Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (3 page)

All right. Maybe not
entirely
his fault. Stefan had behaved like a jackass. Even so. Stefan was in the country illegally, and he was in the country illegally because Petrak had told him to come. This had seemed like a good idea at the time. Stefan was in Canada, and it took nothing at all to get across the Canadian border into the United States. Stefan didn’t even bother to tell their aunt and uncle that he was going until he had already gone.

Of course, that had been Petrak’s idea, too. He was the older one. He was the one who was supposed to have the intelligence and the experience and the maturity to—

Petrak recognized the patter of footsteps behind him, the particular shotgun click of the heels, the odd almost-limping sound of a slight shuffle. Dr. Loftus spent a fair amount of time chasing him in hallways.

He stopped and turned around to wait for her. She was a small woman, barely five foot two, compact and neat looking. She was also indescribably old. Petrak was sure she was at least sixty.

“Petrak,” she said as she reached him, breathing just a little too hard.

“I’m sorry,” Petrak said, “I would stay to talk, but—”

“But you have that court date for your brother,” Dr. Loftus said. “Yes, I remembered. I could tell you were having a hard time paying attention today. And I don’t blame you. I know you’re very conscientious, but you could have taken today off. I would have understood.”

There were two kinds of professors at Philadelphia Community College: One kind was like Dr. Loftus, who always understood. The other kind behaved as if every student were an incipient criminal and had to be kept in line in any way possible. After his first semester, Petrak discovered RateMyProfessors.com, and after that, he’d never had to bother with the second kind again, except in mathematics, where there was no alternative.

Dr. Loftus was still out of breath. She stood still for a moment to catch up with herself.

Petrak didn’t want to be rude, but he did want to be going. “I’m supposed to meet the lawyer—”

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Loftus said, “and I really won’t keep you. I only wanted to know, did you get in touch with Kasey Holbrook at Pennsylvania Justice? Because she really can be of help to you and to your brother. And it’s very important. This woman, this Martha Handling—it’s more than just that she’s harsh. Kasey is sure there’s something going on, something worse, and if you don’t fix the something worse, it gets even worse, and—”

“Yes, Professor,” Petrak said, “I understand. But I am supposed to meet the lawyer, and I have to take the bus, so—”

“The bus?” Dr. Loftus looked startled. “Oh, don’t be silly. I’ve got a car. I’ll run you down to the courthouse. This is my only class today anyway, and it’s not as if anybody ever comes to office hours. I’ve got my car right outside. I’ll get you there in no time.”

“Thank you,” Petrak said awkwardly. He felt very, very awkward. He felt, suddenly, very panicked. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t stop feeling that letting Dr. Loftus drive him was exactly the wrong thing to do.

This, Petrak was sure, made absolutely no sense.

Dr. Loftus was fussing around with her tote bag. She came up with an enormous set of keys and jangled them triumphantly.

“There we go,” she said. “Now, come on out with me, and I’ll get you there in no time flat. You don’t want to be late for Martha Handling. The way that woman works, you want to be early. She’d have no compunction at all at starting things before she said she would just so she wouldn’t have to listen to you. It’s the privatization, you understand. It’s like what we talked about in class.”

Petrak did remember something about “privatization,” but it was vague, and things were moving very fast. Dr. Loftus was marching into the large open space that led to the front doors. She was moving fast, much faster than Petrak would have expected somebody that old to move.

The alarm bells were going off in his head, and so was a little voice telling him he was being irrational.

Dr. Loftus pushed open the door to the outside. Petrak raced after her. He got to the door to the outside just before it would have snicked closed.

“Dr. Loftus,” he said.

She was marching on resolutely. He was having trouble keeping up.

“Dr. Loftus,” he tried a second time.

She pressed her key ring, and the lights on a car a half block away blinked.

“Listen,” she said. “This is important. Never say ‘illegal immigrant.’”

They reached the car whose lights had been blinking. It was a new car, shiny and silver. Dr. Loftus unlocked it with the remote.

