"You can be dramatic anytime you want."

He waited for another minute, perhaps two. A very long time.

Finally, she sighed. "I don't mean to be critical of you," she said. "It's just that I am so worried about you."

"You don't need to be. I'm fine."

"Maybe you are, but you're not the same person you always said you wanted to be." She shook her head. "I'm not saying this right."

"Okay. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."

She wrestled with it for another minute or more. Finally, she sighed. "I just don't know if there's anything you care about anymore."

"I care about you. And the kids."

"No. I know you love us, but I mean with yourself, with your life. Are you happy with your life?"

A million glib answers, the usual grab bag, sprung to his mind. But that, of course, was what she was getting at. He sat up and half turned away from her. "Am I happy? What makes you think I'm not?"

"It's not what I think."

"But something, just now, made you ask."

She reached over and touched his back. "It's not just now. And maybe it's the same something that's making you not answer."

He shifted to face her. "I honestly don't know what that is, Frannie." Then: "I don't feel like I'm doing anything different."

"You don't?"

"No. Not consciously anyway."

"No? What about this boy Amy just called you about? Andrew?"

"What about him?"

"You're happy with him going to jail for eight years?"

Another shrug. "It beats the alternative, which is life in prison. It's also the deal Amy made. It seemed like a good one."

"If he's guilty."

Hardy shrugged. "Amy says he's admitting, so he probably is. Either way, though, the deal gets him out not much later than if he went to trial and got acquitted anyway."

"So eight years for an innocent person is okay with you?"

"Well, first, as I said, he's probably not innocent. And second, he's already in the system. So he's looking at a year or two, minimum, before anything shakes out anyway."

"Which leaves six years. In six years, your own little boy is twenty."

Hardy ran a palm over his cheek. "So this is about Andrew Bartlett?"

Frannie shook her head. "It's about…" She started over. "It just seems everything you do nowadays has to do with manipulating the rules somehow. It's all just cynicism, and money, and cutting the deal."

Hardy's voice hardened perceptibly. "Maybe you don't remember last year too well, Frannie. When you and I tried to play by the rules, and got Polaroids with gunsights drawn on over our kids. The experience hasn't quite paled on me. So yeah, I guess I've gotten a little jaded on the whole play-by-the-rules concept. If I'm good at bending them and that makes life easy, I'm a sap if I don't."

"That's what you tell yourself?"

He turned now, frankly glaring. "Yes, it is. And I do very well at it."

Frannie glared back. "And that's also why you drink all the time now? Because it helps you forget how you're living?"

"What I'm doing is supporting this family, Frannie. The best way I know how."

Frannie watched a muscle twitch in his jaw. "Look," she said, "you cut a deal on this child molester guy the other morning, when you know there was a time you wouldn't have gotten within a mile of him."

"That was fifty thousand dollars' worth of-"

"Stop. Then you go to lunch, have a few drinks, and make a deal for your firm to help elect the DA. Then you have some wine at your partners meeting and try to cut a deal to make poor Gina come back to work when you know that her heart's gone out of it…"

"Let me ask you this, Frannie- tell me someone whose heart hasn't gone out of it, especially after…" He let it hang.

Frannie waited until he met her eyes again. "I don't mean to make you mad. I just don't believe that the person cutting all these deals is who you really are."

"Who I am." His laugh rang dry and empty. "Who I am is a guy who's lost faith in the process. But the bills keep on coming, the kids' college is around the corner. What am I supposed to do? Just stop?"

"Maybe you could do something you care about." She moved over toward him, put her arms around his shoulders. "Here," she said, "lie down with me. Close your eyes. You don't have to make any decisions right now, tonight. But a blind person can see how unhappy you are, how it's all frantic and manic and going going going just to keep busy."

"Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

She kissed him. "You're not going to die tomorrow."

She felt him growing calmer next to her, his breathing more regular. He put his arm around her and she lay up against him. After another minute, he said, "I think maybe I am drinking a little too much."

She noted the repetition of the disclaiming qualifiers-"I think," "maybe," "a little." But it was nevertheless an admission of sorts and, she hoped, a start.

After another couple of minutes, his body seemed to settle next to her. Sleep trying to claim him. "I'm tired," he said. Then, "I'm worried about Abe, too." The words were a barely audible mumble.

Then he was asleep.

Back at her apartment, Wu changed out of her lawyer clothes and chose a black leather miniskirt, a diaphanous red shirt over a skin-colored bra, a heavy leather jacket against the cold wind. Fifteen minutes after she'd hung up with Dismas Hardy, she was among the packed bodies at Indigo's, another bar at the triangle. At a dinner-plate-sized table, twirling her first cosmopolitan of the night with a well-manicured hand, she perched herself on a high stool and showed a lot of leg. The volume of the music- an endless bass and drum loop- made conversation impossible, but she didn't mind.

She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to think about Jason Brandt, either. Or Andrew Bartlett.

Wu shrugged out of her jacket, put it across her lap, straightened her back and turned to survey the groups of men who were drinking and laughing all around her. She caught one of the guys- good-looking in a grungy way, long blond hair, couple of earrings- checking the assets she so artfully displayed.

He was very much interested.

She smiled, slipped off the stool, got her drink in one hand and her jacket in the other, and moved in to cut him out.

10

The wind blew itself out overnight, but it was still unseasonably cold. A high, clear sky, bright sun. A rare city frost bloomed on every patch of green- admittedly not many of them- that Wu passed as she drove up Market Street.

Her hands shook and her eyes burned, but she was still thankful about the timing of the hearing this morning. The ten o'clock call meant she didn't have to go by the office and check in before driving to the YGC, and this had allowed her to grab an extra hour or two of sleep, badly needed after all the cocktails that had gone with last night's adventure. She hadn't made it back to her apartment until sometime after 3:00 A.M. She hadn't fallen asleep until nearly dawn, and was jarred awake by the alarm two hours later- disoriented, depleted, wrung out.

Still, by the time she entered the holding cell behind Arvid Johnson's courtroom, the mixed jolt from the Dexedrine and the espresso had kicked in. Handcuffed, Andrew sat on a cement bench built against the wall. He seemed subdued and nervous, shrugging a greeting of sorts, then going back to studying the pattern in the floor between his feet.

Wu put on a brave face, sat up close next to him. He smelled of disinfectant and soap. "Are you holding up all right? Did you get some sleep? How do you feel now? Are you still comfortable with our decision?" To each question, she got a shrug, a nod.

She tried a few more conversational gambits, telling him that the judge was going to want to hear him admit the petition himelf. All he had to do was follow her lead and it would all be over before he knew it. He nodded some more, then at last shut her up with a curt "I know what I've got to do."