Free The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry Page A

“the political climate, it’s not the same as it was thirty years ago. They won’t just let him walk.”
    Elise glared. She was angry and did not like to be contradicted, and she regarded him as if he had somehow joined the enemy. It wasn’t fair. She got up from the table, pushing her chair back. For a second, he thought she might leave him there—but no, she just went outside and stood there smoking, looking toward the site where the bank had been.
    He wished she wouldn’t act that way. He did not like how the woman at the next table smirked at him now, as if a point had been proved.
    Still, he understood Elise’s skepticism.
    He understood how dead this case had been—how far out in the cold. He’d felt that coldness, firsthand, when he’d approached Blackwell on her behalf, maybe six months before 9/11. But now things had changed. After the towers went down, there was a different atmosphere. Antiterror laws, public fear. People out to settle old scores. So Blackwell had reopened the case.
    When Elise came back, he tried to apologize.
    â€œIt’s okay,” she said.
    Her mood had shifted. Elise was like that. She smiled at him, and he felt his heart leap. She was a young woman, and he couldn’t help the effect she had on him sometimes. She had blonde hair, more freckles than you might expect on a woman her age, a gap-toothed smile. The old biddy was still watching them, making her assumptions, but Sorrentino had seen the expression before: the same slant-eyed look, full of suspicion, that people gave to anyone who wasn’t content to die alone in his room.
    â€œI want to pay you, for all you’ve done,” she said.
    â€œNo,” he said.
    They’d been through this before. He knew her financial situation.
    â€œI told you. I got a check recently for the fund. There are people who want to help. And the first thing—”
    â€œThere’s always strings, those donations.”
    He didn’t quite believe her. Her father had set up a legal fund years ago, but it had gone dry a long time back. Her attempts to raise money, they never worked, and it wasn’t necessary anymore, now that the state was involved. But before he said any of this, she squeezed his hand a little harder.
    â€œNot this time,” she said. “I’ve got the money.”
    She pushed her food away. She hadn’t eaten half of it. She seldom did. The first time he had gone out with her, he’d had to fight the impulse to finish it for her.
    â€œI want to pay you back. I know how far behind you are—on your alimony, on all that. It isn’t right, you shouldn’t have done all this work for nothing.”
    She wore new earrings, new shoes. The other day she’d been wearing a yellow dress, matching heels—a new wardrobe as well, though at the time he hadn’t thought about it much. Most of the women he’d known, no matter what their situation, somehow always managed to come up with money for clothes, and anyway he didn’t begrudge her. He hadn’t done this for money, but it was true, he’d worked a lot of hours with little reward.
    â€œAll right,” he said. “But not now. Maybe later. You can pay me, if that’s what you want to do.”
    *   *   *
    When they entered the courtroom, Sorrentino could feel Elise prickling beside him. Murder trials were not the friendliest of things, but there was an enmity here between the attorneys as well: Blackwell and his assistants on one side of the aisle, stiff-necked and earnest, court briefs stacked in neat folders; then Jensen’s blustering crew on the other. Elise had her supporters, but the defense had filled the room with people who had worked with Owens these last years, old friends and cohorts, and the looks she got—and Sorrentino as well—were sharp-eyed and accusatory, bemused, full of condescension. Or this was how it seemed to him.