Miles lay on a tall table against the near wall as you entered. Milton had insisted they leave him in the same suit he had been wearing when those motherfuckers shot him outside the courthouse, a classic Miles tropical-weight gray flannel with a light-blue button-down and a bright-green tie. He looked good in it, the way the color of the tie seemed reflected in his dark skin. There was some blood spatter you could see on the left shoulder of the suit, and they had leaned his face toward the wall so you would have to work to look at the wound on that side. Milton straightened his tie while he talked to him, and then let Donny and Percy come up close.

Miles was such a fucking hero. Looking at his waxy face with the eyes you could tell had been closed by someone else’s hands, Donny tolled a list in his head of the times he had let his friend down, and the times Miles had delivered even when Donny didn’t deserve it. Donny managed not to cry until he grabbed Miles’s right arm, and it felt like a block of wood.

“I wish we could light him up,” said Donny, looking at the way they had him laid out there on the table.

Percy looked at him through her tears, like her anger at the unknown perpetrators had just been partially transferred to Donny.

“That’s what they do,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to make sure we help get these yahoos moseyed along to whatever redneck Valhalla they think awaits them.”

You could tell she meant it. That something had changed in her. In how she saw things, and how she felt.

“I’ll help you,” said Donny.

And he did. At first, at least.

They divvied up Miles’s caseload, and shared a few of the cases. They tried to find who had killed Miles. They suspected it was tied to the AMR case, but evidence in support of that theory was hard to come by. The courthouse where the shooting happened was blanketed with electronic surveillance, and the incident was captured on two camera views, but neither showed the faces of the perpetrators. And their ability to get more evidence through discovery was cut off when the judge dismissed the case six weeks after the killing.