'Yes.'
'All right.' Again, her focus shifted. 'Can I ask you another question? How do you know?'
'Know what?'
'That it was this Sephia person. Do you have any proof?' The question obviously struck a nerve-Hardy visibly reigned in a rising tide of temper. She put out a hand and touched his. 'Don't get mad at me, Diz. I'm on your side, but it's a legitimate question.'
'I'm sure it is. Jeff Elliot had the same one.'
'Well?'
'Well, I'm getting damn tired of it, to tell you the truth. I know it was Nick. What am I supposed to do, let him kill more people while I try to find proof that he's killed others?'
She drew a deep breath. 'The short answer to that, I'm afraid, is yes. If he did kill somebody else, or even beat up David, and God knows I want pure, sweet revenge for that. But still, you need…'
Hardy cut her off. 'So he shoots at you, you don't fire back?'
'No. Somebody shoots at you, you fire back at where the shot came from. That, as you know better than anyone, is self-defense. If you happen to kill the shooter, two things, you've proven he was behind the gun, and you get your revenge. But you don't get shot at, decide who it must have been, then go to his house and shoot him back two days later. Because what if it could have been, even should have been your guy, but it wasn't?'
'That didn't happen here.'
'No? What's different?' Again she touched his hand. 'My only point is you'll hurt yourself, Diz.' After a minute of silence, she added, 'You've got to find something, that's all. At least for yourself, if not for the law. You've got to know. Really know.'
Hardy shook his head and swore under his breath. Another silence built. Broken finally again by Gina. 'Here's a terrible thought,' she said.
'Terrible is my favorite. What is it?'
'Just that I've got the key to David's apartment.' She started running with the fantasy. 'If something David owned found its way into Sephia's, say, pocket, and Blanca happened to see it, that might get to probable cause for a search. I can't believe I'm saying this.'
'They do a search of his place, they got him,' Hardy said, rising to the idea. 'The plant would only get them inside. It would take some real evidence after that-say blood splatter on his clothes, and my guess is that there would be plenty-to arrest him.'
'Right. We'd just be facilitating a legal search.'
They looked at each other with a thrill almost of illicit love, both of them wondering how it would be to play outside the rules. To beat these criminals at their own game.
Finally Hardy pulled out of it. 'It's a beautiful idea, Gina, but maybe we won't need it.'
'I couldn't do it anyway,' she said.
'I don't know if I could either.'
'Probably that's a good thing,' she said. 'It's why they're them and we're us.'
'Right,' Hardy said. 'If we don't do it by the book we're as bad as they are. Does something seem wrong with this picture somehow?'
Hardy and Frannie hadn't had the best night of their lives so far, and now with Glitsky's urgent and atypical call inviting himself and Treya over to talk about their options, it didn't look as though it was going to improve. They were in the kitchen, an hour after a dinner that had featured a meltdown of sorts from the kids, who had finally processed the reality that their father had been shot at and badly hurt in the bargain.
They might not know exactly what it was, but they understood that something truly bad was happening. Uncle Moses and Aunt Susan had been here until late last night, Rebecca and Vincent banished with their younger cousins to the back of the house while the adults drank and argued. This morning, their father and mother had barely spoken- were they getting divorced? Why was someone trying to hurt Dad? Were they actually trying to kill him? What were they going to do about that? What was Dad going to do? He was trying to find who it was, wasn't he? Get them arrested? What were the police doing? Were they in danger?
Hardy found it difficult to finesse these questions, particularly since Frannie wasn't helping much. She was still mad at the situation, mostly at her brother, true, but beyond that she'd been dealing with the kids' blossoming reaction to all this since six o'clock this morning, by which time her hung over husband was already long gone for work. Tears and fears. What was going to happen to them? What if Dad died? What was this all about?
'I don't want to live like this,' Frannie said. 'I don't know how these people have done this to us.' They were keeping their voices abnormally low so that Vincent and Rebecca, doing their homework in the rooms directly behind the kitchen, would not have more cause to worry. To Hardy, the tension in the house twanged with every sound.
He crossed the kitchen and put his arms around his wife. She leaned up against him. 'I don't know what to do,' she said. 'I just feel so helpless.'
'That's what Abe and Treya are coming over for,' he said. 'We'll come up with some plan, the four of us.'
'But I don't understand why the police, or Clarence Jackman for that matter, why they don't believe you in the first place. That's the part that's making me crazy. You didn't do anything wrong.'
'That's funny. John Holiday seems to think I started the whole thing. Me and David.' At Frannie's look of disbelief, he explained. 'Going after Panos.'
'Hello?' Frannie didn't want to hear this nonsense. 'You've got over a dozen clients he's harmed one way or another. That's not you starting it.'
'I tried to make that same point myself. Evidently Mr. Panos can do whatever he wants, and if somebody like me calls him on it, I'm at fault.'
'John really said that?'
'More or less.'
'That really makes me mad.'
'You must be a bad person, too. Anyway, I tried to explain that maybe I'm not a moral paragon, but what I'm doing is within the law, whereas everything Panos has done and is doing is against it. Call me delusional, but that's a big difference.'
'Did he get it? John?'
'Not really. He's not much into right and wrong. He simply pointed out that I should have been prepared to handle this stuff before I started in on Panos to begin with.'
She moved back into his embrace. 'It's like this bad dream where you're drowning and calling out the names of everybody who could save you on the shore right around you, but nobody hears.'
'I know,' Hardy said. 'I know.' What else could he say? That's exactly what it was like. He and Frannie were having the same nightmare.
Or maybe not exactly the same. She boosted herself up onto the kitchen counter, and she sat with her ankles crossed, her hands clasped between her legs, her head held low. 'This has always been my biggest fear, you know that? That somebody was going to take all this law stuff personally and come after you. Or us. Me and the kids. And you always told me that that never happened. Except now it has.'
'I know.' He rested his own weight against the opposite counter. 'What do you want me to say? I never thought it would.'
'But now that it has… maybe we should reconsider…'
'What?'
She raised her eyes. 'Maybe everything, I guess.'
Hardy didn't like the sound of that at all. 'Everything takes in a lot, Fran. You're not saying you and me, I hope.'
'Not specifically, no… But the life we have. If it's not safe…'
'This is one moment, Fran. It's not our life. Our life has been good. It still is good.'
'But not living like this. If we lost the kids…'
Hardy stepped toward her. 'That's not going to happen-'
'Don't!' She snapped it out, stopping him. 'Don't say it's not going to happen. You don't know what's going
