Hard Bitten

by M. K. York

  The steps creaked under his feet on his way up to the front door. He could already hear a hum of conversation from inside, the lone glass window in the front door glowing with light.

  He pressed the buzzer for the doorbell, and a minute later the door opened. “Buddy!” It was Frank, unfortunately, grinning widely, wearing a T-shirt that proudly proclaimed him a Federal Bikini Inspector. “Come on!” Mark found himself getting hauled into a one-armed hug—Frank needed the other hand for his beer—and then, inexplicably, getting a brief noogie.

  “Hah,” said Mark weakly.

  Frank released him once they were inside the door, and Mark started looking for Lukas, craning his neck. Frank was no help, having apparently immediately forgotten about Mark’s existence.

  He picked Lukas out of the small but vocal crowd a minute later. There weren’t that many people there—certainly not more than fifteen—and he saw Nick and Consuela first, and then Lukas standing next to them, grinning good-naturedly as Nick told a story with exaggerated hand gestures.

  Mark sidled through the people, grabbing a beer along the way, and ended up standing next to Lukas, who shot him a sideways glance with a fond smile.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, once Nick finished the story and there were high fives all around.

  “Good.” Lukas rolled his shoulders. “Client this afternoon decided to hire me.”

  “That’s great!”

  “It’s fine. It’s just infidelity, but it’ll pay some bills.”

  “Oh, uplifting.”

  “Says the guy who defends drunks all day.”

  “Yeah, I’m not saying I want to do this forever.” Mark shrugged. “I did sign the contract renewal, though.”

  Lukas’s mouth twisted. “Well, there you go. They want to keep you.”

  “Yeah. Shock of shocks, it’s not that easy to find people who actually want to do this.” Mark grinned humorlessly at Lukas. “God, let’s not talk about work, though.”

  “What, you don’t want to obsess some more over this witness?” Lukas wiggled his eyebrows. Mark burst out laughing.

  “No! Lena kept calling me all day! It was one thing after another. I’m getting carpal tunnel because of this case. This case in particular.”

  “Well, if you’ve got to sacrifice your wrists for something, at least it’s a noble cause.” Lukas nudged Mark with his shoulder, lingering for a split second, a gesture that would have been perfectly friendly and normal in any other situation.

  It made Mark stiffen; he tensed, and Lukas felt it, pulling away immediately.

  Mark could feel words, ready to be said, you look good and what are you doing after this, and he resolutely didn’t say them.

  Nick turned back to them—he’d gotten involved in conversation with somebody else for a minute—and the talk steered sharply back to the docks, and some people Lukas apparently knew from high school. Mark kept smiling and nodding and laughing in the appropriate places, determined not to let his boredom shine through.

  It was a low-key kind of party. He wandered off after a while, despite the feeling of wrongness that came with migrating away from Lukas, and got himself another drink. He found the kitchen at the far end of the living room, and through it, a screened-in porch.

  He was leaning back against the side of the house, thinking vaguely about how few screened porches he’d seen in Seattle, and how many there were back home, and down South. It was cold, but he wasn’t feeling it yet. It hit him that he’d missed Valentine’s Day this year—God, how had he missed that so completely? But there wasn’t a lot of romance at the office, only Jen with a card tacked to the wall over her desk. The florist down the street with extravagant displays. That made him think about the case again, and he was determined not to think about it, for one night.

  His mind had drifted back to a hot summer visit to family in Texas, stifling heat and fire ants everywhere and his uncle’s pinched attempts at pretending he didn’t suspect the gangly sixteen-year-old nephew of being gay (and his uncle’s utter failure to recognize that the seventeen-year-old neighbor boy down the street definitely was, and when they had trouble finding Mark for dinner it had a lot to do with that boy’s hammock out in a heavily fenced backyard), when the door clicked. His head jerked toward it, instinctively.

  “Oh, hi,” he said. Lukas smiled back.

  “Sorry if I startled you. Deep thoughts?”

  “Hardly.” Mark shook his head slightly. “Good party. Fun people.”

  Lukas snorted. “You don’t have to pretend. I know they’re not as smart as you.”

  Mark frowned, searching Lukas’s face. “Is that—you know it’s not a big deal, right? I went to some extra school because my family could afford to support me. It’s not magic.”

  “Yeah, but you’re—you can tell you’re smarter than they are.” Lukas shrugged stiffly. “It’s funny. When Nick was asking me to be the godfather, he said I was the classy one, out of them. I went to the most school, I’m the smartest. They know it, I know it, it’s not something we worry about a lot. But you’re—a whole other level of class.”

  Mark was silent for a few minutes, digesting that. “Happy birthday, by the way,” he said at length. “I forgot to say it earlier.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  They stood, in the damp chill that was starting to penetrate Mark’s buzz. Lukas had turned toward him as they talked, and Mark had turned back to face him. There was nowhere near enough room between them, or there was too much. Acres of empty space. Mark knew Lukas would be warm, if he closed the distance; if he kissed Lukas, Lukas would kiss back, and damn the trial, damn the investigation. They were almost at the finish line, what could it hurt? He found himself leaning forward, and for a second he thought Lukas wouldn’t move, they’d—

  Lukas pulled himself up off the wall with a rolling movement. “See you back inside.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said vaguely. He watched Lukas leave.

