“I’ll withdraw it, Judge. How’s your temper, Mr. Cruz?”
“Well, I think I’m holding on to it pretty good, considering how you’re talking to me right now.”
That got a relieved laugh from the audience, and Nina thought, he’s going to get through it.
“Tell us more about your schedule, Mr. Cruz. How do you intend to put in the time it takes to raise your children when you’re never home?”
Kevin kept his cool, got a few more chuckles, even one from Judge Milne, kept smiling, and looked confident.
Nina was satisfied. Aside from the vague and unproven trouble on his first job, which did not reflect badly on his abilities as a parent, and the late child support, Kevin had the edge. He was never violent with his kids. He wouldn’t even spank them. Even Lisa had admitted that.
At lunchtime, Judge Milne adjourned the hearing until the next day. Kevin made a mumbled excuse and ran out ahead of Nina before she could speak with him.
Feeling like she’d had all her teeth yanked out of her jaw, the usual feeling that the court clerks, the other attorneys, and the witnesses milling around her in the hall probably shared as they made their way toward the exit at noon, Nina hurried out. As she left the courtroom in the crowd, Jeffrey Riesner sidled up behind her, brazenly close, brushing against her, walking in step, mimicking her short, swift stride for a few moments. She forced herself to ignore him. Thinking back to the case, hustling away, she refused to dirty her mind with rank images of what lurked underneath the gray silk slacks he had pressed so noxiously close.
In the hallway, where the other courtrooms were adjourning for the break, she felt a hard push to her shoulder and whirled around, prepared to confront him. But instead of Jeffrey Riesner, Officer Jean Scholl now stood behind her, uniformed, a skyscraper to Nina’s low bungalow, six feet tall if she was an inch. “Ms. Reilly,” Scholl said, her voice a slow drawl. “So sorry to jostle you like that, but you got right in my way.”
“I don’t believe I did,” Nina said firmly, standing her ground. “Look, if you have something you have to say, why not just spit it out?”
“Okay,” Scholl said, a hand on her hip. By now several other police officers had paused to watch. “Stay out of my face. I don’t appreciate the way you handled the Guitierrez case. You made me look bad, when I was just doing the best job I can. I like to think we both serve justice, but when it comes to someone like you, I wonder. Now, you and I both know he stole that T-Bird and wrecked it.”
“The judge saw it differently,” Nina said. “Obviously, since he let the man off.”
Scholl leaned in until Nina could feel the heat of her breath. “We didn’t read him his rights because the rotgut he was drinking left him comatose. He wouldn’t have understood them anyway.”
“He has the right to a defense. He got it.”
“Technicalities be damned,” Scholl said. “Did you ever think about the kid who spent six years restoring that car? He came into our offices crying. But you don’t give a damn about that, do you? You don’t think about all the harm you cause, setting bad guys loose.”
“Are you done?” Nina asked.
Stepping back slightly, Scholl nodded. “Look forward to seeing you in court again real soon, Counselor.”
Nina fled for the outdoors.
Caught in a rush of wind, her friend Betty, a deputy clerk, sighed, “A big one coming up.” The trees around them rattled and Nina watched clouds massing over the Sierra Nevada to the east. Betty ran for her car. Clutching her blue blazer around her, Nina ran for Paul’s new Mustang, parked in a no-parking zone right out front.
“Let’s blow, otherwise you’ll get a ticket for sure,” she told Paul as she climbed into the passenger’s seat. “There were at least ten police officers in the hall with me. Some big drug case. Jean Scholl was in there. She’s a real old-timer in the department, been there eight years at least and also has a lot of support in the sheriff’s department. She blew up at me in front of everybody. She’d love to lay a ticket on us.”
Paul backed out.
“I don’t know why, but lately it seems like she’s involved in every case I defend. I think she’s taking it personally.” Nina consulted her watch. “I’m exactly four hours into my day. I had to take a witness apart and it was damned unpleasant. Jeff Riesner was opposing counsel. I had to sit passively through his nasty cross of my client. Then Officer Scholl gave me a push and a warning. A morning like this makes me wonder why I do it.”
“Hello to you, too, Beautiful,” Paul said.
She exhaled the breath she had been holding and all the poisons of the courtroom went with it. She smiled, shook her head, said, “Sorry.”
The man deserved her full attention. Ah, how she adored him. Tall and blond and hers at the moment, Paul van Wagoner worked for her as an investigator now and then. She had spent the past several weeks at his home in Carmel playing house, making love, and jumping ocean waves with him. Now they were back to their real lives, his in Carmel and hers in Tahoe, and, although the geographical separations hurt, Nina felt more tightly bound to him every day.
Using his left hand, he pulled out of the lot. His right arm circled her, pulling her close to him.
Taking in the fresh smell of his leather jacket, she kissed his cheek, letting the physical tensions of the morning slip away in his comforting presence. “The farther we get from the courthouse, the better.”
“Good. Let’s go all the way out to the Y and eat at Passaretti’s. You have time?”
“Kevin Cruz’s hearing was adjourned for the day. We start up again tomorrow.”
“Trouble?”
“Besides what you’d expect in a full-scale custody battle?” She paused, reviewing the morning, which chugged through her mind in a blur of questions, answers, and lightning judgments. “Riesner’s odd lately.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “I really don’t know. Just more at me than ever.”
“Family-law cases are the worst,” Paul said. “Give me a good old corporate dispute, partners gouging out eyes, stabbing each other in the back, but, hey, it’s just business. Next week they’ll be toasting the next great joint venture.” He turned left onto Lake Tahoe Boulevard.
