The next morning I sat down to dial a number I’d not called in four years. The receptionist I reached announced the name of the law firm in the hushed tones appropriate to old money. I gave her the name I wanted and waited the couple of minutes it took to work through the various intermediaries until a deep unhurried male voice spoke.
“Grant Hancock here.”
“Grant, this is Henry Rios.”
There was the slightest pause before breeding won out and he said, “Henry, it’s been a long time.”
“Four years, at least.”
“Are you in the city?”
“No, I’m calling from my apartment. Grant, I need your advice.”
“Surely you don’t need the services of a tax lawyer on what you make with the public defender.”
“I’m not a P.D. anymore,” I replied, “and what I want to talk about is death, not taxes.”
“Anyone’s in particular?”
“Yes, Hugh Paris. I thought since you’re both — well, old San Francisco stock — that you might have known him.”
“Indeed I did,” Grant said slowly. “How well did you know him?”
“Well enough to think that he was murdered.” The line buzzed vacantly. “Grant? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss this over the phone. Can you come up here tonight?”
“About nine?”
“Fine. I’m still at the same place. You know the way.” I agreed that I did.
“Henry, did Hugh mention me? Is that why you called?” His voice was, for Grant, agitated.
“No, he never said anything about you. It was my own idea to call. I know how thick the old families are with each other.”
“I knew him a long time ago,” Grant said in a far-off voice, and then stopped himself short. “I’ll talk to you tonight.” The line went dead.
Grant Hancock, along with Aaron Gold, had been one of my two closest friends at law school. His name was the amalgamation of two eminent San Francisco families and he grew up in a mansion in Pacific Heights. He was one of those San Francisco aristocrats who, for all their culture and worldliness, never move a psychological inch from the tops of their hills. Among those families that gave the city its reputation for insularity, “provincial” was a compliment.
In the normal course of existence, I would never have met someone like Grant since his world was far removed from mine and hardly visible to the untrained eye. Its tribesmen recognized each other by certain signs and signals meaningless to the outsider. However, Linden University was an extension of that world and the law school was a kind of finishing school from which he entered a law practice so leisurely and refined that it would have befitted one of Henry Fames’ languid heroes.
Grant cultivated a certain languor and part of it was real, growing out of a sense of belonging that was deep and unshakable. Part of it was an act, a way of masking real passion and a strong if confused decency. His decency was as simple as the desire to treat everyone fairly and civilly but it was undercut by his knowledge that, from his position of privilege, he could afford to act decently at no cost to himself. He wondered how he would treat others had he not been so privileged, and, I think, he assumed the worst about himself.
The fact that he was gay added to his confusion because acknowledging his homosexuality was an opportunity to take a moral risk and he passed it up. He rigidly separated his personal and professional lives and spent great amounts of energy policing the border between them. And for all that, I had once loved him and he had loved me. There had even been a time when it appeared that we might live together, openly, but that time came and passed, and he could not bring himself to do it. We drifted apart, he back to his hill and I back to real life.
I was thinking about all this as I finished dressing and made a pot of coffee. There was something of Grant in Hugh Paris as if Hugh had been a version of Grant more comfortable with himself and more distant from that insular world of old money and unchanging attitudes. I let the comparison lie. There was work to be done.
The weather was beautiful, almost cruelly so, I thought as I walked across the parking lot to the courthouse. The deep and broad blue sky and the dazzling morning sun which should have looked down upon an innocent landscape instead shone above cramped suburban cities and cramped suburban lives. The sunlight brushed the back of my neck as if it were fingers wanting me only to stop for a moment and do nothing but breathe and be grateful that I was alive. Another time, I thought as I pushed open the glass door to the courthouse.
I walked up the stairs to the clerk’s office on the second floor. Telephones screeched and voices rose in frustration at the service counter. This was the place where court records relating to criminal cases were kept. By the time I got a sullen clerk’s attention, I had forgotten the weather and gratitude was the farthest thing from my mind. Having already located the case number on a master index, I ordered the court docket on Hugh’s case to see what had happened to it. Fifteen minutes later, the docket was regurgitated from the bowels of the bureaucracy by the same clerk, who warned me three times not to remove the file from the room.
