Company Man by Joseph Finder

law.”
    â€œShit! Don’t talk to me about the law, Nick. I know the law. I know how it gets twisted and bent if the cops want it to. I’ve done it, okay?”
    â€œNot all cops,” Nick said.
    Eddie flashed him a look of barely concealed hostility. “Put it to you this way. The locals’ll have no choice but to charge you, right?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œFor absolute fucking sure. And when it comes to trial—and it will, you can be sure of that—yeah, you might beat it. Maybe. After ten months of a nightmare . Yeah, you couldget lucky, get a reasonable prosecutor, but even they’re going to face all sorts of pressure to string up Nick the Slasher. You’re going to be facing a jury of twelve people who all hate your guts—man, the thought of locking you up…I mean, in a town this size, there isn’t going to be a juror in the pool who doesn’t know someone, a friend or a relative, that you fired, right? You saw what that jury did to Martha Stewart for a little insider trading. You fucking murdered an old man, are you with me yet? A sick old man.”
    â€œThe bottom line is, I’m innocent.” Nick was feeling ill again, thought he might throw up, looked around for his metal wastebasket in case he did.
    â€œYou don’t get to say what the bottom line is, okay?”
    â€œBut it was fucking self-defense !”
    â€œHey, don’t argue with me ! I’m on your side. But it’s homicide, Nick. Manslaughter at a minimum. You say it’s self-defense, but you got no witnesses, you got no injuries, and you got a dead guy who was unarmed. I don’t care how much money you spend on a lawyer—you get tried here, in Fenwick. And what the hell you think’s going to happen to your kids during this goddamned media circus, huh? You have any fucking idea what this is going to do to them? You think it’s hard for them, dealing with Laura and the layoffs and everything? Imagine you on trial for murder. A fucking lynch mob, Nick. You want to put your kids through that?”
    Nick didn’t reply. He felt frozen in the chair, completely at a loss.
    â€œThey’re probably going to send you away, Nick. Five, ten years if you’re lucky. Sentence like that, you’re going to miss your kids’ childhood. And they grow up with a jailbird father. They don’t have a mom, Nick. All they got is you. You gonna play Russian roulette with your kids, Nick?”
    Eddie’s stare was unrelenting, furious.
    Finally, Nick spoke. “What are you suggesting?”

15
    Audrey Rhimes’s pager shrilled in the semidarkness.
    She jolted awake, out of a blissful dream of her childhood, a warm summer day, going down a Slip’N Slide that went on and on and on, in her family’s steeply canted backyard. Ordinarily 6:30 A.M. wasn’t early at all, but her shift had ended at midnight, and after that came the usual unpleasantness with Leon, so she’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep.
    She felt raw, vulnerable like a freshly hatched chick.
    Audrey was a woman who liked routine, schedule, regularity. This was a personality trait that didn’t go well with her job as a detective with the Fenwick Police Major Case Team. Calls could come at any time of day or night. Though she could no longer remember why, this was a job she’d wanted, a job she fought for. She was not just the only African-American member of the Major Case Unit but the only woman—the real difficulty, it turned out.
    Leon groaned, rolled over, buried his head beneath a pillow.
    She slipped out of bed and moved silently through the dim bedroom, narrowly avoiding a cluster of empty beer cans that Leon had left there. From the kitchen phone she called Dispatch.
    A body discovered in a Dumpster on the five hundredblock of Hastings. A section of town where all of the town’s vice seemed to be concentrated, all the prostitution and drugs and violence