Hard Bitten

by M. K. York

  “You?” asked Lukas tartly, raising his eyebrows.

  “No. Not me.” Mark leaned forward, resting his arms across his thighs, huddling into himself. “I’m—I’m already disqualified. It’s not a conflict of interest now, because you’re not my client and your interests and my client’s interests align at this point, but I’ve got to be careful about how I walk this line.”

  “This line.” Lukas turned to look at him, fully. Mark didn’t raise his head to meet Lukas’s eyes, just kept staring at his knees. “What’s this line, exactly?”

  Mark shook his head.

  “Is it this?” asked Lukas, voice low and rough, and put his hand on Mark’s thigh.

  Mark shut his eyes, tight; there was just the pressure on his skin, and the adrenaline, humming in his veins, abrupt and unrecoverable. “You know it is.”

  “I see why the answer has to be no, until this trial is over.” Lukas spoke so quietly Mark could hardly hear him over the blood thundering in his ears. “But what happens then?”

  “I don’t know.” Mark found himself squeezing his hands into fists. “I don’t know—you don’t want to stop working for us, and I signed the renewal contract.” He opened his eyes.

  He could feel the solid heat of Lukas’s body, inches from his. “So that’s it?” Lukas sounded incredulous. “You’re just going to—you’re not going to try to figure out something, a way around it?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “You’re a lawyer, for Christ’s sake. Your whole job is finding loopholes. Find one for this.”

  “What if I can’t?” Mark shuddered as Lukas slid his hand farther up Mark’s thigh. “I can’t—you can’t ask me to stop being what I am.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “I believe in the letter of the law. It’s what I do. It’s all I do, and I’m good at it. Finding, finding compromises, sure, but I can’t—violate it, and still do what I do. I can’t sit there and know I’m doing the wrong thing.”

  “What makes you so fucking sure it’s the wrong thing?”

  “Because I know the—look, I know damn well why you don’t fuck people you have to put on the stand! You think I’m going to be able to ask you all the right questions, none of the wrong ones? What happens if word gets around? You’re going to be up there under oath. What do you do if the prosecution asks you, if they say, Are you in a sexual relationship with the defense attorney, Mark Eliades?”

  “I’d say no.”

  Mark was still staring out into the distance, still couldn’t bring himself to look Lukas in the eyes. “Great. And what if they say, Have you discussed the possibility of a sexual relationship with Counselor Eliades?”

  Lukas said, slowly, “I’d have to say—we haven’t talked about anything in those terms.”

  “Oh, really? What terms, then?”

  “I don’t—we haven’t said anything explicit—”

  “Do you have an implicit understanding with the defense attorney, then?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “Do you have feelings of a romantic or sexual nature for the defense attorney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he aware of those feelings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he asked you to misrepresent any of the facts associated with this investigation?”

  Lukas recoiled, hand coming off Mark’s thigh. “No!”

  “If he had asked you to misrepresent any facts, would you have complied, due to those feelings you have for him, and of which he is presumably aware?”

  “No!”

  “That’s a very definite answer, Mr. Nystrom. Are you quite certain? And let me remind you, you are under oath.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Lukas. Mark finally turned his head to look at him.

  “So you see.” Mark’s tongue felt heavy in his mouth; he felt tired and disgusted even by the thought of someone asking Lukas those questions. “You see why I can’t. Even—even going this far was a bad idea.”

  “They’d make it sound like that?” asked Lukas. He looked sick.

  “They’d make it sound worse than that.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “What would you do, if I asked you to do something wrong?” Mark shook his head, ever so slightly. “You can’t know until or unless it comes up. I’m just praying no one asks you about Frank, for God’s sake, or whether I ever pulled a ride-along. That was a hell of a stunt. I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have done any of it. But I was—I couldn’t stop thinking, you out there in the dark by yourself, no one to watch your back.”

  “I’ve always been all right,” Lukas murmured.

  “And what if this was the time you weren’t? Christ. It would have killed me.” Mark bent himself nearly in half, rested his forehead on his clasped hands on his knees. “I’m compromised.”

  Lukas reached for him—he could see the movement out of the corner of his eye—but his hand faltered, stopping short.

  “I’m compromised too,” said Lukas, quietly. “What do I do?”

  “Show up tomorrow. Go through trial prep. Lena’s a champ, she’ll keep you on the right track. She’ll make sure you know how to answer any questions the prosecution could conceivably ask you. Do not, unless you are asked point-blank, disclose my presence on either stakeout, or acknowledge that we even know each other socially. Don’t mention your suspicions about Frank. Don’t color outside the lines, here.”

  “All right.” Lukas raised a hand, ran it over his face. “All right.”

  “I just—I would—there’s nothing I wouldn’t do, that I could do.” Mark sat up straight, convulsively. “I want to. You know that. But if I never say the words, then you never have to answer a question about them on the stand, you don’t have to make yourself look like that—”

  “So you’re saying it’s not, not even a possibility, not even—”

  “I’m saying I don’t know! I haven’t—I haven’t researched this, do you get it, I haven’t looked into it, all I know is, right now, for this trial, I can’t even let myself think about it, because if I start that, if I start going down that pathway, I’m going to end up with the DA looking at me and asking, ‘Have you ever had a relationship of a sexual nature with any of the personnel associated with this case?’ and right now, right now, I could say no, but if things changed, at all, I couldn’t say that. I can barely say it with a straight face now.”

