Free The 25th Hour by David Benioff Page A

Don’t start any trouble—;’
    ‘Enough.’ Monty stares at the backs of his hands. He wills them to quit trembling, but they won’t.
    When the waitress brings out their food, Mr Brogan diligently cuts the spinach leaves on his plate into smaller and smaller squares. He had wanted desperately to give his son something, to encourage him in some way, but now, watching the boy try to eat, he knows it is useless. How do you say, It’s only seven years ? Mr Brogan’s father was a barman; Mr Brogan grew up in bars and worked in them his whole life, sometimes rough places where a wrong word could lead to a beating or worse. But he understands that nothing in his experience can come close to what waits for Monty, that Monty is traveling to a foreign land Mr Brogan knows only from rumor.
    Mr Brogan’s bar is his bond to the court, his guarantee that Monty will not run away. Since June, Monty has been free because of the bar: free before trial, during trial, after conviction, after sentencing. Mr Brogan has owned the bar for thirty years, but sometimes he wishes Monty would run. Let them have the place; let them try to make money off it. Caught between Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, he owns a neighborhood bar without a neighborhood. Most of his patrons work at the hospital down the block or in the stores on 86th Street; they stop off for a drink before driving home. They are loyal, his customers, they like him and confide in him, but they do not have much money to spend.
    ‘This should never have happened,’ says Mr Brogan, staring at his glass of soda water.
    ‘All right, let’s not start now. It’s a little late in the game.’
    ‘I know,’ says Mr Brogan. ‘I know it, and I’m sorry, Monty. I should never have let you get involved.’
    Monty raps the tabletop with his knuckles. ‘Hey. Let it go. You had nothing to do with it, okay? Don’t start with this now.’
    ‘I just wish we could have talked about it. You could have made so much money in a real business; you didn’t need that . . . You should never have gotten involved with that.’
    But money was never the sole draw for Monty. He hadn’t grown up poor and he wasn’t greedy; he liked fast cars and Italian shoes but he didn’t need them, didn’t hunger for them. It was more about sway. Sway helps make your money and money helps make your sway, but sway is not money. Sway is walking into a clothes shop and knowing you can buy anything on the shelves, true, but sway is also the clerk opening the shop after hours so you can walk through the aisles alone with your girlfriend; sway is the clerk unlocking the back room to show you the latest deliveries, still sheathed in plastic bags; sway is the clerk standing silent in the corner while you browse, and the clerk won’t complain if you paw the merchandise and kiss your girl for an hour because he knows about you and the trouble’s not worth it. Sway is making a phone call in the morning and having courtside seats at Madison Square Garden that night. Sway is entering a nightclub through the staff entrance so you can skip the metal detector. Sway is locking eyes with an undercover cop on the subway; you know what he is and he knows what you are, and you wink at him because he drives a battered Buick and you drive a Corvette, and he cannot touch you.
    The Corvette is gone now. The government took title after Monty’s indictment. He wonders where it is – parked in some smirking suburbanite’s driveway or else still waiting in a federal lot for auction day. Monty does not love cars the way some men do, but he was proud of his vehicle, proud of its low-slung black body, the roar of its engine, the way he could make it bolt through the gaps in midtown traffic. On lucky days he’d find a string of green lights and cruise home in style.
    In thirteen hours, home becomes the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution; a Catskill Eagle bus will take him there. They will give him the proper documents to sign, they