Pro Bono

Chapter 1 August 2007

1

AUGUST 2007

M cKinley Lawrence Stone was the name he had given himself in the court papers he’d filed three years ago. When the change had been certified he held a party for himself with a few cronies using the last of the money he had left from his time as Steven Wallace. He called it his Launch Party. He had played with variations on the new name, and the one he felt most comfortable with was Mack Stone. The name Mack Stone would mark him as an unpretentious man, and the McKinley had a subtle scent of historical priority and maybe even inherited wealth, with the possibility of some education that he would be far too modest to mention. The party guests included several of his favorite people—Dickie O’Connell, who ran a card game and could deal any hand he wanted each player to have, a pair of women friends named Tracy and Faith, who operated an escort service offering housewives supplementing their incomes, and Ike Potter, a thriving dealer in mail-order pharmaceuticals who had often filled orders for him. It was a memorable party for sure. He was remembering it three years later.

He was thinking about it because at the moment he was at about the same point in the cycle where he’d been at that time, only better. He was driving a beautiful new black BMW 7 series sedan with a load of optional features. Inside the trunk was a leather carrying case that held new socks, underwear, casual shirts, and pants, and a portfolio of stock and bond accounts bought with money that had recently been the property of Linda Warren, but were now in his own permanent name, the one he’d been given at birth. He had never divulged this name to anyone since his family had moved to a new town when he was eight and they’d all made up new names.

He was already far north of Los Angeles, heading east across Nevada. Professionals like him knew enough not to head for Las Vegas. It was the first place the hunters looked. It was exactly the tempting distance from Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or San Diego to make a stupid person think he had left the police and his victims far behind and could relax. Vegas was nowhere near far enough. It was a bright, sunny, sparkling trap.

He had spent the day settled back in the scientifically designed, ergonomically perfect, expertly crafted leather seat while he looked out the window at the jagged, rocky, skillet-hot hellscape of the southern part of Nevada. Now he was enjoying the smooth, silent ride watching the mirages pool ahead on the highway, then dissolve as he approached. The afternoon sun seemed to be throwing its light ahead of him on the future. He had swung north, taken Route 50, and was in northeastern Nevada and moving fast but still barely above the speed limit on the two-lane highway.

A vehicle was coming up fast behind him. He stared at the mirror. He saw it was a gray passenger car with only the driver in it. He had a certain envy, because if he hadn’t been driving with three or four million dollars on paper that he didn’t want to be asked any questions about, he’d be going the same speed.

Mack kept his speed exactly as it was—not fast enough to prompt a cop to wonder why so fast, or slow enough to wonder why so slow. He’d had the throttle on cruise control for nearly two hours. He watched the other car approach in the mirror, holding himself back. He didn’t want to start racing some idiot, when winning meant nothing, and a tiny mistake could be fatal. He had heard that the only ambulance service in the empty parts of Nevada was manned by convicts from the prisons. He’d heard other people say that wasn’t true, but he had decided he’d better believe it anyway to keep himself cautious. Right now, he had everything he had ever wanted—almost too much money, a good car, freedom, and his next woman writing him long, passionate emails every day, with pictures intended to make him choose her house as his next address.

He kept his eyes on the road for a few minutes, but the other car kept coming, and whenever he looked, the car was closer. It wasn’t just on the straight, level stretches. No matter what the road looked like, the car was gaining on him. After a few more minutes, the car was nosing its grille up to his back bumper, like a race car drafting to defeat the wind. The yellow light on his left mirror began to blink to indicate the car was going to pass. Why didn’t it?

Mack couldn’t stand it anymore. He couldn’t see the other driver very well, but he was slight, probably young. Mack very gently touched his foot to the brake pedal, just to make the brake lights glow and maybe shave a mile an hour off the speed to remind this kid what he was doing. The kid wasn’t the only one whose life was in his hands when he was driving.

The gray car slid forward and bumped the rear of the BMW, jolting Mack’s seat so the back of his head tipped hard against the headrest. The bump didn’t hurt, but it shocked and addled him for a second until his eyes found the horizon again. He was instantly angry. He hadn’t carried a gun in years. He had stopped because a couple women he’d been with had gotten so enraged when they learned about the money that if they’d found the gun, they might have used it. Right now, he regretted selling the gun.

He decided to force the driver to pass. As he was letting his speed decrease, the gray car began dropping back slightly. Damn right , he thought. You’d better . He kept going at the reduced speed for a few seconds, searching ahead for a place where they could both pull onto a flat shoulder and have a frank discussion. Then a jolt made him look up into the rearview mirror. The gray car had slowed to build an empty space between it and the BMW, but then the driver stepped hard on the gas pedal, shot forward, and hit Mack’s car again.

