The Last Goodbye Read online

  It was an indication of the sheer repetitiveness of my practice that I looked forward to representing Michael Harrod, my second case of the day. His crime was utterly forgettable—petty larceny, otherwise known as shoplifting—but for once, it wasn’t about drugs.

  His appearance caused a bit of a stir, which is an accomplishment, considering who gets dragged through Odom’s court. Harrod had spiky hair, like Joseph’s famous coat: a haircut of many colors. Piercings were numerous and painful-looking. His T-shirt, emblazoned with the logo of the band Nine Inch Nails, was badly in need of washing. But in spite of all this, he was about as scary as an altar boy. At five foot six and 130 pounds, the T-shirt covered a nearly concave chest. His skin, having apparently been deprived of sunlight for the last several years, was as pasty-white as unbaked bread. He looked nervous, like a sharp noise would lift him off the ground. I met him outside the courtroom about an hour before his trial.

  “Jack Hammond,” I said, introducing myself. He looked at me warily, not returning my handshake. “You’re Michael Harrod, correct?”

  “Call me Nightmare,” he said.

  I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but the comic effect of combining his name and his appearance was irresistible. “Is that Mr. Nightmare?” I asked. “Or is Night your first name and Mare your last?”

  Harrod gave me a narrow, suspicious look that was, I suppose, what he could muster up for arrogance. “Look,” he said, “what do I have to do to get out of this? That’s what we’re here for, right?”

  I have nearly infinite patience with smart-ass clients. I simply remind myself that most of them have never had a father, and that they are minutes away from meeting Daddy. Daddy, in this case, is Judge Thomas Odom. The judge is a decent man but he can turn on the gruff act when appropriate, and coming as it does from a man with the power to send you to hell, it’s usually fairly effective. It usually takes about two minutes for a first-timer’s expression to be transformed from detached asshole to abject, whimpering baby. They crawl back through time, past their victimized adolescence, right back to the moment when a real father would have smacked their butts a little bit and put an end to their insolence problem. “Well, Nightmare,” I said, “even though I personally find you charming, you might start off with a little attitude adjustment. Judge Odom likes his victims a little more contrite.”

  Nightmare looked me over again, thinking. I could see him putting some things together. “I can smile,” he said. “I can bow and scrape for the man.”

  “In that case,” I said, “now would be the time.” I opened up his folder. “I’ve been looking over your file. Apparently you got confused about the correct time to pay for some items in a Radio Shack.”

  Nightmare shrugged. “I needed ‘em,” he said. “They weren’t worth much.”

  “Then why not pay?”

  “I didn’t have it. Anyway, that’s old economy.”

  “Old economy?”

  Nightmare gave me a tired look. “Look, you’re old economy. You’re a dinosaur.” He gestured around him at the walls of the courthouse. “This whole system is.”

  “Dinosaurs, are we?” I was starting to seriously dislike this kid.

  “All of this, governments, court systems, armies, wars. It’s all old economy. It’s dying, and you don’t even know it.”

  “I guess not paying for things, that’s new economy?”

  “Do you have any concept of how fast the world is moving? You think I should shut down my whole world over five bucks’ worth of electronic parts?”

  I looked down at the folder. “That’s what this is about? Five dollars?”

  “Yeah. Five bucks’ worth of connectors for an autodialer.”

  “What’s an autodialer?”

  “It dials. Automatically.”

  “Computers, you mean.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  At that moment I realized that Nightmare was really just a thief, the only difference being that his breaking and entering was electronic. Ten seconds after that, a little plan hatched in my head, most of which entailed getting him as far into my debt as possible. After last night, the particular expertise I suspected he possessed I needed very badly. Since he didn’t look like the type of kid who would do me any favors, I would have to make him owe me. I figured that would take about five minutes.

  I looked across the hall at the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, who was talking to an overweight, dark-haired man of about thirty-five. I watched them for a couple of minutes, thinking. I stood up, and Nightmare flinched back about six inches from the sudden motion. I stared down at him, thinking about how many times he must have had his ass kicked in grade school. But I had no doubt that he was as dangerous with a computer as a prizefighter was with his fists. As much as I hated to admit it, the kid was right; the world was changing, and little pissed-off Nightmares like him were about to inherit the keys to the kingdom. But not quite yet, and in the meantime, I needed a favor from him. “Listen to me,” I said. “I’m sure I’m going to love the world you and your techno-anarchist buddies are building. But right now, the old economy is going to put your spindly little butt in jail if you don’t do exactly—and I mean exactly—what I tell you to do.”

  “Nobody is going to put me in jail over five bucks.”

  “Michael . . .”

  “Nightmare,” he corrected.

  I sort of leaned on him then. I wasn’t angry, I was just in a hurry. If the case was called and we got before Odom, it would be too late. “Okay, Nightfuck, I don’t really care what your name is, you need to listen to me now, because I’m old economy, and that’s whose house you’re in right now.” I took out my billfold, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and pressed it into Nightmare’s hand. “Come here,” I said, “and do exactly what I tell you for a couple of minutes.”

  Nightmare shoved the bill into his pocket and followed me across the hallway. The dark-haired man glowered. “That’s him,” the man said. “That’s the little snitch that stole from me.”

