by David Kazzie
"Well, then, you're an even bigger idiot than-" she said.
"Let me finish," he said, cutting her off and ignoring her latest fusillade of insults. "When I got into the muck of practicing law, I was crushed. Do you know that the first time I took a deposition and I asked the witness his name, his lawyer actually objected to form? I still don't even know what that means!
"Objected to form," Pasquale repeated softly, as if he still couldn't believe it.
"So why did you stick with it?"
"Because I thought if I did things the right way, it wouldn't matter what others did."
"Boy, you were naïve."
He chuckled. Her comment defused the escalating situation like a hostage negotiator acceding to a terrorist's first demand.
"Then, when that didn't work, I decided that the only thing to do was win every goddamn case that I could. Maybe I could humiliate them into changing their ways. I forgot something, though."
"What was that?"
"Your average lawyer has no shame," he said. "You can't shame someone who feels no shame."
Samantha thought about Carter Pierce. Talk about no shame.
"What about us?" she asked. "Are we any better?"
"I don't know," he said. "When I was still practicing, I did things I'm not proud of. Maybe not bad enough to draw the attention of the bar, but when you're trying to decide whether something is ethical, you're probably better off not doing it in the first place."
"And where has being ethical ever gotten anyone?" she asked. "My parents' business is dead because of that dipshit brother of mine. My career is in the toilet because I'm not in the boys' club, despite the fact that I've billed about twelve billion hours in the last eight years. What do you say about that?"
"All I can say is that you're better than that," said Pasquale.
"Screw that," Sam said. "Enjoy your cereal."
With that, she buttoned up her coat and slipped out the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sunday, December 23
8:01 a.m.
After their fight, Samantha got in her car and drove aimlessly around the city. The Downtown Expressway was deserted this morning, and the little coupe felt good underneath her despite the treacherous road conditions. Deciding to forgo the heat, she rolled down the windows and felt the cold, tight air close in around her like a cocoon. She didn't care about getting a ticket. She didn't want to hear any more of Pasquale Paoli's Platitudes. She didn't want to hear about what was right and what was wrong.
When you got right down to it, the truth was this: the ticket had made its way into her pocket. It was hers. Call it karma. Destiny. Whatever. The firm had driven a stake into the heart of her career. It would take her months to find another job, and any work she did find would pay far less than she made now. She would no longer be able to bail out her parents. She was thirty-four and alone, and the thought of practicing law for one more second made her want to drive her little Audi over a cliff. The ticket had to be a sign. Maybe a warning. Maybe even a warning from the universe. How could she ignore the universe? How?
A few miles north of downtown, she took the Broad Street exit, which looped around and dumped her into the middle of an aging industrial and commercial corridor on the fringes of the city limits. At the end of the ramp, she saw two men engaged in what appeared to be an illegitimate business transaction. They looked over at her as she paused at the stop sign and quickly returned to their contribution to the local economy.
Keep it up, fellas, she thought, turning south toward Broad Street. A month from now, she'd be far away from this, living in Fiji or Tahiti.
At Broad, she turned left and headed east back toward the city. She caught another red light at Boulevard, one of the city's major crossroads. Boulevard continued north past the Diamond, the city's aging minor-league baseball stadium, and toward the gentrified area known as Northside. Ahead of her on Broad, the lanes were empty but for a pickup truck meandering between the left and center lanes. Samantha kept her distance.
The stoplights turned her way for a mile or so, and she cruised through half a dozen greens before her luck ran out at Harrison Street. The light had switched over to red despite the absence of any traffic crossing on Harrison. This phenomenon never ceased to amaze her. As she continued to idle at the light, she felt the anger start to well inside her. Samantha Khouri could put up with a lot. Traffic lights, though. They drove her crazy. A minute went by, then another. The light stayed red. She started drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Didn't work. She craned her neck to look at the cross light, which, inexplicably, continued to shine green.
"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me," she yelled to no one.
She peeked in her sideview mirrors, and then checked the oncoming lanes for any stray police cruisers. The cross streets remained free of any traffic. Satisfied the coast was clear, she eased off the brake. When she heard the soft groan of a large vehicle behind her, she pushed down on the brake again. Her heart was racing, as if she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She checked her rearview mirror and saw a city bus ease in next to her in the right lane, shuddering as it came to a stop. In the early-morning gloom, she could see the bus was empty. The driver, a middle-aged white guy with a bushy mustache, sipped on a large cup of coffee.
The light finally changed to green, and Samantha watched as the bus grumbled into gear and pulled away from the light. As the bus continued east on Broad Street, Samantha found herself thinking about Ziad Khouri, who died with martyrdom in his heart and shit in his brains. Everything about that terrible day seemed so clear now, even though the day had begun in such a fog.