Stone’s BMW received the force with a bang, punched forward by the gray car. His eyes opened wide and he uttered a cry, and when he heard his own voice, he realized he sounded terrified. This kid was some kind of road rage case, out of control. He was trying to hurt Mack, maybe kill them both. Mack wondered if he could have done something to set this kid off without knowing it, maybe cut him off way back on the highway. He stepped on the gas pedal and pressed hard to get some distance from the threat.

The broken stripes on the road flashed under his car now, coming toward him like tracer bullets. As he glanced in the mirror again, he saw the kid was right behind. He knew the car he was driving was an incredible machine, capable of much more than the hundred he was going now—certainly faster than the gray car. But he had been driving on this road for over half an hour, long enough to have a feel for it. He could drive faster, but he doubted he could take a severe curve at these speeds without spinning out. There had also been heavy rains all over the west this winter, and plenty of curvy mountain roads had been undermined or blocked by mudslides. What if—

The car behind him edged up close to nudge him again, but he would not allow that. He pressed the pedal harder, and as he did, the gray car was left behind. Mack was still accelerating when the BMW’s right front wheel hit a pothole and dropped to the right, bounced up, then launched itself a foot into the air, off the road, landed in a drainage ditch, and slammed into a tree.

Andy Minkeagan sat in the bus next to his friend Alvin Copes. It was a bright, clear, show-off day to be out traveling, and he supposed that someday one of them would remind the other what this was like after weeks of smoke and sweat-soaked masks. Alvin was good to sit with. They had known each other for years, so there wasn’t a lot of tiresome talk—just the easy, natural kind that made the mile after mile of road pleasant and restful.

They had been on the fire line in California for three weeks fighting the Prickleback Fire, a big one made worse by the weather, with temperatures in the hundred-and-five-plus range, and winds that would blow one way for a while and then reverse, like something big turning back because there was something alive back behind it that it had forgotten to eat. Sometimes the something seemed to be you.

Everyone on the bus was a model prisoner from Ely State. That was why they all got to spend the past twenty-one days on vacation on a fire line in California fighting fifty-foot flames with shovels on terrain so vertical and tough that the only way out was on the feet that had brought them there. The pay was ten dollars a day.

Minkeagan and Copes both had eventful criminal records with enough terms like “grand,” “aggravated,” “armed,” and “conspiracy” to have kept them in Ely for a long time, but neither had ever been convicted of homicide despite some experience with it, so they had been eligible to fight fires. Neither of them was lazy either, so they’d both taken other courses besides Firefighting Basic Training One and Two. Copes was Black and Minkeagan was white, and they’d spent some time vouching for each other with men of their races when they’d taken their first course, Automotive Technology, together, and they had found it a comfortable way to take other courses.

They had taken Commercial Driver’s License and Heavy Equipment Operator. These had been easy to agree on because they were practical, even though Copes and Minkeagan never expected to be out of prison young enough to get jobs. They felt lucky to have programs at all, because Ely was the designated maximum security prison. They took Arborist because it was an opportunity for outdoor exercise, and it was peaceful. They took Culinary because it was a rare chance to taste something besides prison food.

“Copes!” came the voice from the front. “Your turn at the wheel.”

Taking a shift driving the bus was one of the privileges of having a commercial driver’s license, but at times it was a drawback too. The driving could be hard, and it carried a lot of responsibility. Minkeagan stepped into the aisle to let Copes out of the window seat and make his way to the front as Stapleton, the current driver, slowed the bus and pulled off onto a gravel patch.

When Stapleton got up, Copes sat down in the driver’s seat, picked up the clipboard on the dash, and put his initials beside his name on the driver list. He strapped himself in, looked at the mirrors, signaled, shifted, and made the bus growl up onto the pavement of Route 50 and begin to gain speed.

Copes was pleased to see that there were no cars coming up behind, because the bus was climbing on this stretch. Driving a bus going home to Ely was complex. The average altitude around Ely was 6,788 feet, but within fifty miles the up-down variation was over 4,000 feet. It took time to bring the bus up through the gears to build up speed, and he didn’t want to tempt some fool to risk swinging into the oncoming lane to get around the bus and slamming into a driver coming the opposite way.

