Free Empty Ever After by Reed Farrel Coleman

office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. For two years Brightman had proclaimed his innocence. He’d done everything he could, cooperated completely with the police, posted a big reward, jumped through fiery hoops, but it was all to no avail. He had been tried and convicted in the press and in the court of public opinion. Trouble was, Brightman was the fair-haired boy, the next Jack Kennedy and he was too ambitious to just live out his days as a has-been that never was.
    That’s where I came in. Thomas Geary, one of Brightman’s wealthy backers and the father of one of our former wine store employees, got the idea that I could magically clear the state senator’s name. My reputation was for luck, not skill. As my early clients had too often said, “We tried good, now we’re going to give luck a chance.” I guess, if I want to be honest, they were right. I was lucky. My luck extended as far back as 1972. On Easter Sunday of that year, a little girl named Marina Conseco was kidnapped off a Coney Island street. And once seventy-two hours passed,
the search for Marina silently morphed into a search for her remains. I found Marina severely injured but alive at the bottom of an old wooden water tank. She had been molested, then tossed in the tank and left to die. To this day, I’m not sure what made me look up and notice the tanks and think to search them. I was lucky then. I was lucky with Brightman too.
    We were on the 7 train heading back home from Shea. Sarah was sleeping with her head of damp red curls resting on my leg. I was hot and tired too, but my eyes kept drifting to the front page of the Post that the man across the car from me was reading. On it was a picture of evil personified, a serial rapist the papers had dubbed Ivan the Terrible. He had scraggly hair, a cruel condescending smile, and black eyes. They were the blackest eyes I’d ever seen: opaque as the ocean on a moonless night. With a little bit of digging, I found a connection between Moira and Ivan. He eventually confessed to her murder. I was a little too lucky with that one. It all came just a bit too easily. In spite of it, I found the real facts behind the fabricated truths that had been sprinkled on the ground before me like so many bread crumbs.
    I could never go to a game or drive past Shea Stadium without thinking of Sarah’s first Mets game. Every year I renewed my Mets season tickets, but it wasn’t the same without her and it was never going to be the same. These days I usually gave my tickets away to Aaron’s kids or Carmella’s little cousins or clients. I checked the Arrivals screen for the hundredth time in the last ten minutes and noticed Sarah’s flight number was flashing. So far, I had been able to filter Ivan the Terrible’s kind of evil out of my kid’s life and I meant to keep it that way. I dialed Carmella’s cell number.
    “What?” she barked. “It’s so fucking noisy in here.”
    “Her flight’s landed.”
    “No shit! There’s like a screen two feet from my face.”
    “You remember what Sarah looks—”
    “For chrissakes, Moe! I know your daughter for ten years. I know what the fuck she looks like. I could spot that red hair from halfway across the state.”
    “What the fuck’s eating you lately?”
    “My stomach’s been bothering me for weeks. I’m sorry, Moe, I know I been cranky.”
    “Okay, she should be getting down here in a few minutes.”
    “Don’t worry. Anybody comes near her, I got it covered.”
    “Anything suspicious?”
    “I got my eye on a few mutts, but you know these town car drivers try to scam rides. We’ll see soon.”
    Not everything I got right was about luck. I was a good cop before
my accident. I still possessed the ability to anticipate, to see what might be coming around the next corner, and what I saw coming was trouble for Sarah. Whoever had done this stuff with Patrick had gone through a lot of trouble. So far the only direct targets had been Katy and me, but if you really