Dash was shaking his head. 'Nobody loves him as much as I do. I even love it that there's nobody on the Food Channel anymore except him. Except one other, what is it, the Iron Chef?'

'Something like that.' Connie was into it. 'But Emeril… let's kick it up a notch. Bam. I love that.'

He reached over and touched her knee. The skirt had ridden up to her mid-thigh. He popped the glove compartment and took out a small vial of white powder. 'Kick it up a real notch.' In half a minute, he had poured it out onto the mirror from the glove box and arranged it into four short lines. 'Just good old-fashioned nose candy. I don't want to force you to do anything.' One of the lines disappeared up his nose. 'See? Harmless.' Then he made a face, and blew out comically.

She watched him. He finished the second line. 'You know, some nights I'll get home all wired and turn on the tube and watch like three Emeril's in a row. Now that is loving the man. What I don't understand is how come he doesn't get tired. I do three shows in a row at two a.m. and I'm gonna be dragging, I promise.'

'Not with that in you.'

In ten minutes, they were talking about going back to his apartment, which wasn't more than three miles up across Market. 'But what about your friend?'

'Oh, she drove. We talked about it. If I'm not there, she'll just go home.'

16

At seven fifteen on this Tuesday morning, Rich McNeil, bundled in a heavy overcoat, was looking over a guano-stained railing into the green waters of the bay. Further along the railing, a lone Asian fisherman smoked and walked back and forth, pausing every few steps to tug at one of his lines. In the fifteen minutes that McNeil had been waiting, he'd pulled up two small fish and put them in a burlap sack that he had suspended into the water.

A light but steady glissando of traffic noise emanated along the Embarcadero, wheels hissing on the dew-slicked cobbles. The water vanished into a moderate fog at fifty yards and somewhere far off seals were barking. Their cries carried over the trackless distance in a symphony of desolation.

Hands deep in his pockets, McNeil shuddered against the chill.

At the sound of footsteps approaching behind him, he turned. 'Hey, Diz.'

Hardy wore a raincoat over his business suit. He extended his hand and the two men shook. 'This is a cheerful spot.'

McNeil turned his head as though seeing where he stood for the first time. 'It is a little bleak, I guess. I've got some deliverables coming in by boat at Pier Eighteen and I want to be there to meet it. But I wanted to see you first, before work.' He hesitated. 'Before I had any more time to change my mind.'

'About what?' Although Hardy had a pretty good idea.

'Well…' He took a breath, steeling himself. 'I appreciate all you've done for me on this problem with Gait, but I've talked to Sally and we've pretty much decided to just say the hell with it, sell the damn building, take our money and pay off that bastard just so he'll go away. Maybe the insurance company will cover the civil settlement.'

Hardy had his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. He cocked his head to one side. 'Are you sure you want to do that, Rich? Your insurance won't cover it – they'll say the theft charge isn't covered by your policy. It's going to cost you close to what you originally paid for the whole building.'

'Well.' He sighed. 'I know, I know. Sally and I were just thinking about what the trial was going to put us through, cost us, all of that. And for what?'

'To keep Manny Gait from shaking you down, Rich. How about that? You didn't do anything he's accusing you of.'

McNeil shook his head wearily. 'If we lose, though, I could go to jail, Diz.'

'We won't lose. There's no case.'

A brittle smile. 'But you can't guarantee that, can you? You've told me a hundred times, you just can't predict what a jury's going to do. And if they find me guilty, I go down.'

'That's a big "if", though.'

'But it's my life. Why do I want to risk it?'

It was an unassailable point, and Hardy couldn't answer it. Still, it galled and upset him. He jammed his hands further into his pockets, walked over to the railing and peered down into the waters of the bay, then turned back to his client. 'You're just going to let him steal a quarter million dollars from you because he's an asshole?'

A desultory shrug. McNeil was embarrassed by the decision, although that didn't mean he was going to change it back. 'The building's going to go for five and a half or six million. That's plenty to live on. I'll put it on the market like everybody's been advising for the last decade. Give the cretin his goddamn blackmail money, well worth it to get him out of my life at last.'

But Hardy just couldn't let it go. 'I thought we were going to press our own counter-charges against him. Punish him because he, not you, was the one doing something wrong. If I remember, you were pretty pissed off. You wanted to fight him. So did I. So do I.'

'I know.'

Hardy waited.

His client tried another tack. 'It'll cost almost the same as a trial, anyway.'

'No it won't. A quarter mil is about twice as much as a criminal trial would cost you, Rich. At least. Hell, I'll knock my own court appearance fees down to my hourly rate.' Hardy charged private clients three thousand dollars for every trial day in court, far in excess of his hourly rate of two hundred dollars. 'If the trial goes a week, that alone will save you a ton.'

McNeil shook his head. 'It's not about money, Diz.'

'That's kind of my point, too. Gait is the criminal here. Not you. So why are you the one being punished? After all he's put you through, don't you want to get this guy?'

No answer. McNeil pulled his own overcoat more tightly up around his neck. 'So look,' he said, 'what do we have to do to get the charges dropped?'

This morning, like most mornings, a good-sized crowd waited in a cold and sullen line that extended out the door of the jail and along the outside corridor behind the Hall of Justice.

Jody Burgess wore jeans and a down parka, hiking boots and gloves. She'd been living here now for over a year, and still couldn't get used to the California weather. This morning, for example, it felt really cold, Arctic cold. Which was funny, because back in Ohio when it was in the mid-forties in February, it felt almost like springtime. People would go out in shirt sleeves, crunching through the snow, commenting about how nice it was, how warm.

Here, though, in the damp fog, the cold ate right through to her bones. Even bundled up, she shivered.

Finally, she got inside the lobby to the jail, where it was a little warmer anyway. She gave her name to the guard and waited some more. She tried not to spend these interminable minutes worrying, or thinking about how all this would turn out. She would just concentrate on trying to be there for Cole, who was a good boy in his heart. He might have made some mistakes, might have some serious problems he'd have to overcome, but he would never intentionally hurt anyone. He was a good boy.

The time came and the guard escorted her down yet another hallway, to yet another dark doorway. She thought there must be at least a couple of visiting rooms – this one felt different from the last one she'd come to yesterday. The high windows let in a different light, although otherwise, they were pretty much identical. Fifteen gray metal chairs on this side of the glass, each one at its own station. All the chairs taken now, except the one to which they were directing her.

She got to the seat and sat down. Cole wasn't across from her yet. She reached out and touched the little mouthpiece embedded into the glass.

Her son.