Death Rattle

by Alex Gilly

Genres: Police Procedurals; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Every life has its price... A timely thriller for fans of Don Winslow's The Border

When Carmen Vega's boyfriend tries to kill her, she hands over all her savings to a smuggler and sets out from Tijuana in a small, leaky boat. Within sight of the California coast, the boat starts to sink, and its passengers are rescued by border patrol.

Soon, Carmen turns up dead in a privately-operated Migrant Detention Center. Neither Nick Finn, the officer who saved Carmen from drowning, nor his wife, human-rights lawyer Mona Jimenez, are satisfied with the prison's account of what happened to Carmen.

Trouble is, the company that runs the prison is on the verge of signing a billion-dollar procurement contract with Homeland Security. And there are people in this world for whom a billion dollars is worth a lot more than one human life. Or even three.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: July 14, 2020

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 368

Sample

ONE



THERE are two towns named Paradise in California: one in the north, in the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and one in the south, in the treeless desert near the border with Mexico. Mona Jimenez drove around the parking lot of the migrant detention center outside the southern Paradise, looking for a patch of shade to park in. According to her dash, it was an unseasonable ninety-five degrees outside—it was only the first of April. She’d heard someone on the radio say that on average, March had been hotter than the previous July, which would’ve worked as an April Fools’ joke if she hadn’t just spent the past four and a half hours driving over baking mountains and through parched desert, mirages shimmering on the blacktop up ahead, air-conditioning blasting. Now the air-conditioning was making an irritating rattling sound, and Mona was worried. She didn’t need it failing—home was Redondo Beach, four and a half hours in the other direction, and she didn’t think she could take ninety-five degrees for four and a half hours.

But the Paradise Detention Center had been designed for one function only, and that function didn’t extend to providing shade trees in its parking lot for the overheating cars of migrants’ rights attorneys from the coast. In fact, a cynic might argue that the Border Security Corporation of America—the private company that ran the center on behalf of the federal government—had chosen to build its newest facility in the bleached-bone nowhere between Yuma and El Centro precisely to discourage migrants’ rights attorneys from visiting, and at that moment, Mona was feeling cynical. The BSCA legal liaison with whom she’d spoken by phone had warned her to watch her step in the parking lot.

“For what?” she’d said.

“Rattlesnakes.”

There wasn’t a patch of shade to be found anywhere, so Mona parked in the baking sun as near as possible to the detention center itself. She switched off the engine, killing the air-conditioning with it. Then she pressed her forehead against the side-window glass and carefully scanned the ground. She’d never actually seen a rattlesnake in real life, only on TV, and she preferred to keep it that way.

A moment passed. No snake rattled.

Mona sighed, flipped down the sun visor, and checked her face in the vanity mirror. Doesn’t mean they’re not out there, she thought, refreshing her lipstick. Could be just waiting for me to get out. Could be watching from some rattlesnake hidey-hole. Did they even live in holes? How would they dig, without limbs? She checked the ground one more time before opening the door.

Stepping from the air-conditioned car into the bakery-oven heat cut her breath.

“Fuck,” she said, instantly breaking a sweat and regretting the pantsuit she’d put on in the near-dark that morning, dressing quietly so as not to wake her husband, Customs and Border Patrol Marine Interdiction Agent Nick Finn, who’d been working night shifts; she’d chosen the suit because it looked sharp and showed she meant business. She knew from experience that private prisons were operated by men prone to calling women they’d just met sweetheart, and she wanted to preempt that. But the suit was cut from a fabric too heavy for this heat, and she exhaled with relief when she was buzzed into the air-conditioned building. By the time she’d gotten through all the usual formalities (metal detector, pat down, briefcase inspection, surrendering her cell phone, reading the conditions of entry, signing the visitors’ log), she’d almost stopped sweating. So she was disappointed when a guard led her not to a nice cool air-conditioned visiting room but to a fenced-off visitors’ section of the outdoor recreation area, which consisted of a row of picnic tables on a concrete slab laid under a canvas sunshade rigged between pylons. The canvas blocked out the sun’s direct burn, but the air beneath it was still almost unbreathably hot.

Mona took off her jacket, sat down at a table, took out a pen and yellow legal pad, and asked where all the detainees were.

“In the canteen. It’s lunchtime.”