  Mark didn’t stay as late as he’d thought he might. He stuck around for the candles, and the cake, and the singing. (Oh God, the singing.) But he left, mostly sober, without saying goodbye, and when he got back to his apartment, it felt impenetrably empty.

  Chapter Twenty

  Monday morning, Mark was called to a meeting before he’d even had time to put his things down.

  “Lena,” he said, “I have court in like two hours, I have to—”

  “You have to come with me to the DA’s office, is what you have to do.” She didn’t sound like she was going to listen to an argument on the subject. He followed.

  John Dauer was sitting at his desk when they got there, doing a creditable impression of a man who wasn’t freaking out, but Mark had a feeling that only deepened when Dauer leaned back and said shortly, “Counselor Holbrook.”

  “Am I in trouble?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “This addition to the witness list. You know we’re going to cross-examine her. I’m planning on making her look like a bitter alcoholic, which, from what I understand, she conclusively is.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

  “And I have some news for you on our front.”

  She raised both eyebrows, waiting, looking unimpressed.

  “We have security footage of Melinda Kupfer shopping with her best friend. So her alibi checks out.”

  “That’s nice,” said Lena shortly, “but you have to realize that she’s not going to be the primary suspect we moot anymore.”

  “I wanted to discuss that with you.”

  “Oh, really?” Lena crossed her legs, leaning forward.

  “I think it would be for the best if you didn’t telegraph your intentions about this case to anyone outside this room. Including your client.”

  “That’s going to be a challenge.”

  “Is she going to take the stand?”

  “We haven’t made that decision yet. And, as you know, we aren’t required to.”

  Dauer sighed. “Look. Lena. We don’t
—there are some holes in the office. Someone is leaking. We don’t know who.”

  “But leaking things back to Kline?”

  Dauer couldn’t quite control the convulsive movement of his lips, like a grimace of disgust. “Who—what have you heard?”

  “I hear he’s got complaints pending against him with the judicial review committee. I know he’s been acting very strangely about this case. I know Ron Williams has a history of his workers getting into legal trouble and then, somehow, being released without charges. I know there’s reason to believe drugs or some kind of contraband are being trafficked through Ron Williams’s shipping company. I know if Internal Affairs is involved, you suspect there are dirty cops. And if there’s suspicion about dirty cops and a dirty judge, my money is on Kline.”

  “Goddamn it.” Dauer gave up all pretense of cool, pressing his knuckles into his eyes.

  “So, how right am I?” Lena grinned like a shark.

  “I have nothing further to say on that subject.”

  “What I don’t understand is why they involved you.” She leaned back and frowned. “Unless you filed one of the complaints. Or your office. A bunch of prosecutions getting sabotaged?”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “Take it easy, John. I don’t think our client is the source of any leaks. She is, and I say this with all due respect, about as smart as your standard poodle. She doesn’t have much in the way of visitors in jail. But I’ll agree that she lacks a certain sense of self-preservation, and we’ll use discretion in what exactly we share with her.”

  “Good. Good.” Dauer slouched in his chair and closed his eyes. “Lena, you know you would have made a good prosecutor.”

  “Yeah, but at what cost?” She shrugged. “I’m happy enough where I’m at.”

  “How’s Kelly?”

  “She’s good. On my case about a vacation I promised her six months ago, after we just had one.”

  “Yeah, Barb’s bugging me about a tree house I promised I’d build for her brother’s kids.”

  “That’s on you, then. Don’t make verbal contracts with minors.”

  “It’s not legally binding!” he said, and they laughed. Mark was fairly certain he’d ended up on another planet. An alternate reality, maybe.

  After the meeting, Mark said, “I seriously have to be in court pretty much immediately, and I feel like I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Go do your hearing. Is it a hearing? Do it and we’ll catch up later. Shit, you need to prep Lukas for his testimony, and I should help you with that.”

  “I would appreciate it,” he said, while trying not to think about what prepping Lukas would look like.

  “Get ahold of him, find out when he has time to come in.”

  “Will do.”

  *

  The hearing was short and not as bad as he’d been expecting—his client got less jail time than she probably should have and was effusively grateful. Mark always had mixed feelings about that.

  He texted Lukas about the trial prep, and Lukas texted back, anytime tomorrow if that works.

  Great I’ll ask Lena

  They settled on the late morning—Lena cursing out loud while she moved things around on her schedule—and Mark sat with his hands over his eyes, in the early evening quiet of the office. People had started to go home. He’d left the lights off, and there was just a faded reflection of light permeating the office.

  “Hey,” said Gavin from the doorway, half-shadowed, face still and grave.

  Mark looked up, trying to school his face into something resembling a smile. “Hi.”

  “Trial next week?”

  “Yeah.” He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. It felt so real now, imminent and terrifying.

  Gavin sat across from Mark, levering himself down slowly. “You’ve got this. You’re going to be great. I’m not kidding, you have the best oral arguments I’ve ever heard.”

