Read Blood of Angels for Free Online

workers, third-grade teachers, and cops, who carry around what she likes to call “psychic weight.” My father would have referred to the idea of psychic weight as psychic bullshit, but then, his world was a lot simpler than mine. I think about him a lot, making my morning coffee—I exclusively use Peet’s—which, after I pay for shipping, costs me fourteen dollars a pound and is the single Sarandokos-level luxury I allow myself. My father fixed airplanes, and the idea of Zoloft and gourmet coffee making his day would have struck him as pretentious idiocy. I have his tools in my garage, and I tinker with things, little projects that bring me back to the days when he was alive. They’re Sears tools, made in the sixties, and they’ll be here when the earth is roamed by postnuclear holocaust cockroaches. I put on a back deck and later enclosed it; I swapped out older windows in the sunroom off the kitchen for newer, more efficient ones. Maybe the tools keep me centered, maybe the Zoloft, maybe it’s the gourmet coffee. Zoloft wasn’t my first try with mood-altering drugs. I went through a short list of pharmaceutical aids before finding the one least offensive. The first one, perversely, made me more combative; the second, foggy and sexually irrelevant; the third, Zoloft, had theoretically evened things out. Theoretically, because I’ve now taken it long enough to not clearly remember what things were like before. All I know is that spiked edges of nervous energy still run through my skin from time to time, clicking upward through my mood like electricity. Rayburn isn’t the only one who catches me with a nervous leg twitch. I do it myself, all the time.
    What I’m thinking while I wash the Zoloft down is that I’ve made it nine years in the DA’s office, and I don’t want Kwame Jamal Hale to be the reason I ship out. My talk at Vanderbilt yesterday wasn’t just bullshit, after all. I do love what I do. I love it enough to endure the gradual grinding up of a lot of subtle distinctions in my personality, like the ability to be horrified by photographs of dead people.
    Stillman is standing outside my office when I arrive, his ever-present grin pasted on his face. His arms are full of files, which I assume are from the Moses Bol case. Until this plays out, it’s business as usual, Rayburn said. No continuances, no delays. How Stillman got the files out of my office to spend the night with, I have no idea. But I think again that maybe Rayburn is right; I probably would have spent the morning wondering what the hell I was doing getting ready to send somebody else to the death chamber while Kwame Jamal Hale was a few days away from giving his deposition. Stillman, however, is as untroubled as a puppy. I unlock my door, and he steps through in front of me, as though I were holding the door for him. He drops the files on my desk, plops down in a chair, and says, “Whaddaya think, partner?”
    What I think isn’t actually appropriate to share, so I walk past him and sit behind my desk. “David explained to you how I like to work, right?”
    â€œHe said to get you coffee. I assumed he was joking.”
    â€œDon’t ever get me coffee, Stillman. You wouldn’t make it right, anyway.”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œDid he say anything else?”
    â€œHe said you’re the boss, and I said I had no problem with that.”
    â€œSo, if somebody wants to schedule a conference, what do you say?”
    â€œCheck with you?”
    â€œCorrect. And if you want to take somebody’s deposition, what do you do first?”
    â€œI think I got where you’re headed here, Thomas.”
    â€œSay the words, Stillman.”
    â€œI check with you. Except I’ve already set one up. Should I cancel it?”
    I look at my watch; it’s 9:05. “Shit, Stillman, do you ever sleep?”
    â€œDon’t need it. Anyway, I made the call