She waited for him to bring out her client. While she waited, she looked round the empty yard; beyond the picnic tables was a long stretch of dirt interspersed with brittle bushes. A few benches with concrete legs had been installed along the perimeter fence, which had razor wire spiraled atop it.

They needn’t have bothered with the fence, she thought; if anyone escaped, the rattlesnakes would get them.

* * *

Mona heard the beep of a scan card and then the clack of a heavy lock, and then a guard led out a black-haired young woman wearing an orange jumpsuit and plastic Adidas sliders. Mona already knew this much about her: her name was Carmen Vega, she was twenty years old, and she had been plucked from a sinking panga while attempting to enter the country illegally. She had had a large amount of cash on her, much of which was lost during the rescue. She was in detention because it wasn’t her first attempt—attempted reentry after removal was a felony, and the new administration had mandated that every case be prosecuted, no matter the circumstances. The new policy, which the administration had dubbed Operation No Return, had been a boon for the for-profit prison business. Carmen had been sent here to Paradise because the government’s own facility in San Bernardino was full. All this Mona had learned from her husband, Nick Finn.

Mona stood and introduced herself. “I’m the lawyer from Juntos,” she said in Spanish. Mona worked for a not-for-profit called Together for a Safe Border. Everyone called it simply Juntos. The two women shook hands, Mona noticing how bright Carmen’s black eyes were, like stones in a shallow stream. They sat down. “First, let me ask, how are you doing in here?” said Mona.

“Fine.” The girl shifted her gaze to the still-virgin page on Mona’s yellow legal pad.

Mona put down her pen. “How’s the food?” she said.

“It’s fine.”

One thing Mona knew, prison food was never fine. “Listen, Carmen,” she said, “I’m not from border patrol. Juntos has nothing to do with the government. We’re on your side. You understand?”

Carmen’s gaze lingered.

Mona could tell she was being sized up. “For me to be able to help you, I need to know you’re telling me the truth. Everything you say to me is confidential. Understand? Everything.”

Carmen nodded. “The food here is disgusting.”

Mona smiled. It was a small truth, a first step. “What about the guards?”

Carmen looked over her shoulder at the dough-bellied man in uniform by the door. “The guards are disgusting, too.”

Mona softened her eyes, waited for more. When nothing came, she said: “Carmen, has anyone forced you to do anything you don’t want to do?”

Carmen shook her head. “Not like that. They violate us with their eyes. And they don’t respect us. They make us eat with plastic cutlery, for our own protection, they say. The knives are useless. We end up eating with our hands like animals.”

Mona wrote it all down. Carmen was warming to her subject.

“The toilets overflowed last night. They didn’t fix it until this morning.”

Mona reflexively scrunched up her nose. Paradise Detention Center was less than a year old. She’d read somewhere that the BSCA had received $15 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Yet the toilets overflowed.

“I bet you can’t wait to get out,” she said.

“I don’t want to go back to Mexico. I’d rather stay here.”

Mona nodded. She could detect Carmen’s Chilango accent. “You told the agent at Long Beach you’re from Tijuana, but you don’t talk like a northerner,” she said.

The girl shrugged. “I grew up in Ciudad Neza,” she said, meaning Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a well-known slum east of the capital. Mona asked how long she’d lived in Tijuana.

“Five years.”

Mona calculated she must’ve left home at fifteen. “Did you finish high school?” she asked.

Carmen shook her head.

“Too boring.”

“Why did you go north to Tijuana?”

The girl hesitated before saying, “To find work in a maquiladora.”

“Which one?”

Carmen gave the name of a company Mona had never heard of. Mona wrote it down. “What do they make?”

“Electric components. For automobiles.”

“How much did they pay you?” Mona asked casually.

“Thirty pesos an hour,” said Carmen.

About a buck eighty. Pure fiction, thought Mona. She knew the real figure the border factories paid the women they employed. And Finn had told her about the money belt and all the cash floating on the water. Far more than Carmen would’ve made working in a factory. She wrote down Carmen’s number anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Carmen shifting in her seat.

“Are you married?” said Mona casually.

“No.”

“A boyfriend?”

“No.”

Mona gave Carmen a friendly smile. “I’m surprised. You’re very pretty. You remind me of someone…”

Carmen didn’t ask who. Her guard stayed up.

Mona softened her eyes. “Let’s talk about how you got here. It must’ve been terrifying when the boat started to sink.”

“The man said it would be safe.”

“Which man?”

