Last Call Read Free Page A

father had argued the way they used to.With Rene in town, there was plenty to be happy about—so long as he didn’t overanalyze things.
    But he always overanalyzed things. Last month’s draw had fallen short of what some lawyers paid their personal trainers. His ex-wife was a fruitcake, and his post-divorce love life could have filled an entire volume of Cupid’s Rules of Love and War (Idiot’s Edition).
    To add insult to injury, twice a week Abuela called Spanish talk radio to find her thirty-nine-year-old grandson “a nice Cuban girl.”
    Sometimes Jack felt as if he had used up his lifetime allotment of luck getting Theo off death row for a murder he didn’t commit—whose death warrant had been signed by the law-and-order governor of Florida, Jack’s father.
    And then there was Rene.
    She lay on her side, sound asleep, the soft cotton sheet hugging the curve of her hip. Her flight from West Africa had landed that afternoon. She’d finally succumbed to jet lag, though not before taking Jack for a ride that seemed to have been propelled by rocket 14
    James Grippando
    fuel.They had planned to hit South Beach for dinner.They never made it out of Jack’s bedroom.Typical for her first night in town.
    Unfortunately, she would be gone in two days, three at the most.
    Some emergency would undoubtedly come up and force her to cut the trip short.That would also be “typical.”
    The first time Jack had laid eyes on Rene, she was covered in dust, caught in the midst of the Senoufo country’s equivalent of a sandstorm. It was hard not to be impressed by a Harvard Med School grad who had given up the financial rewards of private practice to be a one-doc operation in a clinic near the cocoa region of Côte d’Ivoire. Many of her patients were young children escaping forced servitude on the plantations, mere innocents who had been snatched by kidnappers, lured away by liars, or sold into slavery by their own families for as little as fifteen dollars. Rene saw all that and more—malnutrition, AIDS, infant mortality, even genital mutilation among some migrant tribes. Perhaps it was a stretch, but Jack felt an immediate connection to Rene, having passed up offers himself from prestigious firms right out of law school to defend death-row inmates. For whatever reason, they hit it off. Really hit it off.
    Passion, however, was a tricky thing. On the emotional EKG, Jack and Rene resembled a couple of flat-liners with occasional bursts of tachycardia. She flew into Miami to see him every three months or so. Sometimes she didn’t even tell Jack she was coming.
    Smart, funny, sexy, and spontaneous, she could have been everything Jack thought he wanted in a woman—except that she was hardly ever around. On one of these visits she was going to put away the passport and announce that she was moving to Miami.At least that was what Jack told himself.A little optimism kept him in the game.
    “Rene?” he whispered. She didn’t move. He nudged her.
    “What?” she muttered.
    “Where’s the remote?”
    LAST CALL
    15
    Only one eye opened, which was a good thing. A two-eyed glare of that caliber would have killed him, for sure. She swung her arm around and jabbed the remote control into Jack’s elbow.
    Jack punched the button, but nothing happened. “Damn it.
    How are you supposed to get this thing turned on?”
    “Talk dirty to it,” she said into her pillow.
    “Thanks.”
    “Go to hell.”
    I love you, too , he started to say, but thought better of a joke like that. On her last visit, he’d used the three operative words in a serious way. Her response was not what he’d hoped for. It left him resolved never to say “I love you” again—unless followed by the word “too.”
    Waves of colored light flickered across the bedroom as Jack channel-surfed. He skipped through the reruns and infomercials, pausing only for a moment at yet another forensic drama that looked like CSI: Mars , or some such remote geographic rip-off of the