So, yeah. A good person would care. And a shit lawyer would never have gotten this far. But since I’m neither a good person nor a shit lawyer, it’s easy for me to look Greg dead in the eye and feel not an ounce of remorse.
The thing is, this stuff is easy for me. When you grow up the way I did, with one foot in New York’s criminal underbelly and the other in the real world, you’re basically handed a passport that grants you free entry between the two.
I know the moves. I speak the language.
Gregory Gordon is nothing but a fucking tourist here.
Greg’s lawyer clears his throat. “Can we take five? Please?”
I check my watch and decide to grant him mercy. “Make it ten. I could use a coffee.”
I push back from the table and walk out into the hall. The door shuts behind me like a coffin lid, sealing Greg’s fate that much more. I find a window and look out at the grey city below.
And, like clockwork, my mind goes to her.
It’s been six weeks since I woke up after surgery to find her gone, and she still shows up whenever my brain has a second to wander. All those sense memories, fragmented and distorted.
The ring in her palm.
Her mouth an inch from mine.
I never got her last name. I woke up in that hospital bed alone, with a nurse telling me the woman I came in with had ran out hours ago. She left behind no note and no phone number. Nothing to prove she was ever even real.
Whatever she was, whatever she wasn’t, it’s over now. I’ve got a dying man in the next room to finish killing.
Back to work.
The deposition wraps an hour later. Greg signs what he has to sign. His lawyer won’t meet my eyes, because he knows I just destroyed him. My clients will get their massive settlement, and Greg will get a tiny studio apartment somewhere in Queens. That is, if his friends in low places let him live that long.
Not my problem either way.
I grab my coat and head out. The speakeasy on East 4th is a fifteen-minute cab ride from my offices. Kir is already there when I walk in, tucked into our usual booth in the back. There’s a glass of our normal drink, Clase Azul, waiting for me on the table.
“You’re late,” Kir says as I slide into the seat.
“I was busy ruining a man’s life.”
“Did he deserve it?”
I smirk. “They always do.”
Kir lifts his glass. “Don’t tell me this one pissed in your chair like the last guy?”
I shake my head and sip at my drink. “No, thank fuck. I had to throw the whole thing out. Stank like hell.”
“But he cried?”
He grins, and we both chorus the obvious answer at the same time: “They always do.”
Chuckling, I settle back and loosen my tie. This stupid fabric has been burning my throat lately, though I don’t know why that’s happening all of the sudden. I’ve been wearing a tie damn near every day of my life since I started my first job, filing papers and filling coffees, back when I was just a suddenly orphaned fifteen-year-old boy paying my own way through the world.
But suddenly, this Hermès silk feels like a noose.
“Long day?” Kir asks.
“Long six weeks is more like it,” I mutter.
“Still?”
