Free The Partner by John Grisham

couldn’t remember. He simply couldn’t rememberthe last stage of his torture. His body was on fire. He was near death. He had called her name, but was it to himself? Where was she now?
    He dropped the soda and reached for the orderly.
    Stephano waited until one in the morning before leaving the house. He drove down his dark street in his wife’s car. He waved at the two agents sitting in a van at the intersection. He drove slowly so they could turn around and follow him. By the time he crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge, there were at least two cars trailing.
    The little convoy slid through empty streets until it reached Georgetown. Stephano held the advantage of knowing where he was going. He took a sudden right off K Street onto Wisconsin, then another on M. He parked illegally, and quickly, and walked half a block to a Holiday Inn.
    He took the elevator to the third floor, where Guy was waiting in a suite. Back in the United States for the first time in months, he’d slept little in three days. Stephano couldn’t have cared less.
    There were six tapes, all labeled and neatly arranged, sitting on a table next to a battery-operated player. “The rooms next door are empty,” Guy said, pointing in both directions. “So you can listen at full volume.”
    “It’s nasty, I take it,” Stephano said, staring at the tapes.
    “Pretty sick. I’ll never do it again.”
    “You can leave now.”
    “Good. I’m down the hall if you need me.”
    Guy left the room. Stephano made a call, and a minute later Benny Aricia knocked on the door. They ordered black coffee, and spent the rest of the night listening to Patrick scream in the jungles of Paraguay.
    It was Benny’s finest hour.

Eight
    To say it was Patrick’s day in the papers would be an understatement. The Coast morning daily ran nothing on the front page but Patrick.
LANIGAN BACK FROM THE DEAD
    Shouted the headline in think block letters. Four stories with no less than six photos covered the front page and continued inside. He also played well on the front page in New Orleans, his hometown, as well as in Jackson and Mobile. Memphis, Birmingham, Baton Rouge, and Atlanta also ran photos of the old Patrick with small front-page stories.
    Throughout the morning, two television vans kept a vigil outside his mother’s home in Gretna, a New Orleans suburb. She had nothing to say, and was protected by two vigorous ladies from down the street who took turns walking to the front door and glaring at the vultures.
    The press also congregated near the front of Trudy’s home on Point Clear, but were kept at bay by Lance, who sat under a shade tree with a shotgun. He wore a tight black tee shirt, black boots and trousers, and looked very much the part of a successful mercenary. They yelled banal questions at him. He only scowled. Trudy hid inside with Ashley Nicole, the six-year-old, who’d been kept home from school.
    They flocked to the law office downtown and waited on the sidewalk. They were denied entrance by two beefy security guards who’d been hurriedly pressed into action.
    They loitered around the Sheriff’s office, and Cutter’s office, and anywhere else they might pick up a scent. Someone got a tip, and they gathered at the Circuit Clerk’s office just in time to see Vitrano, in his finest gray suit, hand the clerk a document which he described as a lawsuit the firm was filing against Patrick S. Lanigan. The firm wanted its money back, plain and simple, and Vitrano was perfectly willing to discuss this with the press for as long as he could hold an audience.
    It would prove to be a litigious morning. Trudy’s lawyer leaked the earth-shattering news that at 10 A.M. he would stride over to the clerk’s office in Mobile and file a petition for divorce. He performed this task admirably. Though he’d filed a thousand divorces, this was the first time he’d done it in front of a TV news crew. He reluctantly agreed to be interviewed, at length. The grounds were