The Guilty One Read Free

time putting anything in writing, his mind just didn’t work that way—he could have called her while he was walking out on the bridge, had his say, and then scrambled over and gotten the job done.
    Of course, doing it this way—it was like he wanted someone to stop him. Wasn’t that the conventional wisdom? He had built in the risk factor on purpose, hoping to be seen, to be talked out of it. And that’s just what Maris had done. Had he seen that coming? Did he have some deep vein of gutlessness he wasn’t even aware of?
    Sure, he’d fantasized about doing something like this for a while now. Had let himself consider various means and methods before finally choosing the bridge, mostly because the problem of the body’s discovery would be taken care of: there was no way Deb would be the one to find him if he jumped, and a very real possibility that his body would never be recovered. She could choose to memorialize him or not. She could let her life close over his absence much like the freezing cold water would close over him, and get on with things.
    A selfless attitude for a man bent on dying—if he’d been sincere. But he wasn’t. Ron was gutless. He was only here because he just didn’t have it in him to go another round with Deb over their son’s innocence or guilt. The terrible day a month and a half ago when the verdict was read—it had savaged Ron, but it had also brought him a strange measure of comfort. Because it was finally over. Because they wouldn’t have to walk into that courtroom again. He could go back to work and lose himself in his job for a few hours a day. Finally, the atmosphere inside his home would be free of the weight of Deb’s frantic, desperate hope.
    Such an existence was far from perfect. It would never be good again. But Ron had finally been beginning to think they had leveled off, found their new normal. That they could endure. And then fucking Arthur Mehta had driven his ridiculous Mercedes roadster—with a woman who was not his wife in the passenger seat—into the median strip along North Main two nights ago, causing his tire to blow out and attracting the attention of a cop. This being Mehta’s third DUI (Ron cursed himself for not taking that into consideration when they hired him to defend Karl), the media vultures were all over it, and Deb had worked herself into a frenzy yesterday as the images played over and over on the news. Grounds for an appeal , she’d bleated to him, the skin under her eyes gray with exhaustion, her fingers moving restlessly on the hem of her sweater. Gross misconduct . And all Ron could think, as he pretended to listen and agreed that they should move quickly while Mehta’s arrest was still in the news, was: I can’t do this again.
    God, this was hard, trying to marshal all the directions his brain wanted to go. Especially with the two officers staring at him expectantly. And the flashers on their car . . . did they have to put on the damn flashers? Probably a traffic safety issue, but this was just going to draw even more attention. Shit .
    â€œHey.” His voice was swallowed up by the wind. He was still holding the phone, so he stuffed it back into his pocket, coughed, and tried again. “Hey.”
    â€œIt’s a hell of a view, isn’t it?” The male cop was grinning. Esteban—the little rectangular name tag on his shirt read Esteban. Ron had to squint against the sun to make out the female officer’s name on her tag: Officer Dane looked considerably less comfortable with this whole exercise than her partner. She could stand to take a few pages out of Ron’s favorite book, which—though no one knew this but Deb, who had found the paperback in a used bookstore in the early, flat-broke days of their marriage—was titled Sell, Sell, Sell : Top Secrets of an Irresistible Pitch. Ron had studied that book like the Bible, and it,