Mistress of Justice

have to do. You can pick up cell phone transmissions even easier than landlines.”
    Callaghan: “What we could do—I’ve done this before—what we could do is get an answering service. You call and leave messages. I’ll call on a separate line and pick them up. We’ll have a second answering service going the other way.”
    Clever, Taylor Lockwood thought, though being truly clever, Thom, would have meant wearing gloves when you check out the file cabinet you’re about to break into so you don’t leave fingerprints.
    Suddenly she felt a curious thrill. What was it? The excitement of the pursuit, she supposed, getting closer to her quarry. What Reece felt in the courtroom yesterday. What her father undoubtedly felt—in court, on the golf course, with his beloved shotgun out in the fields.
    When she was young her father would take her with him when he’d go hunting on Saturday mornings in the fall. She’d hated those times, wanted to be back home in bed, watching cartoons or playing on her upright piano, shopping with her mother. But Samuel Lockwood, eyes keen and hungry for a kill, had insisted she come along. He’d carried the tiny, still-warm corpses of the birds back to the car, where came the moment she dreaded: To make her understand that the dead birds couldn’t hurt her, he had her touch each one with her index finger.
    There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Didn’t hurt. They can’t bite when they’re dead, Taylie, remember that
.
    Dennis Callaghan now said, “Look, yeah, we have to be careful but we can’t let this paralyze us.”
    “We’re fucking thieves,” Sebastian said. “Am I the only one taking this seriously?”
    Bosk’s laugh was flinty. “Well, whatta you want, Thom? You want to get walkie-talkies and scramblers? Disguises?”
    “I’m just a little paranoid, okay? There was a weird fuckup.”
    “What?”
    “Well, last Saturday night, when I was in the firm?”
    “Right,” Callaghan offered.
    “I made sure nobody knew I was there—on Friday I taped the back door latch down so I could get in without leaving any record I was in. But what happens is this old asshole, a partner, cops my key and uses it to get in early Sunday morning. So now I’m in the system.”
    Gotcha, thought Taylor Lockwood. John Silbert Hemming, her tall private eye, would be proud of her.
    “Shit,” Bosk said. “Why’d he do it?”
    “How the fuck do I know? Alzheimer’s.”
    Callaghan said, “Not the end of the world. They don’t know what you were doing there, right?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Well, relax. You’ve covered up everything real well, Thom.… Oh, here. Got a present.”
    “Ah, nectar of the gods,” Sebastian said.
    “Sure,” Bosk said. A long pause.
    Then a sniff. Another.
    The magic powder boosted Sebastian’s spirits considerably. When he spoke next he said with a laugh, “I like this—fucking the firm that fucked me and getting rich in the process.”
    “You want a Lamborghini?” Callaghan asked.
    Bosk said seriously, “I don’t like the ride. Rough, you know.”
    Sebastian: “I live in Manhattan. What’m I gonna do, alternate-side-of-the-street parking with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car?”
    “Keep it out at your summer house, Thom, like we all do.”
    “I don’t have a summer house. And I don’t want one.”
    The wind was dicing her face and ears. She closed her eyes against the cold. Her legs and thighs, the last strongholdof heat, were going numb. She touched the glass that separated her from a room that was fifty degrees warmer, where she heard the sounds of two chubby, spoiled boys sniffing the residue of cocaine into their nostrils.
    Bosk said, “So what’s with this Taylor cunt? She put out?”
    “Fuck you,” Sebastian said unemotionally.
    “No, does she fuck
you
? That’s what I’m asking.”
    Callaghan sniffed his white powder then said, “You’ve got gonads for brains, Bosk. Is that all you think about? Sex?”
    “Money, too. I think a lot about money but mostly I think about sex. Tell me about Taylor.”
    “I don’t want to talk about her,” Sebastian said menacingly.
    “Does she have big tits? I couldn’t tell.… Hey chill, will you, man? That’s a fucking scary look. I was just curious.”
    There was a pause. And with an ominous tone in his voice Sebastian said, “Well, don’t get too interested in her. You hear me?”
    Taylor felt a ping of fear at that.
    “I’m just—”
    “You hear what I’m