Unleashed by David Rosenfelt Read Free Book Online Page B

danger.

 
     
    Laurie and I head back to the jail at 9:00 A.M . On the way, she calls the friend in Wisconsin who was going to pick her up at the airport, to tell her that she’s not coming. She asks the friend to tell all her other friends the news.
    I feel guilty about it, but I’ll get over it. Laurie exercised free will in deciding to stay home; I didn’t and couldn’t coerce her, much as I would have wanted to. She loves investigative work and has missed it, so this gives her a chance to be happy. And, naturally, her not going makes me happy.
    Of course, not everyone is happy. Not Barry Price, whose murder basically enabled all this happiness. And not Denise Price, who is stuck in jail for a murder she may or may not have committed.
    Happiness is a zero-sum game.
    We’ve run into quite a bit of traffic, thanks to a broken light up ahead that is just flashing red. It’s bumper-to-bumper, and a car trying to enter from a strip mall on our right side has pretty much no chance to get in.
    The male driver of that car looks at me, and I wave for him to enter in front of us. He does so, without waving back.
    “Uh-oh,” says Laurie, knowing what’s coming.
    “Did you see that?” I ask. “The guy didn’t even wave.” To me, not waving thanks in a situation like that is deserving of imprisonment.
    “Shocking,” Laurie says.
    “Now we have to sit behind that guy in this traffic? He’s going to get where he’s going before we do?”
    “How do you know where he’s going?”
    “You’re missing the point,” I say.
    “So you don’t let them in to help them out. You do it to look like a really nice guy and get thanked?”
    “Of course. Why would I care if that guy was stuck in that strip mall? I wish I had a BB gun with me. I’d shoot out one of his tires.”
    Laurie shakes her head sadly. “Mentally speaking, you need a lot of help.”
    “Maybe so, but I’ll tell you this: if I got that help, I’d wave to the people who helped me.”
    I call Hike Lynch, who functions as my cocounsel on the rare occasions that we have a case. The fact that I work with Hike is reason enough never to take on another client. He’s a complete pessimist, with an uncanny ability to always see the negative side of any situation.
    Hike now has a girlfriend, which in itself defies all logic. She noticed he was depressed, which doesn’t exactly make her Freud, and convinced him to get a battery of tests to determine whether he should be on medication. He was ultimately judged not to be clinically depressed, an outcome that further depressed him.
    When starting a conversation with most people, I would automatically ask, “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” I have learned not to do that with Hike, because I’m guaranteed to be bombarded with a litany of awful things that have happened to him in the last twenty-four hours, often including defective and disgusting bodily functions.
    So instead I say, “Hey, I never got your e-mail.” I had asked him to find out the name of the prosecutor in Morris County who is handling Denise Price’s case and set up a meeting for me.
    “I can’t type,” he says. “I tore a cuticle.”
    “Oh.”
    “Then I pulled on it and it kept coming. I ripped it off almost to my elbow.”
    “I didn’t know cuticles go as far as the elbow,” I say as Laurie stares at me in amazement.
    “Mine does,” he says. “Or at least it used to, before I ripped it off.”
    “Hold on, Hike. Let me put Laurie on; you can read the information to her.”
    I hand the phone to Laurie, one of the meaner things I’ve done in the past decade, and she frowns but gets the information from Hike. It takes a while, and to get off the phone she finally has to lie and tell Hike we’ve arrived at the prison. To get off the phone with Hike, I would check into prison.
    There are two types of photographs that one should never rely on to judge how good-looking a person is. One is the pictures of themselves that people