Among Thieves

Chapter Twenty-Three

Thursday morning was a total loss for Finn. It was as though he were swimming in a pool filled with mud. It would be easier if he could go to the police and enlist their help. That wasn’t an option for him, though. His client wouldn’t allow it, and he was bound to obey

Devon ’s wishes. Sometimes it seemed as though the canons of legal ethics were drawn with an eye toward creating as many dilemmas as possible for lawyers, blind to the difficult realities faced by those who paced the courthouse halls.

He started the day by dropping Sally off for school in the morning. She seemed in mildly better spirits after a decent night’s sleep. She was still quiet, but regarded him without animosity. Perhaps, he thought, she was coming around.

He let her out in front of the school. “One of us will be here to pick you up when school ends,” he said. “Probably me or Lissa.”

She nodded and said, “Thanks.” Then she slammed the door and headed up the stairs to the main entrance and Finn pulled away.

Thanks. It was such a simple little word, said millions upon millions of times every day without thought or reflection. To the woman at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter who poured your coffee. To the man who held the elevator door for just a second longer to let you on. To the kid who bagged your groceries at the store for a summer job. It was said over and over and over, to the point where it almost lost meaning and became a part of the blur of modern reality. Said but never felt; heard but never acknowledged.

That was not the case with Sally. For her, common courtesy was a luxury-one that she clearly had rarely been afforded, and was hesitant to bestow on others. And so when she said the word to Finn-thanks-it made him feel as though, just perhaps, he was doing a good thing.

That feeling of accomplishment lasted only a moment, however, and as he swung the car around and headed for the office, he confronted reality. He would spend part of the morning putting together a motion for a new bail hearing. It made sense: he couldn’t get Devon out of jail until a new hearing was set. He would file the motion and then convince Devon that he was better off out of jail. Accomplishing that seemed a long shot. The man’s fear had been evident at their last meeting, when Devon explained the situation to him. He seemed determined to remain in jail, where he believed he was safe. Even if Finn could convince his client, though, there were no guarantees that bail would be set after Devon ’s behavior at the last hearing.

In the meantime, Finn felt helpless. It seemed as though there was nothing he could do to move the matter along, and he was stuck playing inadequate surrogate father to Devon ’s daughter.

By the time he pulled up to the office he’d worked himself into a sweat, just wrestling with his options. That, in turn, made him angry with himself. Lissa was right after all. Devon was his client, not his family, and this wasn’t, in the end, Finn’s problem. There was no rational reason he should treat it as though it were.

He opened the car door and stood up. Arching his back to stretch out, he looked around him. The weather was warming, little by little, and the buds were beginning to appear on the trees along the street in Charlestown. It was a beautiful place in so many ways; it retained much of the charm of the Old World. He’d built a good life for himself, he thought. Or, if not a life, at least a good professional reputation. He was far better off than he would have been if he’d stayed on the path of his youth. Few others were so fortunate. If he could, he was determined to give Sally the best chance she could have at a normal life. Right now, that meant working to get her father out of jail.

Liam Kilbranish was no longer watching the lawyer. He would return to that soon enough; for the moment he had other things to do.

He took his time. He was careful. He made sure that he knew the layout of the neighborhood well. One of the things that made planning difficult in this city was the layout. It had grown in fits and starts, without any semblance of the urban planning that one might find in a more modern city. Streets followed the original cow paths of premodern times, and neighborhoods had sprouted up, grown, died, and sprouted up again in a whimsical manner. As a result, the streets had few patterns and twisted and turned in an illogical stitching of one-way lanes and dead ends. Knowing the streets was paramount. The likelihood that a chase would ensue was low, but he had to account for the possibility. If it happened and he was unprepared, it would be over in moments.

Once he was sure that he had memorized the area, he went back to the safe house in Quincy. He had to make preparations there, too, if his plan was going to work. The place had a basement, which made things easier. It was a shallow space, with a low ceiling and walls that blended cement with the natural bedrock that had been blasted away to hollow out the ground underneath the little house. There was a furnace that looked as if it had been replaced within the past decade, and a water heater that was smaller than he would have chosen. There were no windows, which was a blessing, and the only way in or out was a staircase leading up to a kitchen. With a little work it would be perfect for his purposes.

Broadark was sitting on the couch, and he watched as Liam went up and down through the doorway in the kitchen, getting the place ready. The television was off; the man had given up his channel-surfing habit. Instead, he was watching Liam intently, and Liam could tell that he wanted to say something, though he held his tongue for a while.

It took less than an hour, and then he was ready. He sat at the table at the kitchen, checking over his weapons.

“Are you sure?” Broadark asked at last.

“I am,” Liam replied.

“This was never part of the plan.”

“Plans change.”

“They do,” Broadark agreed. “It’s not always a good thing when they do. If this goes badly, there will be questions. No one wants us to put the organization in this kind of light.”

“It won’t go badly.”

Broadark had nothing to say to that. To question any further would have brought the two men into a confrontation from which there was no backing down, and both of them knew it. He stood and walked over to the window, looking out into the cement yard. “When?” he asked.

Liam was strapping the knife to his ankle. He checked his pistol and slipped a fully loaded clip into the handle. He wouldn’t need the automatic. Not for this task. “Soon,” he said.

Finn worked through the morning. He drafted the motion for a new bail hearing in Devon ’s case, taking extra care to make it a work of his finest advocacy. Once he finished with the motion, he moved on to get some work done on other cases. He could feel Lissa looking up at him on occasion, studying his demeanor. Normally they would talk to each other periodically, and he generally showed her his work so that she could look it over. Not that day, however. He was too wrapped up in his own thoughts, and he didn’t feel like sharing them at the moment.