“Anyway, it’s over until tomorrow and I’m going to put it out of my mind. And concentrate on you.”
“I like that,” Paul said. He ran a finger down her cheek. “Love me right and I’ll love you right back.”
She kissed him again. “It’s so great when you’re here. I wish you could stay forever.”
“Come live with me in Carmel. You know that’s what I want.”
He popped that out as casually as popping a beer. It was the ongoing struggle between them. How could they possibly create something strong and permanent living 250 miles apart?
“I know.”
“Luck was with me this morning,” Paul said. “I got the two witness declarations you wanted signed. Wish you had been able to drive Highway 89 with me up to Tahoe City. Whitecaps starting up, the sky that sensational transparent blue that you only see when it’s swept clean and a storm’s blowing in. Fall announcing its imminent arrival. The file’s in the backseat.”
Nina disentangled herself and twisted back, retrieved the file, and set it on the floor in front of her. Otherwise she’d never remember it. Curling herself against Paul again, she said, “I hate it that you have to leave.”
“Job’s over,” Paul said. “I’ve got an office in Carmel crying for my attention. You could always come down again this weekend.”
This reminder that he led a life complete and separate from her gave her a pang. The nights without him were hard. She missed the rise and fall of his chest, the rhythm of his breath. “You know I want to, but I’ve got an office in Tahoe crying for my attention too, and Bob needs new shoes and the house is a wreck.” They drove along the lake under a lowering sky. Wind flattened the water way out and threw up ruffled whitewater closer in. One last sailboat tacked into the Keys harbor, the sail taut and the two people inside pulling hard at the ropes, their yellow life jackets bright in the half-light.
“We better get you on the road fast,” Nina said. “You should just drop me at the office.”
“No way will I miss lunch with you. It’s too early in the year for snow. What’s a little rain?”
“You’ve seen the mountain rainstorms,” Nina added. But she didn’t really want him to leave so she didn’t ask again. While they ate at Passaretti’s, the light rain turned into a downpour. By the time Paul kissed her good-bye in the parking lot of the Starlake Building, the skies were delivering a four-star one-for-the-books drenchfest.
Inside, she barely had time to fold up her umbrella and prop it in the corner of her office before the afternoon steamrolled her. Her assistant, Sandy Whitefeather, was in and out on errands, leaving Nina mostly on her own to answer the phone and handle emergencies. Two old personal-injury clients soaked up time without resolving anything. An interpreter slowed down a complicated phone call to the Vangs about a settlement offer in their insurance case.
Then, to cap off an already crowded afternoon, sisters named Brandy and Angel told her a harrowing story about witnessing something on a camping trip that had ended with a suspicious death the next site over.
She took notes, thought fast, kept her eyes on the tasks at hand, tried to keep track of everything. Between the phones and the thirteen other cases that needed attention in the interstices of the main appointments, she drank her bottled water and hung in there. She let the rough morning go and decided she had had a good day because Paul was in it.
Outside, dark came early and water flowed down the street. The lights flickered once or twice. Inside, Nina kept right on trying to fix people’s problems and bring order back into the chaos that afflicted them. She thought once or twice about the Cruz custody case. Paul was right. Custody disputes between two more or less competent parents who both loved their kids were the most painful cases for the lawyer as well as the parents, because no just solution existed. You couldn’t saw the kids in half. They had to spend most of their time somewhere.
She felt bad for Lisa Cruz, for what she had done to her.
When the last client had left and she was finally alone, she washed most of the hardened crud off the coffeepot, turned out the lights, packed her briefcase, and slung her purse onto her shoulder. Umbrella in hand, she headed down the hall not feeling anything at all except the desire to get home. She made it only a few steps at a normal pace from the office door before immense raindrops, ballooned into drunken saturation, reduced her hair to string and her boots to sodden. A gust of wind turned her umbrella inside out.
Abandoning all dignity, she ran for protection. She threw open the Bronco’s door with such force that it seemed for a second it might break off. Safely inside, she tossed her briefcase and broken umbrella to the floor of the backseat and waited. The sky could only dump so much water. For a few minutes, she watched heavy branches ripping and scattering like twigs in the force of the storm. Freshets of water cascaded down Highway 50. Cars pulled over to the side, wipers going like mad, as the street became a brook, a river, a lake.
She let the drumming on the roof occupy her consciousness. Bob had probably made it home from school by now, and Sandy should be safe at home. Paul would be over Echo Summit and down in the Sacramento Valley by now. The briefcase on the backseat floor held her most pressing client files, the ones she would take to bed with her to read and consider.
Sharp pellets struck the roof. Hail. People on the streets scurried for cover like mice escaping a marauding cat. “Just ducky,” she muttered as the streetlights blinked out all at once. Across the street, the neon flicked off on the Mexican restaurant’s sign.
The whole town went dark, and this time the lights didn’t come back.
A mountain town without power isn’t a town at all, but an animal hideout under the trees, like a deer nest or bear cave. They saw it all the time up here, the facade of civilization casually torn away by snow, wind, storms, not to mention the raw human emotions uncovered after losing everything at the all-too-civilized casinos on the Nevada side of town. Scylla and Charybdis, and humanity reduced to headlights in the din.
Now what? She gave it another minute, pulling for civilization, but nature had the town firmly in hand. No lights, rain lashing the windshield. She fumbled for her car keys, which were supposed to
