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every stray dog and cat into the courtroom. I mean, am I going to be giving depositions two weeks before the election?”
    “You’re not giving shit,” Crully said. “You sue Kronon, and then the lawyers delay everything. He’ll file a motion to dismiss because you’re violating his right to free speech and we take weeks to answer and then there’s an election.” Crully threw the back of his hand at Ray, dismissive of the law and all its routine monkeyshines and its predictable inefficiency.
    Ray generally found Crully amusing, perhaps because Ray had been on the team that found him. But Horgan looked nettled. He stood up to hang his suit coat on the back of his chair. Like Paul, he preferred just to ignore Mark at times.
    “Are there risks, if we sue? Sure,” said Ray, as he rolled up his cuffs. “But Hal’s got you pretty well cornered here. He’s going to keep saying you murdered his sister to anybody who will listen. If you sue him, maybe a few more people pay attention. But there’s also a chance he shuts up. Maybe the judge makes him shut up. Net-net, I think you have to do it, Paulie. Otherwise, you’re gonna ride out the campaign wearing the collar for Dita’s murder. That’s a lot of weight to be trying to tote over the finish line. You need to say, ‘I didn’t do it.’”
    “How about if I say I didn’t do it.”
    “You need to back it up. You sue him, you have skin in the game.”
    Paul closed his eyes to think. Even at moments like this, he loved this life. Or most of it. The money part was horrible and getting worse. Close to unbearable. You didn’t get really big dollars from anybody who didn’t have an agenda and a ring to be kissed. But the rest he still relished. He knew enough about himself to admit that he liked the heat of the spotlight—Lidia had taught all her children that they deserved attention. But he still found a thrill in the magnitude of the problems, and figuring out how to get them solved. The county had been playing a shell game for a decade—there wasn’t the money to run the schools or pay pensions, not if you’d passed fourth grade arithmetic. But he, Paulie Gianis, he would be the one working it out. There was no other job with this kind of impact, where the effect of your brief time on earth was magnified so far beyond your own circle. You could invent the semiconductor or make a movie and change lives, too, if people happened to bump up against those things. But in politics the effect was universal. Every person you passed on the street had a stake in what you did and usually an opinion about it. The world was what it was, full of love and cruelty and indifference. But it could get better, with less need, less violence, more opportunities. In his lifetime, black people had gone from the back of the bus to maybe, considering the results in Iowa last week, the White House. And if you put up with all the hard stuff, you could be laid to rest knowing you had helped make that kind of change happen.
    “To be frank,” said Raymond, “the only thing that gives me second thoughts is that he’s basically daring you to sue.”
    “That’s Hal,” said Paul. “The guy’s like a windup toy who turns his own key. If I win twenty million dollars in this lawsuit, he appeals for five years and doesn’t even notice when he writes the check. Besides, he thinks all Democrats are socialists who want to destroy the free enterprise system that made America great. He’s always been crazy-right. I remember when I was six years old, Hal had all these campaign banners for Barry Goldwater in his bedroom. This is 1964. There weren’t R’s in Kewahnee in those days. Even Zeus, his dad, only became a Republican when they moved to the suburbs and he fell in love with Reagan. The hard-right stuff was Hal’s defense against being a nerd. It was his way of saying he was the only guy who knew the truth.”
    “OK,” said Ray. “But he can’t really believe that any Republican is