  Lukas said, “It’s not inappropriate—”

  “Not—no, you don’t fucking understand! There are layers and layers of rules, and those rules are there not because it’s a game but because it isn’t, because actual lives, of actual people, depend on following all of the rules, not just the ones we want to, the ones we find convenient. And if reality doesn’t work out well, if it isn’t clean and tidy, well, that’s what this whole system is for. It’s for a world that’s messy and ugly and where we end up needing to split hairs, where the difference between wanted to and did matters because it has to. Whatever it is that I want, I can’t say it out loud, don’t you get it? We both need plausible deniability.”

  “It’s not very plausible at the moment.”

  “If I get up, right now, and walk out the door, I preserve my illusion of impartiality. If I stayed tonight—if I said, I want to stay tonight—I’d put myself in a position where if someone asked me under oath about that, I’d have to say, yes, I did that, yes, I said that, and I don’t want to put either of us in that position. I don’t want to fuck things up for either of us.”

  “Please,” Lukas said, lips just shaping the word.

  Mark stood up, convulsively. “I’m leaving. I’m, I’m sorry. But I wasn’t—this isn’t coming from nowhere. You see what it’s like, what it has to be like. Being under oath means something to me, it has to mean something to you too, and I won’t—I won’t fuck us like that.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Lukas was staring down at his hands. “Thanks for coming over.” He cleare
d his throat. “Thanks for the—advice about Frank.”

  “Yeah. No problem. It’s my job.” Mark sucked in a shaky breath and pushed out the door.

  He got home and, for once, let himself pour a glass of the dusty vodka that sat in the cabinet next to the pasta and the peanut butter. He drank the whole thing, and then pulled his clothes off and fell into bed.

  *

  The next morning, Lukas flinched when his alarm went off. He’d slept like shit, for obvious reasons, and now he had to get off his ass and go in to see Lena and Mark about the trial.

  Well, if he could make it through the trial prep, the trial itself should be a fucking cakewalk.

  Inside the building, the marble floors echoed judgmentally with every step.

  Lena was already there, and she looked up as he walked in. “Oh good,” she said, half-distracted. “Mark has the file—”

  And right on cue, Mark appeared: not a single hair out of place under the pitiless fluorescent lights, face impassive, laptop under one arm and a cup of coffee in each hand. “Grabbed you one,” he said to Lena, sliding a cup to her across the table. She took a swig, though it had to have been uncomfortably hot from how the steam was rising.

  “Lukas,” Mark added, turning to him as he dropped into the chair. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today. So, we’ll start at the beginning, but we won’t have a lot of time to go over any single element. If you have questions about a specific issue, take notes and we can go over them again later.”

  “Okay.” Lukas was determined to be a quick study. Make it work. The letter of the law.

  And they went through it, one piece at a time. What did you see at the warehouse? grated on him, because it should have been what did we see at the warehouse, but Lukas glossed over it like a champion.

  Lena interrupted periodically to tell him how to phrase something—to make it seem more impersonal and objective; to make it a piece of the evidence, rather than his own experience—and it was strange, to be put into the third person like this on his own life.

  But he would have done it, a hundred times over, for Mark. He wasn’t able to pretend to himself that it wasn’t for Mark. Sure, it worked for his own career, but the way Mark had talked, it was clear that this mattered. If it mattered to Mark, it had to matter to him.

  When they ran out of time, Lena pronounced herself satisfied that Lukas knew what to say, and how. Lukas shook her hand and Mark’s and then saw himself out of the building, and huddled in an alley to stop and just breathe for a while.

  Is the defense attorney aware of these feelings?

  Has he asked you to misrepresent—

  Has he asked you—

  He hadn’t asked for anything at all, and that was the problem. One of the problems.

  They’d had that entire conversation without once mentioning Gina Carville, who he’d never even met. He’d seen her pictures, the frizzy mane of dark hair, big, sad eyes, but he hadn’t heard her voice.

  There wasn’t even really anyone to miss her, if they fucked this up and the trial went down in flames, if she got twenty-five to life. So Mark and Lena were what she had.

  No wonder Mark was wound up tighter than a spring about it.

  Lukas pushed himself up off the alley wall and went to his next appointment, another surveillance gig that he figured would take up most of his day. Another case of garden-variety infidelity, another human relationship that had started out so promising and so well, with suits and a white dress and a big wedding cake, and now he was parking down the block with his video camera and waiting to watch someone fuck around in the ashes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Lena,” said Mark, when they were wrapping up their notes for the night, “if I did something stupid, I should tell you about it, right?”

  “Yes.” She slid her laptop into her workbag and fixed him with a sharp stare. “What stupid thing did you do?”

  “I should have told you sooner.” He sighed, rolling out the crick in his neck. “I don’t want you to get blindsided if it comes up at the trial.”

  She drummed her nails on the desk. “You fucking Nystrom?”

