I

06 September 2005

The sun was shining on my face, which told me two things. While one was of little consequence, the other was fairly inconvenient. The first thing it told me was that I had forgotten to close the blinds last night... again. That wasn’t really too serious, although it did mean that an entire building across the way could see in through my bedroom window. The second was that I was about to be very late. Over the last few days I had noticed that in early September the sun didn’t climb high enough in the sky to shine over the apartment building to the east and through my window until after 9 a.m. It was Tuesday morning and I was due in court at 9:15.

“Damn,” I said as I rolled out of bed and sprinted toward the bathroom, stubbing my toe on a pile of books, which I, of course, knocked over in the process. I made very quick work of the whole showering, dressing, and grooming process and was in my car by 9:22. I pulled out of the parking garage under my building and turned toward the courthouse.

Downtown Luna Nueva, California, consists of a cluster of municipal buildings and other government facilities, as well as a several groups of office buildings. My apartment building is on the edge of downtown, but the entire area is only about sixty square blocks. Outside of the urban area there are no more than a handful of buildings that are more than two or three stories high. The rest of the city is mostly a suburban sprawl that covers a much larger area than the population of Luna Nueva would indicate.

At this hour of the morning it might have been quicker to just walk, but I didn’t really walk anywhere, and getting into my car was more a result of habit than planning. I knew it might take me ten minutes to make it through the city blocks to the courthouse, so I stood on the gas pedal and weaved through gaps in the tail end of the morning rush hour traffic. Since I was already late, it was fortunate for me that the streets of downtown Luna Nueva didn’t resemble the streets of downtown Los Angeles, just over a hundred miles to the southeast.

I’d been driving a 1969 Dodge Charger since I was sixteen years old. It was the same car they drove on “The Dukes of Hazzard” except for the paint job and the doors. I loved that show, but I never quite got the bright orange paint with the Confederate flag on the roof, or the purpose of having the doors welded shut. For the first four or five years that I drove it the body was primer gray, except for the trunk and the passenger door, both of which were factory red, taken from a wrecked Charger at my uncle’s Nick’s salvage yard. It didn’t get the glossy black paint job it was currently sporting until after I had already graduated from the police academy.

Despite the Charger’s prodigious body size, I made good time through the city streets and arrived at the Richard R. Westbrook Memorial Courthouse by 9:33. I knew I was late, but I also knew I wasn’t scheduled to be the first witness, so they could certainly start without me. As I circled the building, becoming increasingly late, I cursed myself for not thinking to ride my bike down here. I hadn’t ridden it in several weeks, so it hadn’t crossed my mind, but I could have covered the distance in the same amount of time and parking would have been a snap.

I spotted an opening when a fire engine red Audi TT coupe pulled out of a space just ahead. I was lucky enough to beat a guy in a car that was almost as long as mine (an old Ford Fairlane) to the spot. I felt a little bad, taking a parking space away from a man who was old enough to be my grandfather, but I had seen it first—and I was very late. I noted, as I hurried up the courthouse steps, that the motorcycle spaces were, indeed, quite available. Only one bike was parked there, an old Triumph Bonneville, leaving four vacant spaces next to it.

With some effort I managed to keep my boots from clunking loudly on the polished marble floors as I hurried down the halls to courtroom three, where I should have been more than twenty minutes earlier. I peeked through the small, square window to find that they had begun, most likely on time, as I had expected. Just as I was about to pull the door open, someone grabbed my arm.

“Stephen!” a familiar voice rasped behind me as a bony hand jerked me around to see the face of my little brother, Jack.

He usually called me “Steve” or even “Stevie” so I didn’t exactly need to pay careful attention to his tone to know that he was unhappy with me. One glance at the grim look that dominated his features confirmed that, as I had expected, he was pretty pissed off at me.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Jack was the Assistant District Attorney. Historically there hadn’t really been enough of a workload to justify employing an ADA, but there had always been one ADA, and they were talking about adding a second. The District Attorney’s office in Luna Nueva hadn’t really needed the one ADA they had for years, but there was so much going on these days that a couple of paralegals and a few clerks just weren’t enough anymore. Jack was a natural for the job, especially now that the workload had been increasing. He seemed to be finally in his element.

Like his predecessors, much of his job had been the kind of work that clerks and paralegals did for his first couple of years. Even now that he was actually trying cases, his principal task was still to track down witnesses and prepare them to testify in court. Tracking me down had been easy for Jack, since I was not only his brother, but also a cop. However, the D.A. also relied on my little brother to make sure the witnesses turned up when it was time to appear in court. This was, of course, the reason for his anger. Ordinarily, he would get his butt chewed for a week over something like this. But we both knew this was not an ordinary situation. The D.A. had known me a lot longer than she had known Jack, and she wouldn’t be able to find a reason to blame him for my late arrival today.

I knew this, and I knew Jack did, too. “Relax, little bro. It’s going to be okay. I know I should have been here earlier, but I’m here now, and Kelly can’t be mad at you. She knows me too well.”

“Whatever,” Jack snapped, still angry.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t even really know what happened. I got home really late last night. I was hungry and I wanted to watch Last Call, but I fell asleep before I got anything to eat. I saw Carson’s monologue, but I didn’t even see the first guest before I was out.”

My explanation to Jack reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything since early afternoon the day before, but I knew this wasn’t exactly a time when I could afford to worry about my stomach.

