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smooth. Even with the added gray and the no-nonsense glasses, she was a woman who’d come into herself as she’d aged, and was now far more handsome than she’d been a decade before.
    But internally, she suffered from a great discontent. Since the upset victory resulting in her election three years before, Sharron Pratt had suffered a steady decline in popularity. Now, with her chance for reelection coming up in November, she had eight months to recoup the eleven points which the latest poll told her she had lost.
    “I don’t understand how this has happened, Gabe. I really don’t.”
    Gabriel Torrey, her chief assistant D.A. and political mentor, was methodically breaking apart the pistachios from the bowl on the bar, gathering the nuts onto his napkin. When he’d accumulated somewhere between eight and a dozen, he would pop them into his mouth, washing them down with nonalcoholic beer.
    Torrey had no trouble understanding what had happened to Sharron Pratt’s fans. Conveying it to her was the difficult part.
    He shrugged, cracked a nut, keeping a casual tone. “Crime’s up, Sharron. Convictions are down. That’s the short answer. People are tired of it.”
    “I’m tired of it, too, Gabe.” Pratt leaned forward on her stool, moved a hand onto his sleeve. “But the damn police are so hostile and we can’t seem to get any coverage . . . what?”
    Torrey was shaking his head. “People are impatient with the excuses, too, Sharron. It’s been three years. People are thinking that if you haven’t been able to fix things in that time, you’re not going to.” He’d only cracked two shells, but he threw the nuts into his mouth early. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but the agenda you got elected on last time just hasn’t played in the real world.”
    “It would, though. If everyone would just get behind it.”
    Torrey knew he had to answer with a great deal of care. This woman might be his bedmate at widely spaced intervals when the stars were aligned just right, but every day she was, after all, his boss. Traditionally she did not warm to philosophical argument.
    She’d worked the legal trenches in San Francisco for years—social worker, public defender, lawyer for various civil rights coalitions—and she knew what played in this town. Her election had confirmed that the people were behind her. They were ready for a change. No more white guys prosecuting minorities. It was going to be a new age.
    She had won by, among other things, promising to do all she could to stop police brutality. Stop prosecuting victimless crimes. Don’t charge petty drug users or prostitutes. Institute counseling and rehab programs for people whose emotional and substance problems caused them to break the law.
    Her administration was going to be known not for enforcing outmoded laws but for doing what was right. And Sharron Pratt always knew, without doubt, what that was—no matter what, she was on the side of the angels.
    But if Torrey wanted to get Sharron elected again, he was going to have to get her to bend, except Torrey knew—to borrow from an old song—that Pratt was an oak, not a willow. She did not bend.
    Maybe, though, he could get her to acknowledge that a private moral position did not have to be reflected absolutely in the political arena. Maybe there could be a gray area, although gray areas, too, God knew (or at least Torrey did), were not Pratt’s long suit. “I don’t know,” Torrey began again. “Maybe people didn’t realize how the results of your—our—programs would affect them.”
    Pratt’s nostrils flared and her vibrant eyes flashed. “What do you mean by that, Gabe?”
    “Well, let’s take the homeless, for example. Now, being homeless is not a crime in itself.”
    “Not a crime at all.” Pratt employed a crisp school-marmish correction almost as a verbal tic.
    But Torrey was used to her, and her response didn’t slow him down. “And no one’s saying it is. But