“Of course,” she said, “I’m sure Martha Handling says ‘illegal immigrant.’ It’s the kind of person she is. She’s the kind of person who’s ruining this country and everything it ought to stand for.”

“Please,” Petrak said.

Most of the time these days, he could think in English, but he wasn’t thinking in English now. The little woman was just marching into the distance at warp speed, and he couldn’t stop her; he couldn’t even explain himself.

She popped open the passenger-side door and told him to get in.

He got in. He tried desperately to think of what to do next. He imagined Stefan sitting in that jail in the jumpsuit thing he’d had on for visiting hours yesterday. Petrak had no idea why, but he still felt absolutely certain that if Dr. Loftus came along, she would ruin everything.

She locked the doors around them, and Petrak realized that the car was a Prius.

4

Mark Granby owed his job to two unshakable realities.

The first was the fact that he was willing to do whatever it took to get the job done, and if “whatever it took” meant something illegal more often than not, he was willing to live with it. That was a decision he had made when he first left Drexel University at the height of the 2008 recession. Everybody you talked to gave the same stupid spiel about striving for excellence and commitment to purpose and blah blah blah crap crap crap. Mark had never understood what any of it meant, and he was pretty sure the recruiters didn’t understand it either. They gave the rap because they wanted to look good if anybody asked about your interview, but what they were really thinking was that this was Drexel, not Penn, and all the real talent was across town.

Mark Granby was a realist. He knew he would never have been able to get into an Ivy League school, even a tenth-rate Ivy League school like Penn. He wasn’t some kind of supergenius, and he really didn’t come from money.

“I don’t come from money. I come from New Jersey,” was what he’d said to the recruiter from Administrative Solutions of America when he went in to talk to him, and as soon as he’d said it, he realized he was going to get the job.

The other reality was something Mark only guessed during his interview, but he’d confirmed it later. Administrative Solutions liked to pretend it was an enormous company, a corporate giant with operations spanning the globe, but it wasn’t really that big, and it wasn’t at all “well regarded.”

As far as Mark could tell, nobody who knew what Administrative Solutions really did wanted to have any part of it. It had taken him only a couple of months on the job to stop telling people the truth about what he did. Then he asked his wife, Bethany, to do the same, and found out she’d been doing it all along.

“I think it just sounds wrong,” she’d told him at the time. “I mean, private prisons. How can there be private prisons?”

Mark hadn’t bothered to give her the spiel he learned in orientation: The prisons weren’t really private. They were Pennsylvania prisons. It was only the administration of the prisons that was private. It was a private sector solution to a public sector problem. Administrative Solutions could run a prison much more cheaply than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could. For one thing, it didn’t have to pay public sector benefits to guards and administrators.

Mark had thought it sounded like a pile of shit then, and he definitely thought it sounded like that now. His job was not to provide a “more cost-effective” administration of Pennsylvania’s prisons. His job was to keep bodies in the beds.

“Think of them like hotels,” Carter Bandwood had said. “The principle is essentially the same. Every empty bed represents a net loss of revenue. Optimal return on investment requires operating at full capacity.”

Mark had never been able to pin down Carter Bandwood’s exact position in the company. He could have been a lowish-level flunky just lucky enough to get a New York office. He could have been one of the owners of the whole shebang. It was hard to get accurate information about who ran Administrative Solutions, or who owned it.

Mark did have one piece of accurate information this morning, though. He knew that Carter Bandwood was panicking.

“She didn’t tell you why she’d suddenly changed her mind about our arrangement?” he asked. “She didn’t give you a clue?”

“She didn’t even tell me she’d changed her mind about the arrangement,” Mark said. “She called this morning, from her car, for God’s sake, because she won’t call from a stable location—oh, no, that would make the calls all too clear—”

“If she didn’t tell you that she wanted to change the arrangement, what did she tell you? What the hell is going on?”

“She told me she had to consider the possibility that, in the event of a criminal investigation, she’d be likely to come out more cleanly if she were the one who walked the information in the door.”

