Last Call

'Theo, stop!'

He kept going.

'Come back, boy!'

Theo ignored him.

'Theo, it's your momma!'

Theo froze. There was blood on the street, on her dress, in her hair – so much blood, the color of her long crimson nails dotted with cheap rhinestones. Flies buzzed with interest around the deep gash across her throat. The wound was just below the white leather choker around her neck, a few inches above the rose tattoo on her right breast. Theo didn't want to see her face, but some inner curiosity made him take a good long look. He saw the open mouth, the painted lips, the vacant eyes staring into the night – two black pools behind a hooker's false lashes and enough sparkling purple shadow to let the Johns know exactly what she was.

And he saw a leopard-print shoulder bag on the ground, beside the lifeless body.

Sirens in the distance grew louder. Theo stood silent and stared, as if searching for the right emotions. He didn't let his eyes go there, but he knew Switch was right: you could see right up her skirt. The view would have been only slightly less revealing had she been standing in her usual spot on the corner.

'Theo,' his uncle said, but Theo ignored him.

He stepped toward his mother, bent down on one knee, and checked to make sure that everyone was watching.

Then he grabbed the purse and ran back to the Chevy.

Twenty years later Chapter 1

Jack Swyteck woke after midnight. The television was playing, but the sound was still on mute. Rene didn't like sex in total darkness. Leno the night-light.

Jack stole a glimpse of the gorgeous woman in bed next to him. He was a lucky guy he supposed, on many different levels. He was a respected criminal defense lawyer with his own practice. He had an unlikely best friend in Theo Knight, an ex-con and former client who would do anything for Jack. His beloved abuela was healthy, and it had been ages since he and his famous father had argued the way they used to. With Rene in town, there was plenty to be happy about – so long as he didn't overanalyze things.

But he always overanalyzed things. Last month's draw had fallen short of what some lawyers paid their personal trainers. His ex-wife was a fruitcake, and his post-divorce love life could have filled an entire volume of Cupid's Rules of Love and War (Idiot's Edition). To add insult to injury, twice a week Abuela called Spanish talk radio to find her thirty-nine-year-old grandson 'a nice Cuban girl.' Sometimes Jack felt as if he had used up his lifetime allotment of luck getting Theo off death row for a murder he didn't commit – whose death warrant had been signed by the law-and-order governor of Florida, Jack's father.

And then there was Rene.

She lay on her side, sound asleep, the soft cotton sheet hugging the curve of her hip. Her flight from West Africa had landed that afternoon. She'd finally succumbed to jet lag, though not before taking Jack for a ride that seemed to have been propelled by rocket fuel. They had planned to hit South Beach for dinner. They never made it out of Jack's bedroom. Typical for her first night in town. Unfortunately she would be gone in two days, three at the most. Some emergency would undoubtedly come up and force her to cut the trip short. That would also be 'typical.'

The first time Jack had laid eyes on Rene, she was covered in dust, caught in the midst of the Senoufo country's equivalent of a sandstorm. It was hard not to be impressed by a Harvard Med School grad who had given up the financial rewards of private practice to be a one-doc operation in a clinic near the cocoa region of Cote d'lvoire. Many of her patients were young children escaping forced servitude on the plantations, mere innocents who had been snatched by kidnappers, lured away by liars, or sold into slavery by their own families for as little as fifteen dollars. Rene saw all that and more – malnutrition, AIDS, infant mortality, even genital mutilation among some migrant tribes. Perhaps it was a stretch, but Jack felt an immediate connection to Rene, having passed up offers himself from prestigious firms right out of law school to defend death-row inmates. For whatever reason, they hit it off. Really hit it off.

Passion, however, was a tricky thing. On the emotional EKG, Jack and Rene resembled a couple of flat-liners with occasional bursts of tachycardia. She flew into Miami to see him every three months or so. Sometimes she didn't even tell Jack she was coming. Smart, funny, sexy, and spontaneous, she could have been everything Jack thought he wanted in a woman – except that she was hardly ever around. On one of these visits she was going to put away the passport and announce that she was moving to Miami. At least that was what Jack told himself. A little optimism kept him in the game.

'Rene?' he whispered. She didn't move. He nudged her.

'What?' she muttered.

'Where's the remote?'

Only one eye opened, which was a good thing. A two-eyed glare of that caliber would have killed him, for sure. She swung her arm around and jabbed the remote control into Jack's elbow.

Jack punched the button, but nothing happened. 'Damn it. How are you supposed to get this thing turned on?'

'Talk dirty to it,' she said into her pillow.

'Thanks.'

'Go to hell.'

I love you, too, he started to say, but thought better of a joke like that. On her last visit, he'd used the three operative words in a serious way. Her response was not what he'd hoped for. It left him resolved never to say 'I love you' again – unless followed by the word 'too.'

Waves of colored light flickered across the bedroom as Jack channel-surfed. He skipped through the reruns and infomercials, pausing only for a moment at yet another forensic drama that looked like CSI: Mars, or some such remote geographic rip-off of the original hit series. At the bottom of the hour, a local news headline caught his eye. He raised the volume. This time, it worked.

'No sound,' said Rene.

'It's still on mute.'

'Liar. I can hear it.'

'That's because you're dreaming. In real life, I'm perfect. Only in dreams am I a total pain in the ass.'

She was too tired to argue, or maybe it was his sense of humor that sent her back to sleep. Jack turned his attention to the television newscast. At such a low volume he could pick up only a few words here and there, but the image on screen was familiar. Jack had visited plenty of clients at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center. A young and attractive reporter with ambition in her eyes and an Action News microphone in her hand was doing a live broadcast from outside the jail's main entrance. Helicopters circled in the night sky behind her, powerful white searchlights sweeping the landscape. Those definitely weren't media choppers.

The words 'Breaking News' and 'Prison Escape' flashed in white letters against a bright red banner on the bottom of the screen.

Jack glanced at Rene – still sleeping – and decided to risk a little added volume. With the press of a button, he immediately heard the excitement in the reporter's voice, catching her in mid-sentence.

'-the second escape from TGK Correctional Center in the past twelve months, and the first ever from the second floor, which is reserved for convicted or suspected sex offenders. TGK is operated by the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department, which countywide houses approximately seven thousand inmates in the nation's sixth-largest jail system. Last April, the department's director resigned after a police and fire task force found that jail buildings were severely outdated, officer training was poor, and 134 positions were unfilled. Department officials say that last night's escape occurred sometime after-'