As though to prove his point, a sporty gray sedan shot around the next curve toward him so fast that the wind from it rocked the bus a little. Copes had stared right into the face of the gray car’s driver, and he had looked very young and very—what? Not scared. It used to be that a kid who was barely surviving doing something stupid would at least show some appreciation for the fact that his ass was still on the planet in defiance of the odds. These days they didn’t seem to feel that.

Copes blew out a breath and then took one back in and kept going, paying acute attention to the road ahead. It would have been a real joke on him to survive eight years in maximum security and fighting fires and then have some idiot turn his car into a torpedo and punch it through the front of the bus and into his lap.

Two miles on, the bus came to the spot where a new BMW had gone off the narrow shoulder into the ditch and hit a tree. Copes didn’t have to tell anybody. The wreck was in plain sight through the bus windows, and Copes slowed the bus down and pulled past a big pothole and a broken-off chunk of road, past the car, and everybody got a look while he eased the bus onto the shoulder.

The car was gouged along both sides, the front wheels were pigeon-toed inward, and the grille was wrapped around a tree so far that the headlights were looking at each other. The driver’s-side airbag was still inflated so it didn’t seem as though the driver could have gotten out. Copes pulled a few feet farther uphill so there wouldn’t be any gas trickling under the bus if there was a leak from the BMW, and opened both doors. “Okay, let’s see what we can do,” he called.

Minkeagan took a chemical fire extinguisher and others took shovels and ran out the two doors toward the wrecked car. Copes engaged the hand brake of the bus, but he didn’t turn off the engine, in case they needed to transport the driver.

By the time Minkeagan arrived, the men had stabbed the air bag to deflate it, and two of them were pulling the driver out of his seat. They laid him out on the ground. Minkeagan leaned in and turned off the BMW’s engine.

“Is he alive?” Copes asked.

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

The man who had made the declaration smiled and looked into Copes’s eyes. He was Holloway, and Copes and the others knew he was the one the newspapers had called “the Night Dispatcher” even though the authorities didn’t. He’d seen plenty of dead men and knew how to make them that way.

Minkeagan said, “All this blood. Is that from the windshield or did somebody light him up?”

“Broken neck and head trauma,” Holloway said, “but I don’t think it matters. Dead is dead.”

Minkeagan was moving to the back of the car, and Copes noticed he had taken the keys with him. Copes said to the others, “You’re right. Let’s get back on the bus, and we’ll call the cops at the first stop. I guess that’ll be the diner with the red roof.”

The others had lost interest when they’d learned the man was past saving, and they were tired, so they shuffled toward the bus. Minkeagan lingered. He used the key fob to open the car’s trunk and saw the leather case. He lowered the trunk lid a few inches to verify that the others were facing the bus and not him, then leaned in and opened the case. He saw the stack of cash, saw the manila envelope full of account reports with the names of banks and finance corporations. He left the cash, took the envelope, and slipped it up under his shirt and down behind his belt, closed the case, and then locked the trunk. He handed Copes the keys.

Copes knew better than to have the conversation now, so he joined Minkeagan and they trotted to board the bus with the last of the others. He got into the driver’s seat, waited for Minkeagan and the rest of the stragglers to sit, called out, “Everybody set and seated?” and then began to drive.

Minkeagan sat near the front, a few feet from Copes. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell him what he thought he had. He could keep it under his shirt for now, but very soon he would have to make a decision about where to hide it next. The ideal place would be somewhere inside the bus, but there was no part of the bus that didn’t get seen by somebody fairly regularly. The inner lining of one of the seats would be good, but the seats were getting pretty worn from normal use, and all the fire crew travel last year had accelerated that. This summer was likely to bring as many fires as last. A place like the cargo bay under the bus might have some spaces that could be opened and then closed, but it was full of fire gear right now. Time felt as though it was speeding up. When the bus got back to Ely, the guards would search everybody right away for contraband before they were brought to their cells.

Minkeagan didn’t get a chance to talk to Copes until they stopped at the restaurant and the others all got out to loiter around the parking lot and wait for the police. As soon as they were twenty feet from the nearest prisoner Minkeagan said, “It’s a bunch of stock, bond, and bank accounts. All the ones I saw were in the name Daniel Webster Rickenger. There’s some ID in that name too, some of it old, like his birth certificate. If we work this right in the next fifteen minutes, we’re rich. Once the cops get here the chance is gone.”

“I’ll go talk to the manager and look around,” Copes said. He walked toward the front door, studying the building as he went. He made it as far as the front entrance before a man in a necktie, a man with a cook’s white coat, and a waiter came out to head him off.

“How can we help you?” the man with the necktie said.

