Read Online Talk Talk by T. C. Boyle - Free Book Online

wash of voices now. Steve shifted from honey to vinegar. “She's in jail for the weekend, nothing anybody can do about that. Monday they'll arraign her and assign a public defender, some troll out of a cave in a cheap suit with a cheap briefcase and a look of terminal harassment, and then you just hope for the best. But hey, listen, great talking to you. Luck, huh?”
    On Monday morning, he called in sick (Radko: “Pliss liv a message)” and drove down to the county courthouse, a showcase building erected in the twenties to resemble something out of the Alhambra. It was all stone, stucco and tile with a monumental clock tower and an observation deck on the roof that gave tourists a view of downtown San Roque, from the blue rug of the ocean to the hazy arras of the mountains. At the information kiosk, a beaming old lady with a long flaring nose and the trace of a British accent told him to consult the daily calendar at the far end of the hall, and he saw Dana's name listed there with some eighty or a hundred others. Her arraignment on charges was scheduled for eight-thirty a.m. in Courtroom 2.
    The courtroom was the sort of place that inspired confidence in the legal system: vaulted ceilings, dark pews with the rich grain of history worked into them, the elevated jury box to the left, the judge's buffed and burnished high-flown bench in the center under the great seal of the state of California, and a long file of lesser furniture--desks for the court recorders and clerks--tucked in along the right-hand wall, everything very hushed and efficient-looking at five past eight in the morning. Bridger took a seat in the last row. Aside from the bailiff--a tall, muscular, eager-looking cop in a tan cop's shirt with some sort of walkie-talkie pinned to the collar--there were only two other people present, a young couple who might have been college students huddled in the front row over the comics page from the morning newspaper. For his part, Bridger was exhausted. He'd worked all weekend trying to catch up, fueled exclusively by Red Bull, coffee and pizza, The Kade's face so bleakly familiar to him it was like a hallucination, the too-small eyes and the ape-like bone structure of the skull visible to him even when he wasn't staring at the screen. It was a good thing the work didn't require even the smallest modicum of thought, because his mind was as far from Drex III as it possibly could be. All weekend he'd thought of nothing but Dana, Dana locked away in a cell, Dana scared and vulnerable, Dana eating some slop out of a bucket, harassed, put upon, unable to explain herself.
    He'd called every attorney in the phone book and got nothing but recordings, “You've reached the law offices of Merker, Stillman; our hours are ten a.m. to five p.m., Monday through Friday; if this is an emergency, please call 565-1608.” It was an emergency and he did call--some fifty-four different attorneys at law--and all but one of the emergency numbers fed him a recording as well. The one that didn't--this was Saturday morning--was answered by an overwrought woman who demanded to know who in hell had referred Bridger to her private number and what was so goddamned earth-shattering that he had to interrupt her on her day off. There were shouts in the background, the thwack of a tennis ball connecting with the sweet spot of a racket. He explained the situation to her and suddenly she was the most reasonable and beneficent woman in the world, outraged over what the legal system had done to his significant other--Dana, that was her name, right? Dana?--and willing to fight for her till she dropped... as soon as she got her retainer in the amount of $75,000, that is.
    At eight twenty-five the room began to fill, people of all ages ducking through the door with a nervous glance at the judge's dais before sliding noiselessly into one or another of the pews. Their demeanor indicated how modest, submissive and blameless they were, men and women alike, each of