  “You’ve never been to one of my trials.”

  “No, but you rehearse them in here, asshole.” Gavin leaned over, hand up. “C’mon. High five. Don’t leave me hanging.”

  Mark returned the high five listlessly. “I just... This is more responsibility than I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “Yeah, but Lena’s going to do the ugly parts, right?”

  “Yeah. She is.”

  “And she’s been doing this, what, thirty years?”

  “Close to.”

  “So she’s not going to let you fuck up.”

  “That is actually pretty comforting.” Mark rubbed at his forehead. “Thanks.”

  “No problem, bud.” Gavin stood to go. “I’m going to go home, as someone who does not have a massive case coming up. You should go home and sleep.”

  “I will. I’m just doing the trial prep for Lukas tomorrow with Lena, and I want to go over what we’ve got and make sure I know exactly what we’re asking him. We had some new info come up last week. I have to get started on that too.”

  “Okay, but go home by seven, all right?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Seven, hard limit.”

  “Eight, max.”

  “Okay, eight.” Gavin rolled his eyes. “Overachiever.”

  “Murder case, you asshole,” said Mark without heat.

  “Yeah. Don’t kill yourself over it, or you’ll double the body count.”

  Mark waved Gavin away, and he went. Mark spent the next couple of hours glued to the paperwork—he turned his desk lamp on, and went back and forth between his scribbled paper notes and the computer files he had—and he’d built a pretty decent framework for Lukas’s testimony by the time he finally pushed to his feet, ready to head home.

  He was halfway out of the building when his phone buzzed. He checked it, and it was Lukas. call me, it said, nothing else.

  He ducked into a niche, even though the building was mostly empty, before dialing. “What is it?” he said, when Lukas picked up. “Did something happen?”

  “No. No.” Lukas sounded distracted. “Look, can you come meet me?”

  “Yeah,” he said, even though he was dead on his feet and the thought gave him a surge of uncomfortable adrenaline, mixed fear and desire. “Where?”

  “My place?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there—” He’d driven that day, for once, so he did the math in his head. “Twenty minutes? Half an hour?”

  “Good. Thanks.” Lukas hung up before Mark could say anything else.

  Mark drove as fast as the traffic would allow; at least it had petered out from the rush-hour bumper-to-bumper routine. He made it out to Ballard, with the requisite glimpses of the nearly black Sound off to the left, in good time.

  Lukas’s door opened while he was raising his hand to knock.

  “Oh, good,” said Lukas, vaguely. He looked like hell, and he put a hand on the back of Mark’s neck and all but dragged him inside. He did not look like someone who was thinking about putting the moves on Mark.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Mark asked, which he thought was a pretty reasonable question.

  “Look. Williams is a good old Ballard boy, right?” Lukas dropped down to sit on the edge of his sofa, leaving Mark nowhere else to sit but beside him. So Mark did. It had been a long goddamned day.

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’m a good old Ballard boy.” Lukas shook his head as Mark opened his mouth to argue. “I am. I mean, come on, my parents got married at the Sons of Norway hall.”

  “Huh,” said Mark.

  “So something occurred to me. I thought, what if I know some of the same people Williams knows? Not the rich people, but what if I know some of the guys who do his heavy lifting?”

  Mark stared at Lukas. His face was perfectly serious. “Shit,” Mark said softly. “Do you?”

  It was a sucker’s question. Of course he did, or he wouldn’t have called, and Mark wouldn’t be sitting here, knee so close to Lukas’s they were almost touching—and Lukas so far gone in his head that it
seemed like he wasn’t even noticing, fingers tapping nervously on his legs.

  “You know I catfished Williams a while back. I went back through his friends list, and long story short, I think—this is going to sound crazy.”

  “Try me.”

  “I think Frank is on his payroll.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Frank?” Mark finally said. “Stupid T-shirt, moron Frank?”

  “Supervisor-at-the-docks Frank. Frank who knows a lot of guys who’d pay money for drugs.”

  Mark digested this. “You think he’s selling to his employees?”

  “He’s had money lately. I didn’t—I know he’s been working some overtime, I just figured that was it.”

  “You’re not going to like what I have to say about this.”

  “Try me,” Lukas echoed back at him, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. That’s why I called you.”

  “Frank can be one of two things here. He can either be a source, or a distraction. That’s it. So if we want to ask him what he knows, that means telling him we know shit we don’t want to leak before the trial. If we were the cops, it would be one thing, we’d have options. Resources. Protection. But we don’t have any of those things. And that leaves distraction. If we start digging into who’s involved in this, it opens us up to a whole new circus at the trial. And trial’s already going to be a shit-show.”

  Lukas sat still, quiet, for a while. Eventually he said, “So you’re saying I should leave it alone.”

  “At least for now. At least until we have the trial underway and the cops finally figure out what they need to be investigating.”

  “Do I say anything to Frank about it?”

  “No. Right now, officially, you don’t know anything, and it’s safer for both of you that way. He doesn’t need to know shit, and it would give you possible problems down the road. Play dumb on this one until or unless the cops come and ask nicely, and even then don’t talk to them without a lawyer present.”