“She meant if she was the one who went to the police and told them about the arrangement.”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“Christ on a crutch. She doesn’t even care that she’d go to jail herself? She doesn’t even care?”

“Carter, honestly, I couldn’t tell you. We were doing that thing again where I could only pick up one word out of three.”

“She would go to jail herself,” Carter said. “If she thinks she wouldn’t, she’s insane. It’s a juvenile court she’s dealing with. The press will go insane.”

“Probably.”

“She didn’t tell you when she was going to do this? Today? Next week? At a press conference? What?”

“She didn’t even tell me that she was going to do this. It’s like I told you. The reception was all crapped up. She refuses to talk anywhere but in her car.”

“Well,” Carter said, “you’re going to have to call her. Or go to see her. You’re going to have to go do something. If she’s going to do this, it’s going to be bad no matter what, but I can tell you it’s going to be a lot worse if we’re not ready for it.”

“Ready for it or not, Carter, I don’t think it’s going to make any difference. We paid a juvenile court judge a lot of money to make sure she sent kids to juvie for as long as possible to make sure the places were, uh, operating at full capacity.”

There was a long, drawn-out silence at the other end of the phone. When Carter Bandwood’s voice came back, it was flat and metallic. It didn’t sound panicked at all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “And if you’re taping this, I’ll find a way to make you dead.”

After that, there was nothing. Mark shut off his phone and then disassembled the recorder device he’d bought at the advice of a private detective he knew. The private detective was the only person Mark had ever known who was more cynical than he was himself.

Somewhere upstairs, somebody flushed a toilet. Mark put the device into his inside jacket pocket and called up. “Bethany? Or is that Kaitlyn? Everybody’s late today.”

Bethany came down the stairs with a towel around her head. “Kaitlyn’s not running late,” she said. “She’s not home.”

“She left early?”

“No,” Bethany said.

Mark looked at his wife. She’d been a pretty girl at school, and she wasn’t bad now. But that wasn’t the point. Her sister was the point.

“We’re going to have to do something about this,” he said.

“We’ve got a judge and a lawyer,” Bethany said. “We are doing something about this. She just needs a little time to grow up.”

“She may not have any more time,” Mark said, tapping his chest.

But then it just seemed wrong, somehow, to bother Bethany with all this, especially when he wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. The only thing he had decided was that he wasn’t going to jail alone, and that didn’t begin to cover the situation.

5

When Russ Donahue first agreed to take a case in juvenile court, he had been more than half convinced that he would fail at it. Lose your temper, lose the argument, his father had always said. The very idea of a “juvenile justice” system made Russ lose his temper. Surely there was something wrong with a country that could think of nothing else to do with its troubled children but lock them up and parade them around in leg irons anytime they went outside.

Russ had seen the leg irons once when he was late for a court session and went around the back way as a shortcut. The kids brought in from juvie had had a delay of their own, or the door they were supposed to use had had something wrong with it, or something. Russ didn’t really know. Still, there they were, lined up along one wall, their hands in cuffs behind their backs, their ankles in irons—as if every one of them were a precocious Jeffrey Dahmer, ready to commit murder and mayhem if given half the opportunity.

That night he’d gone home to Donna and Tommy and the baby and stared at them all through dinner, as if the fact of them could make sense of the fact of what he had seen at court. Tommy was close to the age of many of the kids he had seen. Russ tried and tried to think of something Tommy could do that would make leg irons a necessity. He even tried to think of something Tommy could
want
to do. He’d come up blank. Eight-year-olds didn’t rob banks and gun down all the tellers. They didn’t carjack little old ladies in grocery store parking lots and shoot them in the woods to get their wallets full of one-dollar bills.

Some of the kids against the wall had been older, teenagers at least. That had made a little more sense. Teenagers were at least capable of doing real harm. A seventeen-year-old was more or less an adult—in size and strength, if not in maturity.

Then he found out that there were almost no seventeen-year-olds in that line against the wall, or sixteen-year-olds either. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who had done truly bad things were almost always charged as adults.