"Above The Law" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Tim)

CHAPTER 2

UP MAPLE AVENUE HALFWAY TO LOVE FIELD WAS A SUNOCO filling station. One day, one of two partners disappeared with all the money he could carry. The weather-worn building sat empty long enough to lose half its windows to vandals and the cinder-block south wall facing the street caught a new shellacking of graffiti every other week. The pumps stood like upright corpses, dead to the world beneath a metal roof built to entice patrons in out of the sun or a thunderstorm to fill up.

When Casey rounded the corner she wasn't surprised to see every bit of the shadow under the roof occupied. From the rectangular crowd, a single line of people connected the pump area to the filling station like a human umbilical cord. It was 8:57 in the morning and people knew Casey's clinic opened at nine. Monday was the day they interviewed people for new cases. Like a school of fish, they turned in a single motion when her Mercedes rocked up over the lip of broken asphalt from the street, groaning and yipping on shocks gone bad twenty thousand miles ago.

She pulled around to the back of the building, thankful she'd laid down the ground rules over a year ago, when she first moved into the neighborhood. Unlike the shoppers at Neiman Marcus, these people had a quiet dignity and respect for others that superseded even their own tragic lives. They would wait for her to open the front door for business.

As she unlocked the back door, she heard a muffled flush from the exterior bathroom she shared with her clientele. The doorknob rattled and an overweight woman with long dark hair hanging from the fringes of a dirty white cowboy hat let herself out with a red-faced frown, hurrying around the corner to regain her place in the line.

Casey gave her Mercedes a fleeting look. Hubcaps and hood ornament had been stolen in her first week on Maple Avenue, and without the protection of a garage, the Texas sun had overcome German engineering, blistering the midnight-blue paint in several places, giving the car a leprous quality. Inside the filling station she bolted the door behind her and flicked on the AC unit in the boarded window. The burst of rank air that ran until the unit got going made her seek refuge in the outer room. There she breathed deep the smell of fresh-made coffee, then poured a cup.

Casey had known from the little red Fiesta out back that her two associates, Sharon Birnbaum and Donna Juarez, had beaten her to the clinic, but the coffee was proof positive. Casey sighed and surveyed the little storefront room where people had once purchased unhealthy snacks and paid for their fuel. It now served as the reception area for the Marcia Sales Legal Clinic for Women. The old single-bay garage, partitioned into three offices and a conference room by a friend from Habitat for Humanity, was where the women sat, as would a third associate if they could ever find another lawyer willing to work so hard for so little.

Casey's lawyers sat waiting at the plastic picnic table in what they called the conference room, poring over some documents, each with a laptop in front of her and each clutching her steaming coffee with two hands.

"Full slate this morning," Casey said, nodding toward the garage door and the crowd she couldn't see through a sheet of plywood put up over the broken glass. " Sharon, you've got court at two, right? Let's skip the meeting. Just remember, don't get into it with traffic violations. Tell them to check the guilty box and pay the fine. We'll get going as soon as Tina gets here."

Tina served as the clinic's interpreter.

"We can start," Sharon said.

"Right," Casey said. "I can start when Tina gets here."

"You gotta learn the language."

All three of them turned. In the doorway stood Jose O'Brien in faded jeans, wearing a denim shirt over his white tank top to cover the Glock he carried under his arm and the little nickel-plated snub-nosed.38 he kept tucked into the back of his pants.

"When I went to school," Casey said, pushing a wayward lock of long red hair behind her ear, "everyone took French."

"Je suis desole," he said, telling her he was sorry.

"How do you know French?" she asked.

"School," he said. "No need to relearn Spanish. My mother said English didn't make any sense. I got all the Spanish I needed from the cradle on."

"Yeah, but think about the number of people I could help in the time it would take me to learn," Casey said.

Jose smiled at her in his easy way, white teeth flashing like small blades, and shrugged. His long dark eyelashes fluttered with their bashful tic. It was hard for Casey to imagine how he'd gotten the reputation he had when she saw that handsome, winning face with big liquid brown eyes that misted over at times when other men might stare blankly or look away. An ex-cop who'd become the youngest homicide detective in Dallas PD history, Jose had given up the force after just eight years to become a private investigator and satisfy his young wife's demands for more time and money.

With the same determined zeal, he built a ten-person investigation firm that catered to wealthy divorce candidates looking for angles. Three years into it, his own wife played an angle, taking him for nearly a million dollars and half his income until their daughter reached eighteen. Jose sold the business and became a one-man show, working for just enough money to pay the rent and his greedy ex-wife, and, recently, giving the rest of his services away to Casey's legal clinic, which desperately needed an investigator.

Jose was just over six feet with arms that tested the limits of his shirtsleeves and the wide V-shaped torso of a linebacker. The cops Casey knew still talked about his time as a patrolman on the street and the way the sight of Jose in blues would send gangbangers scrambling for cover. One story had him snatching a chrome-plated.45 right out of the hand of a drug dealer and beating him senseless after he'd threatened to kill Jose and his partner.

"And," Jose said, "this place wouldn't be the same without Tina."

On cue, Tina, a small dark girl with waves of kinky black hair, appeared blushing beside Jose and apologized for being late.

"No worry," Casey said. "We're going to skip the meeting and open the floodgates. Is Stacy here yet?"

"Waiting for all of you!" Stacy Berg shouted from the other side of the wall. "And the line's not getting any shorter."

"So, here we go," Casey said.

Jose gave Casey an unusual look and angled his head toward her office, disappearing that way himself. Casey got up from the plastic table and walked past Stacy, who sat behind the filling station counter, ready to direct the human traffic that came in the door.

"Before you send me anyone," Casey said, "I need five minutes with Jose."

"You and every red-blooded woman on the planet," Stacy said, eyeing the investigator as he disappeared into Casey's office.

Casey followed him in and closed the door.