I went over to the reading counter and flipped through the pages of the docket. The criminal charges filed against Hugh the day after his arrest were possession of PCP, being under the influence of PCP and resisting arrest — all misdemeanors. His arraignment had been set for a week after his release from jail. On that day, he appeared through his attorney, Stephan Abrams, and the D.A. moved to dismiss all charges against him. The court granted the motion and that was the end of the case. I made a mental note of the D.A.’s name: Sonny Patterson, an old courtroom adversary. I had the docket copied and went down the hall to the office of the District Attorney.
Sonny Patterson rattled the docket sheet and dropped it on his desk. He took a drag from his cigarette, scattering ashes on his pale green shirt and bright orange tie. Hick was written all over his puffy potato face, but it was an act, like his carefully mismatched clothes. He got juries to like him by letting them think that they were smarter than he. But Sonny had a mind for detail and one that made connections. A good mind. Evasive when circumstances required evasion. He was being evasive now.
“Come on Henry, I handle twenty cases a day in the arraignment court. You’re talking a thousand cases ago.”
“It’s not every day that you dismiss a three-count complaint involving drugs and resisting arrest.”
“Misdemeanors,” he replied disdainfully.
“Being under the influence carries a mandatory thirty day jail sentence.”
“So?” he said, shrugging. “With good time/work time figured in you’re out in twenty.”
“That’s still twenty days longer in county than I’d care to spend.”
“I know your position on determinate sentencing, counsel,” he said stiffly.
I held up my palms. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t come here to debate the point. I just want to know why you dumped the case.”
“What was the defendant’s name again?” he drawled in a vaguely Southern accent. Another affectation. The furthest south Sonny had ever been was Castroville.
“Hugh Paris,” I replied.
“Isn’t he the guy they pulled out of the creek about a week back?”
“The same.”
“You know him pretty well?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The papers say it was an accident.”
“So do the cops.”
“I know,” he said, “I had Torres up here to tell me about it. He mentioned — in passing — that you identified the body.” He leaned forward on his desk. “Do you know anything about this man’s death that the police don’t know?”
Police, I thought. Did he mean the cops? Any moment now he’ll be calling them peace officers. Aloud I said, carefully, “I don’t know anything about Hugh’s death the cops don’t know. I just added up the information differently.”
“So did I,” he said, picking up the phone and pushing a button. He reeled off a string of numbers into the receiver. A couple of minutes later there was a knock on the door and his secretary entered with a thick file. Hugh’s name was written across the outside of the manila folder. She put the file on the desk and Sonny flipped through the arrest report to the three sheets of yellow paper on which the complaint appeared. He turned the last sheet over to some writing. This was the alibi, so-called because every time a D.A. dismissed a case he was required to set out his reasons on the back of the complaint in the event someone — like a cop or irate citizen — took exception to the dismissal down the road.
“Insufficiency of the evidence,” Sonny said, lifting his face from the sheet.
“That’s meaningless. What was the problem?”
“The alleged PCP cigarette was analyzed by the crime lab and came back as creatively rolled oregano, dipped in ether to give it the right smell. Mr. Paris’s pusher misled him. Street justice, I guess.”
“And the other charges?”
“We won’t pursue the under the influence charge unless the defendant was examined by a doctor at the time of his arrest. The cops didn’t do that.”
“What about the resisting arrest count?”
“That was plain, old-fashioned contempt of cop. A little chickenshit charge. Not worth the paper it was written on.” He glanced at the complaint with an expression almost of distaste. I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. The D.A.’s know better than anyone what cops can be like — touchy, hostile, self-righteous.
“Have you ever heard of that lawyer, Abrams, before?”
“Nope. He’s not a local. He’s got himself a fancy address up in the city. You want it?”
I nodded.
He scrawled an address on a sheet of legal paper and pushed it across the desk.
“Thanks,” I said, rising to go. “You don’t think Hugh’s death was an accident, either, do you?”
“If I did,” he said, suddenly grim, “I wouldn’t have given you the time of day.”
“Then why are you?”
“The cops botched this one,” he said. “I know it, but I can’t prove it. I’ve already beefed Torres but even if they reopen the investigation now, the trail’s cold. You seem to know something about this case. Better you than no one. Good luck and remember,” he said, as I opened the door, “you’re an officer of the court.”
“Meaning?”
“If you find out who did it, let me know the bastard’s name. He won’t get away with it.”
