The next epic crime novel from Jordan Harper, a story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge, and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down.
Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein's monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city.
A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing -- and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime ...
JAKE DEAL is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city's chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud -- until a job he can't refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he'll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt -- and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA's most powerful men, who call themselves "The Kids in the Candy Store."
DOUG GIBSON is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges - he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he's hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he'll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client "commits suicide" in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon - and become a warrior.
KARA DELGADO works for an underground private concierge company - a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties.She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara's the only person who knows that Phoebe's place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city.
As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they'll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion.
Release date:
April 28, 2026
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
320
Reader says this book is...: dark (1) realistic characters (1) unexpected twists (1)
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Brake lights smear red across the dashcam screen. Cars honk; sirens whoop; bass thumps from open windows. The night is electrified.
He tells them, “LA is a Frankenstein’s monster—all these felonies sewn together into something like a city. Stolen land gulping stolen water. Streets paved with corpses. We even went and massacred the sky: smog strangles the air; light pollution buries the stars.”
He tilts the dashcam to show the starless night. A plane coming in for a landing at LAX swoops down low and huge—you could reach up and touch it. It slices through the shot like he planned it. Gooseflesh blooms; clap emojis scroll up the comment bar on the laptop riding shotgun.
See Jake Deal, driving fast. He is long and bony, his seat pushed all the way back; he is tanned, his eyes dark, heavy-lidded, this half smile riding on his face. He’s thirty-three—he calls it the Year He Beats Jesus. His skin is tattoo scribbled like so much notebook paper. People call tattoos permanent—Jake knows nothing is.
He drives one-handed, pans the dashcam to catch Randy’s Donuts, this big fucking donut on the roof—the totem of an American sort of god. He switches lanes, drives over the 405. It’s late; the eight lanes of traffic below actually move. The 405 is LA’s major artery. Every rush hour it clogs to a stop; every evening LA has a fatal heart attack; every night the jam clears and the city rises from the dead.
A chirpy melody from the laptop lets him know someone dropped a fat tip in the chat.
“Thanks, KAOSRIDER_11. Everybody, be like KAOSRIDER _11. Tip, like, subscribe. Purchase salvation. Welcome to the Creepy Crawl.”
The cabin of Jake’s car is a mess of wires and electronics, like the insides of a bomb. The dashcam feeds to the laptop. Jammed in the center console: A Uniden police scanner. A digital camera and extra camcorder ride in the back. Jake’s Bluetooth earpiece/mic combo patches his voice in with the dashcam video and police scanner feed. The laptop livestreams it all through a wireless router to the Creepy Crawl audience. It’s a full house; Friday night in South Central guarantees at least one hit of pure, clean madness.
Tasty smoke blows in from a gas station parking lot rib crib. He tilts the dashcam: check out the oil-drum smoker. The cam catches a bus stop bench, an ad for a defense attorney: this corny guy in a suit with boxing gloves, the slogan I’LL FIGHT FOR YOU. The scanner spits static, spits numbers, spits crimes. Nothing worth chasing. Not yet.
He tells them, “I read how scientists call Southern California a cataclysmic region—like, geologists don’t mark time here in months and years—they mark it with catastrophes. Our eras are defined by earthquakes and wildfires, floods and tsunamis.”
The scanner spits a burble of words: a woman in mental health crisis on Tamarack. It’s not worth turning the car around. Mental health calls are a massive bummer—and not in the way his audience craves. Not in the way he craves.
“And we mark time the same way in the city too. Our eras are measured in brutalities and savage nights. We talk about before and after the Zoot Suit Riots. Before and after the Black Dahlia. Watts. Manson. The Night Stalker. Rodney King, the riot, OJ. Before and after the Clout House Massacre and the Bum Bomber, all the way up to right now, the LA Ripper era.”
Check out the comment bar: they go nuts with knife emojis just at the mention. The LA Ripper: a throwback serial killer like in the old days. Nobody wants to admit how much we missed them. The Ripper is up to three victims and counting. Nobody wants to admit how much it matters that the victims are pretty. Nobody wants to admit how much it matters that the victims are white.
“Everybody wants to know, who is the LA Ripper? When will he kill again? If you want to hear the whole long murder ballad, I’ll be doing a Ripper tour tomorrow night live on the stream—get the inside stories of each kill, right where it happened. Inner Circle members only, so subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.”
