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Authors: Mark Gimenez

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BOOK: The Perk
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"Maybe he'll flunk out."

"Of what? P.E.? He's a fifth-year senior.
Turns nineteen September three, so he's still eligible and he's taking one P.E.
class to stay eligible."

"He's two months from nineteen?"

"Yep. Quentin held him back in kindergarten
and again in seventh grade so he'd have two extra years to get bigger. He
did. Lots of dads do that now. Soon as the season's over, he's enrolling at
UT."

"In the middle of his senior year?"

He spat. "All the big football factories get
their quarterback recruits enrolled for the spring semester, so they'll be
there for spring training. Get a jump on next season."

"What about being a kid—senior class trip, prom?"

"Don't mean squat when you're on the fast
track to the NFL."

"Doesn't sound like much fun."

"It ain't supposed to be. Slade goes first
in the draft, he'll get sixty million with a ten-million signing bonus. How'd you
like to be twenty-one with ten million bucks in your pocket? Football ain't
about having fun. It's about making money."

Beck shook his head. "High school football
is more complicated these days."

"You don't know the half of it." Aubrey
stared out at the field where the boys were now running sprints the length of
the field; Slade was out in front by twenty yards. Aubrey spat. "But if
we do win state, I might quit anyway. Figure I might could trade up for a
college job, maybe ride Slade to an assistant spot with UT. Better pay, might
be able to get Randi back."

"Randi Barnes?"

Beck and Mary Jo and Aubrey and Randi had double-dated
all through high school. Randi was two years younger.

Aubrey nodded. "We dated till she
graduated, got married that summer. But you know Randi, she always wanted more.
Left me a few years back, moved to Austin. Ain't seen her since."

"Do y'all have kids?"

Aubrey recoiled almost as if Beck had hit him.

"J.B. didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

Aubrey's eyes dropped and he stared down, as if
searching for an answer in the brown puddle of tobacco juice. He spat.

"We had a girl. She died … four years,
six months, five days ago today. On New Year's Eve. She was only sixteen."

"Jesus, Aubrey, I'm sorry."

Aubrey's jaw muscles flexed like he was chewing
on the past. He spat.

"She was murdered, Beck."

"
Murdered?
By whom?"

"Don't know. He gave her cocaine, she
OD'd."

"How do you know he gave it to her?"

"She didn't do drugs, Beck. She was a good
girl."

"No, I mean, how do you know she was with a
guy?"

"They got his DNA."

"From what?"

Aubrey looked like he might cry. "Semen."

"Was she raped?"

"Same difference, drugging her like that.
She couldn't have known what she was doing or she wouldn't have done it. But
it don't matter—she was sixteen and that ain't legal." Aubrey stiffened
up. "We got his DNA, Beck, we just don't got him. And we've only got
five months and twenty-six days to get him. I keep a calendar."

"What do you mean?"

"I mark off each day since she died—"

"No. The 'five months and twenty-six days'?"

"Oh. Five-year statute of limitations on
statutory rape. Runs out midnight New Year's Eve."

"Aubrey, I'm not a criminal lawyer, but if
he gave cocaine to a minor and she died, that's got to be murder, or at least
manslaughter. And there's no statute of limitations on murder or
manslaughter."

Aubrey was shaking his head. "That's the
problem—gotta prove he gave it to her. He'll just deny it and who's to say
otherwise? D.A. says no way he could get a conviction on murder or
manslaughter."

He spat.

"But he can't deny the DNA. If he was three years older than her, ain't no defense to stat rape, even if she let him. He's
going to prison—if we find him in time. D.A. says if he's not indicted by
midnight on New Year's Eve, he's a free man forever." Aubrey stared out
at the field, then said in a quiet voice, "He dumped her in a ditch,
Beck. Out 290 East by the city limits sign."

"The white cross."

Aubrey nodded.

"So what's happening with the case? Are the
police still looking for this guy?"

Aubrey shook his head. "Sheriff—she was on
the county side of the line—he says there's nothing left to do. They got DNA from every male in the county fifteen and over. No matches."

"Stutz ordered that?"

