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three-hundred-dollar-an-hour Main or Franklin Street lawyers take care of Derek. But Derek’s offense was unrelated to Turbo’s business, so that accommodation had not been made. Sloughing him off to someone like Fiske was a form of punishment for Derek doing something as stupid as losing his head over a female. Turbo had no reason to fear Derek’s turning snitch. The prosecutor hadn’t even made any noises along those lines, knowing it was futile. You talk, you die — in or out of prison, it made no difference.
    Derek had grown up in a nice middle-class neighborhood, with nice middle-class parents, before he decided to drop out of high school and take the easy route of drug dealing over actually working for a living. He had every advantage, could have done anything with his life. There were just enough Derek Browns around to make the world largely apathetic to the horrific lives of the kids who turned to the sugar-elixir provided by people like Turbo. Which made Fiske want to take Derek out to an alley late at night with a baseball bat in hand and teach the young man some good old-fashioned values.
    “The ACA doesn’t give a damn about what he was doing to your girlfriend that night.”
    “I can’t believe this shit. Buddy of mine cut up somebody last year and he got two years, half that suspended. Out in three months with time served. And I’m looking at five damn years? What kinda shitty lawyer are you?”
    “Did your buddy have a prior felony conviction?”
Was your good old buddy one of the top men for one of Richmond’s worst diseases? Fiske wanted to ask, and he would have but it would be wasted breath.
“I tell you what — I’ll go back with three and time served.”
    Now Derek looked interested.
“You think you can get that?”
    Fiske stood up.
“Don’t know. I’m just a shitty lawyer.”
    On the way out, Fiske looked out the barred window and watched as a new shipment of inmates climbed from the prison van, grouped close, shackles beating a chant on the asphalt. Most were young blacks or Latinos, already sizing each other up. Slave to master. Who gets cut or scored first. The few whites looked as though they might drop and die from sheer panic before they even got to their cells. Some of these young men were probably the sons of men Patrolman John Fiske had arrested ten years ago. They would have been just kids then, maybe dreaming of something other than the public dole, no daddy at home, mother struggling through a horror of a life with no end in sight. Then again, maybe not. Reality had a way of punishing one’s subconscious. Dreams weren’t a reprieve, merely a continuation of the real-life nightmare.
    As a cop, the dialogue he had had with many arrestees tended to repeat itself.
    “Kill you, man. Kill your whole damn family,”
some would scream at him, drug-faced, as he put the cuffs on.
    “Uh-huh. You have the right to remain silent. Think about using it.”
    “Come on, man, ain’t my fault. My buddy done it. Screwed me.”
    “Where would that buddy be? And the blood on your hands? The gun in your pants? The coke still in your nostrils? Buddy do all that? Some buddy.”
    Then they might eye the dead body and lose it, blubbering.
“Holy shit! Sweet Jesus! My momma, where’s my momma? You call her. Do that for me, oh shit, do that, will you? Momma! Oh shit!”
    “You have the right to an attorney,”
he would calmly tell them.
    And that now was John Fiske.
    After a couple more court appearances downtown, Fiske left the glass and brick John Marshall Courts Building, named after the third chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall’s ancestral home was still right next door, now a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the great Virginian and American. The man would have turned over in his grave if he had known of the vile acts being debated and defended in the building that bore his name.
    Fiske headed down Ninth Street toward the James River. Hot and humid the