But so often criminals do, I nearly said, but I kept the thought to myself.
At the end of the day I drove to San Francisco on highway 280, the serpentine road that wound through the foothills behind the posh peninsula suburbs and within view of the hidden houses of the rich. The twisted eucalyptus trees stood high and elegantly on those hills and the air was moist with the fragrance of their leaves. Deer grazed those hills and now and then a jeep went flying along the dirt roads with no apparent destination. A line of horses appeared on the horizon and then disappeared behind a clump of oak.
I was passing through some of the wealthiest communities in the country, and the only sign of money was its absence. The developer’s hand was stayed from these hills and woods to perpetuate a view of California as it had existed a hundred years earlier. Even the Southern Pacific commuter train, whose whistle I heard in the distance, was a subsidized prop, reminding listeners of the pristine age before Henry Ford gave wheels to the masses. A hundred years earlier, Grover Linden raised monuments to his wealth, but his heirs bought privacy, the ultimate luxury. Judge Paris lived somewhere in those hills, as safe as money could make him. Like God, he moved a finger and the sparrow fell. To him, a little death. But not to me. I floored the accelerator as if physical speed could make time move faster. I would bring this death home to him, whatever it took.
I followed a curve in the road and when I looked up, the darkened skyline burst across the rose-colored sky of dusk, vaguely Oriental in shape and pattern and decidedly sinister. This was the first time I had returned to San Francisco since Hugh’s death. Those untroubled summery days seemed far more remote than a mere ten days ago. I exited near the Civic Center and came up Market, now nearly deserted as downtown emptied, toward the bay. For all its magnificence the city seemed shabby to me as little gusts of winds kicked up scraps of newspaper and blew them across the street and the bag ladies stood shapelessly in front of dark windows muttering invectives. It would be cold later. I had not thought to bring a coat.
Stephan Abrams’s office was on the fifth floor of a highrise on Montgomery Street. Having called him earlier, I followed his directions and got to his office a few minutes before I was expected. His secretary told me he was on the phone and asked me to sit and wait. I took a look around the office. Chrome-and-leather furniture, off-white walls, industrial gray carpeting, an unnumbered Miro lithograph; all the indicia of unspectacular success. He entered the room and confirmed my image of him.
Abrams was bulky but not fat. He had sharply etched features, a receding hairline he made no attempt to disguise, and eyes that shone from deep within their sockets. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, red silk tie. He looked solid, not one to start a fight but not one to run from a fight either. The perfect all-purpose family lawyer. We shook hands. His grip, predictably, was firm.
“Mr. Rios?” he said. “I’m sorry to make you come up so late in the day but I was booked solid.” “That’s fine. I have another appointment a little later.”
“Oh? Well, then, there’s no problem, is there? You said something over the phone about a client we had in common.”
“Yes, Hugh Paris.”
“Maggie,” he said to his secretary, “why don’t you go on home, now. I’ll close up here. Step into my office Mr. Rios.’’
I went into his office and he followed me in, closing the door behind him. There were the usual framed degrees on the wall, one from Berkeley and another from Hastings Law School, full of seals and flourishes; a little vulgar, I thought. Abrams stepped over to a small roll-top desk against a wall, fiddled with the lock and opened it to reveal a bar. He motioned me to one of the two armchairs in front of a large plain desk in the center of the room. Without asking, he poured two glasses of scotch, Chivas Regal, and carried them over. He sat down in the other chair and handed me a glass.
“So,” he said, “Hugh Paris. At what point did you represent him?”
“I didn’t, actually. I offered but he turned me down. Then you picked up the case and got the charges dismissed.”
“It wasn’t hard, considering the lab report. Your cops have itchy fingers down there, but then that’s true of cops in most college towns when it comes to drugs.”
“The voice of experience?”
“I was a P.D. too, in Berkeley, back in the ‘sixties.” He took a healthy swallow of his drink. I swilled mine around in my glass, to be sociable. I hate scotch. “But the fires burn out.”
“You’re doing well.”
“I have no complaints,” he said. “So, what’s on your mind, Mr. — look, do you have a first name? Mine’s Steve.” He smiled engagingly. I was beginning to dislike him.
“Henry,” I said. “Did Hugh hire you?”
“I was retained on his behalf.”
“By whom? Robert Paris? Aaron Gold?”
