He was calm and seemed sane, even with the rifle in his hand. He was just my client, still in a bad spot, still wanting me to help him, and I was trying.

“Aren’t there cops out front?”

“I’ve been watching,” he said. “They’ve all stayed out back, where I told them I’d come out. So will you do it?”

I said okay. There was no arguing with him, and nothing else I could say. He called 911 and we waited while the operator figured out how to patch him through to the squad cars below. I asked him again to give up and he said no. He told them we were coming out. We went downstairs with both my wrists held behind me, his grip warm and damp but not tight. Then he took the office keys and told me to wait a minute before I went out. Crouched down, he dodged through the cubicle dividers to the front door. I heard a dead bolt scrape. Blue streetlight outlined his body, and he waved to me to go.

The back door was a fire door that opened without a key, and I pressed the bar and put a hand out to wave so they wouldn’t shoot me, and then I stood with one hand behind my back, the door barely cracked. I thought I was going to do it, to play the part Sawyer had scripted for me, and then somehow it seemed impossible, a thing that was plausible back in the dark but now was not. He was a man with a gun. I stepped out with my hands up and said, “He’s in front,” but my voice cracked and I had to say it again, louder. “He’s in front.”

Sawyer wrote me a letter from prison. He said,

It would sure be great if you came by. Tuesdays from 2–4 I can have visitors and it would be really something to see you. Or if you wrote a letter. You wouldn’t believe how great it is to get a letter from the real world. On good days I can read okay now, and I can write back, and on bad days someone will read it to me. No one writes to me except my defense lawyer, and he’s an asshole, and hardly writes anymore anyway. (Don’t tell him I said he was an asshole. I know all you lawyers are tight.) And don’t feel too bad about what happened. Of course they were out front. You did what you could do.