Free Lush Life by Richard Price

approach the prosecutor and the witness across the street.
    "They were facing you?" The ADA, a still-young ex-cop, offered up some gum, his now regrettably tattooed wrist, a trompe l'oeil ring of barbed wire, peeking out from beneath his stiff white shirt cuff like a bracelet.
    "No, with their backs to me. I was walking up from the corner towards Nikki."
    "Your girlfriend."
    For a brief moment they both took five as a tall blond girl on a bicycle stopped directly in front of them to watch the action, the tattoo at the base of her spine drifting up from the ass of her jeans like blue smoke.
    'Your girlfriend," Flaherty repeated.
    "Yeah, and she was walking down towards me and they were like in between us, across the street, so . . ."
    "You hear anything they said?"
    "Not really." Randal shielded his eyes from the daylight, their whites now as red as his hair.
    "A lot of people on the block said they heard arguing."
    "I didn't hear any, maybe Nikki did. Anybody giving her the third degree?"
    "I'm sure they are. So, arm in arm in arm, backs to you . . ."
    "Yeah, and we were coming at each other, me and Nikki, then a shot goes off, the guy in the middle like, crumples to the ground, the guy on the left falls straight back with his arms out, and the third guy runs into the building."
    "Did you see a gun?"
    "No, at that point Nikki and I kind of met from where we both started walking towards each other, fortunately, and I just went on au-tomatic pilot, you know, pulling her down right behind this car here," touching the passenger door of a battered Lexus, "so I wasn't looking."
    "So you never actually saw a gun."
    "No, but I'm pretty damned sure as I was walking towards Nikki I saw the guy that ran into the building raise his arm beforehand, and I bet you the dead guy had a bullet in him."
    "And you didn't see anybody else with them."
    "Nope. Just those three."
    "Just those three." The ADA popped some gum. "Any people walking by?"
    "Nobody here but us chickens."
    "But who?"
    "It's a song."
    The ADA stared at him.
    "Never mind." Condo looked off, half smiling then. "No. No other people."
    "And nothing was blocking your view, no parked cars, no moving traffic."
    "It was like a ghost town."
    The ADA took a beat to shift gears, the both of them watching as a gray-haired Chinese woman carrying two plastic bags of vegetables walked obliviously through the blood.
    "I understand you overheard that guy telling the detective his version of what happened." "I did."
    "So you know he's claiming two black or Hispanic guys did the shooting."
    "Yeah, well, what did you expect him to say?"
    "How do you feel about that?"
    "You're asking me that why, because my girlfriend's black?"
    Flaherty waited.
    "Are you asking me if I would lie and try to screw some guy because he's a knee-jerk racist? Or are you asking me if I would lie to cover for two scumbags because they're the same color as the woman I sleep with?"
    "Either."
    "Neither.""Just between us." The ADA waved off a reporter before he could even get halfway across the street. "Walking around here four in the morning, you weren't stoned or anything?"
    "I haven't gotten high in nine months."
    "Have anything to drink?"
    "Why are you asking me all this like I'm the bad guy?"
    "Better me than a defense attorney, trust me. Have anything to drink?"
    "A few beers." Condo shrugged. "These days? Basically, I'm into clarity."
    "You ever been arrested?"
    Randal stared at him. "I have two master's degrees, one from the Berklee College of Music, the other from Columbia University."
    The ADA shielded his eyes from the sun again. "So, were you or weren't you?"
    Thirty minutes later, back in the squad room, the ADA stole a peek at Randal's girlfriend, Nikki Williams, through the three-quarter-lowered Venetian blinds of the otherwise vacant lieutenant's office as she waited for someone from the Prosecutor's Office to take her through it again.
    "The guy was pretty confident," he said. "How was the girl?"
    Matty