcoat" twice, then "Wolves, Lower"-and Shauna grew quiet, her body rising and falling with ease.

"Next year'll be better, Jase," she mumbled. I'd thought she was down for the count. I tried to coax her up and, failing that, lifted her up and carried her to her bedroom. She smiled and moaned with pleasure when her face touched the cool pillow. Moments later she was in a deep slumber. I kissed my hand and planted it on her forehead, then went back to the living room and played the same songs all over again.

18.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I REPORTED FOR DUTY AT THE state building. An efficient older woman showed me into a small office that I'd be able to use. She showered me with forms to fill out and various bureaucratic idiosyncrasies (I had to take an ethics test; I had to promise to disclose any securities I might sell) and left me for a couple of hours. I had about twenty questions about what I was filling out, but I just did the best I could, or left something blank, figuring they knew where to find me if there was a problem.

The last document I came upon was a confidentiality agreement. I had to swear that I would keep all official business confidential, and that I would not remove any items from the state office. It put a little acid into my stomach to sign it, but it made sense that an office that oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts might want to keep the wall up at all times.

The day before, I'd put in a call to Jon Soliday, a lawyer I knew in state government. He was the lawyer for Senate Majority Leader Grant Tully, his lifelong friend. Jon was one of these friends of a friend, but he'd always seemed like a pretty straight-up guy. More recently, I'd come into contact with Jon by virtue of Hector Almundo's prosecution. Nothing hot and heavy, just some general background information from Jon about things the senate did, and some questions he'd had for me, always deliberately vague. I'd sensed that Jon hadn't wanted to get too close to the hot iron. I'd also sensed that, as professional as Jon tried to keep it, Hector Almundo hadn't been his favorite senator.

We met for lunch at the Maritime Club, an old boys' club just a few blocks south of the state building. His hey-how-are-you was overly punctuated, given the circumstances, and I thanked him for the note he'd sent after Talia's car accident.

I liked Jon, because he kept most of his thoughts to himself, and when he spoke, he had a good reason. I'd first met him several years ago, and compared to then, he'd showed some signs of age-more wrinkles carved in his forehead, more snow at the temples-but otherwise hadn't changed a bit.

"So what's this opportunity?" he asked me, as he worked some Caesar dressing through his salad with his fork. I can't do that, the salad thing. It's not just a philosophical opposition, although that's part of it; roughage just doesn't fill me up.

"The Procurement and Construction Board," I said. "I have a contract for legal services."

He paused for only a moment, long enough for me to see that I'd struck a chord. With a poker face, eyes diverted, he asked, "Is that something you've already accepted?"

I almost laughed. He'd already given me the answer I'd sought. He didn't want to shit all over my "opportunity" if I had already signed up. If I hadn't, he was going to warn me off. "Give it to me straight," I said.

"I'm not sure I'm the right person to do that." He smiled. "Our current governor and the legislature aren't exactly the closest of friends."

Thinking back, I guess I'd read something along those lines. I didn't follow local politics all that closely, though representing a state senator had attuned me slightly more. The media, always more interested in the conflict than the policy, had covered the fight this past year between the governor and both the house and senate-but especially the senate, and especially Jon's boss, the senate majority leader, Grant Tully.

"The straight scoop, Jon. Please. I'm no partisan. I'm just a lawyer."

"Carlton Snow is an idiot." Jon opened his hands. "That straight enough?"

"Go on."

"He was the city clerk here-meaning you got your marriage license from him-who somehow managed to finagle his way into the nomination for lieutenant governor and then, by some God-forsaken twist of fate, actually won. And then he fell ass-backward into the governor's mansion when Lang Trotter went federal on us. I mean, Snow has absolutely no idea what he's doing, but he thinks he's going to be president some day."

Hector had said the same thing, the presidential ambition. "So-"

"He waltzed in on day one like he's Winston Churchill, having absolutely no idea about the legislative process or how to do anything other than issue a press release. He punched everyone in the capital in the face, refused to compromise on anything, and then wonders why nobody likes or respects him. He surrounds himself with yes-men who tell him he walks on water. See, you got me started." He took a drink of water.

"Don't sugarcoat it, Jon."

Jon's smile quickly evaporated. "The Procurement and Construction Board," he said. "That was initially something Snow created in the governor lite's office."

"The governor-?"

"Sorry, the lieutenant governor's office. Basically, your job as lieutenant governor is to sit around and be ready if the old man croaks, but the one thing that falls under the lieutenant governor is driver's licenses. He oversees DMV."

I'd seen that. Adalbert Wozniak's company had sought to provide hospitality supplies to the affiliate Department of Motor Vehicles offices.

"So, Snow falls into the governorship, and he decides to use that same model. Only the governor doesn't just preside over one agency-he oversees dozens of administrative agencies with millions upon millions of dollars' worth of contracts. Each agency doles out contracts, right? For anything you can imagine. Well, now Snow says, all of those agency contracts-all of them-are going to fall under a single board, the PCB. That's over a billion dollars in contracts, with five people appointed by Snow deciding who gets what." He looked up from his salad. "You get this contract through Hector?"

I nodded.

"Right. And who interviewed you? Derek Bruen?"

"Who's that?"

Jon shook his head. "The guy who'd normally be interviewing you," he said. "Anyone other than Charlie Cimino?"

I drew back. He seemed to have a pretty good handle on things. "Just Cimino," I answered.

"Sure." Jon shook his head and smiled. He seemed to be sensing that he was coming on too strong. "Well, hey, I'll say this much-there's lots of work with the PCB. Lots of money for a private practitioner. I'm sure it'll work out fine."

"Are you?"

He wiped his hands with his napkin and took a long drink of water. "Jason, you're a big boy, and a smart guy. Smarter than they'll be used to over there. Just call it like you see it, and document everything. Paper the files."

"Cover myself."

"Cover yourself, exactly."

"Jeez, Jon, is it that bad?"

He took a long time thinking about that. "The truth is, I don't know. I hear things. But the capital, I mean, it's like a sewing circle. Who knows? But when I say names like Governor Snow and Charlie Cimino, I don't usually use words like 'ethical' in the same breath. Know what I mean?"

I wasn't particularly surprised by what Jon was telling me, but hearing him say these things, I admit, gave me some pause.

"Look, I'll just say this once, Jason. Because you're asking. And then I'll shut the hell up."

"Okay." I opened my hands. "Hit me."

"The second best thing you can do is be careful, like I said. Cover yourself."

"And the best thing I could do?"

"Walk away," he said. "Walk away, Jason." He wagged a finger at me and did not smile.

19.

"THIS IS WHERE EVERYBODY WHO WANTS SOMETHING comes. And we're the ones who decide whether they get it."