Free Fatal Flaw by William Lashner

her tighter, but with the shift in her accent for a moment I am not certain anymore whom I am holding.
    “What was the thing?” I say. “The thing you wanted to tell me about.”
    “Nothing important.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Nothing you should worry about. Nothing that affects you.”
    I don’t say anything. I hold tight and wait. She wanted to tell me before, she wants to tell me now, so I wait.
    “It was last night,” she says. “Guy. We were together in the Jacuzzi. There were candles, rose petals.”
    “I don’t want to hear the details.”
    “He thought it was romantic. The candles. Like a commercial or something.”
    “Really, I don’t want to hear.”
    “Then he asked me to marry him as soon as the divorce goes through. To marry him.”
    She says nothing more, and I say nothing, and the silence swells and stretches until it is as taut as an overinflated balloon that I can’t help but prick with my words:
    “And what did you say?”
    “What could I say? I said yes.”

7
    I COULD barely look at Guy as he sat next to me at the defense table, still in the clothes of the night before, the clothes, like Guy, now rumpled and stinking. I could barely look at his puffy face, his red eyes, the way his hands trembled. I could barely look at the fear that overwhelmed him as he began to understand the abject consequences of his single moment of uncontrollable rage. Whenever I looked at him, I wanted to strangle him, so instead I looked around the courtroom, at the bailiff, the guards, at the bored reporters scattered in the otherwise empty seats, at the detectives sitting in the front row behind the prosecution table, Stone leaning back, arms stretched out, Breger hunched forward in weariness. It was still early, the judge was not scheduled to arrive for another quarter of an hour, but it pays to be prompt when they are arraigning your client for murder.
    The Montgomery County Courthouse was an old Greek Revival building with porticoes and pediments and a great green dome, all set in the county seat of Norristown. They had put us in Courtroom A, the building’s largest room, with its high ceilings and wood paneling and big leather chairs at the counsel tables that squeaked with righteousness. The courtrooms in Philadelphia are fresh and spanking new, modern and streamlined, with a sense of the assembly lineabout them, and so it felt good to be in a place with heavy wooden benches and red carpeting, a place that exuded harsh justice of the old sort. That’s the kind of justice I was hoping to find.
    I let my partner, Beth Derringer, coach Guy through the procedure so I could stew blissfully in my own emotions. “This is just a formality, Guy, you know all this,” she said quietly. “We’ll waive the reading of the indictment, plead you not guilty, and get started building your defense.”
    Beth was not just my partner, she was my best friend. Sharp, faithful, absolutely trustworthy. So of course I couldn’t trust her with all that had happened between Hailey and me and what had been decided the night before.
    And what exactly had been decided? Justice, vengeance, take your pick, they both felt the same to me.
    It all would have been simpler had I been able to go it alone, but this would be a trying case, I would need assistance, and so I had asked Beth to assist. And having Beth on my side had another distinct advantage. She could be my canary in the mine shaft. If I could keep her in the dark about what had happened and what I had decided to do about it, I believed I could keep everyone else there, too.
    “What about bail?” said Guy. “I’ve got to get out of here. Do you have any idea of what it’s like in prison? Do you have any idea of the way those animals inside look at me?”
    “No,” said Beth. “I don’t. We’ll try to get you out, Guy, but it’s a murder charge, and you were trying to run. The judge will grant either no bail or one absurdly high. But how much could you put up if bail is