“The man in Tijuana.”

She paused, and her expression changed.

“Thank God for the lifesavers,” she said. “The captain saved my life.”

Captain. Mona suppressed a smile. Four days earlier, her husband, Nick, had pulled Carmen out of the water. Mona thought she might try calling him Capitán when she got home, see how he liked that.

“What made you get into that panga, Carmen?”

“To escape poverty and misery.”

It was a stock answer the coyotes trained their clients to give. Mona had heard it a hundred times.

“But you had a good life in Tijuana. A good wage, no husband or boyfriend weighing on you—”

“I don’t want to work in a maquiladora for the rest of my life.”

“What do you want to do?”

Carmen sat up a little taller. “I want to be an actress on television.”

Mona’s expression didn’t change. Everybody has dreams.

“I can imagine you on-screen. You’re pretty enough.”

This time, the compliment outflanked Carmen’s guard. She started twirling a lock of hair. Mona tapped her pen on the pad. “I remember now who you remind me of: Do you watch Aprendí a Llorar?”

Carmen looked coy. Aprendí a Llorar was a hit Colombian TV show about a teenager named Dolores Romero who loses her parents when their private jet crashes into a mountain. Dolores inherits their fortune but can’t touch it until she turns eighteen. Her uncle becomes her legal guardian and tries to poison her. She survives and runs away, but the toxin leaves her horribly disfigured. Penniless, she gets a job with a traveling circus, selling tickets from a darkened booth. She falls in love with a handsome young knife thrower but doesn’t dare show him her hideous face.

“You look just like Dolores at the start of Aprendí a Llorar!” said Mona.

“That’s just a stupid telenovela,” said Carmen. Mona shrugged. Telenovelas were her guilty pleasure. It’s how she switched off after work. That’s why she knew that the lovelorn but disfigured Dolores strikes up a friendship with a sideshow snake charmer, who works out what kind of toxin the uncle used and concocts an antidote. Dolores blooms into a ravishing beauty and becomes a target for the knife thrower, spinning on his wheel. A television producer sees their double act, signs them up, and makes them famous. The uncle recognizes Dolores on TV, tracks her down, and tries to murder her again, but the knife thrower saves her just in time, killing the uncle in a flurry of blades. Millions tuned in to watch the finale, in which Dolores returns to her family’s hacienda and marries her knife thrower on her eighteenth birthday.

“How much did you have in your money belt?” said Mona.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Mona raised an eyebrow. “You saved up $5,000 just from working at the maquiladora?”

Carmen shrugged. “I work hard.”

“How much did you pay the man on the beach?”

“One thousand.”

“Did you pay the same the first time you tried to cross?”

No answer.

Mona looked candidly at Carmen. “I want to make sure you understand how serious the situation is,” she said. “The first time a person gets caught trying to cross the border, it’s a misdemeanor. La migra sends you back and tells you not to try again, like they did”—Mona consulted her notes—“on August 26 last year, at San Ysidro. But the new laws mean if you get caught a second time, they can send you to prison for two years.”

Mona paused. Then she leaned forward and said, “But it’s not just that. You almost died in that boat. You want me to tell the judge you risked your life just to go to Hollywood?”

Mona watched Carmen closely. She really was very pretty, her black eyes gleaming beneath long lashes and attended-to brows. Mona was almost certain the girl had never seen the inside of a maquiladora. She was a pretty young woman in a coarsened world. Mona could see she was thinking hard.

“What do you want me to say?” said Carmen.

Mona put down her pen and took Carmen’s hands in hers. “You don’t have the hands of someone who works in a factory, Carmen.”

The guard said, “Hey. No contact.”

Mona let go of Carmen’s hands. “I want you to trust me.”

“I had a boyfriend,” said Carmen.

“He gave you the money?”

Carmen stiffened. Her voice got sharper. “I took it.”

Mona could tell she’d touched a nerve. “Where is he? In Tijuana?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know. He moves around.” Carmen rubbed the back of her hand.

“Why did you leave him?” said Mona.

No reply.

“Did he hurt you?”

Carmen put her arms across her chest. “He was … he was finished with me.”

“What do you mean, ‘finished’ with you?”

“I mean it was finished between us. You understand?”

Mona shook her head.

Carmen’s black eyes flashed. “If he finds me,” she said in a whisper, “he’ll put me in with the snakes.”

A moment passed. Mona realized she was holding her breath.

