“Mr. Pickens,” the judge said. I came to my feet. “Do you have anything further you wish to offer the Court in support of your motion?”

“No, Your Honor.” I sat down, grateful to the judge for many things. Standing before this crowd to argue the reasons why I should be trusted outside of lockup would have been unpleasant at best. She had spared me that humiliation.

“Anything from the state?” she asked. If Douglas wanted to raise hell, he could. He could argue a great many points, many of which would make sense. He could make the judge look bad, and I hoped he would not do that. Slowly, he stood, his eyes on the tabletop, stretching the moment until it almost burst.

“The state requests only that bail be reasonable, Your Honor.”

Again, an excited stir ran through the packed courtroom, an energy wave that broke against my back before receding into yet another hushed expectancy.

“Bail is set at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” the judge said. “The defendant is bound over to superior court and remanded into custody until such time that bail is satisfied. This court will stand in recess for fifteen minutes.” Then she banged her gavel once and rose to her feet, looking small and withered inside the black robe of her office.

“All rise,” the bailiff thundered, and so I did, then watched in stillness as she slipped through the door behind her bench and the courtroom erupted into unabashed speculation.

I looked at Douglas, who had not moved. Muscles worked in his jaw as he stared at the door through which the judge had exited. Then his head swiveled, as if he felt me. He gestured to the bailiffs, and within seconds the cuffs were back on. Our eyes locked. Mills mouthed near-silent words into his ear, but he continued to ignore her. There was something in his eyes, and it was something unexpected. I knew this even though I could not recognize what it was. I knew only that it was not the normal look I’d seen him give other defendants. Then he surprised me by smiling. He stepped to my side, and his voice was like warm oil.

“I’d say that went rather well for you, Work.” Mills remained at the table, her face inscrutable. Behind us, several lawyers turned to watch, but none approached. We existed in a pocket of silence that seemed to belong to us alone. Even the bailiffs felt momentarily insubstantial. “You should be back on the street within a couple hours.”

I tried to pin him with my eyes, but in the orange coveralls and steel bracelets, I’d lost that power. His smile blossomed, as if he, too, had arrived at the same conclusion. “Why are you talking to me?” I asked.

“Because I can,” he replied.

“You’re a real ass, Douglas. I wonder how I’ve missed it all these years.”

His smile vanished. “You missed it because you wanted to miss it, like all defense lawyers. You want the deal. You want to be my buddy, so I’ll make your job easier. It’s a game and always has been. You know it as well as I do.” His eyes flicked left and right and he raised his voice ever so slightly. “But the game’s over, and I don’t have to play it anymore. So enjoy your little victory. The next judge won’t be so easy on you, and you can rest assured that I won’t be.”

Again, something felt odd, something in his eyes, maybe, something in what he said or how he said it. I tried to figure it out, when suddenly it became clear. Douglas was playing to the audience. Lawyers were watching, and Douglas was playing to them. I’d never seen him grandstand before. Looking at his face, sorting this out, a question occurred to me. I’d thought about it the night before, yet I had almost forgotten it. Before I’d considered my words, they were out, and their effect was immediate.

“Why did you let me go to the crime scene?” I asked.

Douglas looked uncomfortable. His eyes darted at the surrounding lawyers, then settled back on me. His voice dropped.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“The day they found his body, when I asked for permission to go to the crime scene. I didn’t think you’d agree; no reasonable district attorney would have. But you did. You almost ordered Mills to show me the body. Why did you do that?”

“You know why I let you go,” he said.

“For Jean.”

“For Jean. That’s right.”

A silence stretched in the wake of his words. For both of us, Jean had that power, which was probably the only thing that remained common to us both.

“It won’t help you as much as you think,” he said, referring to my presence at the crime scene. “I won’t allow it to.”

“Maybe it already has.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that a man has a lot of time to think in jail, Douglas. A whole lot of time.”

I was taunting him, and he finally realized it. But I’d scored a point; I’d made him doubt, if just for an instant. His face closed down like a carnival ride. The power just drained away, leaving everything still. For an instant, we had an eye thing going, the kind of unspoken communication I’d only had once or twice in my life. It was not so much a message as a feeling, one of cold, the kind I’d expected to find in jail yet, strangely, had not. But like that cell, his eyes were empty, dark, and timeless. Then some unfathomable emotion twisted his mouth into a cruel smile, and with a nod to the bailiffs, he sent me away.

The next hours dragged, as I waited, perhaps in vain, for someone to bail me out. They’d given me a phone again, and I’d called the only person I could. But Barbara was not there, or she chose not to answer. So I left a message for my wife and waited to see if she would leave me to rot.

They put me in a padded detox cell down the hall from central processing. The judge’s doing, I guessed. At some time, the walls may have been white. Now they were a mixture of browns, like burled wood. At times, I wanted to throw myself at them, scream as if I were indeed strung out. I’d never lived a longer day. The room seemed to shrink with each passing hour, and I came to wonder just how much my wife had come to loathe me. Would she leave me in jail out of spite? I honestly couldn’t say.

Eventually, they came for me, processed me in reverse. I tipped the stained manila envelope onto the counter. My watch spilled out, followed by my wallet, which contained money, credit cards, identification. All present and accounted for; I signed the little piece of paper that said so. They gave me back my clothes-wrinkled, my belt, my shoes. And as I put them on, I felt the change come upon me. I became a human being again, and again I passed through the jailhouse doors, this time walking into the musty lobby, where normal people waited for people like me. What did I expect? Barbara? A faceless bail bondsman? Truthfully, I had not thought about it, not since I’d first felt underwear against my skin. In the mounting excitement of my rebirth into the human race, I expected to walk beneath blue skies, breathe fresh air, and eat a decent meal. My future was so uncertain, that was all I could expect. I did not expect Hank Robins. I did not expect what he would eventually tell me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

He gave me a crooked smile, one that showed his chipped front tooth. “I should ask you.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

There were two other people in the room. One was a washed-out woman who could have been thirty or could have been fifty. She sat on the hard plastic chair, head tilted against the wall, mouth open; she reeked of tobacco and hard living, all wrinkle and no laugh line. Her sunburned thighs hung loosely under cutoffs too short for a teenager. She clutched her purse like a talisman, and I wondered how long she’d been waiting, and for whom. The other person was a uniformed cop. I watched him sign in at the bulletproof window, then check his weapon into one of the steel lockboxes mounted on the wall. He never turned his back on us, not completely, and Hank watched him with ill-concealed distress. I knew that Hank did not wish to be associated with me under my current circumstances, and I wondered what could have brought him to see me.