Down Here

As soon as I escaped from the hospital, I went looking for them. That took a lot longer, because I didn’t know who they were. But I found them. When I did, the pain didn’t stop. But it changed.

I’ll never truly know if I’d done all that for them, or for me. Not for sure. What I did know is, they wouldn’t have cared.

You’re here now, I said in my mind. Get what you came for.

I didn’t concentrate on pocketing balls, only worked the white one, focusing on my stroke. I was just starting to feel okay about my draw when Molly Sands came downstairs.

It only took a second for his cop’s eyes to pick me out. It took less than that for everyone else there to make him for what he was.

“A little nine-ball?” I asked him.

“Eight-ball’s my game,” he said. “And I’m used to smaller tables.”

Bar tables, I thought, keeping it off my face. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll rack them, you break.”

Sands was an appalling player. He managed to pocket a solid, then muffed an easy shot on the three ball.

“What’s new?” I asked him, as I chalked up.

“The techs got a good look at the slugs.”

“And?”

“They can’t tell for sure, without a barrel to match them to, but the guy they have in charge says he’d bet a year’s pay it didn’t come from any cheap piece. He says you can always tell the workmanship, and whatever the shooter was using was quality.”

“Doesn’t mean much,” I said, pocketing the ten in the corner, then deliberately blowing a shot on the fifteen.

“Well, a gangbanger might use a cheap-ass twenty-five—in some neighborhoods, they sell them like hot dogs. But a baby caliber in a good gun, that’s something a pro might use.”

“A twenty-two, sure,” I agreed. “They hit hard enough, if you place them perfect. But a twenty-five? Never heard of it.”

“I did,” Sands said. “After I checked around, I heard of something even smaller, too. Beretta used to make a twenty-two short. Smaller than a twenty-five. The whole piece, I mean, not just the bullet. Fucking tiny. The gun guy I spoke with even said it was called an ‘assassin’s special.’ Mossad used to use it, all the time.”

“Mossad? Yeah, I’m so fucking sure. Every gun nut around has got a Mossad story, but you’re grasping at straws with this one, pal.”

“Is that right?” he demanded, face flushing in the overhead lights. “How can you be so positive? You take subsonic ammo, put a silencer on the piece, you could probably do someone in church, nobody’d even look up from praying. And, remember, the shooter picked up his brass; that’s a pro touch.”

“You’re riding the wrong bus,” I said. “A pro wouldn’t use a bullet like that anywhere but a head shot. Never mind fucking Mossad, okay? Caliber like that, those guys would have gone for a triple-tap. Unless you’re saying the ammo was tipped?”

“No, it was all hardball.”

“No hollowpoints, no cyanide for a make-sure, and no head shots. Plus, whoever tried to do him didn’t stay around long enough to finish the job. Yeah, you’re right—a professional assassin would be my first guess, too.”

“They could have heard someone coming,” he said, lamely.

“Not from the way you laid it out the first time. Anyway, we both know, someone walks into the middle of a pro hit, there would have been one more body.”

The waiter cleared away the remnants of our meal, asked us if we wanted dessert. Laura Reinhardt raised her eyebrows at me. “I could go for a little torta,” I said.

She held up two fingers.

“Now, that may have been going too far,” she said, patting her lips with a white napkin when she was done. She leaned back in her chair, seemed to think better of it, and bent toward me. I lit another cigarette for her.

“Tell me about the book,” she said.

“You’ve been reading about the death-penalty cases—the ones where they find out, years later, that a man sentenced to death was innocent all along?”

“I’ve seen things on TV, that’s all.”

“It’s a national scandal,” I said, locking her eyes with my sincerity. “In Illinois, the last governor canceled every single pending execution before he left office. He said he just couldn’t be sure that people on death row are really guilty. In one case, this guy was accused of raping and murdering a little girl. Turned out it wasn’t him.”

“How would they—?”

“Sometimes, it’s DNA,” I told her. “Sometimes, believe it or not, the actual criminal confesses—usually when they’ve caught him on a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes, it’s as simple as an alibi they never checked out. But it always comes down to the same thing, which is what my book’s about.”

“Innocence?”

“No. I mean, innocence is a part of it, but that’s not the theme, not the . . . drive- force. I’m trying to go deeper. These things aren’t due to incompetence. Well, some of them are, sure. But the dark underbelly to all this is the kind of people who become prosecutors. I’m not talking about corruption, either—although that happens, too—I’m talking about people who have lost their way.”

“Prosecutors?”

“Prosecutors. Some of them lose sight of the difference between fighting crime and fighting criminals.”

“I don’t see the difference myself,” she said. “If you fight criminals, you do fight crime, isn’t that true?”

“In that order, yes,” I agreed. “But not when it’s reversed.”

“How could it be—?”

“A child is murdered. A woman is raped. A building is torched, and a fireman dies when the roof collapses. A . . . You know the type of crime I’m talking about. Public outrage. Lots of media attention. Demands for results. The pressure on prosecutors is tremendous. And, sometimes, they can be so hyper-focused on the crime that they ignore the criminal. It’s almost like, if they can put someone in prison, the crime is ‘solved.’ It just . . . consumes them. Like going snow-blind.

“And it’s our—the public’s—fault, too. How do we judge prosecutors? On their conviction rates, right? So, if a DA has any sort of political ambitions, he’d better clear his cases. That’s where plea bargaining came from, originally. It is a bargain. The criminal gets a much lighter sentence, and the prosecutor doesn’t take a chance on losing a trial.”

“But why would an innocent person agree to a plea bargain?”

“They don’t,” I said, lighting another cigarette. I left it in the ashtray next to the candle-in-Chianti-bottle that had been burning since before I sat down. “And that’s where the gate to hell opens. That’s when the pressure builds to get a result. Any result. That’s when an innocent man goes to prison.”

“A man like—?”

“John Anson Wychek. You understand what they did to him, don’t you? I don’t mean the wrongful conviction,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her from speaking, “I mean the rest of it.”

“I know it ruined his—”

“Ms. Reinhardt . . .”

“Laura.”