Page 57 of The Wrong Side of the Law

Chapter Seventeen

Gabriel

It’s only a ten-minute drive home, but it feels like forever when you’re wrestling with your feelings. This is not me. It’s never been me.

I’m good at self-deception. I like to keep all that shit stuffed down deep in a box at the back of the closet.

Actually, no. In a tiny little lock-box, in the bottom of a bigger lock-box. I’ve hidden that one inside of a safe, and I keep the safe inside of goddamn Fort Knox’s vault. And when I’m forced to be introspective, I have to open all that up and confront things.

I’m the king of analysis and probing. I’m great at probing other people’s lives, scrutinizing their behavior to figure out their motives. I can break a witness on the stand, leave them so angry and confused that they’ll confess to everything and then look surprised at what they’ve just done.

And that’s why I hate self-examination. I’m no good at half-measures. When I’ve got a witness on the stand, I’m going at it with everything I’ve got. It’s too dangerous when I put myself on the stand.

Emily Wilson pushed me to this point. I should be furious with her for it… and I’m not.

Once I make it through the door of my condo and kick off my shoes, I pour three fingers of good scotch in a coffee mug with a picture of Deadpool on it, then flop on the couch and stare moodily out the window.

The skyline in Point Lookout is so different now. When I was a kid, the tallest things around were two-story townhouses with fancy tile roofs, and all the grownups were disgusted when they built the Central Hotel. Times change, though. And people change with them.

The good old days. Some people call them that, but they forget that there weren’t any jobs here then. The kids all went off to college and never looked back. And everything changed when Mayor Connor signed off on the permit for the Central Hotel. He used to boast that he was the one who put Point Lookout on the map, and he did. Of course, he also put it on the national news when he got caught running a drug ring.

Although I do have to allow myself a cynical grin over that, too: he always was proud of how many new jobs he created. He just didn’t expect anyone to find out about the illegal ones.

Stray thoughts. I’m drifting away from the important stuff. Am I doing it on purpose?

Whisky makes a line of liquid fire down my throat, warming my belly.

Emily. She doesn’t belong in my office. She doesn’t even belong in the SA’s office. Not as a paralegal, anyway. She should be finishing up her third year of law school now, studying hard to make the NYU law review.

I swirl the amber liquid in the mug. I should put ice in it. It cuts down on the bite. No, that’s what I want right now. I want it to burn.

I shouldn’t be working this closely with Emily. It was a mistake to let her in. What were Barbara and Lisa thinking?

Well. No, Lisa told me what she was thinking. She as much as admitted that she was pushing Emily at me as… more than an employee.

Everything about that woman is damn near perfect. She’s brilliant and intuitive. Going through cases with her tonight showed that her instincts with the law are spot-on. If Emily’s this good now, what’s she going to be like in five or ten years once she’s got some practice under her belt? Her red hair is an attention-getter, but everything else? She’s beautiful, in an understated way that really appeals to me.

It’s been way too long.

Since Dorothy I’ve gone on a few dates, had a few flings, but nobody ever captured my interest for the long term. I smile remembering the blonde DA from Ohio that I met at the NDAA conference last summer. We hit it off, sure, but we both knew it was… how did she put it? Maintenance. Recreational maintenance: it’s fun, but mostly you’re just making sure that the equipment still works.

That’s all it’s been, since the divorce. Just occasional recreational maintenance.

In a way, that’s what’s got me so shook up now. Emily’s a pretty girl, and she’s not out of my reach. She was absolutely flirting with me tonight. Physically? She definitely does it for me, there. That became painfully obvious when she worked on my neck and shoulders tonight.

God, I hope she didn’t notice that.

I try to shrug away that thought, burn it out with another sip of whisky, but it doesn’t work. The memory of her touch has me hard again in an instant, and that just leads to thinking about her in… other ways.

Gah. Bad timing. Think about work.

That was always a problem with Dorothy. She hated my job, and always wanted me to leave my work at the office. Trying to leave everything behind at the office led to longer hours, and that led to her hating it even more, because even then I couldn’t just walk away from it all. And it wasn’t even the long hours she disliked: it was the job itself.

I toss back the rest of the single malt and close my eyes, but it’s useless. I’m tired—exhausted, really—and I know I need sleep, but all I see in the darkness behind my eyelids is a pair of bright blue eyes. And a pair of…

Okay, that’s enough of trying to sleep. Christ almighty. I need some of that recreational maintenance. Maybe that would get my mind off her? Except that I know it won’t.

I sit back up with a sigh and load up the Deadpool mug with another three fingers of single Highland malt on the way to grabbing my laptop. Back on the couch, I flip it open and unlock it with a fingerprint, and when the screen lights up I’m greeted with the last thing I’d worked on this afternoon before meeting Emily. John Whitehall’s campaign finance filings from the past few years.

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