Pat drifted along in this dark, deep memory as he was speeding toward the overpass for the Trinity River. Gathering in the wide open of the city limits was a menacing, dark column of thunderclouds. Storm’s coming. This evening for sure. Tossed and blown. It would be another half mile in the wrong direction if he didn’t U it immediately. Pat veered into the right lane to turn, and that’s when he couldn’t feel his leg or the brake pedal, and he panicked and jerked the car off the road, missing the retaining wall by inches.

The black mouth of the Cougar tore through weed trees, and then the car bucked over the berm by the road and dipped down until Pat finally found the brake. The car heaved into a ditch a few feet from the Elm Fork of the Trinity River. He braced himself against the dashboard and steering wheel, and the car stopped, the engine groaning over the rushes.

He was lucky not to have gone full-on into the river, and Pat, his head and heart swimming with adrenaline, the throbbing gone from his legs, looked out at the miserable brown flow of the Trinity and thought of lying on his childhood bed as the radio from the McGarritys’ kitchen blared from across the air shaft. Scully takes over the call from Allen. Top of the fifth, one out, Hodges drives it to left center. And somehow the Mick gets there. And Larsen is still perfect.

All of Willis Avenue was listening, and he could hear the cheers and claps echoing down the shaft. And Pat realized, he didn’t care. He just hated losing more than he ever wanted to win.

April 15

[ APRIL 15 ]

Number seven, Donna Passerine, picked at the edge of the cheap and chipped wooden table with crimson nails, her head bowed as if in prayer, as she speculated to her fellow jury members.

“I’m pretty sure she confronted him that night about the affair.”

“We don’t know that,” Dr. Mark Ferris replied. He was the foreman, juror number one. When the deliberations had started, he cheerily shared that he was a dentist and then made some canned drilling-down joke. Dr. Ferris was like a lot of chivalrous, prosperous Dallas men, and Anne was quick to detect undertones of chauvinism in his feints at being trustworthy.

Donna sensed it too and was struggling not to be timid. She was young, no more than thirty, but seemed a bit swollen, moonfaced, as she scratched olive skin at the elbow. She couldn’t bring herself to look up. “What if he wanted to be with that girl and not his wife? What if Mrs. Raleigh threatened to reveal—”