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ever.”
    He was taken aback by her honesty. She could tell he liked it.
    “Why should I choose you?” he asked.
    “Because I’ll work harder than anyone you’ll ever meet,” she said. “And I’ll always tell you the truth.”
    He hired her, she beat the charges on a technicality, and they’d never looked back through a decade of trials. In every case, they’d either made the best possible plea bargain or won outright. Never lost an actual trial.
    Parish looked at him, hunched over in her car. He’d grabbed the blanket and pulled it up to his neck. Her hands were freezing. She couldn’t believe it was this cold already, and only the middle of November. Last winter she’d splurged and bought a real nice pair of leather gloves that, inevitably, she promptly lost.
    A taxi passed, and more traffic was on the way. She closed the back car door halfway. “Larkin, you’ve never kept your mouth shut.”
    “I will, you’ll see. So will Dewey.”
    “Dewey?” St. Clair had met Dewey Booth years before when they were in juvie, the name all the kids had for the young offenders’ detention center. St. Clair was sixteen and already about six foot four. Booth was a fifteen-year-old pipsqueak. Hardly five feet. He’d been in jail for a week when St. Clair arrived and hadn’t eaten a thing. Everyone was stealing his food. Larkin was enraged. He beat up three or four guys on the range, made sure Dewey got double portions, and their lifelong bond was formed.
    “What was Dewey doing there?” she demanded.
    “He’s like my little brother. One hundred percent rock-solid,” he said.
    “This just keeps getting worse.”
    “Anyhow, the cops’ll never find him.”
    “Spare me,” she said.
    “If they do, he’ll keep his mouth shut.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    Parish couldn’t stand Booth. At least with St. Clair, despite all his bluster, all his lying and half-truths, he had a code. She had never known him to fire a gun or wield a knife. He hated bigots in jail and guys who hit women. Just before his eighteenth birthday, the two of them broke into some rich people’s house one weekend when they thought the family was skiing up north. They were surprised to find the nanny’s teenage daughter in the basement, studying for her exams. They tied her up and Booth wanted to rape her. The girl’s statement to the police made it clear that St. Clair, who loved to brag that he’d never lost a fight, kept his young partner in crime off her.
    Over the years, Parish read the statement many times to remind her of why, despite all the trouble he caused her, she remained so loyal to Larkin St. Clair. She knew it by heart:
     
    “I was studying chemistry and they came in and tied me up with a rope. The tall one with long hair went out to get some duct tape for my mouth. The short one was real scary. He just went crazy. Panting like a dog. He grabbed my breast and started ripping off my skirt, but the tall one ran back in and pulled him off me. Threw him against the wall. ‘You just go nuts, don’t you, every fucking time,’ he said. ‘Don’t lay a hand on her again.’ He was very angry at his short friend but he smiled at me real nice. Said he was sorry they had to tie me up and told me not to come to court. Said no one would hurt me. I knew he was telling the truth. They left the room and I heard them breaking things all through the house but I never saw them again.”
     
    Parish’s coat wasn’t heavy enough and her body wasn’t accustomed yet to the cold weather. The wind seemed to cut right through her.
    St. Clair rubbed the blanket under his chin. His eyes were bloodshot. His badly cut hair was ragged. “How old was the kid who took the bullet?” he asked.
    “Four years old,” she said.
    “My aunt’s son Justin is five.”
    St. Clair had been living with his aunt, Arlene Redmond—the only person in his family without a criminal record—since he’d got out of jail. Did some cooking and gardening for her, babysat