“That’s what he did to the last girl he was finished with,” said Carmen. “Put her in the box with the snakes. When they found her body, her flesh had turned black.”

“He threatened to kill you?”

Carmen nodded.

Mona made a note. “Carmen, this is important,” said Mona, her voice low. “Did your boyfriend ever hurt you?”

Before Mona could stop her, Carmen unzipped the front of her jumpsuit, pulled up her T-shirt, and showed Mona her breasts. Where her flesh should have been smooth and beautiful, it was burned, pitted, the color of rancid milk. Mona broke out in goose bumps, as though the rec yard had suddenly turned freezing cold. She couldn’t help but avert her eyes.

“In Hollywood, there are the best plastic surgeons in the world,” said Carmen, her black eyes glowing. “That’s why I took the hijo de puta’s money. He did this to me. He made me ugly. He’s going to pay to make me beautiful again.”

* * *

It was dark by the time Mona got back to Redondo Beach. The whole drive home, she’d replayed the scene in the rec yard over and over in her mind’s eye. She hoped Carmen hadn’t noticed her recoil when she had revealed her wound. Mona had never seen the effect of battery acid on human flesh before. Now it was etched so deeply into her memory that she doubted she would ever forget it.

She got out of the car and stretched the cricks out of her neck and back. Her lower back ached from the hours behind the wheel. She was grateful for the nearness of the sea and the distance from the desert.

Inside, Finn was at the stove. The rich aroma of roasting chicken filled the room. Mona put down her bag, put her arms around him, and pressed her cheek against his back. He smelled of garlic and grease. He had the TV on, watching a Lakers game. He turned around and kissed her.

“Hungry?” he said.

“Starving. But I want to take a shower before we eat. It was a thousand degrees out there.” She nodded toward the oven. “Have I got time?”

Finn pulled open the oven door and examined the bird. Mona could hear its juices sizzling in the pan.

“You’ve got time,” he said, taking it out of the oven. “You have to let it rest.”

Mona smiled. He always said that.

Ten minutes later, wearing comfortable jeans and a blouse, she was sitting at the table. Finn had brought the candles out. He’d turned off the TV, dimmed the lights, and tuned the radio to a smooth-grooves station. She watched him carve the bird, each piece coming away cleanly on his carving fork. He’d put a wineglass and a bottle of white wine next to her plate. Finn was drinking his usual iced tea. It’d been three years since his last drink.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Simple. Went for a run down at the beach. Went to a meeting, had lunch with some of the guys after. Then I went to the grocery.”

It was his day off, and he looked relaxed. There’d been a time in their marriage when Mona hadn’t known what to expect on his days off, and she’d almost left him because of it; but he’d worked to fix himself, stayed off the drink and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and now when she came home, she never had to think twice before opening the door.

“How’d it go with the girl?” said Finn.

The smile slid from Mona’s face.

“She grew up in a rough part of Mexico City. Left home young, at fifteen, and headed up to Tijuana, to work in a factory—or so she says. In TJ, she got mixed up with an enforcer for the Caballeros cartel by the name of Salvador Soto. She tried to get away from him, so he threw battery acid over her. She’s burned from the neck down.”

Mona picked up her wineglass and poured half of its contents down her throat. She didn’t add that Carmen had been tortured after U.S. border agents had returned her to Mexico. In the anger that had consumed her in the car, Mona had felt a need to blame someone, and the people she felt were most obviously responsible were the border agents at San Ysidro who had sent Carmen back to her horrific fate. But Nick was a border agent, and she knew he would hold the cartel thug responsible, not his colleagues at San Ysidro. He’d be right, of course; the border agents were just doing their jobs, enforcing the law. But right at that moment, Mona didn’t need him to be right.

After her shower, Mona had seen Finn’s dress uniform hanging in the closet, and for a moment had felt a rancor against him. Her work colleagues were always surprised when they learned what her husband did for a living, and when her job confronted her with the cruelty in the heart of people, as it had that day in the detention center, she was sometimes troubled by the notion that she had married the enemy. She reminded herself that it was Finn who had saved Carmen, and it was Finn who had asked her to help her.

“Know what a ‘herper’ is?” she said finally.

Finn shook his head.

