As Donny looked at the phone, wondering if it felt as dirty as he did, he considered trying to recall the other messages he had sent. He tried to convince himself he really was doing the right thing, and one of them would understand. Maybe he could even get Mario Walsh to reconsider.

Instead, he found himself reconsidering a lot of his own choices, aided by what was left in the bottle of cheap mezcal he found in the drawer. It tasted like Clorox for the brain, but felt better than that sounds.

He was already on the waiting-room couch by the time he got to the worm, and when he finished swallowing it, he lay back and tried to forget his worries. Instead, they rushed him, all at once, at the edge of sleep, the ghosts of the dead and the ghosts of the living.

When he finally started to get some ideas about how to solve his problems, he nodded off.

He dreamed about raccoons in suits. When the raccoons started talking, Donny realized they were in court. And they were arguing against him. When he got up to object, he woke up.

It was still dark in the office, the room pulsing with the glow of Donny’s screen saver in the next room. Five after midnight, but he was wide-awake.

He realized that in the dream, the courtroom the raccoons were in was the one in New Orleans. A real courthouse Donny had been in, back when it housed the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and that now was used for the truth and reconciliation tribunals they called the Tributary. The main difference, other than the talking raccoons, was that in the dream the courtroom looked like the one in the old Perry Mason TV show, complete with the gallery full of 1950s Americans in black and white. But the case they were arguing was a real one. It was Heather’s case.

He got up, made some fresh coffee, and looked the case up.

It was too late to call when the idea really took root and he got the nerve to try it, even though he knew it was probably a bad idea, the kind of idea that a brain in a corner comes up with in a reckless effort to save itself. So he sent a message instead, to an old friend who was a different sort of victim from the ones he had been calling earlier.

To his surprise, he got an answer, just as he was getting ready to lie back down.

Can u talk now?

12

When he heard the voice, he realized how long it had been since he last heard it.

“Lou?”

“Hello, Donny.”

In the long pause that followed, Donny remembered the rest of the story. Not all of it, but most of it. The details they mostly kept out of the news.