'Know it? Hell, Martin, I invented it.'
— 6 Bagman
Bobby drove to the hospital with Kingsley's wad of cash bulging uncomfortably in his pocket. He felt disembodied, numbed, as if under an anaesthetic.
I'm to blame for this. I'm the one who got Nightlife off the first time.
Was this his penance? Was a wrathful God bringing him here to lance the boils that festered on his conscience? He felt weak, as if his spine were made of leaves, wet and mushy from the rain. He tried to rationalize.
It's my job, dammit! If it weren't me, it would be someone else.
His thoughts turned to his boss. What was Kingsley thinking now? Surely not about the woman sedated in a hospital room. No, only whether the Mustangs hang tough for another win. Back-slapping along the sidelines as the last seconds tick away, then some quips for the sportswriters.
The nurse's station was deserted, the staff huddled at the end of the corridor in the visitors' TV room. Bobby heard the familiar background noise of the football game. IV's and bedpans could wait; the Mustangs were on the tube.
Bobby could feel his pulse quicken as he let himself into Janet Petty's room. She seemed to be asleep. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut, and a spot of dried blood stained a bandage at the corner of her mouth. An African-American woman in her early twenties, she probably was attractive when her face wasn't swollen from a beating.
Bobby's legs felt heavy as logs, and his breathing became so labored, he worried his exhalations would wake her. Looking at her, battered and bruised, his heart thundered in his ears, as if beating itself to death in some rocky cavern.
'Are you a doctor?' Janet Petty asked through parched lips. Her eyes had opened, tiny slits in the swollen flesh. 'Because if you are, I'd just as soon have one who's not wearing a Mustangs shirt.'
'I'm the lawyer for the team,' Bobby said, taking on the role he despised.
Her laugh was a parched and humorless cough. 'The D.A. said you might come around. I'm not gonna sign anything, so you can just go talk to my lawyer.'
I have a job to do, so do it!
'I'm not here to get you sign anything,' he said. 'The team management simply wishes to assist you in your current situation.'
'I don't have a situation! I've been beaten and raped.'
Bobby reached into his pocket and withdrew the wad of hundreds, crisp as fresh kindling. Surely, somewhere on the planet, he told himself, was someone who was sleazier, scummier, more reprehensible than his own miserable self.
'Isn't that what lawyers do, Bobby? Make excuses, settle cases, get people off?'
Maybe it is, Chrissy, but once I pictured myself as Atticus Finch, standing tall for justice…and look at me now.
He started peeling off the bills, letting her see Ben Franklin's picture, trying to whet her appetite.
'The D.A. told me not take any money from you,' she said.
'No obligation,' Bobby told her. 'We just thought you could use some spare cash for babysitters, food, doctors' bills. Then, when you're feeling better, we could bring some paperwork by.'
Jesus Christ, how did I sink to this?
'No way,' she said. 'You talk to my lawyer. He'll be by later.'
'Lawyers,' Bobby said, rolling his eyes. 'I hate to say it, but sometimes my brethren just slow things down, muck things up.'
'I'm in no hurry,' she said, shifting her position on the pillow, wincing with pain.
Beaten but proud, refusing to be buffaloed by the fistful of hundreds. 'The D.A. told me he'd done it before.'
'What?'
'Nightlife. That he raped another girl, but that it never got into the papers. Had I known, I never would have gone up to his room.'
Bobby started to say something about everyone being innocent until proven guilty, but he bit off the words like a strand of thread.
'Did you know about it?' she asked.
Bobby sucked in a breath but stayed quiet, his own silence bearing down on him like a tombstone.
'Of course you did.' She propped herself on an elbow, grimaced as if someone had just lodged a dagger between her ribs, then sized him up. 'You're his lawyer. You're probably the one who hushed it up, aren't you?'
'I…' He wanted to say he was only doing his job, but it sounded so pathetic, he swallowed the thought.
What kind of a job was that? What kind of a man am I?
'How do you sleep at night?' Her swollen eyes filled with tears. 'What do you see when you look in the mirror?'
Engulfed in misery, he put the money back in his pocket. 'I want to help you. I really do. Forget who I am, or what I came here to do. If there's anything I can do to help…'
'Put your client behind bars.'
He wanted to tell her it didn't work that way. The system, you know.
'I can't.' Feeling empty.
Janet Petty turned her head toward the wall and spoke so softly Bobby could barely make out the words. 'After they gave me the sedatives last night, I dreamed about that animal. He was biting me and clawing me, dragging me down and soiling me…'
'I'm sorry,' Bobby said, his voice dry as burned paper. 'I am so very sorry.' His pity extended to both of them. He stepped closer to the bed and reached out for her arm, but when he touched her clammy skin, she recoiled and screamed.
'Get out! Get out of my room!'
She frantically reached for the buzzer, her face twisted in pain, and Bobby fled, fighting back tears of his own.
— 7 A Gutless, Spineless, Soft-Bellied Shyster
Bobby wound his way through the bowels of the stadium, working his way toward the locker room where a cacophony of sounds echoed off the walls. The game had ended half an hour earlier, a Dallas victory, as if that mattered in the grand cosmic scheme.
Reporters circled players, jamming microphones into their faces, pleading for grunted tidbits of wisdom. The floor was slick with sweat and shower spray, littered with soggy towels and wads of tape. Filthy uniforms were flung into laundry carts. An occasional victory whoop was heard, as the players celebrated defeating Washington, their long-time rivals.
Bobby waited until the reporters edged away from Nightlife, having asked the same question a dozen different ways. Bobby was constantly amazed at how complicated the sports writers tried to make a game that was essentially blocking and tackling, throwing and catching.
'Hey, whas-up, 'Meanor?' Nightlife asked him. The nickname, 'Misdemeanor,' which always bothered Bobby, infuriated him now. A former defensive back had coined it after Bobby convinced a judge to reduce an attempted murder charge to simple assault.
'We have to talk,' Bobby said.
'Talk's cheap, but Nightlife ain't.'
Nightlife looked at Bobby with innocent, doe-like dark eyes. He had a child's face and a slightly buck-toothed smile that only made him seem even more boyish and guileless. Bobby considered him a narcissist and pathological liar.
'Hey man, you're not still pissed about your old lady, are you? Wasn't my fault.' He was naked except for a white towel wrapped around his midsection. He was shorter than Bobby, one of those quicksilver wide receivers with explosive strength and Olympic speed, a gazelle who darts across the middle unafraid of being crushed by ornery linebackers who outweigh him by fifty pounds. If not for his highly developed pecs and trapezoids that
