“Tell me you are not going back to prison. Make that promise to me right now.” I jab my finger on the top of the legal pad in front of me. I’m still a little agitated from lunch, but I’m trying very hard to put it—and Flint—out of my mind.
Isamu Mori spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. “I hope not.”
I hope not? There’s no way he makes it. Just two days out of prison and he’s already got one foot back inside.
“Christ, Isamu. I can’t keep bailing you out. Remember the whole three strikes rule? You’re two-thirds of your way to a life sentence for stupid drug offenses.”
“How am I going to pay for treatment when I got to work? There ain’t no jobs for felons like me out there that will pay for a doctor’s visit. You want me to stay out. My mom wants me to stay out. I want to stay out. But if I don’t got a job and someone on the street is willing to pay me $100 for a ten-minute delivery, it’s hard to say no.” His size ten sneakers shift uncomfortably on the floor.
“Aren’t any,” I correct. At his blank stare, I wave my hand. No point in correcting his grammar.
Isamu isn’t wrong. The system is designed to fuck with the poor people, and the poorer you are, the more the system doesn’t work for you. Other than his elderly mother, Isamu has no support and so it’s easy to see why he turned to drug dealing to pay his bills and make sure his mother ate. And now with two felony counts under his belt, he is virtually unemployable.
With a few strings pulled, I got him a job doing construction work with a local firm that is shady as hell. They injure more employees than they hire, and they pay under the table. But at this point, it’s better than nothing. “I like you, Isamu. You’re a good kid, but if you get caught again, there isn’t anyone who is going to be able to take care of your mother. She’ll die of heartbreak at the very least before you ever see another day of freedom.”
He blanches. “I’m going to try,” he promises again.
I stifle a sigh. He doesn’t need my nagging. It didn’t do any good the last go around anyway. He was out for only eight months before he was caught dealing again.
“Go on then. And tell your mother hello and thank you for the gyozas.”
He jumps to his feet and shakes my hand vigorously. “No problem, Ms. Harris.”
And with that, he’s gone, leaving behind the delicate scent of fried ginger and steamed pork—fresh dumplings courtesy of his mother. The one good thing about representing Isamu was the world-class Japanese dishes his mother kept making me. Too bad her home cooking can’t keep him off the streets.
“Why do I do this?” I ask my admin, Tanya Muir, who peeks her head in after Isamu leaves.
“Because you love it?”
“I don’t love it.” I rub my stomach. “In fact, I think all of these sad cases are giving me an ulcer.”
You need a break, Amy, I hear Flint telling me. But what does he know? Does he even work? I know he does things for his club, but he has enough free time that he can follow me around.
“Your ulcer is the result of no eating and all working.” She waltzes over to my desk and lays down my appointment calendar. Despite all the technology around me, I still like keeping my appointments on paper. But there’s something wrong with my July because there isn’t anything on there for the entire month. It’s blank. Actually, that’s wrong. There is one continuous line drawn through it in red. Red is what I use to denote time I’m out of the office.
“You gave me the wrong calendar,” I inform Tanya. “This one is defective. There’s a red line through all of July and none of my appointments are showing.”
“You’re so cute.” Tanya leans over and flips back one month, where all my appointments are written in a mash of pencil, ink, and highlighter. “You’re going on vacation.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s where you leave the office and don’t think about it for a set period of time.”
“I was joking.” I fold up the fake appointment book and slide it across the desk. “I know what a vacation is.”
“Do you? Because you’ve never taken one.” Tanya pushes the ledger back.
“That’s not true,” I protest, and flip the book open. “I took a break…” I page back a couple months and then a couple more. “Look.” I point to January 1. “I took off January 1 and 2.”
“Two days is not a vacation, and one of them the courthouse was closed anyway.”
“These cases don’t try themselves.”
In the back of my head, I hear Flint telling me I need a break, but Flint and Tanya are wrong. What I need is an overhaul of this society so that kids like Isamu have a better choice in the world than between earning minimum wage at the local fast-food joint and $100 for a ten-minute delivery.
“The problem is that you aren’t going to be able to try a case either if you burn out. So you are taking a vacation.”
“I have hearings and client meetings and trials.”
“No, you don’t.” She lays the book down in front of me, and the little white squares are blank. Her finger stabs down. “Nothing on your calendar.”
“Is this for real?” I turn to August and see entries. A hearing in Terry. A pretrial conference for Allred. An entire month with no hearings, no trials, no meetings. That would takes months and months… “How long have you planned this?”
Tanya is halfway out the door. “Since last year. I need a vacation even if you don’t.”
She shuts the door firmly behind her.
I stumble out of my office at nine because the vacation doesn’t start until I say it does. The problem is, with nothing going on for a month, I actually ran out of things to do. Tanya’s evil plan is working.
My head hurts.
I climb into my car, the sedate four-door sedan I paid for with cash ten years ago.
Maybe I should get a dog. No, that would require way too much effort. A cat? Possibly a fish? I think I could keep a fish alive. Then I remember the plants in my office that only live because Tanya waters them.
I’m thirty-three and live alone. That’s normal, though. Lots of women aren’t marrying or having kids. Lots of women are satisfied with their careers and their battery-operated boyfriends.
True, I don’t remember the last time my vibe gave me an orgasm like Flint wrenched out of me at the restaurant, but maybe it was just my technique. In the darkness of the car, alone, I give myself over to the fantasy of Flint.
My whole body tightens at the thought of the big, brutish vice-president bending over my bed, one hand on the mattress and the other on the antique brass headboard. I’ve often wondered where his tattoos stop…or maybe it’s where they start.
He has them on his arm, and I can see a hint of them a
round the collar of his t-shirts. They’re colorful and varied, from dragons to strange symbols that maybe I would be able to discern if I’d paid more attention in history class. He’s the epitome of biker hot—the kind of guy you might see in a movie or television show and say I’d do him, but when faced with the real thing, you run away. Fast.
Because who knows what happens when he catches you. I’m too soft for that.
Besides, my sole Death Lords client, the one who brought Flint into my life, once said that those bikers could have sex for three hours.
“That’s all you did was eat and have sex? All night?”
“It was only about three hours.”
“No one has sex for that long,” I told my client.
“You ain’t never had a Death Lord in your bed, have you?”
I think three hours is too long. I could maybe handle thirty minutes. That’s longer than I’ve ever had before and leaves enough time for me to read a deposition or two before I fall asleep.
Besides, the three-hour thing was just a brag. No one has sex for three hours straight. Who would want to? Certainly not me.
It doesn’t take more than ten minutes to drive along the nearly deserted South Minneapolis streets to pull into the alley behind my house. The lights are off in the small two-bedroom Craftsman home I purchased ten years ago.
A vacation? I can’t take a vacation. Doesn’t she understand that?
I work all day long because there isn’t anything to go home to.
The automatic lights flicker on as I pull into my garage. I had those installed a couple of years ago when there was a string of robberies in the area. I don’t know what kind of deterrent they actually are, but I figure only the really dumb are going to try to attack me in the middle of a pool of light. There are better marks around here.
I unlock the door and push inside. The stale odor of a house unused all day hits me. I flick on the kitchen lights and throw my briefcase, purse, and keys on the scarred oak table.