They used to call it nightcrawling, like in that movie—driving LA at high speed, looking for footage, looking for blood on the streets, broken glass, car fires, and corpses. Back then you’d sell the footage to the local TV news departments for Los Angeles to wake up to—murder and mayhem as part of a healthy breakfast. It used to be a living, back before everybody in the world had a phone with a camera. Nowadays footage is cheap; nowadays tragedy is a buyer’s market.
Unless you find your angle. Jake has found his: An online audience who want more than little bites of the wildness. They want to gorge on it. They live through the screen, in these lurid dreams he sells them. He shows them the world they want to see: this city as a neon-lit, bullet-pocked war zone. He’s got the Creepy Crawl live feed, social media for the tamer photos, and the VIP-level Inner Circle for access to uncensored blood and bodies.
He cruises east on Manchester, looking for action. He moves the camera to catch a locksmith, a taco spot, a pay-by-the-hour motel. Up top, a billboard for the new Tarzan sequel, the blond dipshit actor’s face graffiti tagged, spray-painted with letters five feet tall: LA IS NOT SAFE.
He tells them, “Something wild happened today. You see it? They actually put cuffs on a rich guy. I’m talking about Hollywood sicko Eric Algar. Word is, he’s been abusing teen actresses forever. Allegations going back more than a decade. They didn’t race across town to bust him, huh? Cops drive slow when they’re heading uphill.”
He heads south on Western, turns the dashcam to catch a woman on the corner, her shopping cart filled past her head, her shirt bright red, FUCK FENTANYL blazed across her chest.
“So this business-class sex fiend gets away with it for years. Nothing new, right? Like the man says, this is America—”
The scanner cuts in—“Robbery in progress, shots fired, 1541 Florence respond Code 3, ambulances en route.”
Here we go.
Jake stomps the gas and pulls a hard U-turn in mid-street. The g-forces tickle his balls, tickle his soul.
He says it again with the joy of the chase: “Like the man says, this is America. And get it straight—this is America. Los Angeles is the Great American City. New York? A hangover from the lost continent of Europe. And the folks in the middle want to think that we’re something different than them, something foreign. Like looking into a mirror and not recognizing your own face. Check again, friends. Los Angeles is America, and America is us.”
He swerves around a double-parked Jeep, dodges oncoming traffic. Gas, brake, gas, swerve, brake, gas—go.
“We are America dreaming itself. We’re a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We’re cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky—please rise for our national anthem, am I right?”
He picks up speed. The light turns red. He rockets through it. Pissed-off horns chorus on both sides. He glances down at the chat, watching it roil with HELL YEAHs and mushroom-cloud animations. He turns hard onto Florence—tires sing. This high, wild laugh comes out of him.
Sometimes life reminds you it started with a lightning strike.
“They used to say, ‘Go west, young man.’ This is it: as west as it gets, our destiny manifested, for good or fucking ill.”
The dashcam catches the restaurant up ahead, people standing aimless. Cop car cherries splash the scene in blue, then red, blue, then red.
He tells them, “LA is America with no place left to run. LA is America with its back against the wall.”
He parks like a crash landing.
He says, “Let’s fucking go.”
He points the dashcam, gets the view through the restaurant window: All these people looking down at something on the floor. Something they can’t stop looking at.
“Okay, Creeps, enjoy the show.”
A commentor says, come on man take us inside. Jake kills the engine, grabs his camera.
“Hey now. If you want to see beyond the veil, subscribe to the Inner Circle. I’ll show you this secret world that’s right in front of your eyes, the world the way it really is. You’re watching the Creepy Crawl—in the strange, confronting the Real.”
He kills the mic, opens the door. Noises bum-rush him: sirens in surround sound, planes taking off and landing crisscross overhead, people shouting, people keening, all of it whipped into this white-noise hymn. Jake sings along under his breath as he crosses the street.
The crowd mills; the crowd rumbles; the crowd films one another with their phones.
The parking lot is calamity—but check out the Rolls parked in front. This beautiful young woman leans against it; tears dig pink canals through blood spatter on her cheeks. Jake points and shoots—pure instinct. She’s too deep in whatever hole she’s in to notice.
The Rolls and the girl hint at something bigger than just another South Central tragedy. Jake walks faster. The crowd parts, shoots side-eyes, sees him for what he is: an outsider with a camera, a whiteboy with a profit motive.
The crime scene a freeze-frame of chaos: knocked-over chairs, spilled chicken and waffles on abandoned tables. Two bored LAPD unis stand over a young Black man, dead on the floor of the restaurant.
