“You got screwed,” Big Man said.

“Thank you,” Sawyer said, with no irony in his voice, only relief that someone else could see the injustice. “What can I do now?” he asked me. “Tell me, now, what can I do?”

“Give yourself up.”

“No, I’m serious here. I mean about the claim.”

I looked at the heavy stack of papers in my lap. “I don’t think you can do anything,” I said. “Go to physical therapy, be nice to your wife.”

“She’s gone,” he said. “No, that’s all over. This is over, too, isn’t it? It’s a wrapped-up case.”

I nodded. It was in with the dead files. And finality was the effect of the letters, read together: it was a thing done.

“I’m letting Amituana go,” Sawyer said. He helped the kid to his feet, which was a struggle with the rifle in one hand, the kid’s wrists tied and both men so heavy. Amituana staggered back against a cubicle divider and it shuddered, and then they were both upright. “He’s got a country to rule,” Sawyer said. “Fourteen people could die, easy.”

He brushed off the kid’s clothes with his free hand. “If you get to be king of Samoa and I show up there,” he said, “you’ll have a job for me, right? You’ll remember I got screwed and I let you go?”

“Sure,” Big Man said.

“Okay,” Sawyer said. “You take the stairs and go outside, and tell them if they try anything I’ll kill the woman. She’s my lawyer, I’ve got reason to kill her. Tell them that.”

I looked at Sawyer to see if he was serious, but I couldn’t tell.

“Okay,” Big Man said.

Sawyer turned him around and clapped him on one of his great halfback shoulders, and the kid nodded at both of us like he was leaving a party. He walked off toward the staircase, trailing orange twine from his bound wrists.

“He’s a good kid,” Sawyer said as we watched him go. The heavy, careful steps died away on the stairs below. Then Sawyer turned to me.

“You can still help me,” he said.

“If you turn yourself in,” I said, “we can gin up a mental distress defense, get you a good lawyer for it.”

“Nope,” Sawyer said. He checked his watch. “I’ll slip out the front, where they don’t expect me. You go out the back, to the parking lot where you came in, and keep them busy. Stand in the door and pretend I’ve got the gun on you, and relay messages to the cops like I’m hiding there. Say I want a car, and I want three thousand dollars, and I want an hour’s head start. Okay? Afterward, they’ll never know I wasn’t there with the gun. Just give me a chance to get out the front and get away.”