“It’s someone who keeps snakes as pets. Carmen says that this psychopath, Soto, is a herper. Just loves snakes. Especially the venomous ones. He collects them from Australia, Thailand, all over. She says he has aquariums filled with cobras and rattlesnakes. She says he gets them out to impress his narco buddies, scare them a little. And she says when he wants to kill someone and make a point of it, he puts them in a box with the snakes. He threatened to do it to her.”

Mona took another sip of wine and made a conscious decision to relax and enjoy the remainder of the evening. Like any institution, the CBP had its good guys and bad guys. One thing she knew for sure, her husband was one of the good ones. “Anyway. Guess what she called you?” She smiled. “Her salvavida. Do you know what that means?”

When he shook his head, she said, “Lifesaver.”

He chuckled. “Salvavida. That’s my Spanish word for the day.”

“I thought you’d like that. She also called you capitán.”

His dimple appeared. “So you’ll take the case?” he said.

“Of course. Your wish is my command, Captain Lifesaver,” said Mona. She took another sip of wine. It left a tingle on her tongue. She was starting to relax.

Mischief flashed across Finn’s eyes. “Well. I just hope she realizes how lucky she is, getting the best legal counsel in California,” he said. Casually adding, “Best-looking, too.”

About then, Mona had an urge to walk over to her husband and straddle his lap. Instead, she stripped meat off a drumstick with her teeth and gave him a look that said, You’re next.



TWO



SHORTLY after nine the next morning, a Tuesday, Mona was at her desk at the Juntos office in Boyle Heights when Joaquin Vargas walked in.

Joaquin wore an open-collared dress shirt, dark pleated trousers, smart shoes. He’d recently started dyeing his hair, according to Natalie, the legal aide who also worked the reception desk part-time. “I think he does it himself,” she’d whispered.

“How was your trip?” said Joaquin.

“Long and hot,” she said. She pictured rattlesnakes but didn’t mention them.

Joaquin smiled. “And the girl Finn rescued?”

“They’ve got her on illegal reentry. Arraignment’s on Monday.”

Joaquin settled into the seat across from Mona’s desk. “Talk me through it,” he said.

Mona thought for a moment. “She grew up in a slum in the capital, but she’s been living in Tijuana for the past five years. She’s smart and tough. She’s also terrified. She got involved with a guy who turned out to be a psychopath. An enforcer with the Caballeros. She ran away, got stopped at San Ysidro and sent back. To punish her, he poured battery acid on her.”

Joaquin’s features clustered into a knot of revulsion.

“The boyfriend’s name is Salvador Soto,” continued Mona. “He’s pretty high up in the organization, according to Carmen. She says he can reach Oriel whenever he wants.”

Joaquin raised both eyebrows, impressed. Oriel, the head of the Caballeros de Cristos cartel, was the most wanted man on earth.

“You know Forbes put him on their rich list?” he said.

Mona said no, she didn’t.

“He’s worth, like, two billion,” said Joaquin.

“They give a figure? Forbes did an audit on Oriel?”

Joaquin scratched the back of his head. “Good point. Who the hell knows how they came up with the number.” He went quiet for a moment. Then he said, “From what you’ve told me, I don’t see much of a case.”

One great thing about working for a not-for-profit, the hierarchy was flat. Though Joaquin was nominally her boss, he never actually pulled rank or vetoed any of her initiatives. But he liked winning, and if a case appeared hopeless to him, he always argued against taking it. She’d often heard him say that he’d worked too long in the not-for-profit sector to charge at windmills, and she’d had many robust discussions with him about various cases she had taken on. Now she leaned back in her chair and waited for him to say his piece. When he leaned forward, she noticed his gray roots.

“Illegal reentry’s a felony, not a misdemeanor,” he began, “which means federal court, not immigration, which means you won’t be fighting just to keep her in the country; you’ll be fighting to keep her out of jail. Right there, you’ve tripled your workload. On top of all that, she has criminal associations. The court won’t like that.”

“She’s a torture victim. If she goes back, Soto will kill her.”

“You’ll have to prove that. You’ll have to prove they were in a relationship. How are you going to do that?”

Mona spun her computer monitor around.

“She gave me her Facebook password,” she said. She pointed at a photo on Carmen’s page. It showed Carmen in a bikini, standing on a beach next to an unsmiling, fully dressed man with a black mustache. Carmen had an arm around his shoulder. Her other hand was on her hip. She was arching her back, thrusting her breasts forward, posing. The photo had been taken before Carmen’s boyfriend had poured acid on her.