"Nope. Sheriff asked. Everyone came
forward on their own, even the Mexicans, at least the legals. Dads brought
their boys in. No one wanted to be a suspect."

"That wouldn't have happened in Chicago."

"Small town, Beck. Everyone would know who
refused."

"So this guy was an outsider? Or an
illegal?"

"Mexicans know better than to come around German
girls. He was an outsider, I'm sure of it."

Aubrey stared at his players for a time. Then
he spat and turned to Beck.

"You do me a favor, Beck, for old times?"

"What kind of favor?"

"Look into her case. Smart lawyer like
yourself, you might see something the sheriff didn't."

"Aubrey, I'm a civil trial lawyer. I'm not
even that right now. I don't know what I could do."

"You can do anything you want to do when
you're the judge. Word around town is, you're gonna run."

"Word around town?" Then Beck
remembered. "J.B. was in town this morning."

"I heard about it over at the Java Ranch.
Coffee shop on Main. Got the whole town talking."

"I haven't decided yet."

"Well, now, that creates a bit of a
problem."

"Why's that?"

" 'Cause I told everyone I'm backing
you."

"Aubrey, every lawyer in town is going to
file."

"Every lawyer in town didn't win the state
championship."

Aubrey gazed into the sky. Beck looked up: a
red-tailed hawk was circling in the distance like a kite on a string.

"You're her only hope, Beck."

"Her hope for what?"

"Justice."

There was that word. Beck Hardin knew all about
justice. At Notre Dame, Beck the law student had asked about justice; an old professor
had said, "Justice? Mr. Hardin, justice is God's domain. Our domain is
the law. A good lawyer never confuses the two." So Beck the lawyer had
not expected justice. But Beck the man had, only to learn that there was no
justice in this life, not for his wife or his mother … or for Aubrey's
daughter. But he saw the same hope in Aubrey's eyes that he had seen in Annie's
eyes and in the eyes of the other patients in the chemo room when he had taken
her in for treatments, the desperate hope that there was still justice to be
had in life. The same desperate hope he now saw in his own eyes each morning
when he shaved.

"Aubrey, even if I won, by the time I took
office, there'd only be three months left before the statute runs."

"How much do you charge, as a lawyer?"

"Eight hundred an hour."

He spat. "I can hire you for six hours and
… twenty-two minutes."

"Aubrey, you're not paying me."

"The sheriff's holding back on me, Beck,
not telling me everything he knows. He might talk to you."

"Why would he withhold information?"

"I don't know. You're my lawyer—ask
him."

Aubrey reached to his other side and grabbed a
cane. He struggled to his feet. Surgical scars ran down both sides of his right
leg, which was noticeably thinner than his left leg.

"You are my lawyer, aren't you, Beck?"

Beck exhaled and pulled his eyes off the scars.
He looked up at his old friend and nodded.

"Yeah, Aubrey, I'm your lawyer."

"Thanks, Beck. I'll pay you, least until
you're the judge."

"I don't want your money, Aubrey."

Beck stood, and they shook hands again. Aubrey
nodded down at Luke.

"He your only kid?"

"I've got a girl, Meggie. She's five."

"And you don't have a clue about raising
girls?"

"No."

"I didn't either. Mine died in a ditch—and
I don't know why." Aubrey wiped his eyes. "Find out what happened
to my girl, Beck, so yours don't end up in a ditch, too."

Beck stepped down the bleachers. He and Luke
turned to walk away, but Beck stopped and turned back. He called up to Aubrey.

"What was her name, your daughter?"

Aubrey spat then called down to him.

"Heidi."

FIVE

Drive north out of town on Ranch Road
965 and the landscape turns from white to pink—from limestone to granite—as you
climb onto the Llano Uplift, an underground granite mass seventy miles wide.
Granite outcroppings dot the rugged terrain, granite bluffs rise from low
creeks, and granite boulders lie scattered across the land like God had smote
his kitchen countertop into a million little pieces. And the biggest piece of
granite in these parts is the Rock.

"We're gonna climb that?"

Directly in front of them stood a four-hundred-twenty-five-foot-tall
pink granite dome jutting out of the earth like the round tip of a granite
iceberg. The above-ground portion comprised one square mile, the underground
portion one hundred square miles. It'd been there a billion years.

