Donny’s Dallas office was halfway between the courthouse and the jail, in a beat-up old strip mall that also housed a combination liquor store and secondhand electronics shop. Donny had taken down the big “Law Office” sign he’d inherited from the prior tenant, a local criminal-defense lawyer who got tired of losing to the government and retired early to Costa Rica, so now the front of the building was dominated by the sign for the business next door, the name crazy river in big, red, illuminated caps. The name was not as crazy as it sounded, because right there on the other side of the jail flowed the Trinity, which had always been a crazy river, even crazier now than it used to be, no matter how hard the town fathers worked to tame it.

Right behind the building was another sort of river, the overpass where Interstate 35 passed downtown on its route between Laredo and Duluth. Behind that was Dealey Plaza, in the shadows of the dome-topped Reunion Tower and the rest of the Dallas skyline. Dallas was the town that proudly invented the triple underpass, a city where the freeways came first. The high-rises where the freeways pretended to end were the sort that worked hard to fake you, pretending to be the beacons of a promising and prosperous future while they helped to hide the relics of a more complicated past, and pushed the poverty and repression of the present into their shadows. Like the shanties people had built up along the riverbanks, hidden from view by the levees and the jails.

The traffic on the overpass above Donny’s office was not what it had been, now that driving your own car was a retro luxury, and the conflicts with Mexico had eliminated most of the Texas truck traffic. But it was still loud. It didn’t stop the guy zonked out at Donny’s door from sleeping his way through the lunch hour. So Donny decided to let him be, and entered through the back.

The radio was on inside when he opened the door. That alarmed him, until he remembered he had left it on the last time he was up here a few weeks earlier, on the advice of a burglar client who told him that’s a good cheap substitute for an alarm. One of the fortunate by-products of the government collapse was that the media controls had collapsed along with it, and now you could tune the dial to any number of eclectic stations operated by microbudgeted indies trying to make a meager buck in the ruins. This one was an alt-classical program, at that moment playing some raging bummer of a baroque guitar solo that sounded like an old man remembering the plague. Donny went to turn it off, but then decided it suited his mood.