“You going to show this to the court?” said Joaquin. “She looks like a hooker.”

Not a word Mona used, but she let it go.

Vargas looked up. “Is she?”

Mona shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“It will to the judge. He’ll cry moral turpitude.” Joaquin looked dubiously at the photo again. “She’s smiling. She looks happy.”

Mona shook her head. “She’s not smiling because she’s happy. She’s smiling because there’s a camera. In the picture, she’s seventeen.”

He sighed. “I don’t know, Mona.”

“She says he’s killed dozens of people. He’s crazy, she says. He would lock her in the closet and leave her there for hours. And that was before the acid. He threatened to kill her.”

“Have you got any evidence? Anything at all?”

Mona picked up her phone and keyed a code into the screen.

“She gave me the PIN to her message service. Listen.”

She held up her phone toward Joaquin. A man’s voice played from the phone: “Voy a matarte, puta. Lentamente, para que sufras. La víbora te va a besar.”

He made a hissing sound.

“‘The snake’s going to kiss you’? What does that mean?” said Joaquin.

“He’s threatening to put her in a box filled with snakes. That’s what he’ll do to her if she goes back. She says he’s done it to others before.”

“Look, I feel for her. I really do,” said Joaquin. “But I just don’t think you have a case, Mona. That’s the cold hard truth.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Nothing I’m saying is making the slightest difference, is it?”

Mona smiled.

“No,” she said.

* * *

Mona didn’t see Joaquin again until the end of the day, when he said a quick goodbye and disappeared into the elevator with Natalie, leaving Mona alone in the office. She swiveled around to the window and watched the last of the light slip down the glass faces of the skyscrapers downtown. Her thoughts turned to her parents, to how, like Carmen, they’d also crossed the border, drawn to the work and the opportunity for a better life this nation had provided them. Mona was born in the United States and knew no other country. But she also honored her parents’ experience; what it had cost them to leave their homeland, and the efforts they had made once they had reached their adoptive one. She knew she’d gotten into college thanks to the solid foundation her parents had laid for her. They’d worked hard and taught her and her brother to do the same.

The sun dropped below the horizon, and the sky turned bruise purple. She thought about her older brother, Diego. She remembered how angry she’d been when he’d gotten out of the navy and promptly joined the border patrol’s air and marine unit at Long Beach, which her college-student self had insisted on calling la migra out of a sense of solidarity. Diego justified his action by saying there weren’t many jobs for ex-navy personnel that allowed him to stay close to home. “It’s either that or the coast guard,” he’d said. “And I’m done with the military.”

Then, a year later, it was Diego who had introduced her to Nick. Not that she’d been looking to meet anyone; she had recently graduated law school and had just been recruited full-time to Juntos. When Diego had badgered her into coming to a family barbecue at the Long Beach Air and Marine Station, she’d done so reluctantly and had gone determined to make sure the irony of her presence was lost on no one. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m here to support Diego. I’d rather die than date a border agent,” she’d said to Finn when Diego introduced them. Finn had simply smiled his dimpled smile and asked if she was hungry. Then he’d gone off to fetch her a plate of barbecued beef and pinto beans. Mona ended up dating him anyway. And then it was Diego who died.

Three years had passed since Diego had been killed in the line of duty, but the grief still sometimes flooded through her in waves so powerful, they left her out of breath. She waited for the feeling to subside. Outside, the city’s lights twinkled like stars on the surface of the sea. Her pulse settled. She swiveled back around to her desk, switched on the desk lamp, and got back to work.

The hours passed. She reviewed the relevant laws and made notes of those that might be helpful. She reviewed summaries of pertinent cases. When she caught herself rereading the same line three times without registering it, she looked out the window again. The moon was high. The clock on her computer told her it was two in the morning. Enough. She grabbed her handbag, switched off the lights, and took the elevator down to the underground parking garage.

Mona walked past a gleaming, pearl-white Porsche Macan. It belonged to the guy who ran a tech start-up on the top floor. Mona felt a twinge of envy. The guy looked like he was twenty-five, tops. She’d once sat at her desk and calculated that if, instead of going into the not-for-profit sector, she’d joined one of the big firms that had tried to recruit her out of law school, just the late-night billable hours she clocked as a matter of course would’ve paid off a Porsche outright. Instead, she made monthly payments on the Toyota. She was thirty-two.

She presse