The cops look at Jake, see his camera. The looks on their faces read just another bloodsucker.
Jake gives them a smile like right back at you.
“Don’t step in it,” one says. She goes back to her phone.
Jake raises the camera. The viewfinder turns the world hyperreal—even the dead glow. He trains the camera on the body on the ground—a shock of recognition: Chicago rapper OZ Dash. His underground mixtape blew up last year. He recorded it from prison, on a jail phone—the tinny vocals just add to the realness. He signed with a label right out the prison gate. Maybe he came to LA to celebrate. Maybe he didn’t read the posted signs: LA IS NOT SAFE.
Famous and dead make this a real-money gig. As long as Jake gets the shot. He gets closer to the body, counts four holes across Dash’s chest. Wings of blood spread under the body. Jake gets the shot. Purple welts rise on Dash’s neck, shaped like the chains his killers ripped off him. Jake gets the shot. A peek of metal where his shirt rides up: the pistol his killers didn’t give him time to grab. Jake gets the shot.
Jake remembers being told always get their face. Jake knows right away who will buy the photos. Jake gets in close. Dash’s eyes are wide open so they can take in the Big Nothing. The thing that everyone runs away from. The thing that everyone can’t stop searching for. Jake gets the shot.
Some big shiver comes through him. He lets it wash through. This is it. This is the moment. Life lived down to the marrow. The life his subscribers chase but will never know. Most people spend their days peering through smeared screens, living by proxy, afraid to break the glass and step into the world. Jake knows how that life of safety and endless scrolling is its own sort of death. He knows how almost everybody these days is committing suicide on the subscription model.
“He famous?” one of the cops asks Jake.
“Was gonna be.”
The cop takes out his cell phone and snaps a picture. He does it on the down-low—the Kobe Bryant crash put a twenty-eight-million-dollar price tag on cop snuff pics. It taught them to have a little discretion.
Back in the car, everything glows like he’s still looking through the viewfinder.
He keeps the dashcam on the restaurant, lets the Creeps watch the crime scene unfold in the red/blue light show. He hooks his Canon to the laptop, starts sorting pictures. The worst go to trash, the mid pictures to Instagram, the hardcore ones to the Inner Circle subscriber page. The best ones he’ll try to sell right now.
He scrolls through his contacts: Michelle Weiss, founder of online gossip website Truth or Dare. It was her voice he’d heard in his head, standing over Dash’s corpse.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Well, well, well. The prodigal son of a bitch returns.”
“I’ve got wet blood to sell, Michelle. Who else am I gonna call?”
The old rhythms come back quick.
“Make it a quickie, chico. It’s a busy night: this big-time Hollywood pedo just got arrested and there’s some rapper who just got perforated down in—”
“OZ Dash, Chicago rapper, just got got in Inglewood—”
“Are you—”
“I’m there. I got clean, pro-level shots of the body, fresh death in 4K—I can let you have them for a price.”
“Send them.”
“Already did.”
She makes noises like she’s eating something delicious as she scrolls through the snuff pics. He drums a beat on the steering wheel. He thinks about the old days: same city, different planet, working for Michelle as a Hollywood nightlife writer. Famous faces and VIP rooms and so many goddamn secrets. He swallows hard—he tastes the ghost of cocaine drip.
Michelle’s voice snaps him out of it.
“The pretty Black girl with the blood on her face—the girlfriend?”
“If I had to guess.”
“Bad news for her. The internet lights torches as we speak. She put a picture of him on her feed an hour ago, in the restaurant, chicken on his plate, chains on his neck. She geotagged the photo, let every jacker in the hood know where to find him. Looks like they did.”
Across the street, the girl stands alone, weeping, looking at her phone.
Jake says, “So you’re about to make her the wrong kind of famous.”
“No such thing,” Michelle says. “I’ll take them. Right now. A thousand no arguing. They’re good pics, but the audience can find shitty ones for free online right now, so…”
“Anybody ever tell you you’re cheap and sleazy?”
“You called me, chico.”
“I’ll take the grand.”
“Beautiful. Now I got to run, we’ve got perverts and killers and mug shots oh my.”
She clicks off without saying goodbye.
He closes his eyes. He sees Dash’s dead body. He lets it happen. He knows he’ll see the body again and again—and then one day he won’t. In the end, even ghosts die. More or less.
