L Is for Lawless

said I was in danger and that's why Charlie gave you the information."
    Ray shook his head, baffled. "He must have misunderstood," he said. "Sure, I was looking for you, but I never said anything about danger. That's odd. Old guy can't hear. He might have got it mixed up."
    "Never mind. Just skip that. Let's talk about something else."
    He glanced over toward the entrance to the restaurant, where a motley group of adolescent kids were beginning to collect. It must have been the same kids I'd seen running out on the road the day before. They must have been in town for some kind of track-and-field event. The noise level increased, and Ray's voice went up to compete with the din. "You know, you really surprised me in my hotel room the other day."
    "How so?"
    "You were right about Johnny. He was never in the service. He was in jail like you said."
    I love being right. It always cheers me up. "What about the story about how you knew each other? Was any of that true?"
    "In the main," he said. He paused and smiled, revealing a gap where a first molar should have been. He put a hand against his cheek where the bruising was deep blue with an aura of darker purple. "Don't look now, but we're surrounded."
    The track team seemed to spread out and around us like a liquid, settling into booths on all sides of us. The lone waitress was passing out menus like programs for some sporting competition.
    "Quit stalling," I said.
    "Sorry. We did meet in Louisville, but it wasn't at the Jeffersonville Boat Works. It wasn't 1942, neither. It was earlier. Maybe '39 or '40. We were in the drunk tank together and struck up a friendship. I was nineteen at the time, and I'd been in jail a couple times. We hung out together some, you know, just messing around. Neither of us went in the army. We were both 4-F. I forget Johnny's disability. Something to do with a ruptured disk. I had two busted eardrums and a bum knee. Bad weather, that sucker's still giving me fits. Anyway, we had to do
something
- we were bored out of our gourds – so we started burglarizing joints, breaking into warehouses, stores, you know, things like that. I guess we pulled one job too many and got caught in the act. I ended up doing county time, but he got sent to state reformatory down in Lexington. He did twenty-two months of a five-year bid and moved his family out to California once he got sprung. After that, he was clean as far as I ever heard."
    "What about you?"
    He dropped his gaze. "Yeah, well, you know, after Johnny left, I fell into bad company. I thought I was smart, but I was just a punk like everyone else. A guy steered me wrong on another job we pulled. Cops picked us up and I got sent to the Federal Correctional Institution up in Ashland, Kentucky, where I spent another fifteen months. I was out for a year and then in again. I never had the dough for a fancy-pants attorney, so I had to take pot luck. One thing and another, I've been inside ever since."
    "You've been in prison for over forty years?"
    "Off and on. You think there aren't guys who've been in prison that long? I could've been out a lot sooner, but my temper got the better of me until I finally figured out how to behave," he said. "I suffered from what the docs call a 'lack of impulse control.' I learned that in prison. How to talk that way. Back then, if I thought of it, I did it. I never killed nobody," he added in haste.
    "This is a big relief," I said.
    "Well, later in prison, but that was self-defense."
    I nodded. "Ah."
    Rawson went right on. "Anyway, in the late forties, I started writing to this woman named Maria I met through a pen pal ad. I managed to escape once and I was out long enough for us to get married. She got pregnant and we had us a little girl I haven't seen in years. A lot of women fall in love with inmates. You'd be surprised."
    "Nothing people do surprises me," I said.
    "Another time, when I was out, I ended up breaking parole. Sometimes I think Johnny felt responsible. Like if it hadn't been for him, I might never have gotten in so tight with the criminal element. Wasn't true, but I think that's what he believed."
    "You're saying Johnny kept in touch all these years because of guilt?"
    "Mostly that," he said. "And maybe because I was the only one who knew he'd been in jail besides his wife. With everybody else, he was always pretending to be something he wasn't. All the tales about Burma and Claire Chennault. He got those from books. His kids thought he was a hero, but he