Winner Take All Read Online Free Page A

shame.
    “Their details match to a surprising degree. Both mothers are black and in their late teens. Both claim they were offered nice apartments for half the going rate. Both say once they were settled in, the landlord propositioned them.”
    Marcus recalled the first time he had tried a case in Judge Rachel Sears’ courtroom. The woman had become a mother only six months prior to being elected to the bench and was still fighting the postbirth weight battle. The robes had left her looking both dumpy and frail. Then she had seated herself upon the dais, and the skin of her face had pulled back so taut that her lips had almost disappeared, as though she was consciously shedding every vestige of laxity. From mother and friend to wielder of power.
    “I continued the case over to this morning. I also obtained the names and addresses of three other women who this defendant claims had the same thing happen to them.”
    A robin took roost just outside his open window, and mocked the dawn’s treachery with song. “You want me to obtain affidavits and confront the landlord in open court.”
    “The young lady gave her previous address as your side of Rocky Mount. I arranged for a shelter to take her and the children last night. But she needs someplace semipermanent.” Judge Sears read out the names and addresses. “Marcus, do I have to tell you anything more?”
    “This phone call never happened,” Marcus confirmed.
    He disconnected, took another breath, and dialed Deacon Wilbur’s number from memory. As he listened to it ring, his mind wandered back to his waking thought, and the fear that Kirsten’s call would be to say she was leaving him for good.

    He and Deacon collected the young woman and her babies, spoke with two of the other women, then headed downtown. By the time they arrived on the Wake County courthouse’s third floor, the babies were squirming and cranky.
    Her records claimed Yolanda was nineteen. The elder of Yolanda’s two children, a boy, was almost two and looked huge in her arms. The daughter was about six months old and far lighter in skin tone than her brother. Yolanda crossed the foyer with the blank-faced sullenness of one who was well used to living without hope.
    Marcus staked out the stairway while Deacon stood sentry before the elevators. Deacon Wilbur was a retired black pastor who revealed his seventy-plus years in the gaunt caverns at his temples. Deacon had never studied much besides the Bible; his formal schooling had endedat nine when his sharecropper daddy had ordered the boy to join him in the fields.
    There had been a period in Marcus’ life, separated from the present by a mere knife’s blade of time, when sorrow had been both crippling and constant. As he drove back from a weekend on Figure Eight Island, his car had been struck by a truck and his two children killed. His wife had used their subsequent divorce to brand him with further public shame. When Marcus had finally begun emerging from his own dark pit, Deacon Wilbur had been there to shed light upon what Marcus had almost decided was a hopeless and intolerable climb.
    The older child started mewling again. Deacon turned to Yolanda and spoke softly. She snapped from her internal funk long enough to hand him the boy. Deacon held the child with a grandfather’s experience, bouncing him slightly on his hip, and paying the fretful sounds no mind whatsoever.
    Hamper Caisse emerged from the stairwell so deep in conversation with his client that he almost collided with Marcus before he saw him. “Marcus, why don’t you go find some other place to park your sorry carcass.”
    “I have some affidavits you may want to see.”
    “Don’t go waving your papers in my face. You want to see me about something, you come to my office.”
    “These affidavits relate to a case you’re trying this morning.” The man seeking to hide behind Hamper was a caramel doughboy and minus a neck. “Would you happen to be Mr. Duane