Pleading Guilty Read Online Free PDF Page A

whatever, we'll take a piece of your candy-ass, I don' care what kind of sta r y ou carry. To me, Mr. Roberts, man, I better not hear no Mr. Roberts again, you know?"
    "Got it."
    I was gone fast. Bert may have been a fake tough guy; these fellas knew a thing or two about making hard choices, and I was dressed and on the street in a jiffy, bombing down the walk, my insides still melted down in fear. Nice crowd, I told Bert, and, once I'd started this conversation, asked a few more questions like why he was calling himself Kam Roberts.
    I was now up to the intersection of Duhaney and Shields, one of these grand city neighborhoods, the league of nations, four blocks with eleven languages, all of them displayed on the garish signs flogging bargains that are pasted in the store windows. Taxis here are at best occasional, and I stomped around near the bus stop, where a little bit of the last snow remained in a dirty crusted hump, my cheeks stinging in the cold and my soul still seething from the trip into that inferno of tough men and intense heat. Near my native ground, I found myself in the thick grip of time and the stalled feelings that forty years ago seemed to bind my spirit like glue. I was hopelessly at odds with everyone--my ma, the Church, the nuns at school, the entire claustrophobic community with its million rules. I took no part in the joy that everybody here seemed to feel in belonging. Instead, I felt I was a spy, a clandestine agent from somewhere else, an outsider who took them all as objects, surfaces, things to see.
    Now this last couple of years, since Nora scooted, I seem to be back here more and more, my dreams set in the dim houses beneath the Callison Street Bridge, where I am searching. Four decades later, it turns out it was me who was secretly infiltrated. Sometimes in these dreams I think I'm looking for my sister, sweet Elaine, dead three years now, but I cannot find her. Outside, the wash flags in the sunshine which is bright enough to purify, but I am inside, the wind shifting in the curtains and the papers down the hall as I prowl the grim interior corridor s t o find some lost connection. What did I care about back then? Desperately, in the nights now, I sit up, concentrating, trying to recall the source of all of these errors, knowing that somewhere in this dark house, in one room or another, I will sweep aside a door and feel the rush of light and heat, the flames.

    Chapter III. MY LAWYER
    It was about seven-thirty when I got back to the office, and Brushy, as usual, was still there. Near as I can tell, none of my partners believes that money is the most important thing in the world--they just work as if they did. They are decent folks, my partners, men and women of refined instinct, other-thinking, many of them lively company and committed to a lot of do-good stuff, but we are joined together, like the nucleus of an atom, by the dark magnetic forces of nature--a shared weakness for our own worst desires. Get ahead. Make money. Wield power. It all takes time. In this life you're often so hard-pressed that scratching your head sometimes seems to absorb an instant you're sure will be precious later in the day.
    Brush, like many others, felt best here, burning like some torch in the dark hours. No phone, no opposing counsel or associates, no fucking management meetings. Her fierce intelligence could be concentrated on the tasks at hand, writing letters, reviewing memos, seven little things in sixty minutes, each one billable as a quarter of an hour. My own time in the office was a chain of aimless spells.
    I stuck my head in, feeling the need for someone sensible. "Cot a minute?"
    Brushy has the corner office, the glamour spot. I'm ten years older, with smaller digs next door. She was at her desk, a plane of glass engulfed at either end by green standing plants whose fronds languished on her papers.
    "Business?" she asked. "Who's the client?" She had reached for her time sheet already.
    "Old one," I