  He didn’t ask why she’d ask. She’d just been in a small room with them for hours; it was a miracle she wasn’t making it harder on him. “No. I went along on two of the stakeouts, though.”

  “Oh. Hmm.” She leaned back, lips pursed, thinking it over. “You definitely should have mentioned it before we did today’s trial prep. We could have worked it in. Did you do anything illegal?”

  “No.” Always keep the answers short and factual; answer the question asked, and only that question.

  “It’s unfortunate but not a deal-breaker. Did you tell Lukas anything in particular to say?”

  “I just told him not to bring it up but to be honest if he gets asked.”

  “Good enough. Jesus, Mark, not enough excitement around here for you? You thinking about going into the PI business?” She gave him a thin smile.

  “No, I just... I don’t know. I wanted to know more about what was going on.”

  “Because I told you not to go there? You’ve got to get over that.”

  “It was stupid. I won’t do it again.”

  “Damn right.” She stood up, shouldering her laptop bag. “Ex-wife is flying up on Friday so we can do our trial prep for her then. Be ready.”

  “I will. I’ve got a couple of other witnesses this week, and then you’re handling the opening statement, right?”

  “What, do I look like I’m going to make you do it? I’m not that cruel.” She laughed. “This case is going to be a clusterfuck from the word go, I’m not dropping it in your lap.”

  “Thanks. Okay. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with.”

  *

  Meeting Beatrice Williams in person for the first time was a real...something. Mark tried to shake her hand; she went in for a full-contact hug.

  “Hey, hon!” She squeezed before letting go and kicked out one of the chairs at the interview table, sitting in it heavily. Her hair was blown out to within an inch of its life, bright artificial blond, and she grinned at him with zero self-consciousness. “Good to meet you. I’m Bea.”

  “I’m Mark Eliades. I’ll be doing some of the questioning. This is Lena Holbrook, the senior attorney on the case.”

  Bea winked at Lena—which got Lena to make a face that Mark was pretty sure he’d classify as constipated on anyone he did not in fact work for—and set the tone for the rest of the questioning. Bea was clearly too comfortable; no one kept that level of comfort up on the stand, and he had to keep reining her in, bringing her back to earth. No, she didn’t need to tell that story. No, her perspective on Ron being a tightwad wasn’t helpful.

  “And that detective,” she added, leaning forward, bracing her elbows on the table, her ample assets threatening to spill out of her neon shirt. “Such a sexy voice!”

  “That’s also not going to be a necessary detail in court, Bea,” said Mark. She had insisted so many times that he call her Bea, and not Mrs. Williams, that he’d given in, with the stipulation that he would call her Mrs. Williams in court.

  “But it’s why I talked to him! He friended me on Facebook, and I couldn’t think who on Earth he was but he was so cute, or his picture was, and then when he messaged me I thought, well, that makes sense. Ron was always a piece of work.”

  “We’re going to have to put this into more of a question-and-answer format.” Mark had said it at least fourteen times. And counting.

  She winked at him, then. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that voice.”

  Mark sighed. “Bea. Do you really think you’re going to get a chance to be that conversational on the stand? I assure you, the DA’s attorneys will object if we get chatty.”

  “Aw, sorry, hon. You’re right.” She straightened up in the chair and folded her hands in front of her, hot pink nails fluttering like a flamingo’s wings. “Let’s get to brass tacks.”

  And the funn
y thing was, once she settled down, Bea was a pretty good witness. She was consistent. Everything she said came out sounding genuine.

  “Is the reason you’re testifying here today that you and your ex-husband have a poor relationship?” Mark asked, when they were working on questions that might come up under cross.

  “No. Lord, no.” Bea leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I can’t pretend that things ended well with Ron, but you asked me to come here and tell what happened between us. And that’s how it was.”

  After they finished up, it was late. Bea was their star witness; she needed more hands-on time than anyone else. Even Lukas just had bits and pieces, the results of his surveillance, and Katie would be spending nearly as much time on the stand.

  But Bea was the key. Bea knew where all the skeletons were buried. Bea would single-handedly undermine every piece of the prosecution’s argument that it hadn’t been Ron Williams.

  “Do you feel safe, where you’re staying?” Mark asked Bea, as she got her enormous, jingling purse.

  “You think Ron might try something?” She raised her eyebrows, thinking about it. “Honestly, hon, I don’t see how he would even know where I’m staying. But even if he did, I’m at the Four Seasons. Best spa in town! I don’t think they’d put up with any shit from him.”

  “Okay. Remember, if you feel unsafe at any point, contact hotel security, call the police. Don’t be shy about calling 911.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. You worried about me?” She nudged his shoulder with hers and winked up at him. “Want to make sure Bea’s safe?”

  “It’s a very sensitive case, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. It is definitely going to be a media circus. And what do you say if someone from the media calls you for a comment?”

  “No comment!” Bea laughed. “It’s going to be tough. I love talking!”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed,” Mark said dryly, but not without humor, and Bea grinned at him and gave him one more hug on her way out.

  “Don’t worry about me, hon, worry about you!” she called as she left.

  Lena watched her go with folded arms. “She’s a real character. We’re going to have a hard time with her on cross.”