She rushed off in tears now, unable to hold the emotional flood back a moment longer.
Darwin caught up to Stuttgart and rammed his face close to hers. “Then try new strategies, go drastic, do something even if it's wrong.”
“Like what? We've exhausted every avenue.”
“File papers against the fuck-king governor,” Darwin fired back.
This stopped her from climbing into the car alongside her partners. She called into the car's black interior, “Shanley, Ayers, did you hear that? Take Governor James Hughes to court in his own state. You guys wanna put up drywall the rest of your lives?”
The lawyers screeched off and out of sight down the tree-lined sandy red earth path and out onto the highway in the distance.
“So much for pinning hope on a gaggle of lawyers,” Jessica said. “No need to rip out a few spines there.”
“What do you call a thousand lawyers without a single spine among them?” asked Richard.
When no one could find the answer other than stuttering, Richard delivered the punch line. “A snafu… Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”
“Richard has had run-ins with divorce lawyers,” Jessica explained to Darwin as she and Sharpe again climbed into the rear seat.
“Oh, yeah… I see,” Darwin replied, getting behind the wheel and starting up the engine. He peeled out, leaving smoking rubber behind them.
As they found the highway for the hotel, Richard remarked to Darwin, “I'm afraid only Cellmark in St. Paul can save your brother now.”
“Not if we work together on our last-straw plan,” said Jessica.
“It's madness,” protested Richard, “and it could get Darwin killed in his brother's stead, even if you could get Towne into full agreement.”
Darwin shouted over his shoulder, “If I can manage to take his place, I will not for a moment hesitate, Sharpe.”
“If we could bait and switch this prisoner free,” mused Jessica, “I mean since you two look so startlingly alike, and with his guards all being white…”
The others stared at her. “Well, it's a known fact that cross-cultural and cross-race eyewitness testimony have been proved notoriously wrong in accurately identifying people.”
“But are you sure they look enough alike, Jess?”
“We're like a pair of twins,” Darwin assured him.
“It's still too damned risky.”
Jessica ignored Richard's negativism. “We could get you inside and him out,” she said to Darwin.
“Then what?” asked Richard. “We all become fugitives except for Darwin who is executed in his brother's stead?”
“No, we videotape Towne, hold him someplace, and we stick it to Hughes. We get him to grant the stay of execution on the grounds that it is the wrong man-literally the wrong man now-that he has on death row.”
Richard vigorously shook his head. “That's blackmail of a high-ranking public official, isn't it?”
“So our combined list of criminal activity grows?” she asked. “And at this point, what other recourse have we? What help or support has been offered? Even from our own FBI field offices here?”
“So we go to death row and we break a man out as if it's to be as easy as… as changing out a roll of toilet paper.” Richard remained skeptical.
“It's our only recourse, Richard! The only one the system's left us. I didn't wake up this morning and say, 'Why don't I break the law, today?' but you went your rounds with Hughes, you know what we're up against.”
“Whoa, I didn't say it lacked nobility, just common sense, Jess.”
She suggested, “I say we use the media.”
“Leak the story at the crucial right moment, ingenious,” replied Darwin. I can see the governor choking on the headlines now: 11th Hour Stay for Towne in STRANGE TWIST As Towne's Twin Surrogate Laughs in Governor's Face. Hey my fifteen minutes of fame!”
“Will the real Robert W. Towne please stand up?” joked Jessica.
“How can you two be so cavalier about this?” asked Richard. “A thousand things could go wrong with this so-called plan, one of them horribly wrong.”
Darwin only replied, “Here's another headline: Officials Unsure When and for How Long the Amazing Switch Took Place.”
“Dramatic Desperate Act to Save a Brother from Execution,” added Jessica.
Sharpe gave up, joining in the speculation about headlines. “Towne's Whereabouts Still Unknown While Brother Is Executed.”
“It's the only fucking way we're ever going to get a stop-execution order,” said Darwin.
“And Big Jim Hughes will get his well-deserved hefty dose of the Geraldo moment coming to him,” Jessica added. Laughter filled the car. Sharpe added, “It may well be worth it to be handed our walking papers just to see Hughes brought down.”
“And if we all go to jail for it?” asked Jessica. “For a conspiracy to save an innocent man from execution by the state… Gentlemen, sometimes morality is more important than the law.”
“Ask Huck Finn,” said Darwin.
Sharpe replied, “Here here. I like it.”
“If it is the only way to stop this gross injustice,” said Jessica, wrapping her arm around Richard's, “then it is the only way, and if it means our jobs-”
“Then may God blind me… ahhh… if we don't act.”
“Just do it. Trust me, Nike will be calling us to do an ad.”
Darwin didn't hesitate. “I'm in.”
“If you harbor any doubts, Richard, you go… fly back to Quantico before it goes down,” Jessica said to Richard.
“You mean no point in our losing both incomes?” he asked, patted her hand, and added, “No, dear one, I'm like Darwin put it… in. I'm in. I'll stay and see it through, Jess.”
“Then we do the bait and switch.”
SEVENTEEN
Dancing in the lion's jaw.
GILES Gahran made for a strange sight standing at the concrete barrier wall created by the Chicago Parks Authority, dressed in black with a long coat flapping around him in the breeze-Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, minus the cool elan. But he carried with him an interesting-looking, curiously irregular shaped, ornately ribboned leather- bound box. Where he stood staring out at the oceanlike enormity of Lake Michigan. Dusk had come on. He'd hoped for darkness by now as a blackening sky had rolled in from the lake to cover Chicago in a blanket of metal-gray turning to onyx.
His knuckles had gone white holding so tightly to his father-in-a-box, as he fully intended to do away with the parasitic mind-leeching holdover from his childhood. Mother's final gift to him.
He had come to the enormous great lake of the Great Lakes here in Chicago, with a wind whipping so treacherously up at him from the stone barriers erected along this section of Lincoln Park that he felt as if the Devil of the wind wanted the box, that it meant to rip it from his hands and do with the box what it willed rather than see him throw it into the pounding waves. He imagined the contents spilling out and flying in all directions, flyers to the world here disseminating who he was-the sins of the father making tomorrow's Tribune and Sun-Times. He clutched