He sits a long beat. He watches Dash’s girlfriend across the street, her phone in her hand, blood on her face. He figures she’s scrolling through death threats and hate speech. He figures she’s scrolling through his photos of her murdered man. He thinks about how the two of them are connected through particles of shared air, through pictures sailing up to space and then raining back down. The two of them are intertwined together forever in this weird way even though they will never meet.
He pushes the thoughts away. They don’t mean anything.
He starts the car, clicks back onto the mic. He tells them, “Hope you’re enjoying the show. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Inner Circle for the real dank shit. And if you dig it, tell your friends you’ve seen hell, and I planned the trip.”
He pulls out onto Florence. Late-night traffic passing the restaurant has jammed. Cars slow down as they pass by.
He tells them, “Everybody taps their brakes when there’s blood on the pavement.”
He tells them, “Maybe it’s wrong to let the violence juice you. Maybe it’s sick to chase the chaos. But like the man says, if you can’t be cured, you might as well enjoy your symptom.”
He sees a police chopper in the air a few miles ahead of him, turning in a tight circle, the night sun on its belly pointing a finger of light down into the city.
He tells them, “There is no solution. This place is a crime that can’t be solved. And that’s why we love it.”
He stomps the gas. He follows the night sun. He takes them back into the darkness.
Doug Gibson drives past razor wire. In the rearview mirror a strip mall glows, neon signs on every storefront: BAIL BONDS 24 HOURS. It’s night, but somehow Men’s Central Jail casts a shadow. This squat building framed against the sky, featureless and stark—like the black bar censors place over something they don’t want you to see.
Men’s Central: the biggest jail in Los Angeles County, the biggest jail system in the world.
See Gibson as he hits the night air: forty-seven, in a Koreatown-tailored pinstripe suit that’s tight in the middle. A strong jaw softened by loose skin. His hair is slicked back, black and gray. A pinkie ring on his right hand, the kind of ring a prosecutor would never wear. In his world everyone knows to look their part. Across the street, on a bus stop bench: Gibson in a suit and boxing gloves, seven years thinner. His slogan underneath: I’LL FIGHT FOR YOU. The taggers leave the ad alone—he might spring them someday.
He checks his phone on the move. A text from Shelley—a video of little kids playing with goats. The usual spray of emails from his assistant, Morgan: a client arraignment in El Monte for conspiracy and sales of controlled substances, a meeting Monday with some kid charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with gang enhancements. There are always new charges, new motions, new trials. The thing we call justice never stops eating.
Closer to the jail you can see its inhuman design. The slitted windows make Gibson think of nuclear reactor vents. He opens the door marked VISITORS’ ACCESS. The light that spills out is sodium yellow. Gibson thinks about radiation again. Things that poison you slowly in ways you can’t see.
A text pops up: I’m ready to transfer your retainer.
Most of his new clients reach out from the jail phone, or the call comes from a mother or girlfriend or the bar panel. This text came from a personal assistant.
Gibson doesn’t have clients with personal assistants.
“Eric needs a lawyer right away,” Minhal, the assistant, had told Gibson on the phone. There had been fear in her voice. Maybe she was scared for her boss. Maybe she was scared of him. “They aren’t letting him out. He told me to call you.”
He knew who Eric Algar was—he’d been reading the LA Times when she called. Eric Algar, tween TV megaproducer arrested for sex crimes. The article said he’d been named as a predator in a PR leak a few months back—with hints that his crimes went back decades.
He texts the assistant back: don’t send the money yet.
There are big clients. There are hot clients. This client is a load of white phosphorus, ready to burn up the air itself. Gibson’s smart enough to be scared. Even as he walks double-speed into the fire.
The waiting area outside the attorney room is crowded with lawyers and sad women. Wives and girlfriends and moms, all of them Black or brown, most of them looking like gravity is heavier where they live. Gibson has met with hundreds of women like them, explaining bail, explaining what the charges are, telling them what they can and can’t say in the visiting room. If it’s their first time, they look wide-eyed, unbelieving. It’s part of the job to let them know they aren’t the ones who are crazy.
If it’s not their first time, you don’t have to explain anything. If it’s not their first time, they look at you through masks, through eyes that don’t show you a thing. Like veterans of some invisible war where the shooting never stops.
A sharp voice cuts through the murmur. “There’s been a mistake.”
The voice comes from a man facing the check-in desk. His suit looks like it costs three of Gibson’s. He’s got a hunk of gold on his wrist—mid five figures easy.
