Free Indefensible by Lee Goodman Page A

around. Lloyd kneels and feels his pulse and looks into the boy’s eyes. “Let’s get him to the hospital,” he says.
    â€œAre you, um, medical?”
    â€œDoctor,” Lloyd answers. “Used to be, anyway.”
    I make eye contact with the trooper who wasn’t about to shoot me. He comes over, and we lift the kid up and get him into the cruiser. He flops down in the seat, hands still cuffed behind. “Uncuff him,” I say to Stubby. He obeys. Then the cruiser goes out the driveway, Lloyd in back with the kid, lights flashing, whoop-whoop ing into the landscape.
    Flora, Lizzy, and I get into Flora’s car and head for the hospital. My cell rings again. “Davis here,” I answer curtly.
    â€œNick, it’s Chip.”
    â€œChip,” I say, and it comes out squeaky because my throat catches with affection. Chip’s stable and gentle voice is a psychological oasis among lunatic events. “My buddy Chip.”
    â€œBad news, Nick. Cassandra Randall is dead.”

PART II

C HAPTER 13
    T he second Monday in September. It’s been a rotten summer, and I’m glad it’s over.
    I drive through town, watching workers burst from office buildings to speed home and hear about the kids’ first day back at school. At an intersection, the light says walk , and a damburst of crossers flows into the street. Now the light says stop, but they keep coming. I nose through, and in the no-man’s-land before the next light, far from any crossing, a guy steps off the curb. He stops me with an upturned hand like a traffic cop as he waits for an opening in the other lane, but no one is as persuadable as I. So I’m stuck waiting until he can spot his chance and bolt. If he’d look at me, I could smile and offer the gift of my patience. By ignoring me, he steals it. Not even a glance in my direction, so in a flash of fury, I add the feeble bleat of the Volvo’s horn to the sounds of the afternoon. The crosser sees his opening and runs, but in the air behind him, he leaves the vision of that upturned palm, which, in the moment of its departure, too late for me to stomp the gas and run him down, becomes a single-fingered wave.
    Fuck you, too, my friend.
    Beyond the business district, I drive past the fenced-off wreck of the old Aponak Mill complex where my dad was a floor superintendent for most of his career. He died of lung cancer three years short of retirement.
    Just last week, a couple of kids got inside the fence and spent the afternoon lobbing bricks into the road. No one was hurt, but a few cars got dinged, and the kids earned a trip to juvie on criminal trespass and destruction of property. As I pass now, I see the form of someone in a garbage bag huddled against the fence, a piece oftwine tethering his or her wrist to a shopping cart that waits like a loyal steed.
    I’m on my way out to Seymour Station to look at another body. This one was found in a freezer. I’m not needed there, but it’s a good chance to catch up with Dorsey and Chip. I’ve scarcely talked to them since June.
    There have been no arrests in the murder of either Zander Phippin or Cassandra Randall. The lovely and innocent Cassandra Randall was killed in her home. It was after dark. Someone with an assault rifle shot her through her living room window—a single shot to the head. The shooter apparently waited under a tree across the street from her home. Cassandra’s two teenage children were at their father’s house, and they came home in the morning to find her there, her hair stuck to the carpet in a hideous mass of dried blood.
    We feel pretty certain it was Avery Illman, aka Scud, who killed Zander and probably Cassandra as well, but we’ve had trouble putting it all together. Of the half-dozen players picked up that day last June, none mentioned Scud’s name or admitted knowing anything about Zander Phippin. Maybe they really didn’t know, or maybe