“I have to claim the privilege, counsel. But if you speak frankly, then perhaps I can, too.”
“Hugh was murdered,” I said. “That’s to the point, isn’t it?”
“Brutally,” he replied, smiling. “Do you have any evidence to support your assertion?”
“None that I can share with you.” His eyebrows shot up. “But it seems to me that someone who cared enough to hire a lawyer on his behalf might also care enough to assist me in finding his murderer.”
“Anything you say to me, Henry, I assure you will reach the right ears.”
“I don’t deal with middlemen,” I said, tasting the scotch.
“Then why did you come here? To insult me?”
“To give your client a message,” I said.
“A message, Henry?” he asked softly. “If you want to deliver a message, I suggest UPS. Their rates are lower than mine.”
“Tell your client I know who killed Hugh Paris. The police are cooperating and it’s just a matter of time before we nail him. He’s not safe. And neither are you. You may not answer my questions but you’ll answer to a subpoena and, if you’re helping to cover up a crime, I’ll have you brought up before the Bar.”
“Get out of here, Henry, before I throw you out,” he said, rising. “Now.”
I stood up. “All right. Thank you for your time — Steve. And here’s my card.” I flicked it on the desk.
I shut the door behind me, and stood outside waiting to see if he picked up the phone. He didn’t. I went out into the street. I’d blown it. My purpose in coming to Abrams was to find out for whom he worked and the extent of his relationship to Hugh. Instead, I’d implied misconduct on his part and threatened him. Those were courtroom tactics, not the way to handle an investigation. But then, I’d been thrown out of a number of offices during this investigation. I seemed to be making people uncomfortable. That was some progress. Now, if I could only get them to talk. I set off in the darkness to find Grant Hancock.
Grant lived in a twenty-eighth floor condominium in a building that rose above Embarcadero Plaza. I walked there from Abrams’s office through the early evening. Seagulls squawked overhead as I approached the blue awning that marked the en trance. A doorman stood just outside the double glass doors. He wore a blue blazer over gray flannel trousers. I noted the bulge beneath his jacket where he strapped his holster. It was an odd neighborhood for a luxury high-rise, but there were spectacular views of the bay from the condos and, at night, it was as quiet in the streets as a graveyard. In the noisy, cramped city in which new construction was constantly obliterating someone’s view, peace and a vista of Sausalito from the living room were reason enough to pay the toney prices for a few hundred square feet of condo.
I identified myself to the doorman and he called up to Grant’s apartment. A moment later I boarded a dimly-lit elevator that carried me to the twenty-eighth floor.
I rang the bell and he opened the door. Behind him, in the darkness, candles were burning, and his window framed the bridge and the lights of Marin blazing across the bay. He still wore the slacks from his suit and a button-down shirt the shade of pearl; purchased, no doubt, from one of those men’s shops that sell to you only if your great-grandfather had an account with them. The three top buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a patch of tanned and expensively maintained flesh. His sandy hair was clipped short above his ears and the handsome, expressionless face was as mysterious and self-contained as ever. He smelled of bay rum, and his clear blue eyes took me in with a long detached look. I could see myself in that look; disheveled, thin, dark beneath the eyes and getting grayer, liquor on my breath. I heard, for the first time, music playing softly in the room, guitar and flute.
“Come in, Henry,” he said stepping back. I took it all in and smiled. The room was a joke. The candles were set in a pair of silver candlesticks atop an orange crate. There were some pillows stacked against the wall and an elaborate stereo system but no other furnishings. There was, I remembered, a mattress on a box spring in the bedroom and a butcher block table and two chairs in the kitchen. The refrigerator was apt to be stocked with wine, fruit juices, vitamins, some apples and cheese. The kitchen shelves contained a few mismatched plates of heirloom china and beautiful old wine glasses. He was holding one in his hand. The years had faded for a moment and all my feeling for him came back with an intensity that made my heart pound. And then he took a step and the feeling passed as quickly as it had come.
“I see the decorator hasn’t been in yet,” I said, more edgily than I’d intended.
Grant shrugged. “When I get lonely for furniture I go to my father’s house. A glass of wine? Or do you want to stick to whiskey?”
“Wine,” I said. “I was drinking scotch with a lawyer.”
