The Hidden Law Read Online Free Page A

phone numbers and an envelope addressed to Judge Ryan with the return address of SafeHouse, the same rehab that Gus Peña had been in. I tucked the envelope into my pocket.
    Josh had left the kitchen window open and the room smelled faintly of the anise that grew wild down the side of the hill from our house. He wasn’t there. I poured myself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table with the envelope I’d taken from Deeds’s room. Inside was a letter from Edith Rosen, M.F.C.C., attesting to the fact that Deeds was scheduled to enter SafeHouse the following Monday, three days hence.
    “You little shit,” I said aloud, but what I felt was more grief than anger. In my work, I was used to losing, but I thought I’d staked out a tiny victory with Deeds.
    But then, I’d always had a weakness for junkies, for their defeated, helpless charm. Of course I knew better. My own fight with the bottle had taught me intimately everything there was to know about addiction. Drunks and junkies all had a big hole in their gut that sucked in panic like Pandora’s box in reverse unless it was already filled by booze or a fix. Eventually, that stopped working, and the panic went out of control until the only thing left was dying. Sometimes, like Deeds, death is what you got and sometimes, like me, you were given a reprieve, but there was no logic about it. Even if you lived, the panic was still there. It only faded when you began see it for what it was, the long drop from darkness to darkness, and you stopped fighting.
    At that moment I could feel the panic elbowing me, tossing up the image of Deeds in that grisly motel bathroom, reminding me of every grisly room through which I had stumbled drunk, so close to dying myself. And when that didn’t get me going, the panic asked, “Where’s Josh?” a sure-fire tactic. I got up from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom, switching on the lamp and stretching out on the bed, still unmade from that morning. A book was half-buried in the covers, the paperback edition of Borrowed Time, Paul Monette’s moving tale of his lover’s death of AIDS. Josh had been reading it.
    It was after eleven. The demonstration was certainly over by now.
    I sat up and fumbled for the TV remote control, flicking on the set at the foot of the bed. I switched channels until I found some local news, looking for a report about the Act Up demonstration. Instead, I found myself watching Agustin Peña, standing against the backdrop of the city council chamber, his arm draped around his son who gazed at his father with a look that conveyed a history of betrayal. Peña was saying, “My kids have always made me proud, now I want them to be able to say the same thing about me.” Little Peña didn’t seem to be buying it.
    Watching them, I thought of my father, and about pride and about betrayal. I shut off the TV, got undressed and into bed, ready for a long night.
    “How was the demonstration?” I asked the next morning, pouring myself a cup of coffee as I waited for my bagel to toast. I had been asleep when Josh had come in. Waking beside him, my face against his bare back, I had breathed another man’s smell on his body.
    Shaggy-haired and heavy-lidded, he sat at the kitchen table in boxers, mixing an assortment of liquid vitamins into his organic cranberry juice.
    He looked up at me. “It was great, Henry. The cops were wearing thick plastic gloves and riot helmets. You could tell they were terrified that one of us might bite them.”
    “Anyone get arrested?”
    He finished mixing his holistic cocktail. “No, the cops told us that Antonovich wasn’t even in town, so after an hour we split.”
    The toaster oven clicked and I retrieved my bagel. Buttering it, I asked, as casually as I could manage, “What did you do then?”
    “Drove Steven home,” he said, straining for equal nonchalance. “Sat and talked to him for awhile. Did you find your client?”
    I sat down at the table. “Yes, as a