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Before Braun got involved it seemed pretty clear that New York was going to have its first execution in a very long time.

The Braun Machine, as it was known, took the case to a new level. An appeal was granted after Braun showed that much of the evidence against his client had been circumstantial and his publicly assigned lawyers were incompetent. Newspapers suggested that a self-defense plea was in the making. Protests proclaiming “Free Man” were being held from coast to coast.

I wasn’t a fan. When it came to cops as victims I was just another brick in the Blue Wall. Few civilians understood how hard it is to be a policeman when almost everybody is afraid of you and suspicious too. The mayor, the city council, and half the civilian population were willing to believe the worst of us when we put our lives on the line 24/7.

Us.

I still considered myself a cop. In my days on the force I’d been sucker-punched, stabbed, spit on, shot at, and singled out by a thousand videophones. Every time I’d make an arrest the community seemed to come out against me. They had no idea how much we cared about them, their lives.

“So are you a lawyer, Ms. Portman?”

“I passed the bar this past June,” she said. “But I’m working for Braun because he does the kind of work I want to do.”

“And what does Stuart Braun want from me?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m here because Mr. Man is innocent and Stuart Braun is about to sell him down the stream,” the young woman replied.

“River,” I said.

“What?”

“The saying is ‘sell him down the river.’ ”

“Oh.” Willa looked at me with both desperation and anger in her eyes.

“I thought Braun had committed himself to saving Man,” I said.

“He had,” she said, “at first. He gathered all kinds of evidence against the cops that Manny shot—”

“He’s admitted to the murders?”

“N-no,” Willa Portman stuttered. “I mean, yes, but not the way you’re saying. They were trying to kill him. They were stalking him. They’d already murdered three of his blood brothers and paralyzed the other one. They were after him and he just protected himself.”

She’d been looking around while making these claims but ended the sentence by looking into my eyes.

“So,” I prompted, “Braun was gathering evidence…”

“He had days and times, ballistics reports, and testimony from reliable witnesses who could be vetted.”

“Sounds like a case.”

“It was. It is. But then, two weeks ago, Stuart, I don’t know…he turned cold. There really isn’t any other way to say it. We were supposed to go see a church lady named Johanna Mudd. Ms. Mudd had agreed to testify that Officer Valence received payments from Deacon Mordechai to provide access to young homeless people for the purpose of forced prostitution.”

“Run out of a church?”

“The Last Rite of Christ Baptist Church ran a charity that was supposed to help runaway and orphaned girls and boys. Mordechai and some of his friends had the access. Valence, Officer Pratt, and others ran the business.”

“So that’s the defense?” I asked. “That Man and his crew were fighting a prostitution ring?”

“Not just that,” she said. “Not just that. Manny says that the cops were involved in all kinds of criminal activities. There was stolen merchandise, drugs, and murders. People were being killed if they tried to stand up to them.”

“But then one morning the Honorable Mr. Braun went cold, you say.”

“I asked him when we were going to leave to see Ms. Mudd, and he said that we weren’t. I asked why, and he told me that everything A Free Man had told us was a lie; that he was the one who had killed his blood brothers because they were going to turn in Valence and Pratt.”