Page 8 of The Reckless Rookie

“I heard something interesting came your way.” Of course he heard. Sebastian hears everything that moves money in three counties. “The O’Sullivan matter.”

“News travels.”

“It’s a genuine opportunity if it’s handled right. Visibility like that, a program like yours, the story practically…”

“No.”

A pause. He wasn’t expecting to be stopped mid-sentence, because men like Sebastian aren’t usually. That’s the thing about being ahead of someone. You get to end the sentence they haven’t finished, and they never quite forgive you for it.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“I know the shape of it. I’ve watched you build that exact sentence before.” I’m not angry. Anger would mean he’d gotten to me, and he hasn’t, and that’s what he can’t stand. “The answer’s no. He’s a placement, not a press release.”

“I’ll come out one of these weekends. We’ll talk about it properly.”

“It’s Catt,” I say. “You called me Catalina.”

“I’ll see you soon, Catalina.”

He hangs up before I can hand it back to him, which he thinks is winning.

I set the phone down on the counter, screen up, and it goes dark, and I catch my face in it for half a second before it does. I stand there in the kitchen with my hand still on the phone, doing a small piece of math I didn’t decide to do. Three years. Not once has he used the name I asked for. Not in front of his partners, not in bed, not one time.

I’ve been keeping that number without meaning to. The way you notice a stone in your boot and keep walking on it anyway, telling yourself you’ll deal with it at the next gate.

I’ve been telling myself that for three years.

I go back out to the fence, where the weak spots at least have the decency to show themselves.

Chapter four

Finn

The tie is trying to kill me.

Not the tie’s fault. I’ve worn a hundred of them to galas and sponsor dinners where you smile at people who’ll forget your name by dessert. I can knot a Windsor in the dark. But there’s a difference between the suit you wear to be looked at and the suit you wear to be judged, and my body knows it even when my hands are steady. The collar’s a size too tight on a neck that fit it fine last week.

So here I am in charcoal wool, sitting at a defense table in a district courtroom that smells like floor wax and other people’s worst days, waiting for one man to decide the rest of my life.

A week ago some drunks jumped me in a lot.

I’m the one at the table.

I keep turning that over and it keeps coming back the same. I did what anyone would have done. Five of them. A bad knee. The ground. And the math of that lands me in the wool suit and the guy who shoved me gets to be the victim, because he’s the one who woke up in a hospital instead of a holding cell.

Nobody wants to hear the part where I was walking away. I’ve stopped trying to say it.

My lawyer’s good. Expensive-good, the kind Marcus found in an afternoon. He lays it out clean, the retreat, the group, reasonable force under the circumstances, and he says the word walking three separate times, because there’s a tape somewhere that shows me walking and he wants the sound of it in the room even though the tape itself isn’t.

I watch the judge while he talks.

The judge doesn’t move. Chin down, eyes on the file, listening the way you listen to a thing you’ve already decided about. I clock him for a man who decided before he sat down, which is what a face like that means. He’s going to make an example of me. Small guy, big paycheck, viral clip. I’m a gift to a judge who wants to look tough.

I’m wrong about him. Takes me a long time to find out how wrong.

He talks, and I brace for the part where he calls me an animal. It doesn’t come.

He states that the video is not present, but the state’s description of it is. The state has this defendant walking away when five men closed in on him. The arena’s own game footage, entered here, has him taking two deliberate runs at the knee of a much larger man that same night, both uncalled, and answering neither one. He turns a page as if it disappoints him personally. “I have no reason to doubt any of it. So let the record show this court does not believe it is looking at a man who went into that lot hunting something to hit.”