At one point Lissa got up and walked over to him. “You all right, boss?”

“Fine.”

“You sure?”

He looked up at her. “There’s nothing more I can do,” he said. “I can write the briefs, I can make the arguments, but that’s it.”

She nodded. “That’s true.”

“It pisses me off,” he said. “I should be able to do more.”

She flashed him an understanding smile. “That’s bullshit,” she said. “But at least it’s nice bullshit. It’s what makes you who you are.”

“My bullshit makes me who I am?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It does. True of everybody else, too, so don’t feel bad. Your bullshit is better than most.” She leaned in close to him. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t bullshit all the same,” she said softly.

He took in a deep breath and exhaled; returned her smile weakly. “Is that all you wanted to say to me? You had to walk across the room to tell me that? I’m full of shit?”

“No,” she said. “That’s not all.”

“What else, then?”

“It’s almost one-thirty.”

“So?”

“So, Sally gets out of school at one-thirty. You’re already going to be late.”

He looked at his watch and sighed again. “Damn, I almost forgot.”

“Almost?”

“Fine, I forgot.” He looked at the papers strewn across his desk. “I have no idea when I’m gonna get the rest of this work done.”

She looked at him for a long moment. He could sense a change in her recently. Something he was having trouble putting his finger on. She had always been one of the harder people he’d known. She didn’t let people in easily, and life seemed to roll around her without making a dent. But she seemed softer now, somehow. Perhaps it was just his imagination.

She walked back to her desk and picked up her car keys. “I’ll get her,” she said.

“You don’t have to,” Finn replied. He stood up and pulled his jacket off the back of his chair, feeling in the pockets for his own keys.

“I don’t mind,” Lissa said.

“I appreciate it, but she’s my responsibility.” He was moving toward the door, but she stepped in front of him.

“Finn,” she said, “she’s not your responsibility. You do understand that, right?”

“We can’t just leave her at the school.”

“I don’t mean right now. She’s not your responsibility long-term.”

“I know,” he said.

She looked at him. “Do you?”

“I do. I just want to do what I can to try and keep her father out of jail.”

“A lot of it’s out of your control, though. Even if you get Devon out on bail, you know he’s gonna go back in after the trial. You’re a good lawyer, but you can’t change the fact that you have a guilty client. Not just guilty; dead to rights.”

“I know,” Finn said. “But I’ve got to try. Maybe with a little time on the outside, Devon can figure out someplace for her to be. Someplace better than where she would otherwise end up.”

“There are lots of kids in the system who do just fine,” Lissa said. “Sally’s tough. She may be fine.”

He nodded. “Maybe. But maybe not.” He tried to step past her, but she moved to block him.

“You wanna tell me what this is really about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

He put his head down and took a deep breath. “There are moments in life you’d like to have back. Times you wish you could go back and change the things you did-change the things you didn’t do.” He looked up. “The system’s overwhelmed. It’ll put kids anyplace they’re out of the way. The last foster home I was in, I was fifteen. No one in their right mind takes in a fifteen-year-old. But this family ran sort of a group home. They got fifty bucks a week from the state for each kid they took in, so they’d take in anybody. They had about eleven of us when I was there. They had a bunkhouse out in the back where we all slept; one side for the boys and one side for the girls.”

“Sounds cozy.”

“Not the word I would have chosen. There wasn’t a lot of love in the place. And the kids…well, let’s just say the kids had their issues. Three of the older boys, in particular. They were into drugs. Into the gang scene.”

“So were you, right?”

“Fair enough,” Finn said. “But these three were different. Vicious. There was this one little girl, probably around thirteen, who was like a lost soul. See, most of us had been in the system our whole lives. We were used to it. We knew what to expect. But this one girl had grown up with a family. I’m not sure what happened to them; the girl didn’t talk about it. Something bad enough for her to end up in this god-awful place.

“Anyway, she kept to herself mostly. She had a diary and she spent a lot of time writing in that. Like her own form of therapy. One day one of the three boys stole it. He brought it into the boys’ bunkroom and started reading from it. It was sad and pathetic and everyone started laughing. Then this girl walked in and realized what was happening. She went berserk. She attacked the kid who had the book, kicking and screaming at him. He and the two others got a hold of her and just started whaling on her. Beat the hell out of her. She kept fighting, though, as long as she could. Finally, when the fight was gone from her, the three of them picked her up and carried her into the girls’ bunkroom. They kicked everyone out; threatened to kill anyone who ran to the main house-not that I think anyone there would have cared. They locked the door. I can still hear the girl crying.”

Lissa pursed her lips. “That’s not your fault,” she said. “You were a kid, and there were three of them. There was nothing you could have done.”

“Maybe not. But I didn’t even bother trying. You know what I did? I pulled out a bag and threw my shit in it and left. Never went back. Figured I was better off on the street. Still, I like to think that if I had it to do over, I’d do it differently.”

“And this is your chance to prove that?”

Finn shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Lissa shook her head. “It won’t change what happened. It won’t do anything for that little girl in the bunkhouse, and I’m guessing in the end it won’t do anything for your conscience either.”

“Probably not,” Finn admitted. “Worth a shot, though.”

“If you say so.” Lissa walked over to her desk and picked up her keys. “I’m going to pick Sally up.”