“A seemingly innocent pursuit,” he observed drily, pressing a glass into my hand. “You’re awfully thin, Henry. Still forgetting to eat?”
“As always. You look — very well, Grant.”
Aloud he said, “Thank you,” but he was thinking something else. Bad feelings have a life of their own.
I wanted desperately to say something that would wipe away the stain from our last, angry conversation four years earlier but for me that was all history. I had lost the scent of the emotions that led to the breakup. I had almost forgotten that I was the one who stopped returning calls. I could only think of how well he looked and how it was good to see him.
He sat on the floor, cross-legged. Candlelight blazed through his hair. Theatrical, I thought, but effective. I lowered myself to the floor until we were face to face. “I wanted to ask you about Hugh,” I began, tentatively.
“Yes, of course.”
“What did you know about him?”
He shrugged. “The Paris family is peninsula and seldom ventures up to the city. I didn’t really know Hugh until we were undergrads at Yale. He was younger than I by a couple of years and I took him under my wing.” He looked into his wine glass. “I was in love with him,” he added simply.
“What happened?”
“Hugh was eighteen and not out of the closet. Neither was I, for that matter. He was tactful enough to overlook my infatuation. We behaved toward each other,” he said, suddenly bitter, “like perfect young gentlemen. And at night I lay in bed praying to God to make me different or kill me or, preferable to either, put Hugh beside me.”
“You never told me any of this.”
“It was ancient history by the time I met you and, besides, I hadn’t seen or heard from Hugh in years. Not until about six months ago when I ran into him on the streets. He saw me and tried to slip by but I stopped him. He wasn’t particularly friendly but he agreed to have a drink with me that night.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, and he spent the night here.” A twinge of jealousy constricted my chest for a second. “It was nothing like I’d imagined it would be when I was nineteen,” Grant added. “It wasn’t memorable and yet-” he poured wine into his glass from the bottle beside him — “I’ve thought of him almost every day since then. He’s one of those people who live less in your memory than your imagination. Like a symbol.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“I suppose it’s different for everyone who knew him,” Grant replied. “For me, he was a symbol of being young and unknowing.”
“I’ve never thought that was an enviable state.”
“No? Then maybe life has spared you some of the things I know about.”
“I don’t think I’ve been spared much of life’s nastiness,” I said, “but I don’t take it personally. And as for Hugh, I preferred the flesh-and-blood human to the symbol. Tell me, what do you know about the judge?”
“What does anyone know about Robert Paris? The poor boy who made good by marrying into the right family. My father thinks he’s the ultimate nouveau riche, but no one denies that he’s a brilliant and ruthless man. Of course, that was before the stroke. Now I hear he’s half-dead but he hasn’t actually been seen in town for months.”
“What stroke?”
“He had a series of strokes about a year ago. Since then, he’s stayed up on the Linden estate in Portola Valley. He sees no one, and no one sees him.”
“What about a man named John Smith?” I asked.
“Are we going to explore every branch of the Linden family tree?” Grant asked mockingly.
“Hugh saw him the day he was killed.”
“Well, he is Hugh’s great-uncle,” Grant replied. “So surely there’s nothing unusual about Hugh having seen him.”
“I don’t know. Is there? What kind of man is John Smith?”
“He’s a stuffy old zillionaire,” Grant said, “nominally a banker but only in the sense that he owns banks. He’s Robert Paris’s brother-in-law and controls the other half of the Linden fortune. He and the judge don’t get along.”
“Really? Do you know that as a fact?”
“Good Lord, Henry, half of the city knows that as a fact.”
“Then he’s someone Hugh might have gone to for help.”
“Help for what?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to talk to him though.”
“It’s easier to see the Pope,” Grant said, “and probably more fun.”
“What do you mean?”
“Smith is a recluse. You’d never get past the palace guard.”
“Could you?”
“I’d have to know why I’m trying.”
“I think Robert Paris had Hugh murdered.”
Grant sipped his wine. “You’re crazy,” he remarked cheerfully. “Smith would throw you out the minute you uttered those words.” Grant shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t help you.”
He finished his wine and set the glass down on the floor.
“I’m perfectly serious, Grant.”
“That’s your forte,” he said, “but even so you don’t go to someone like John Smith to accuse a member of his family of homicide. That’s what the police are for.”
“They’re not interested.”
