Ruiz said, “You going to the shrimp fest tonight?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Shrimp is my weakness. I’ve yet to taste a way of making it that I don’t like.”
He smiled and stirred two packets of sugar into his coffee. “You are a local boy,” he said, “through and through. And I hear you. Me too.”
I looked at the menu. “I guess for once I won’t have it for lunch,” I said. “That’d be kind of overkill, with what’s going to be on offer tonight.”
He sighed. He had something on his mind. After a second, he said, “You know, Leland, this ain’t my business, but I can’t help wondering. Did you want to come back home, or did you have to?”
“Uh, how do you mean?”
“Well, would you still be up at the solicitor’s office if what happened there hadn’t happened?”
I wasn’t sure how much he knew, but I figured there was no point being cagey. We were part of a small legal community in a small town; privacy was hard to come by. And maybe being straightforward with him would encourage him to do the same.
I said, “You mean if I hadn’t gone over to the wrong side of the law trying to protect my wife?”
He nodded. There was not a flicker of surprise. Evidently word had reached him, most likely from someone he knew up at the Charleston solicitor’s office. I had misused the powers of my office to keep Elise from being charged with a DUI, more than once. I’d put lives at risk trying to protect her from consequences. I’d been lucky to be allowed to resign in lieu of facing an ethics complaint.
I thought back to his question. “Would I still be there? Yeah, I guess. It’s almost addictive, isn’t it. You know, the caseload, the fast pace, the sense of putting bad guys away. On good days it feels like you’re saving the world.”
He smiled and shook his head. I got the impression it had been a long time since he’d felt that way.
I said, “Why do you ask? You thinking of moving on yourself?”
The waitress came back to set down his burger and fries and take my order. I didn’t want him to feel obligated to sit there waiting for me, so I asked for a ham sandwich, hoping it’d be out quick.
He poured himself a mound of ketchup, started in on his fries, and said, “Maybe it’s a small-town thing, but it ain’t often that I get the sense of fighting the good fight. You know, I put some domestic abuser away, and a year later he’s back out doing it again. To the same woman or a new one, it don’t hardly seem to matter to those jackasses.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Although I guess you still spare somebody a year’s worth of pain.”
He shrugged. “I might as well smack one mosquito down at the swamp, for all the difference it makes.”
I nodded and took a sip of coffee. Then I asked, “You still on board for Jackson’s trial, though? Hope you ain’t going to leave me in the lurch.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He sounded tired of Jackson’s case, tired of pretty much everything. “I got nothing lined up. I ain’t even started looking yet. It’s just, you know, something I’m thinking about.”
On a hunch, I said, “I don’t blame you. I ain’t heard good things about your boss.”
He laughed. “There ain’t much in the way of good things to hear. Let’s see, uh… he drives a nice car? He still has all his own hair, I think, although he might just have a really good hair-plug surgeon. After that, I kind of run out of compliments.”
I laughed and thanked the waitress, who’d come by to set down my sandwich.
“I was wondering,” I said, “if your Mr. Hair Plugs is the reason you ain’t run a plea offer past us yet.”
He dragged a fry around in his ketchup like he was painting a picture. “Uh, he’s the reason for a lot of things. What, that totally innocent client of yours might take a plea?”
I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “Oh, you know how it is. Given the possible sentence here, it’s something I’m duty bound to consider and advise him on. And I know every solicitor’s office runs a little different, so maybe it’s nothing, but up in Charleston, that’d probably be on the table by this point.”
He nodded slowly, still drawing with his fry.
“It’s hard to know sometimes,” he said, “why Mr. Hair Plugs picks one case to be a hard-ass on and not another. But that’s his call, not mine.”
“Him and Blount,” I said, and he nodded. I could see he knew some of the pressure was coming from Blount, and maybe he even had some sense as to why, but he didn’t say anything.
To fill the silence, I said, “It’s like they think they got Osama bin Warton locked up in the county jail.”
He laughed.
“By the way,” I said, “that forensic report was interesting. What’d you make of the trace amount of heroin they found on the boat?”
He tossed his fry in his mouth and said, “Somebody went out for a sea cruise and got high. Party on the motorboat. You’d be surprised”—he looked at me with wide eyes, his voice dripping with sarcasm—“but people in Basking Rock get high all the damn time.”
I laughed. “Up in Charleston, we used to joke that at some point they were going to have to declare that the winner of the war on drugs was drugs.”
He picked up his burger, said, “You might as well declare war on the goddamn sun,” and took a bite. After chewing for a second, he added, “No matter what you do, it’s going to rise again tomorrow.”
“It ain’t rising by itself, though,” I said. “I mean, oxy, meth, whatever—people make that or get it from a doctor. But who’s bringing pure heroin into Basking Rock?”
He washed his burger down with a sip of coffee and said, “Where there’s roads, there’s smugglers.
