5. Andrew
Andrew
T he phone rang just after eight p.m. The caller ID read Denver City Detention Center. What on Earth? Was one of my clients in trouble?
“Andrew Lawson,” I answered in my professional voice.
“This is a call from the Denver City Detention Center,” a robotic voice announced. “Will you accept a call from…,” the robotic voice was replaced with a human voice that haunted my dreams, “Katy Robertson Steph’s friend”. This was followed by the robot asking me to press one to accept or two to decline.
I pressed one.
“Hello? Katy?”
“Andrew. Thank God. I’m so sorry to bother you. I… I need help. I need a lawyer.”
I was dying to ask questions, but I knew that her phone time was limited.
“Are you in detention downtown?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She sounded sad.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Thank you.”
I changed into a suit, so I’d look more lawyerly and took off down the mountain. It was dark out but fortunately the roads were clear and traffic was light, so I made good time, arriving in downtown Denver in just under an hour. Someone pulled away just up the street from the jail and I grabbed the open parking spot before jogging up to the detention center.
Fifteen minutes and a pat down later I was in a small room waiting for Katy. They brought her in wearing handcuffs, but she was wearing a dress and boots. There was a dark stain over the front of her dress that I suspected was blood, although she didn’t appear to be injured.
“Can you take the cuffs off my client please?” I asked in my best asshole lawyer voice.
The guard sent me a bored look. “No touching. No sudden movements.”
Katy just nodded, looking more somber than I’d ever seen her. Of course I’d only spent a few hours with her, including that hot kiss in the parking lot six months ago. The guard removed her cuffs and she gasped in pain.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”
Katy shook her head. “I’m fine. Thanks for coming.”
She was beautiful, with long, dark blonde hair, pouty lips, wide brown eyes, and skin that looked lightly tanned despite the fact that it was February in Colorado. She was strong – I knew she needed to maintain a level of physical fitness for her job – but had womanly curves that I wanted nothing more than to explore with my tongue.
I’d grown up hearing the family legend of the Lawson Lightning Bolt. My family believed in love at first sight, and when it came, it hit you with a bolt of electric heat that was akin to being hit by lightning. I’d always thought it was just a story my parents told, like Santa Claus. After all, my two brothers and I got well into our forties without ever experiencing anything close to love.
Until Steph came to town and knocked my older brother Christopher right onto his grumpy ass. One look at her and the guy was gone. I would have found it entertaining if I hadn’t met Katy a few days later and felt the Lawson Lightning Bolt for myself. Unfortunately Katy lived an hour away and unlike Steph, she’d been very clear she only did casual.
Now I was the grumpy one in our family, because the woman I loved didn’t seem all that interested in me. It had been eating at my insides for a year and a half now.
“What happened?” I asked as soon as the guard left us alone.
Katy sagged down into a plastic chair and I sat across from her, a metal table bolted to the floor between us. The room smelled like sweat and despair. My heart ached at the defeated look on her face.
“I went to happy hour with a few friends from work,” she said. “It was eighties night so we were dancing and having fun. At some point my coworkers left but I stayed to dance some more.”
“Were you drunk?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I only had two drinks all night, I swear. I was on the dance floor and this guy comes up and starts grinding against me like he thinks that’s dancing. I told him several times to get lost, that I wasn’t interested. But he kept bothering me, being aggressive and handsy, a total jerk.”
I felt a rush of anger at whoever this guy was.
“I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me alone, but then he comes up behind me, pulls my ass back to rub against his erection, and grabs one of my boobs. Hard.”
Her voice rose in agitation.
“So I whipped around and punched the asshole in the face. Broke his nose.”
“Atta girl,” I said admiringly.
She winced. “Turns out he’s a cop. Off duty, but that didn’t stop him from having his buddies arrest me. Now the asshole says he’s pressing assault charges.”
“All right, let me see what I need to do to bail you out,” I said.
“I’m sorry to call you,” Katy said. “You’re the only lawyer I know.”
I wasn’t technically a criminal attorney, but I wasn’t going to leave her hanging. And I certainly wasn’t going to leave her in some hellhole jail with a bunch of criminals.
After calling for the guard, I headed out to the front to pay Katy’s bail. They brought her up a little while later, and she sent me a look that was so filled with gratitude and relief it was all I could do not to pull her into my arms.
“Come on, I’ll take you home,” I said.
“Thanks, Andrew. I really appreciate this.”
I followed Katy’s directions to her townhouse on the north side of town. She lived on one end of a long row of skinny, modern looking homes. The first floor was the garage and entry way, with an open plan living room, dining and kitchen area on the second floor and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the third floor.
“You have to stay in my guest room,” she said. “It’s the least I can do after you came all the way out here.”
It was going on midnight and I was exhausted, so I didn’t argue. Katy set me up in her guest room and I changed into some sweats and a tee shirt that I had in my car for emergencies.
I settled into bed, staring at the ceiling, and heard the water turn on in the bathroom next door. Katy was taking a shower, no doubt washing off the blood and the grossness of the jail. I thought I heard her cry out and I sat up, listening carefully. When I didn’t hear anything else I told myself I’d just imagined it. A few minutes later I heard her pad across the hallway, then the door to her bedroom closed.
I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, content for the first time since Katy drove out of my life eighteen months ago.
When I woke up in the morning, she was at the dining room table drinking coffee, an ice pack resting on her hand.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” I asked, frowning at the ice pack.
“I guess I hurt it somehow when I punched that guy,” Katy said, lifting it up to show me. “It’s all bruised and swollen, and I can’t move my pinkie or my ring finger. It hurts like hell.”
I moved closer to take a look. “Shit. We should get you to the emergency room, that looks bad.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said dismissively. “There’s no way I want to spend six hours in the ER and get a twelve hundred dollar bill for them to tell me to ice and elevate it. I just took some ibuprofen, that should help. Let me get you some coffee.”
Fucking U.S. healthcare system. People should not be making decisions to seek care based on cost.
Katy reached into the cabinet with her right hand, then cried out and dropped the cup she’d picked up. It fell into the sink with a crash.
“Damn it!”
“That’s it,” I said firmly. “We’re going to the ER.”
She sighed deeply. “Let’s try Urgent Care first. It’s cheaper.”