Copes said, “We’re a fire crew from Ely, just heading back after three weeks in California. We found a man who had been in a single-car accident two point three miles west on Fifty. The man is deceased. We stopped to ask you if you would please call the police and tell them, or let me use your phone to call them myself.”

The man with the necktie said, “Just you?”

“Yes, sir,” Copes said. “I’m driving the bus, so I feel like it’s part of the job.”

“Everybody else stays outside?”

“That’s right.”

“Come in.”

The man held the door open for Copes to enter, and followed him in, “You can use the phone over here by the lectern. It’s for taking reservations.” He guided him over to the lectern, which was empty now, the person replaced by a sign that said, “Please seat yourself.”

Copes dialed 911 and listened to the female operator’s greeting, “911, what is the location of your emergency?”

Copes told her as precisely as he could, gave his name and the group he was a part of, and said he would hold the bus and wait for the police to arrive and give them the keys to the wrecked car. He said he would hand over the phone to the manager of the restaurant and did. When the man had verified that Copes was real and hung up, Copes thanked him for the use of the phone and walked to the front door and went out to the parking lot again.

He was scanning for Minkeagan, saw him leaning on the side of the building, and approached him already talking. “There’s a hood with a ventilator running on the wall above the stove. I think they clean the fan from inside, and the vent is on the roof.” He kept walking while he was talking, drawing Minkeagan with him. They reached a spot near the back of the building where the roof sloped down to a height of about ten feet. He squatted and knitted his fingers to give Minkeagan a stirrup.

Minkeagan didn’t talk, just stepped onto his cupped hands and stretched his arms above his head while Copes lifted. He caught the edge of the roof and pulled himself upward while Copes kept pushing. In a few seconds Minkeagan was up. He bent low and walked as quietly as possible up the red roof. He had no trouble finding the vent because he could hear the hum of the fan. The rectangular sheet metal shaft rose above the roof about a foot and a half and turned sideways. Its mouth was a metal flap on a hinge. The flap was wavering outward an inch or two to emit a smoky, meaty smell from the grill. Minkeagan moved close to it, opened the flap and looked. Inside the shaft about a foot and a half down there was a screen, probably to keep any animals from using it as a way to get into the kitchen. He took the envelope out of his belt, slid it into the shaft so the bottom edge rested on the screen and the envelope was curled close to the inner side, so it might not be seen even if somebody removed the flap. It was a fairly tight fit without blocking the vent. He looked under the flap again, then took a step back. The vent was high enough to keep the mouth above the snow level, and the opening and flap faced southeast. There wasn’t going to be a better place.

Minkeagan hurried down to the edge of the roof, lay down, and lowered himself. When his legs reached the edge and draped downward he felt Copes wrap his arms around them and lower him to the ground. They walked past the front corner of the restaurant and saw that the other prisoners had gathered around the bus again. They joined the group and participated in the general complaining about how long it was taking for the cops to come, how long the drive from California had been, and the predictions of screwups to come. The police would try to blame the driver’s death on them, and treat everything they said like it was a lie just because. They would keep the bus waiting here long enough so they’d miss dinner at Ely.

A few minutes later two police cars and an ambulance pulled into the parking lot, and Copes went to meet them. One set of partners was a pair of large men, and the other car held a man and a woman. Copes gave the car keys to the first cop who approached him, and then told all the cops at once where the man and his car were. The male and female cops and the ambulance drove toward the accident scene, while the two men stayed behind and interviewed Copes and Minkeagan for the police report. After some conversation on their car radio, one of the cops told Copes and Minkeagan the bus could return to the prison.

By then, most of the fire crew were back inside in their seats, so the loading didn’t take long. Copes got in, looked at the clock, and saw his shift was over. He looked at the roster on the clipboard and called, “Daly! It’s your turn to drive.” He and Minkeagan went back to sitting together near the rear of the bus as it pulled back up out of the lot onto the highway.

The next day during exercise period while they lifted weights Minkeagan described to Copes every detail he could remember seeing in the packet of financial papers. They were finally far enough from other prisoners to speak freely about the accounts, and about how, in reality, they were already rich. The money would stay where it was safe. In fact, it would grow. As soon as either of them could get out of Ely, he would go back to the restaurant, climb up on the roof, and retrieve the envelope. Within a few days he would become Daniel Webster Rickenger and make his way to Los Angeles to convert their wealth from investments into spendable cash. He would put half in a special account for the one who was still here in Ely. A life sentence was not an easy thing, but it seldom meant a man’s full life. Now that they knew what the future held for them, the years ahead were going to fly.