* * *
On the night before Ziad's attack on the bus, perhaps as he was conducting his final, pathetic walkthrough (she wondered if he'd actually done a walkthrough, she wondered if he'd even given any thought to what he was doing at all), Samantha had been at the firm's annual New Year's Eve party at the Jefferson Hotel. A thousand people of varying levels of social and professional importance were in attendance, guzzling free booze and slurping down one heavy tray of shrimp cocktail after another. Samantha herself drank cosmopolitans long after Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark had rung in the New Year. Her ability to put away cocktail after cocktail and feel none worse for the wear left her feeling young and vibrant. She even ordered a pizza after stumbling home at three in the morning.
The next morning, however, proved to be the proverbial credit card bill to the previous night's shopping spree. She woke up on the couch, still wearing her little black dress, along with two slices of pizza stuck to the dress. Classy, she remembered thinking. Her head felt like it had been dipped in hot lava, and her lips were stuck together. Her memory of the evening was mostly intact, and, other than a midnight kiss with a guy from Real Estate that may have lasted a bit too long, it had been a relatively uneventful evening.
After a gingerly walk to the bedroom and a methodical change into sweats, she took position under a blanket on the sofa while her liver metabolized the last of the alcohol like a lonely factory worker. At noon, she flipped over to CNN, where she was greeted with its Breaking News graphic striped across the bottom of the screen. A sucker for breaking news, Samantha lingered there.
The on-screen headline screamed for attention: SUICIDE BOMBER STRIKES IN CHICAGO. She sat up suddenly, the vertigo from her hangover almost inducing a major upchuck. The details on the bombing were sketchy: a bus had exploded on the city's south side two hours ago, the bomber was dead, but no one else had perished. She watched, mouth agape, as the nation's terror alert level was kicked up to a really scary color. There were special news bulletins and press conferences all day long. Buses, planes, trains, subways, even taxicabs ground to a halt.
When word slipped out that the bomber was of Arab descent, the media, along with the public, went predictably wild. A rash of hate crimes against folks with olive skin, regardless of actual ethnic descent, erupted overnight. In Phoenix, Arizona, a Pakistani convenience stor
e owner was shot dead by assailants who didn't even bother stealing anything. In Ogunquit, Maine, three teenage boys burned down a bed-and-breakfast owned by a Jordanian couple. A CNN/USA Today poll taken the day after the attack found that 89 percent of Americans supported immediate military action, even though they weren't sure who to take this military action against.
Samantha clawed her way out of her hangover like millions of other Americans did that New Year's afternoon, glued to television coverage of the attack. Everything changed, however, when two young FBI agents knocked on her door that evening. She remembered the agents well, one white and serious, the other black and serious, both named Smith. That was what really stuck out for her on that surreal night, when the black one introduced himself as Agent Smith, and then nodded toward the other and identified him as Agent Smith as well.
They asked her to accompany them to the FBI's Richmond field office, where she spent much of that night fielding questions that she didn't have the answers to. The agents insisted that she was free to leave at any time (even though she didn't have her car), and so technically, she wasn't entitled to have her Miranda rights read to her. A clever little ruse that law-enforcement types liked to use. If they had, Samantha knew better than to remain silent or to ask for an attorney. Even first-year law students knew that was akin to admitting you were guilty. Most of the time she spent explaining that she had no relationship with her loser of a brother. She spent the rest worrying about her parents, whom she suspected were in a very similar interview room.
Agent Smith, the white one, drove them all back to her parents' house around four in the morning and told them to stay in town for the immediate future. After getting out of the black Chevy Suburban, Zaina Khouri told Smith to "fuck yourself" and slammed the door. Her father apologized for his wife's outburst, claiming that the lack of sleep had made her a bit crazy. Samantha said nothing and took in a few restless hours of shuteye in her old bedroom.
At seven, her dad drove her to her car, and she drove into the office, where she shut her door and buried herself in work. Later, she met with Carter and Hunter Pennington Smyth, III, who wanted to make extra sure that she was not a member of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Islam. She assured them that she was not but dismissed the idea of telling him that Islam was a religion, not a terrorist organization. Satisfied that one of their lucrative profit centers probably wouldn't come to work with dynamite strapped to her chest, they quickly sent her back to her desk to start billing again. Suicide bombing or not, it was, after all, a new year.
But things were different after that meeting, she had to admit to herself, now, in the bright shining light of her wrecked career. Not hugely different. Subtle. A few weeks later, they sent her on a document review trip, a mindless task she hadn't done in three years. Her performance evaluation had just a shade of negativity, the first less-than-stellar review she'd received during her time at the firm. She started working harder and longer, but her once-promising shine had dulled like an old penny.
* * *
She was crying now, her car still idling at the stoplight where she had seen the city bus.
Jesus, how could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen that her brother had destroyed more than an empty city bus? Ziad had infected the Khouri family tree with his hate and his anger and his poison. It remained to be seen whether the tree would survive. It remained to be seen whether the other branches of the tree could inject the roots with enough life, enough vitality to make the tree strong again. She thought about her sisters, doing their best to raise children, who, whether they liked it or not, were charged with bridging the gap between the old country and the new world that was America. She thought about her parents, who had sacrificed their entire lives to provide for their children. Most of all, she thought about the empty chair at each Khouri family gathering.
