Read One Dog Night for Free Online Page B

one dollar, Hike and I will serve as his lawyers for the next two hours. I’m hoping that two hours from now I’ll be home walking Tara, but I use it as an outside amount of time. Galloway has no money on him, so I accept his promise to pay. We do all this so that anything he tells us will be covered by attorney-client privilege, though he seems unconcerned by it either way.
    Once that’s accomplished, he quickly tells us that he has always known that he set the fire, but that he has no recollection of doing so. It comes as no surprise, since Becky had said the exact same thing. But it still makes very little sense, so I ask him to explain his feelings of guilt.
    “I had hit bottom,” he says. “Except I didn’t bounce off the bottom; I stuck to it. My entire world revolved around drugs, pretty much every dollar I had went to pay for them. And I didn’t have many dollars.
    “I would have blackout periods, sometimes lasting for a day or more. When I would wake up, I had no idea what I had done, or how I had gotten to the physical place I was in. It was scary, but not as scary as you would think.”
    “Why not?” Hike asks.
    “Because I really didn’t care that much if I lived or died, so there was nothing to be scared of. And if I did live, dealing with blackouts was not important; getting drugs was the first and only priority.”
    Galloway is saying all this in a fairly dispassionate way, with no apparent embarrassment, or emotion. It seems he has long ago come to terms with what he was in those days.
    He continues. “So I woke up one day from a two-day binge, in my apartment. The drugs hadn’t worn off, not even close, but it was the pain that brought me out of it.”
    “What kind of pain?”
    “I had burns on both of my arms. Chemical burns.”
    For the first time, I’m seeing emotion in Galloway as he gets closer to talking about the fire that killed all those people. I don’t want to ask him anything yet; I find that when a story is pouring out voluntarily, questions can be a distraction.
    He goes on to describe how the people in one of the apartments on the first floor of the incinerated building were his suppliers, and how they had cut off his credit, little as it was, earlier in that week. Though he doesn’t know where, he says he must have gotten the drugs elsewhere, but they were likely of lower quality, and he reacted badly to them.
    “I was terribly angry at them for doing that; I had been buying from them for over a year, and they knew how badly I needed it…” He shakes his head at the memory. “There’s no doubt I wanted them dead. I wanted them worse than dead.”
    He goes silent for about twenty seconds. Silent time in a prison interview room is interminable, treadmill time zips along by comparison. I obviously need to get him back on track. “You mentioned chemical burns, as if that were significant,” I say.
    He nods. “I have a graduate degree in chemical engineering. The mixture that was reported to have caused the fire is something I am very familiar with. Most people aren’t.”
    I ask Galloway if he knows what the police uncovered so many years after the fact to lead to his arrest, but he professes to have no idea.
    “Whatever it was,” he says, “I feel glad it finally happened. It was long overdue.”

This is the kind of stuff they should include in the orientation.
    That’s what Senator Ben Ryan thought about as he sat at the bar, and it brought a smile to his face. The rest of the night, he knew, would bring quite a few more smiles.
    Incoming freshman members of Congress are subjected to long, boring meetings about what life in the halls of power is like, and how to successfully navigate this “new world.” The focus is on understanding the rules, whether they be legal, political, financial, or ethical, and dealing with the press and constituents.
    That was all fine, and Ben had heard it, internalized it, and used it to his advantage in the eleven years since. But