The deputy leans back in his chair. He says, “I’m telling you, sir, he says he’s not your client.” The way he can make sir sound like asshole—the man’s worked a desk a long time.
The lawyer turns away from the desk, his face like why hath thou forsaken me? Gibson clocks him: Frederick Kim. The high-powered defense attorney in LA. Kim is expensive; he’s celebrity certified. He was one of Robert Blake’s lawyers; he sprung the Bum Bomber. He’s made of sweetheart pleas, high-level connections, deals cut over small plates in Brentwood bistros. He’s the Platinum Plus version of justice the rich can buy themselves. Exactly the person you’d expect Eric Algar to call.
Gibson steps past Kim, flashes his bar card to the deputy behind the desk.
“Doug Gibson, for Eric Algar.”
Gibson can see himself reflected in Kim’s smug eyes. The way a first-class flyer eyeballs you on your way back to coach. Kim’s teeth are bleached and polished like porcelain. His smile says oh, aren’t you cute.
Gibson’s hands make fists. “Frederick Kim.”
“Doug Gibson.”
“There seems to have been a mix-up, Mr. Gibson. I’m presenting myself as counsel for Eric Algar. Let me be a part of the team, on a consulting basis. I’ve worked with Algar’s legal team for years—”
“Man gets to choose his own lawyer. I don’t see the mix-up.”
“Algar isn’t some gangbanger caught with his hand in the cookie jar. There are intricacies at work here that I can help you navigate.”
Right now, the question of why Algar would choose him over Kim doesn’t matter—all that matters is that he knock that smile out of Kim’s mouth.
Gibson says, “This is Men’s Central. I know my way around.” He leans in close, talks softly. “Look around, friend. You’re the one who’s lost.”
He steps past Kim to the deputy.
“Eric Algar, please.”
The deputy waves Gibson to the gate.
Kim’s too much a pro to let the anger show. It’s sweet anyway.
You feel the gate closing behind you each time. The clank and the thud. Locked in a place the sun never touches. You can feel the machine rumbling, here in its tubes. You can feel the terrible fission of men, the subsonic rumble of lives bouncing off one another, splitting and mutating.
A deputy leads Gibson out of the visiting room—eyes strictly forward, this heavy silence. Gibson has met him before. Gibson put him on the stand last year and grilled him about the 3000 Boys, as much as the judge would let him.
It goes like this: The sheriff’s department runs the Los Angeles jail system. The deputy gangs run the sheriff’s department. The jails are the turf of the 3000 Boys. Every couple of years somebody runs another exposé on the gangs—how they share gang ink and gang laws, how they dish out head-stomp justice and choke-hold vengeance. Every three years or so the people on the outside read the articles and cluck their tongues like so sad, then get on with their lives. After all, nothing that happens inside is their business. All they do is foot the bill.
Eric Algar says, “It’s like being swallowed by a maniac. Like I’m living in his skull. There’s voices all over the place; they never stop. Screaming, laughing, gibbering at the goddamn moon.”
Algar had been a kid actor back in the day—he’s never lost the chubby cheeks or the big eyes. Now in his fifties, sitting on the other side of the visiting-room glass, he has a decrepit kid face, stubbled and bloated. Red wine and luxury leave their scars same as anything.
Algar says, “There’s fires burning all over. Guys cooking in their cells—I mean open flames, smoke. And it’s goddamn freezing. Fire and freezing at the same time, swear to Christ. And there’s shit smeared on the walls. Blood and shit and who knows what else. You get in here and you figure out real quick, Dante didn’t know shit about shit.”
Gibson gives him a nod like I hear you. This is how it is with white clients—they get outraged the moment something that has existed their whole lives suddenly turns around and touches them. Gibson tries to think about the last time he had a white client. He draws a blank.
Algar rubs his face with his hands. “Look at me, showing you my belly right off the bat.” When he takes his hands away, he’s slapped on a smile. “I’ve seen your ad on a bus stop bench.” He holds his hands up like a boxer. “You’re the one who went after the cops who caught that guy on fire last year, am I right?”
“That’s me.”
“You went after them with a meat hook. Goddamn beautiful. Cops don’t scare you?”
“This is what I do. I’m all fight, no flight.”
Algar laughs. “All fight, no flight, huh? I like that. So how soon until you get me out of here?”
“We need to get something straight,” Gibson says. “I’m not your lawyer—not now, maybe never.”