Jack was not quite ready to forgive me, but I could feel his ire losing steam. He continued to glare at me, but said nothing. I almost laughed as I looked up at his thin face. His steel-blue eyes locked on to mine in what he clearly thought to be a penetrating stare. I suppose it was, but I couldn’t really take this sort of attitude to heart when it came from my little brother. Jack towered over me—he had outgrown me during my senior year of high school, when he was only a freshman. In his mind, this height advantage should have allowed him to intimidate me. But despite the five inch difference between Jack’s six and a half feet and my six foot one, he’s never quite been able to muster any kind of threat that I could take seriously.

Jack was tough enough to get by, but between the two of us he was always the smart one. As near as I could tell, he’d just spent too many hours with his nose buried in books. I certainly did my share of reading, but I never had the obsessive hunger for it the way Jack did. The result of Jack’s constant use of his free time in the pursuit of knowledge, while I was outside playing whatever game the neighborhood kids were playing, was that I became the athlete and he became the scholar (and probably explained why he was an attorney and I was a cop). It also left Jack susceptible to whatever torture I—in my role as the older brother—chose to dish out.

Here we were twelve years removed from the last time I was still taller than my little brother and he was still trying (with no more success than he had achieved with any of his earlier attempts) to put some fear into me by whatever means he could manage. I ignored all of this as I explained my situation.

“Next thing I knew,” I continued, “it was morning and the sun was shining through my window. I did manage to get my boots and my shirt off, but I slept with my pants on and without setting my alarm.”

“You’re pathetic,” Jack said, but I could tell the situation had already de-escalated to the point where this was just brotherly ribbing now.

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed. “But it wasn’t completely my fault. Some of it was just bad luck. I have an alarm on my cell phone that goes off at 7:30 every morning, but I lost my phone yesterday, chasing down a purse-snatcher, of all things. I can’t even remember the last time I chased a petty street criminal. Even though I knew it was gone, I didn’t exactly think about it as I was passing out last night.”

“Okay, okay,” Jack said. “You’re forgiven. I still think you’re pathetic, but I forgive you for being late. Now get in there before Kelly has kittens.”

It seemed funny to me that we had ended up in these roles. The truth was that they fit us quite well, but it always amused me when I thought about them it terms of how we got to where we were. Jack was totally irresponsible until he got to college. He was always a smart kid, but school work bored and disgusted him, so when he wasn’t reading, he went out and got into trouble. He barely graduated high school and when he decided it was time to pull it together, only community college was a viable option.

He had suddenly found his groove, though, and over the following seven years he became everything my parents ever wanted for their boys. He excelled at the same kind of assignments he had shunned in high school and quickly transferred to U.C. Santa Cruz. His grades at Santa Cruz were nothing but A’s. During his last year there he hit a homerun on the Law School Admissions Test and Stanford practically begged him to come to their law school.

In contrast, I was the responsible one during high school. I played on the baseball team and the golf team and did all my homework. I wasn’t an exemplary student in terms of grades, but I did well enough. Decent grades and a very solid S.A.T. score got me into a number of California schools. After considering list of available options I chose San Diego State, left Luna Nueva, and headed south. I pretty much went through the motions for a few semesters before I decided I’d had enough. I think the day my parents found out I had dropped out of college might have been the saddest day of their lives. Oddly enough, I don’t think it was really about the fact that I wasn’t going to finish college. It was just that I had always been the one that did what they expected. At that point Jack hadn’t pulled it together yet, so the fact that their child who didn’t always disappoint them was leaving school really hit them hard.

I punched Jack softly in the arm as I turned back toward the courtroom door. I mentally thanked the courthouse maintenance staff for keeping the hinges well-oiled as I slid silently through the giant oak doors. I moved as quietly as possible up to the row directly behind the prosecution table. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder just as Jack sat down in the chair next to her.

District Attorney Kelly Pierce turned to me and gave me an icy glare, which I tried to deflect with my best “I’m really sorry, please don’t hate me” smile. I could tell she wasn’t buying it, but I knew she’d get over it—as long as my testimony proved to be worth the wait.

I had known Kelly Pierce since the eighth grade. She had moved with her family from Phoenix into our neighborhood at the beginning of the school year when I turned fourteen. She was more than a year and a half younger than me, but she had been starting seventh grade. I remember the first time I saw her like it was yesterday.

She had been sitting alone, eating her lunch on a bench. I knew almost every kid in the school, so I was pretty sure she was new. At first glance I might not have given her a second thought, but her long, raven hair drew me in like a tractor beam. I didn’t even want to go over to her, but I felt as though it was beyond my control. I walked up to her and nervously asked if the seat next to her was taken. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, so I sat.

“I’m Stephen Rollins,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Kelly Pierce,” she mumbled, as she shook my hand briefly before pulling back.

“Are you new here?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you around.”

“Just moved in,” she replied, again almost unintelligibly.

“Well, I know pretty much everyone in this school,” I bragged. I was pretty sure she wasn’t impressed, but I charged forward courageously. “So if you need anything, I can probably help you out.”

“Um, thanks.”

“I’ve gotta run,” I said. “I’ll see you around.”

That proved to be mostly untrue, though. I hardly saw her at all the entire school year, since we weren’t in the same grade and didn’t have any of the same classes. I didn’t see her at all the following year, having moved on to high school while she had another year of junior high.

The next time we met was during my sophomore year. She didn’t remember me, which was not a new experience for me, but it was oddly painful this time. She introduced herself politely, a gesture which I returned, more out of habit than anything. I couldn’t figure out why, but it bothered me so much that this girl didn’t remember me. I spent the rest of my high school years trying to figure Kelly Pierce out.