“I’ll argue for what I believe in, like I always do,” said Donny, feeling his own bullshit detector go off as he talked. “In my own words. And that means I will do everything I can to persuade them that this tyrant should serve a lifetime in maximum-security prison for every life he stole. Down in the hole, at the inescapable Supermax he built to lock up the real patriots. The ones who fought for a future we can all live in.”

The president watched Donny with a smile on the edge between sincere and sarcastic, and then he started clapping. A slow clap, a clap of derision and ridicule, but a real one. Except that it was when he started clapping that Donny remembered the left hand was fake, a prosthesis that was another relic of the bombing. And when he clapped with it, it sounded like rubber. Donny looked at the fake hand, and wondered if it was capable of giving him the finger. And then he thought about how in prison, they would not let him keep it.

16

Donny was telling his grandmother that story after his meeting with Lecker, as they sat on her porch and enjoyed the takeout he had brought.

“You want some?” she said, proffering the brownie from which she had just taken a hearty bite.

“No thanks, Carol,” said Donny. “I can never keep up with you.”

“Suit yourself,” said Carol. Carol was Donny’s maternal grandmother. The first lawyer in the family, and the best, and the most ethical. And the most likely to be high, even in her eighties. Especially in her eighties.

Her place was in Plano, an old farmhouse that had somehow survived as suburbia boomed around it. And then outlasted them all, as the diminishing future pushed everyone back downtown. From the back porch where they sat, she had a view of a stretch of abandoned freeway. A surprisingly large herd of deer were gathered at the landscaped pond out in front of the former offices of a telecommunications software company, as the sun began to flash out behind the slowly collapsing shopping mall. When it was backlit like that, but there was still enough light that you could see the mustang vines growing up the sides and poking out through the windows, the modernist concrete blocks of the old JCPenney store looked every bit like a Mayan ruin.

It was a special house—and was now being secretly mortgaged to pay for his mistakes.

“I’m happy to just enjoy the view,” said Donny, trying to defer a difficult conversation. “Hard to believe this was a refugee camp.”

“And you helped shut it down,” said Carol.

“And got a great deal on this place, before that news broke. But I can’t believe how quickly it got ruined.”

“Once the water started to get through, nature took over.”

“Have you been inside?”