caliber. He did it, but this new lawyer was trying to get the case thrown out.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
Fearless shrugged his shoulders.
“What kinda dude is he?” I asked.
“Armed robbery, single-handed, two men shot. Three-quarters bad if he can blindside ya. Half bad face-to- face.”
Fearless considered himself and maybe three other people he’d ever met to be
19
LORETTA WAS SHUFFLING papers on her desk before Fearless and I awoke the next morning. We had decided that sleeping at the Tannenbaum house was too much for either of us, and I still had Milo’s key.
“Morning, Mr. Jones, Mr. Minton.” Our presence held no surprise for her.
“Mornin’,” we said together.
I had let Fearless have the couch because he was just out of jail, and I was still feeling guilty for not helping him sooner.
“When’s Milo due in?” I asked the Japanese passe-partout.
“Soon, I think,” she said. “He has a problem with a client who has to show up for sentencing at three. A friend of yours.”
“Who’s that?”
“Lucas North.”
“Luke?” Fearless smiled. “What’s that boy up to?”
“He was with some friends in a stolen car. He wasn’t driving. He didn’t even know the driver. They had gotten drunk together and were taking some high school girls for a ride. The judge had seen Lucas before and decided to scare him, I guess. He found him guilty but postponed the sentencing. Milo thinks it was just to make Lucas sweat, but if he doesn’t show up, there’s six hundred dollars on the bond.”
Fearless scratched his head. I stifled a yawn. It wasn’t our problem.
MILO CAME IN at around nine. Fearless was taking his dog over to Dorthea to keep for the day. I was reading about Chichikov, the con man protagonist of
“Hey, Paris,” Milo said. “You gonna have to start payin’ rent you keep warmin’ my couch.”
“I got a problem, Milo.”
“One shot to the temple and problems just go away,” the bailbondsman replied. Then he turned to Loretta. “We hear from Mr. North?”
“No sir, not yet.”
“Shoot.”
“Milo.”
“What, Paris?”
“I got a problem, man.”
The china whites of Milo’s eyes flashed out from his coal-black face. “I’m out six hundred dollars at three o’clock, and you want me to worry about you?”
“Lucas North,” I said. “Fearless and I will look for him if you do somethin’ for us.”
LUCAS’S MOTHER, Inez North, was in her late thirties. Lucas was maybe twenty-one, at least in years. He was an immature boy who got into trouble as a kind of hobby. He worked at that pursuit twenty-four hours a day because he couldn’t hold a job for over a week.
I first met Lucas when he was only fifteen. His mother and Fearless had a thing going for a while. In the middle of it Lucas got arrested for knocking down an ex-girlfriend’s fence with his mother’s new used car.
The girlfriend’s father wanted to press charges, and as much as Fearless tried to argue with him, old Landry Lamming wasn’t buying. Fearless came to me because he was on the verge of coming to blows with Landry and he knew that that would have been wrong.
I asked around about Landry and found that he was from Guyana originally and was so conceited about his lineage and education that most of the people in the neighborhood were happy to run him down.
