Free Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner

ash-blond hair, some circles under her eyes, and her dimples were starting to become deep permanent grooves. In the next few years she’d either lapse into premature hagdom or become the kind of second-act hottie who always had younger guys eager to bring her coffee in bed.
     
“Sorry I couldn’t stick around and give you a ride from Rikers after the hearing,” she said with a strained smile. “But the babysitter had to go home early because her kids were sick. And I had no one covering for me. . . .”
     
“’S all right. I found my way.”
     
“Oh, I’m so glad.” She stopped, reminding herself to inhale. “You get a good night’s sleep at your cousin’s?”
     
“Uh, yeah. Felt good. You know. La familia. ”
     
He knew it was wrong to start off the day lying to his attorney, but what else was he going to say? A part of him was still a little Nuyo-Rican boy in a blanco school, wanting to impress the girls.
     
“Uh-huh, that’s great.” She nodded absently. “So how you like being a free man?”
     
“It’s a-ight.” He looked around, noticing a child’s finger painting next to her law degree on the wall, its taped corner flapping over an air vent. “I keep thinking you-all are going to tell me it’s a joke and I have to turn around and go back.”
     
“No, it’s no joke. But we do have some serious things to discuss.”
     
He hugged the duffel bag to his chest, hearing a hint of sternness. “So, what’s the DA saying? Are they gonna let the charges drop?”
     
“I’m afraid I had a very testy conversation with Paul Raedo this morning.” The words went off like a string of firecrackers too close to his ear. “They’re taking the position that the judge vacated your conviction on a ‘technicality.’” She crooked her fingers into quotation marks. “But the underlying indictment still stands.”
     
He fell back in his chair, knowing it was all too good to be true.
     
“Let’s face it. We got lucky yesterday.” She sat forward, leveling with him. “Your old lawyer had four of his cases overturned in the last few months. It happens sometimes, but not usually all at once. We were swimming with the tide.”
     
Lucky? Rage started to gurgle up inside him again. If he’d been lucky, he wouldn’t have been set up in the first place. If he’d been lucky, his father wouldn’t have hired Ralph Figueroa. That drug-addled old bastard never told him he had the right to testify on his own behalf or that they’d been offered a five-to-fifteen plea bargain by the DA. Turned out he’d been screwing up cases for years—missing deadlines, showing up unprepared, filing the wrong papers. And taking $12,000 of Papi’s life savings. The lawyer was living in a nursing home in Florida now, probably drinking out of the toilet and blissfully ignorant of the fact that four separate state judges had been forced to set aside old jury verdicts because of his gross negligence.
     
“I’m sorry, Julian. It’s politics.”
     
All at once he was back in the courtroom again, swimming in pure adrenaline terror and the itchy gray suit his father had bought him. The foreman reading the verdict as he felt his body go cold. Guilty, guilty, guilty . . . Every time they polled a member of the jury, he lost a few more degrees of body heat. His teeth were chattering by the time the guards took his arms and stood him up, so hunched over that he could barely turn around to say good-bye to Papi as they walked him back to the pens.
     
“All right, hold it, hold it.” She could see the blood drain from his face. “This is all just posturing and jockeying for position. Everything’s probably going to be just fine.”
     
“ Probably? ” he squawked. “Ms. A., don’t talk to me about probably. Just tell me what I have to do and let me do it.”
     
“Look. This is an unusual case.”
     
He noticed how she had to consciously slow herself down and pause to take a breath every few sentences, as if she were used to dealing with people who were either hard of hearing or willfully