And what about Samantha herself? She was a bright young attorney who could do anything she wanted. So this firm, this bottomless pit where souls went to die, didn't want her? The hell with them! She could do better than making rich, giant companies a little bit richer and more giant. She'd read stories about lawyers who worked for a pittance and slept the sleep of the righteous. Why not her? For years, the only thing she had liked about her law practice was that the firm encouraged the associates to take on pro bono work, which was encouraged largely because it looked good in the firm's press releases.
Her thoughts drifted back to the ticket, tucked safely into her pocket. How could she ever think about stealing it? If she stole it, she would be no better than Ziad Khouri. She would be the suicide bomber to Jamal Wheeler's future. She would be another Ziad Khouri, only she would be alive to know the damage that she had inflicted – even if Jamal, or whoever the rightful owner of the ticket was, never did. Her parents, already devastated by their only son's legacy, would really be proud of her.
OK, she thought to herself. It was over. Just a little crisis of conscience, as her eighth-grade English teacher had referred to episodes like these as. She would protect the ticket until she could find Julius Wheeler's rightful heir, whether it was a son, a daughter or the man in the moon. It was her burden, her cross to bear, especially since it was now clear that W&H probably didn't have the best interests of their late client in mind. She reached for her phone to call Pasquale but remembered that she had left it on the kitchen counter when she stormed out earlier.
As the snow intensified, Samantha turned her Audi south for a handful of blocks before heading east onto Cary Street toward home. Not surprisingly, the streets were deserted on this Sunday morning, the blizzard still packing a punch. She parked her car and took the elevator to her floor. She was starting to feel like herself again. The weight of the ticket didn't seem quite so crushing anymore.
She realized something was wrong as soon as the elevator doors whooshed open. The elevator opened onto a long corridor, flanked on each side by two apartments. From her vantage point in the corridor, she could see her front door was ajar. Pasquale would not have left the door open. She froze, too afraid to even take a breath. Ohmigod, she thought. Pasquale had been right. Someone had come looking for the ticket.
In the dead silence of the corridor, she listened for any sound, any indication that would give her a sense of what had happened. Behind her, the whoosh of the elevator doors sliding closed again startled her, causing yet another near-miss bladder incident like the one back at the cabin.
She debated retreating back to her car, but the idea of going down the elevator or the stairwell alone now terrified her. Forget it. She had visions of being strangled in the empty darkness of the building's foyer. At least there was light in the hallway. And what if Pasquale needed her in there? She couldn't just abandon him. Pressing her back to the wall, she edged down the hallway toward her apartment, her ears primed for any sound. Nothing. The Christmas lights blinking in the hallway seemed to flash a warning for Samantha to run while she still could.
Oh, Jesus, what the hell are you doing, Samantha?
That was when she saw it. An envelope with her named scrawled across it, perched on the threshold between the corridor and her home. She knelt down and picked it up; it was an ordinary business envelope, sealed shut. She opened it and found a note inside, etched upon a piece of her personalized stationery that she kept in her desk. The message was short and made her veins ice over.
You left your cell phone on the kitchen counter. If you want to see Pasquale alive again, I recommend you leave it on and wait for my call.
Without much regard for whether anyone was lurking in her apartment, Samantha made a beeline for her guest bathroom, where she threw up in the toilet. After finishing her peristaltic backflush, she discovered that the apartment was empty.
Pasquale was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sunday, December 23
12:48 p.m.
When Pasquale regained consciousness, he initially thought he had died and discovered that the afterlife smelled like old rags and spare t
ires. It was pitch black, the void broken up by a constant thrum surrounding him, punctuated by intermittent thumps. Slowly, it dawned on him, the smells and sounds clicking into place. He was in the trunk of a moving car. Broken shards of the events that brought him here lay scattered before him like a jigsaw puzzle missing a few pieces. He remembered Samantha storming out of the apartment. He decided to have a second bowl of cereal. He heard a rustle behind him, thinking Samantha had come back to the apartment. He wasn't sure if he'd seen who was behind him and just couldn't remember, or if he hadn't turned around in time before the world had gone dark.
His hands were tied behind his back, and a piece of duct tape was affixed to his mouth. While simultaneously trying to wrestle his terror to the ground, he took stock of the present situation. He took solace in the fact that he was still alive, which suggested to him that his life had some value to his captor. He knew that it didn't necessarily mean his life would continue to have value, but it was better than, say, having already been shot in the head and dumped in the river. He primed his ears and listened to the ambient noise, wondering if he could get a sense of where they were. After a minute, he gave up. It had been years since he'd lived in Richmond, and besides, they could've been driving down the street he grew up on, and he would never know.
In retrospect, he was glad that Samantha had stormed out of the apartment earlier. Obviously, his new friend up in the driver's seat was after the ticket, and had she been there, Pasquale and Samantha might both be dead by now. He hadn't been kidding her earlier. There were many, many people who would, without the slightest hint of remorse, kill anyone for the little ticket in Samantha's pocket. Pasquale had met the type in the days since he left the practice of law and the love of his life behind.