Time passed, what felt like an hour, though it was only a matter of minutes. We were both silent, save for our labored breathing. I wasn’t the only one who was scared. I could hear it in Smith’s voice. We’d taken this game too far, beyond the point of return. Neither of us was having fun.

“Okay, Smith, this is a one-time-only offer,” I said. “Are you listening?”

I knew that he was. He was a wounded animal, just like me. No matter how much he had me over a barrel, it was clear that I had him by the shorthairs, too.

“My hearing is tomorrow at one P.M. That gives you a short window of time to do as I say. I want signed affidavits from the people who helped pinch Pete on that arrest. I know one of them is his supplier, J.D. I don’t know who the other guy is.”

I did know, of course—it was Marcus Mason, the notorious “Mace.” Joel Lightner had delivered me a rather voluminous file on that gentleman. But I didn’t need to share that with Smith.

“J.D., and the other guy,” I continued. “They will swear in their affidavits that Pete was only there to make a small purchase of powder cocaine. He wasn’t a drug dealer, and he wasn’t a gunrunner. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They will deliver those signed affidavits to the detective who arrested Pete, a guy by the name of Denny DePrizio. I think he works a regular day shift, so he shouldn’t be hard to find.”

He didn’t need to know that I had connected DePrizio with him. Maybe he’d figured it out already, but I wasn’t going to tell him. I needed to be as much of a question mark to him as he was to me.

“No chance,” Smith said.

“You have my brother,” I said. “And you’re not letting him go until the trial is over, if ever. You’ve got the leverage on me, Smith. You win. But if you really mean what you say about letting him go when this is over, and clearing him of the charges—well, then, you have to do part of that now. Clear the charges now, show me that you’re serious. And then I’ll drop that request for the DNA testing. If that hasn’t happened by one o’clock tomorrow, then I go forward with that motion.”

“No deal,” Smith said. He must have enjoyed that, throwing my oft-repeated line back at me.

“Then I have to assume you’re just going to kill Pete, anyway. I have nothing left to lose. That’s DePrizio, D-E-P-R-I-Z-I-O. He better have affidavits in his hand before my one o’clock hearing. You know me well enough to know I’m not bluffing, Smith.”

I hung up the phone and held my breath. I fought it as best I could, any thought of what might happen to Pete. I couldn’t rule out, much less control, anything they might do to Pete to make his stay with them less enjoyable. If I showed weakness, it would only get worse for him. They had to see me as a forceful adversary. It was the only way to get Pete back.

Unless, between now and the trial, I could figure out who killed Audrey Cutler.

I SAT ON MY BED, watching the clock approach midnight, pondering everything, using my abilities at cross-examination to punch holes in my plan. There were plenty of flaws, but I was satisfied that I was doing all I could do. The best thing I had going for me was the element of surprise. They didn’t know me. They thought they did. It would have to be enough.

Just after midnight—thirteen hours before my hearing on the DNA testing before the judge—I turned off the bedroom light, leaving my entire town house in darkness.

46

JUST PAST THREE in the morning, two men—two of Smith’s men—approached the town house from the rear. The front made no sense; it was too well-lit and on a fairly busy street. The rear, on the other hand, worked well for their purposes. The town house was backed up to an alley, a locked gate separating the alley from a small garden area consisting of a circular patio with the ubiquitous barbecue grill, table, and chairs.

The gate lock had to be picked, but that was not an overly difficult chore. Once past the lock, the two men slowly moved through the garden area toward the town house. One of the men, the bigger of the two, looked through the back-door window into the kitchen, searching for the house alarm. The alarm had a green light on it, meaning it was disarmed.

“It’s not armed,” he said to his partner. He readied his tension wrench and hooking pick to get through the back-door lock. “We spend all that time getting the combo to the alarm from his idiot brother and Kolarich doesn’t even set the damn thing.”

“Someone should tell these yuppies there’s crime in this city,” said the other, quietly.

“I’ll make a note of it,” I said, swinging my baseball bat at the bigger guy first, just as he’d turned, connecting square across the nose. The second guy was reaching for his weapon. I kicked out at his knee, the heel of my foot hitting the side of his kneecap, causing a painful buckling of his leg before he fell. Once he was on the ground, I used the butt of the baseball bat, two sharp blows into his face, knocking his head against the stone patio. The bigger guy hadn’t had time to recover—he was stunned, crumpled awkwardly on the two concrete stairs leading up to the back door, blood gushing from his nose. “Where’s my brother?” I asked him.

“Fuck . . . you,” he said through his hands.

I swung the bat with all my might, with all the rage that had festered, into his kneecap, then into his chest. I didn’t want to kill these guys, nor did I want retrograde amnesia. They needed to get word to Smith, with the one phone call they’d be allowed.

“Tell me where he is or I crush your skull.”

At that moment, a light went on in the town house next door. We were making enough noise to wake the neighbors. It didn’t look like I was going to get the answers I needed. I’d miscalculated, yet again. I should have let them come into my house and jumped them there, instead of huddling in the corner of my back patio awaiting them. My thought had been that I was safer outside, where I could run, I could yell for help, if these guys got the better of me. But if I’d chosen inside to make my move, I probably could have spent more time with them. I could have extracted the information I needed. Another mistake.

Figuring that my neighbors would be doing so shortly, I pulled out my cell phone and called 911, giving the dispatcher my address and telling them about two men trying to break into my house. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and surveyed my attackers.

They were suffering badly. The bigger guy’s nose was shattered and bleeding uncontrollably and the blow to his chest had left him struggling for air. The second guy was stunned from the blows to his face followed by the immediate contact with the patio, forming a one-two punch that left him unable to discern up from down, dark from light, such that he didn’t even seem to notice that his knee was dislocated.

I went back to the first guy. “Try again, Igor,” I said, poising the bat over my shoulder. “One last chance. Where’s my brother?”

“Your brother’s . . . gonna fucking die.” He managed something in the realm of a chuckle. I hit him across the chest with everything I had. He didn’t take it well.

“You, Einstein.” I stood over the second guy, who was barely conscious. “Where’s my brother?”

I’d hoped that his dazed state might serve as truth serum, but he was unable to respond. I tried a couple more times with the bigger guy, alternating my watch from one to the other—they were armed, after all, and I had to be sure they wouldn’t reach for their weapons. I decided not to disarm them because I wanted the cops to find them that way.

The bad thing about living in a nice neighborhood—normally a good thing—is that the cops come quickly. It was less than ten minutes later that two uniforms approached from the alley, coming through the same gate that Smith’s buddies had entered.