Aftershock by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online Page A

want to get her a lawyer, is that it?”
    “We
have
to get her a lawyer. Her father’s been on the Double D”—I guess I’d been paying more attention to those kids than I thought, because I knew she meant Drunk Disability—“for years, her mother’s got a job packing groceries, and her little sister, Danielle, she’s only … I mean, she goes to the same school. She’s a sophomore. So what kind of money could that family have?”
    “If they don’t have money, the state has to—”
    “No!”
    “Ssssh, honey. It’s okay. Find out who’s a good lawyer around here, we’ll take care of him, all right? They’re not going to set bail on a murder charge, so you’ve got some time to ask around.”
    “I don’t have to,” she said, the steel back inside the core of her voice. “The best criminal lawyers are all far away from here.”
    “How could you know that?”
    “I don’t know that. What I do know is that the criminal lawyers around here, all they know is how to plead guilty. It’s like a joke with some of the kids. They say the DA is as soft as warm custard. He’s more afraid of trials than the plague. And he’s been in office since forever, so I guess the local lawyers all got used to making deals. Now they’re no good for anything else.”
    “You want me to … ask around?”
    “No. What’s the point? MaryLou did … what they said. There had to be fifty different witnesses, and they found the pistol whereshe dropped it in the hall. So it’s either going to be a guilty plea or an insanity trial.”
    “Then …?”
    “She’s going to be in court Monday. It’s so terrible. That’s the same day she was supposed to be leaving for summer camp—softball camp, I mean, at college. Now she’s probably never going to play softball again.”
    “It’s still early—”
    “I have to make sure whatever lawyer they assign asks the judge to allow me in to see her.”
    “I don’t know how that works.”
    “This is only Saturday. By the time they bring MaryLou to court, you could find out.”
    The way Dolly said it, I knew she wasn’t talking about what I
could
do.
    W e were still talking when the early light started to crackle the darkness. Nobody saw me leave.
    It took a little more than two hours to get to a city where I could ask around.
    Actually, I didn’t have to ask, just listen. I felt my way into a section of the city where the bars would open early. Plenty were talking about the shootings—I guess it had been on the news—but I never heard a single lawyer’s name mentioned.
    Most of the talk was about whether the trial would be on TV.
    So I drifted back over to another part of town, where I could find coffeehouses, bookstores, outdoor-supply stores. Closest thing to intel I could pick up was a kind of general agreement that the girl must have been bullied at school.
    Although nobody that far away from the scene claimed to have witnessed any bullying of MaryLou, I only had to listen to learnthat there were other ways to bully schoolkids than by slapping them around. Bullies could write ugly things about the target on their Facebook pages, send nasty e-mails, even use Tweets—some kind of Internet darts. But it seemed those kind of kids ended up killing themselves instead of anyone else.
    And no way a girl they called Mighty Mary was getting bullied, especially in a place where girls’ softball was such a big thing.
    S o I took the shortest route in. Dolly asked MaryLou’s best friend, Megan, to get one of her parents to put “Aunt Dolly” on the visiting list.
    “They were kind of weird about it,” Megan said when she got back, “but I took Franklin with me, so they didn’t argue. You can visit today. Is that soon enough?”
    “Sure it is, honey,” Dolly told the girl. “You did a great job.”
    The girl smiled like she’d never heard those words before.
    Nobody noticed me sitting in an easy chair in the living room. I knew that, if people aren’t expecting anyone