Eleven thousand years ago, the first human
climbed the Rock. More followed: the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca; the Indians,
first the Tonkawa, then the Apache, and finally the Comanche; and then the
Texans. Officially known as "Enchanted Rock" because the Indians
believed magical spirits inhabited the caves in the granite, it's now a state
park.

Beck's mother had first taken him up when he was
five. The Rock was her special place; her body was buried on the homestead,
but her spirit lived on here. They had climbed to the summit many times and had
sat and talked, mother and son. She had spoken of life and love and the land.
Beck had often looked at her and thought how beautiful she was; he knew now
that she had been only in her late twenties. Her skin was red from the sun, her
hair blonde from her German heritage, and her hands rough from working goats
all her life. But her heart was as soft and gentle as the warm summer breeze.

After she died, Beck had hitched rides out.
When he turned fourteen and started driving off the homestead, he came out once
a week, sometimes twice. He had climbed the Rock over two hundred times; the
last time was the day before he had left for Notre Dame. But by then, his
heart had become as hard as the granite. Now his son's heart had been hardened
by life.

"That's a big rock," Luke said.

But Beck saw the sense of challenge in his son's
eyes.

"Let's do it."

They were wearing sneakers, shorts, tee shirts,
and Chicago Cubs caps. They each packed a bottle of water. It was a hundred
degrees, but a fresh breeze always blew out here, and there were at least fifty
acres of open land and a thousand trees for every human being in the Hill
Country. There was no smog, no concrete reflecting the heat, no brown haze
hanging over the farm-to-market roads, and no heavy industry dumping pollutants
into the air that trapped the heat like a blanket.

There was only the land.

They walked through a gazebo that had been added
since Beck's last visit and onto a crushed granite trail. Small granite blocks
served as steps up a path wandering through the native grasses, cacti, mesquite,
and oak trees, and massive blocks bordered both sides like a granite gauntlet.
Beck pointed to the yellow blossoms of the cacti.

"Prickly pear."

Beck's mother had educated him about the Rock's
ecosystem. He could distinguish a live oak from a post oak from a blackjack
oak; a Texas persimmon from an agarita shrub; bluestem grass from grama grass;
rock squirrels from fox squirrels. Farther up the trail, Beck spotted a gray
creature darting into the underbrush.

"Look, Luke, an armadillo."

They soon arrived at the mushroom rock, a granite
boulder shaped by weathering into the form of a giant mushroom. It marked the
base of the Rock, where the tree line ended and the dome turned barren like the
hairline on an old man's bald head. They stepped around the mushroom rock and began
the ascent. The grade steepened so they leaned forward for leverage; the wind
quickened. Beck turned his cap backward so the current didn't sweep it up into
the blue sky where two black turkey vultures circled overhead in hopes of a fat
rodent or a fallen climber.

They climbed around sheets of granite three feet
thick and fifty feet long that had sheared off and slid down the dome like
sheets of ice down a glacier until friction had finally halted their descent. They
stepped over small patches of cacti and fairy sword ferns sprouting from fractures
in the granite face and granite blocks on which lichens had taken root and
spread out like a nasty orange-and-yellow rash. Luke's young legs were taking
the climb with ease; Beck's surgically repaired knees throbbed with each step.
When he was eighteen, he had run the Rock.

By the time they made the summit, they had sweated
through their shirts. But the wind at 1,825 feet above sea level soon dried
them. They drank the water and took in the view. Luke's head turned in every
direction and his eyes were alive; for a brief moment, he was that
adventure-loving boy again. He pointed northeast. Over on Turkey Peak two climbers were standing on the summit with their arms spread like Rocky Balboa.

Beck turned in a circle, a 360-degree view of the
Hill Country. Smaller granite hills—Little Rock, Freshman Mountain, Buzzard's Roost, Flag Pole—looked like Rock wannabes; across Echo Canyon over on Little Rock huge granite chunks hung on the side of the rock as if daring
gravity to pull them down. The distant ridgeline stood in sharp relief against
the blue sky. The water of Moss Lake glistened in the sunlight.

BOOK: The Perk
10.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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