  “You?” Nightmare sneered. “Radio Shack is a multinational corporation that doesn’t know you exist. They spend more on toilet paper than your annual salary.”

  I took Nightmare’s arm and squeezed it hard. He winced, which didn’t surprise me, since he was about as muscular as a toothpick. I nodded hello to the DA, then turned toward the dark-haired man with a smile. “And you are?” I asked.

  “Vincent Bufano,” he said. “I’m the manager of the Radio Shack.”

  “Mr. Bufano,” I said, “Mr. Harrod here has something he wants to give you, and something he wants to say.”

  Bufano looked at Nightmare, who was squirming under my grip. “Give him the money, Michael,” I said. He started to speak, but I pressed my middle finger into the center of his bicep so hard he almost wilted. He reached his free hand into his pocket, took out the bill, and handed it over to Bufano. “And now Michael has something he wants to say,” I said. “Tell the man you’re sorry, Michael.”

  Nightmare started to pull back, but I had my grip on him. He muttered something under his breath, and the man just sneered. I dug my thumb into the side of Nightmare’s arm, getting the nail right in there between the tendons. Then I started to work my thumb back and forth. Nightmare straightened up. “I’m sorry,” he said clearly. I pressed harder. “Terribly, terribly sorry.”

  “And it will never happen again, isn’t that right, Michael?” I moved my thumb slowly, filleting the muscle.

  “No,” he said. “Never again. Not ever.”

  Bufano looked at Nightmare for a while, eyes peering out above his ample cheeks. He folded the bill, put it in his pocket, and said, “Don’t come in my store again, boy.” I looked over at the DA, who had watched all this with a bemused smile. She wasn’t any more interested than I was in dropping a couple of hours on the case.

  “I suppose the state can drop the charges,” she said, “if Mr. Bufano has no objection.”

  Bufano looked at Nightmare, obvi
ously enjoying his penny-ante justice. “He can go,” he said. “But like I said, he don’t come back in my store.”

  “So our business here is concluded?” I asked the DA.

  She laughed. “Yeah.” She looked at Nightmare. “You can go.”

  I didn’t release the grip on Nightmare’s arm. “Say thank you to the old economy, Michael,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he muttered. With that, I let him go. He walked back across the hallway, rubbing his arm. I shrugged at the DA, shook Bufano’s hand, and walked back over to Nightmare. He looked up at me, grimacing.

  “That hurt, dude,” he said. “That was uncalled for.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Which economy is jail in?”

  “Nobody was going to jail. Not over five bucks.”

  “You might be the future, Nightmare, old pal, but you don’t know much about the Georgia legislature.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that a lot of good old boys decided that the judges were a little lax around here, and they made sentencing mandatory for petty theft. You would have got a five-hundred-dollar fine, plus court costs.”

  “I don’t have five hundred dollars.”

  “Plus costs.”

  “I don’t have that, either.”

  “In that case, you would have got ten days, and served six.”

  “For five bucks?”

  “Ain’t the old economy a bitch?”

  I could see the wheels turning in Nightmare’s head. Gratitude was a relatively new concept for him, so it took a while. “Hey, man,” he said after a few moments, “thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “No, really. That would have sucked.”

  “I agree.”

  “Look, I don’t have the ten bucks.”

  “You can pay me back another way.”

  Nightmare’s face covered itself in detached indifference. “Payback,” he said. “You suck, man.”

  I got a faraway look in my eye. “I can just picture you in the county lockup, where they sleep in cots, thirty to a room. Young skinny white kid like you would be really popular about two A.M.”

  Nightmare trembled involuntarily. “All right, what is it?” he said. “But don’t make it suck.”

  “It’s right up your alley,” I said. “I want you to break into a computer, and I want you to keep your mouth shut about it.”

  Nightmare’s expression transformed itself from insolence, through surprise, and stopped on a crafty, thin smile. “Hell, yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  LIKING DEREK STEPHENS would never have been easy. His particular brand of effete arrogance was never my cup of tea. It’s nothing personal; it’s just that back in Dothan, we would have kicked his ass a little bit, to give him perspective. Then he could still run off and rule the world, but without feeling quite so entitled. So I didn’t really want to see flowers from him on my secretary’s desk when I got back to the office around noon. Blu played it off, saying he was just being sweet, and besides, for a guy like him, they cost practically nothing. She probably had no idea how true that was; if he was rich now, it was a safe assumption that he held stock options in Horizn that were about to make him fabulously wealthy. But in my experience, thirty-six roses is a pretty big statement, whether or not they’re yellow.

  She did look happy, though. Atlanta is full of women living papier-mâché lifestyles, a thin copy of the life they mysteriously expected to become real at any moment. They looked like millionaires, they acted like millionaires, they hung out around millionaires whenever they could, only they didn’t actually have any money. To women like that, guys like Derek Stephens had the approximate value of plutonium. He was priceless.

  Which was not, frankly speaking, my own current value in that world. Lawyers who have fallen from grace and barely hung onto their licenses trade somewhere in the penny stock range. I watched Blu smell her roses for a while; then I went to lunch with Sammy at The Rectory, the bar where he used to pour drinks but now buys them.

