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Peltier has already spent more than twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Under Peltier’s picture is a handwritten message in dark marker: NO MISTAKES WILL BE TOLERATED. I can’t figure out why the pamphlet is there, and I definitely don’t like the tagline, since it’s more gung-ho than the tone of the anti-death-penalty faction.
    I stand around for a minute or so, confused, wondering if some bogeyman is going to jump out and tell me he put the pamphlet on my car. The pamphlet is too weird to be a coincidence, but I only just found out about Hale myself, so I can’t figure out how somebody could already be tailing me. Normally, I’m pretty good at ignoring the list of a hundred or so people who have a reason to be pissed off at me; I found out on my first day in the office that would be a part of the job, when I noticed the half-inch-thick bulletproof glass between the office receptionist and the waiting room. But if this is one of the usual wackos, it’s pretty interesting timing. Maybe it’s Professor Buchanan, softening me up for the kill before I meet him and his client at Brushy. If it is, it’s a mistake, because it’s pissing me off, which will definitely make me more difficult to deal with. I get in my car and pull out onto I-65 south for the three-mile drive from the mall to my house. At least as far as I can tell, nobody’s tailing me. Unfortunately, my time in the army didn’t include counterinsurgency or anything like it. I spent my time in a courtroom, when I wasn’t playing racquetball or jogging with the other junior officers.
    By the time I get home fifteen minutes later, I’ve decided to ignore the pamphlet, just like I ignore the three or four letters I get every month from prisoners describing, often in lurid detail, the various acts of revenge they contemplate against me, should the legal system ever be crazy enough to let them back onto the streets. I pull into my garage and walk into the house. My cat, Indianapolis, is waiting inside. He was a stray when I found him, about as lost as a cat can get. The tin ID tag on his collar was worn down, and the only thing legible on the street address was the city, Indianapolis. I don’t like cats, something I impressed on this black-and-white fur ball the first ten times he came around by steadfastly ignoring him. But he took to me, or maybe the smell of my pine mulch. He ended up planting himself outside my door meowing his brains out until late one night I made the mistake of giving him a saucer of milk to shut him up. From that moment on, he regarded me as a tenant on his property, and I resigned myself to cans of cat food and bags of litter. Not that Indianapolis is in any way untidy. Compared to me, he’s a monk. He looks at me steadily as I come in the door, inscrutable as a sphinx, and slinks his way through my legs, rubbing against me. I wonder sometimes why he picked me out of the hundred other houses he could have chosen in the middle-class suburban landscape. He must have known something about me I didn’t know myself, because he was relentless. The damn cat would have starved himself before he left. I tell myself I keep him around because he’s spectacular at hunting moles, which my yard attracts like frat boys to an open kegger. He makes gifts of their blind carcasses from time to time, dropping them off on my back deck like a sacrificial offering. But when he stares up at me with those pale, fathomless eyes, I keep thinking he’s got something on his mind. Until I figure it out, it’s Mi casa es su casa, cat.
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    THE NEXT MORNING , Thursday, I wake up and calm myself with my ritual two cups of coffee and a Zoloft. The Zoloft is courtesy of Dr. Tina Gessman, who convinced me that being an assistant district attorney is the kind of job that the human body isn’t necessarily genetically prepared to do. She has a long list of clients, like social