“You didn’t get the retainer? I told Minhal—”
“I told her to not send it yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Jesus Christ, man, I went on my last audition when I was fourteen years old. I don’t try out for you; you try out for me.”
A fact flashes across Gibson’s brain: he doesn’t like Eric Algar. But liking the client isn’t part of the gig. Another fact: Shelley won’t like him taking this job. That matters more.
He tells Algar, “It’s not an audition. See, I tend to work with clients who are disadvantaged—”
“So you get off on being some sort of hero, getting killers and junkies out on the street.”
“You’ve been charged with the creation and possession of child pornography, Mr. Algar—”
“Real goddamn cute. Guess you’d like me better if they charged me with a drive-by, huh? And what, you’re allergic to money or something?”
“Hey, I like money. But I don’t like working for rich people. They don’t just think they’re buying a service. They think they’re buying me. I’m not for sale, not like that.”
Algar shifts in his seat. His eyes blink hard, like he’s taken a picture of Gibson in his head.
Gibson asks, “You got money on your books?”
“What?”
“For the commissary, you need to get some money sent in so you can buy things.”
“What do I need that for? You’re getting me out of here.”
“I haven’t agreed to be your lawyer yet. Anyway, you can’t get arraigned until Tuesday.”
“It’s Friday night!”
“You got arrested the worst time someone can get pinched. They’ve refused you bail before arraignment. Somebody wants you to cook for the weekend.”
“Those bastards…”
“I’ll make a call, get you K status—”
He sees the huh? on Algar’s face
“Protective custody. You’re high-profile, you need protection. I can do that for you. It doesn’t mean I should be your lawyer. For one thing, I don’t have any experience with sex crimes. There are lawyers out there who do. And I should tell you, I ran into Frederick Kim outside—”
The rage comes on like yanking open a blackout curtain at noon. Algar slams his hands on the table. This big vein cresting on the side of his face.
“The balls on these smug pricks. I don’t want Kim. I need someone who isn’t in with them.”
“In with who?”
“I’m Samson over here,” Algar says. “I got my hands on the pillars of this whole goddamn town.”
“What does that mean?”
Algar shakes his head like a wet dog, smiles. His mask back on tight.
“I don’t want Frederick Kim. I want a scrapper. Like you. And I want you to get me out of here. Get me my bail. That’s job number one.”
Algar is hiding something. Add it to the pile of reasons for Gibson to walk, alongside how it will put a spotlight on him, the way Shelley will worry about what her friends and clients will think. It will take time away from his other clients, people who need him. It will draw him more clients from a world he doesn’t want to deal with. But most of all, it’s Algar’s rage and his secrets that make it the smart move to walk away.
So Gibson doesn’t know why he says, “I’ll handle the bail hearing—”
Algar smiles like he’s won. Maybe he has.
“—and then we’ll talk about finding you more suitable counsel. But for now, I’ll get to work.”
Algar says, “Just get me out of here.”
Gibson says, “We’ll put together a package, make a strong argument to the judge. I’ll need a list of assets, a description of your businesses, your ties to the community.”
“Yeah, sure. Just tell Minhal I said give you what you need.”
“You’ve got no priors, you have assets to put up as collateral, you’re too well-known to go on the lam. They’ll want you to give up your passport, we can do that. We can offer up house arrest as an alternative. So we’ve got things to work with.”
Algar nods like he’s not listening. “Whatever you need. Just get me out of here.”
“I can’t promise you a result. I can promise you I’ll work like hell to get you out.”
“That’s why I called you. ’Cause you’re a fighter.”
Later, looking at the corpse, Gibson will wonder how he didn’t see what was coming. For Algar, and for him. He’ll wonder if maybe he saw it coming the whole time.
The stereo plays an urgent love song in a language Kara can’t understand. This raw beauty in the rideshare driver’s native tongue. All this yearning fills the air, works its way inside Kara. Purple tracers dot the night. Outside her window, crowds pack the sidewalks, stand in line for nightclubs, everyone laughing, yelling, the hum of it bleeding through the glass. Streetlights and headlights make little rainbows where they hit the glass. She thinks about how you make a rainbow by slicing up light, how the glow gets slashed into beauty.
She is so high.
A voice in her ear: “Hello? Are you still there?”
She remembers where she is, what she is doing. She says into her phone, “He’s a famous Norwegian six-foot-four god of a man with a million dollars in jewels around his neck. How hard can he be to find?” She clicks off the call.
See Kara: thirty years old, five feet three, her
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