  Sammy’s life has proved an unlikely theory to be true: if you are miserable, try killing what you want. You’ll probably discover you are much happier. It was like that with Sammy. After spending a few years serving drinks to lawyers and eavesdropping on their conversations, he determined to join their ranks. In other words, he started hoping. He got dreams. Unfortunately, the only law school that would accept him met at night in the basement of the YMCA. Considering the academic flotsam and jetsam with whom he studied, he might have taken the fact that he graduated nineteenth out of a class of nineteen as a bad omen. During his first year after law school he failed the bar three times. In desperation, he took a job as the clerk of Judge Thomas Odom in the Fulton County Criminal Court. Within one week he made a startling discovery: all he had really wanted in the first place was to wear a decent suit and have a little power. In other words, he was happy as a clam. See what I mean? It’s like my mantra: Strip it down and let it go. Sammy holds in his Seagram’s-stained hands the destiny of several hundred actual lawyers, which pleases him greatly.

  By the time I showed up at The Rectory, Sammy was a couple of drinks ahead of me. It didn’t do his appearance any good. He had the kind of relaxed body that was passable in high school, but which was gradually relocating to less attractive places. He was getting the frat-boy fifteen-years-later look, which was exactly who he was. He still had a quick smile, but you could see a hundred or more drinking nights that had somehow turned into mornings in the widening face, the short brown hair starting to thin, the pale shine in the cheeks. He had partied hard for about as long as the human body can absorb, and unless he took immediate action, he was going to look middle-aged in about six months.

  The first thing I did was buy him a drink. He was going to drink anyway, and I try not to make value judgments on what people call recreation. I was going to pump him for information and then ruin his day, so the drink was the least I could do. Sammy, oblivious to the bad news I had for him, was dividing his attention equally between staring at the ice melting in his glass and the waitress who was working the opposite side of the bar.

  “Sammy,” I said sitting down, “you and your imagination should get a room.”

  “All I have are dreams, Jackie. Don’t take those from me.”

  “Well, if you’d get out more, maybe get a little exercise.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.” He took a swallow. This was going to be a three-drink conversation, unless I hurried things along. “You ordering anything?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m getting the club on rye,” I said. “Listen, I need to ask you a couple of things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, who’s running McDaniel Glen these days?”

  Sammy paused, thinking. “That would be Jamal Pope.”

  “Pope, huh? I thought he was—”

  “Nope. He’s at large, as we say. Doing a brisk business, so I hear.” He took another sip. “You still got that Doug Townsend thing on your mind?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I want to find out where he got the fentanyl, maybe get a lead on his state of mind.”

  “I don’t believe Mr. Pope is the talkative kind.”

  “Safe bet. Anything I can use to leverage him?”

  Sammy leaned back in his chair. Thankfully, he hadn’t had enough Seagram’s to cloud his thinking just yet. “Maybe,” he said after a while. “You got that scrawny bastard Keshan Washington off a couple of months ago, didn’t you?”

  “Look, Sammy, it’s not my fault a busted taillight doesn’t give a cop the right to strip-search a motorist.”

  “Yeah, and your clients are all just misunderstood. But the point is, thanks to you Mr. Washington is once again free, walking the streets of Atlanta. Care to guess what he’s doing with his time?”

  I looked at Sammy. “Working for Jamal Pope?”

  “Bingo,” Sammy answered. “So the way I see it, the king of the Glen owes you. He
’ll probably buy you dinner.”

  “Thanks, Sammy,” I said. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “Get the Bill of Rights repealed? We got bad people to put away.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  Sammy took another big gulp, draining his glass. “Listen, Jack,” he said, “if you’re going over there, why not have Billy Little send a uniform with you?”

  “Sure, Sammy. That’ll open up Mr. Pope like a sieve.”

  “All right, go get yourself killed. See if I care.” Sammy flagged the waitress down, and she walked over to our table, all short skirt, long legs, and emphatic breasts. She looked about twenty, in contrast to Sammy’s thirty-five. I ordered my sandwich, and Sammy said, “Two more,” holding up his fingers like a peace sign. “And one for yourself, sweetheart.”

  To her credit, the waitress didn’t roll her eyes. She just smiled and glided off, probably thinking about her lifeguard boyfriend. But Sammy was about thirty seconds away from forgetting about her, because that’s how many seconds it was before I dropped my bomb on him.

  “Listen, Sammy,” I said, “tell me what you know about Derek Stephens.”

  Sammy shrugged. “Stephens? Why do you ask?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Spends his time up in federal court, destroying people for Horizn Pharmaceuticals. It’s mostly intellectual property stuff, people encroaching on Horizn patents.”

  “Yeah, that’s getting sticky these days.”

  “He’s not around much, but there’s a buzz when he comes in the courthouse. Mostly because everybody hates him.”

  “Because?”

  Sammy raised his eyes. “Classic asshole. Treats everyone like shit, and gets away with it because he’s so brilliant. That’s the kind of thing that gets annoying after a while. Hits on everything that moves, too.”

  “So he’s not married?”