But Cole didn't seem to hear him. 'No,' he said, as though to himself.

'No what?' Hardy asked. 'You're not going to remember anything new?'

'Not that. I mean…' He rolled his eyes back and forth. 'I mean remembering something… that's not what I'm thinking about.'

Hardy knew what Cole was thinking about – his next hit. 'That's what you ought to be thinking about, Cole. Maybe you can use the time to clean up.'

A shake of the head. 'No. I don't think…' He stopped.

This was foreign soil to Hardy. He'd of course been around for much of the beginning of the drug culture in the late sixties, early seventies, but as a Marine in Vietnam, and then a cop before law school, he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of illegal substances. He'd found his excitement without resort to chemicals, and then, later – when he felt the need to escape from the pain of his failed marriage and the death of his son – he gravitated to what the Irish called the good man's weakness, drink.

But even that had never controlled him. He chose to drink, sometimes copiously, then chose when to stop.

This boy, he knew, was in a completely different world.

'Do you want to get out of it?' he asked.

Cole shrugged. 'If I do, there's a program for it.' A mirthless laugh. 'There's a program for everything, isn't there?'

'It does seem like it.' It surprised Hardy – this first moment of connection he'd felt with his client – but he felt the same way. Here in San Francisco, tolerance and understanding for every human frailty or aberration had been politicized, funded, institutionalized. Someone was being paid to help you with whatever ailed you in San Francisco, and if nothing ailed you, someone was being paid to find something that did. 'Is there anything I can do?' Hardy asked.

Cole turned his head. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean, if you decide to move the process along, get you counseling, like that.'

'Probably not.' Cole let out a breath. 'If it's going to happen, it falls to me.' He tapped his heart. 'In here.'

Hardy knew that this was true, but it was still good to hear Cole say it, to acknowledge that his fate was to some extent his own responsibility. Maybe he wasn't completely lost after all.

'So what happens next,' he asked, 'in the law world?'

'Next I file a few motions. The stuff I was talking about in there.' He pointed at the courtroom door. 'The procedural problems, these special circumstances.'

'Will that really work?'

'In what sense?'

'I mean, if they didn't read me my rights-'

Hardy narrowed his eyes. 'At the hospital the other day, you told me you didn't remember if they did. You thought not. Now you're saying if.'

He corrected himself. 'No. They told me I wasn't arrested for the murder so I didn't need a lawyer yet. They were just questioning me because I was in the alley and I ran.'

'So you do remember that?'

'That was after they'd kept me for hours. I kind of woke up halfway through things.'

Hardy wasn't thrilled with the constant shifts Cole's story took, but he saw no advantage in fighting about that now. 'Well, if that's really what they said, then you might have pulled yourself a break. We could get it tossed.'

'I'll tell you one other thing, though. About those special circumstances.' He shuddered involuntarily. 'I sure as hell didn't kill that girl because she was black.'

The world was suddenly still. Hardy sharpened his tone. 'Then why did you kill her?'

'What?'

He snapped it out harshly, under his breath. 'Why did you kill her, if it wasn't because she was black?'

After he'd seen Glitsky's videotape and reasoned things out for himself, Hardy had come to accept at least the possibility that Cole hadn't been the agent of Elaine's death. So he'd decided to stay with the case. But now here – apparently – was a second confession. Unsolicited, uncoerced.

Cole's face registered confusion at the rapid change in Hardy's demeanor. From protector to inquisitor in the blink of an eye. He twitched. 'Hey, come on, what? All I said was it wouldn't have been because she was black.'

'Wouldn't have been? Or wasn't?'

If there was a difference, Cole didn't seem to understand what it was. He strained to come up with something. 'I'm saying black, white, brown. Who cares? It wouldn't have been a race thing is what I mean. I don't even think like that.'

Hardy leaned in close, and this time the sweat was his client's. 'You just admitted again that you killed her. Don't you understand that?'

A deer in headlights, Cole was shaking his head. 'I don't know. I didn't. I said that?'

'You don't know if you killed her?'

Finally, a rise. 'I don't remember killing her. I told you that. I don't think I killed her, but I might have… if I shot the gun.'

'You might have! Cole, listen to me. You just said you didn't shoot the girl because she was black. Those were your exact words.'

But he was shaking his head from side to side, side to side. 'See? No. That's not what I meant.'

'OK, tell me.'

He sighed deeply, did something with his hands that caused the cuffs to rattle against the bars. Hunching his head down into his shoulders, he cleared his throat, spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. 'Look. If I was ever going to kill somebody, which I wouldn't, it wouldn't be because they were black, OK? So if I killed this girl-'

'Elaine.'

'Yeah, Elaine. If I killed her – which I don't remember, so it's possible maybe I didn't, too – that wouldn't have been the reason.'

'But if you don't remember killing her, why did you admit that you had?'

Cole rolled his eyes. 'Didn't we already go through this? I told you. I was coming down so hard-'

Hardy reached over, put a hand on his shoulder briefly. 'Stop, just stop.'

But he couldn't do that. 'You know, man-'

'Cole, call me Dismas, would you? Or Diz.'

'OK. But I also don't remember not killing her, I just don't. I don't remember the gun, how I got the gun…' The voice trailed off.

'Did you find it by the body? On the street, maybe?'

'It seems like.'

'Before or after you saw her?'

He closed his eyes, trying to bring it back. 'I don't know. It seems like before, because after… I mean, there was no time after, right? I'm leaning over her and the cops came.'

'And you remember that?'

Cole grimaced, the effort to recall out of his reach. He shook his head hopelessly. 'Not really.'

Hardy leaned back again. He had lived much of his adult life as a bartender and had great respect for the effects of alcohol, but the kind of total blackout that Cole seemed to be describing was far beyond that. 'Cole,' he asked gently, 'what do you remember after you picked up your bottle of whiskey?'

The young man raised his eyes. They had become glassy. 'I don't know, man. I just don't know.'