“Then perhaps you should take your cue from them,” he said, rising. “I’m going out to get some dinner. Want to join me?”
“I can’t tonight, but I’ll take a rain check.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
Rising to leave I said, “It was good to see you again, Grant.”
A smile, at once cynical and tender, flickered across his lips. “What amazes me most about you,” he said, “is your sincerity.”
“I’m afraid that it’s my only social skill.”
“Good night, Henry,” he said, letting me out.
I stepped out of Grant’s building, passing the doorman who acknowledged my departure with the slightest of nods. I had parked down by the piers on Embarcadero and had walked, first to Abrams’ office and then to see Grant. Now as I returned to my car, walking beneath the freeway, the streets around Embarcadero Plaza were deserted. It was only the racket from the freeway and the lumbering noise of the buses as they screeched to a halt at the nearby bus yard that gave an illusion of activity.
It was the road noise that kept me from making out my name the first time it was shouted by a voice behind me. The second time I heard it distinctly, stopped, and turned around. A man, my height but considerably more muscular, hurried toward me. He wore tight levis and a leather bomber jacket over a white t-shirt. As he stepped beneath a streetlight, I saw he was carrying something in his right hand. A gun. Aimed at my stomach.
“Henry,” he said in a friendly voice, “I’ve been shouting at you for the last block.” His dark hair was cut short and he wore a carefully clipped moustache. He was good-looking in an anonymous sort of way. A Castro clone.
“I don’t think I know you,” I said.
“Well, we’re going to be good friends before the night is over.”
He kept the gun on me while he raised his left hand in the air and motioned toward us. A moment later a car — black, Japanese, four-door, with its lights out and no license plate — crept up beside us. Two other men were in the front seat and one in the back. The two in the front and my friend with the gun were not only dressed identically but, as far as I could see, might have been a set of triplets. The man in the back seat differed from the others only in that he was a blond. He stepped out of the car and approached us.
“Hello, Henry. Just relax and do what you’re told and everything will be fine.”
“Sure,” I said, as the car came up directly behind me.
The blond reached into his back pocket and pulled out a black bandana, of the kind allegedly used by some gay men to indicate their sexual specialties. I didn’t think that he was signaling me for a date. Smiling, he brought the bandana over my eyes and tied it at the back of my head.
“Put your hands out, please,” he said.
I put my hands out slowly. They were bound with rough twine. I was led by the arm into the back seat, where I was wedged between the two men. Lest I forget who was in charge, the dark-haired man pushed the nozzle of the gun against my side, just below my ribs.
The motor started and the car jumped forward. It was pretty quiet outside, so I assumed we were traveling on the periphery of the city. I had no sense of time. Finally, we stopped and the only noise I heard was the sound of the sea as someone unrolled a window and the windswept in.
It occurred to me that I was about to be killed. I wondered if it would hurt. I wondered if there was an after-life. I supposed that I was about to find out. It was too bad I hadn’t gone to dinner with Grant.
“Who sent you?” I asked.
A voice that I recognized as belonging to the blond said, reasonably, “Don’t ask questions you don’t expect answers to.”
My arms were pulled out in front of me. I felt something cold and liquid dabbed at the inside of my arm at my elbow. The smell of alcohol filled the car.
“Nice biceps,” the blond said. “You lift weights, Henry?”
“No,” I said. “It’s heredity.”
“You’re lucky then,” he replied. “I have to lift pretty hard to stay in shape.”
The needle hit me with a shock, and I jerked my arms back.
“Steady,” the dark-haired man said, holding the gun against my neck. “Stay cool.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“We have some questions for you,” the blond replied. “This will make it easier for you to answer them.”
Minutes, or hours, passed. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth. Things stopped connecting in my head. I struggled to stay awake but it was like trying to keep my exhausted body afloat in a warm sea. It was so much easier just to give up and go under.
“Sodium pentothal,” I muttered in a voice that I vaguely recognized as my own. “Truth serum.”
“Very impressive,” the blond said. “Now relax.”
“It doesn’t work,” I murmured, half to myself. “Results aren’t admissible in court. I won’t tell you — anything I — don’t want to-”
“Quiet now,” one of them was saying. I couldn’t tell which anymore. “Rest. Later we’ll talk.”
I heard a roaring in my ears that was either the ocean or the sound of my blood.