Dark Rivers of the Heart

illegal activity, and they'll say the planted drugs are reasonable cause even if the drugs don't prove anything."
        "There's that reform law in Congress-"
        "Moving slowly."
        "Well, you never know. If some sort of reform passes, maybe it'll even tie forfeiture to conviction."
        "Can you guarantee I'll get my house back?"
        "With your clean record, your years of service-" Harris gently interrupted: "Darius, under the current law, can you guarantee I'll get my house back?"
        Darius stared at him in silence. A shimmer of tears blurred his eyes, and he looked away. He was an attorney, and it was his job to obtain ljustice for his big brother, and he was overwhelmed by the truth that he was all but powerless to assure even minimal fairness.
        "if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone," Harris said.
        "It could happen to you next. It could happen to my kids someday.
        Darius… maybe I get something back from the bastards, say as much as eighty cents on the dollar once all my costs are deducted. And maybe I get my life on track, start to rebuild. But how do I know it won't happen to me again, somewhere down the road?"
        Having held back the tears, Darius looked at him again, shocked.
        "No, that's not possible. This is outrageous, unusual-"
        "Why can't it happen again?" Harris persisted. "If it happened once, why not twice?"
        Darius had no answer.
        "If my house isn't really my house, if my bank accounts aren't really mine, if they can take what they want without proving a thing, what's to keep them from coming back? Do you see? I'm in prison, little brother.
        Maybe I'll never be behind bars again, but I'm in another kind of prison and never going to get free. The prison of expectations. The prison of fear. The prison of doubt, distrust."
        Darius put one hand to his forehead, pressed and pulled at his brow, as if he would like to extract from his mind the awareness that Harris had forced upon him.
        The car's emergency-flasher indicator blinked rhythmically, in time with a soft but penetrating sound, as if warning of the crisis in Harris Descoteaux's life.
        "When the realization began to hit me," Harris said, "back there a few blocks ago, when I began to see what a box I'm in, what a box anyone could be in under these rules, I just was… overwhelmed… felt so claustrophobic that it made me sick to my stomach."
        Darius lowered the hand from his brow. He looked lost. "I don't know what to say."
        "I don't think there's anything anyone can say."
        For a while they just sat there, with Wilshire Boulevard traffic whizzing by them, with the city so bright and busy all around, with the true darkness of modern life not to be glimpsed in mere palm shadows and awning-shaded shop entrances.
        "Let's go home," Harris said.
        They drove the rest of the way to Westwood in silence.
        Darius's house was a handsome brick-and-clapboard Colonial with a columned portico. The spacious lot featured huge old ficus trees. The limbs were massive yet gracious in their all-encompassing spread, and the roots went back to the Los Angeles of jean Barlow and Mae West and W C. Fields, if not further.
        It was a major achievement for Darius and Bonnie to have earned such a place in the world, considering how far down the ladder they had started their climb. Of the two Descoteaux brothers, Darius had enjoyed the greater financial success.
        As the BMW pulled into the brick driveway, Harris was overcome by regret that his own troubles would inevitably taint the pride and well earned pleasure that Darius took from that Westwood house and from everything else that he and Bonnie had acquired or achieved. What pride in their struggles and what pleasure in their attainments could survive, undiminished, after the realization that their position was maintained only at the sufferance of mad kings who might confiscate all for a royal purpose or dispatch a deputation of blackguards, under the protective heraldry of the monarch, to lay waste and burn? This beautiful house was only ashes waiting for the fire, and when Darius and Bonnie regarded their handsome residence henceforth, they would be troubled by the faintest scent of smoke, the bitter taste of burnt dreams.
        Jessica met them at the door, hugged Harris fiercely, and wept against his shoulder. To have held her