“I’m a public defender, low on the totem pole, so I get all the weird cases. Tomorrow night’s the full moon. I can hardly wait to see what the next day will bring.”
Konrad laughed. “Imagine that, Roz Wells gets the weird cases. You must have some stories to tell.”
“Yeah, too bad about that attorney-client privilege thing.”
“Oh, come on. You can talk in generalities. Some of those stories probably wind up in the news anyway.”
“True.”
“Give me some examples of full-moon cases.”
She sighed. “Well, there are the usual extraterrestrial sightings, but with what I call the loonies, there’s always an unusual twist.”
“Like zealots with shotguns wearing tin foil hats for protection?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, or like one time when a guy claimed to see a spaceship melting. Funny how it happened on a hot day on a tar road.”
“Ah, so he was seeing a mirage?”
“Probably. I didn’t hear about any melted spaceships.”
“Why did he need a lawyer? It’s not against the law to report an extraterrestrial sighting.”
“But shooting out the windows of a ‘melting’ minivan is kind of frowned upon.”
Konrad’s laugh was deep, sort of like Santa Claus without the “Ho, ho, ho.”
“The moon isn’t full every night. What do you do the other twenty-seven days?”
“If it’s not the nuts, then it’s the dregs of society. Drug dealers who hang around playgrounds getting into turf wars with the pedophiles, each one claiming the same street corner. Once I had a not-so-bright client who called the cops on the druggies, only to be picked up himself for violating his parole. And of course there are the vandals who like to show off their colorful vocabulary by hating a particular subgroup in graffiti.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but you knew it wouldn’t be, right?”
“Sure, I knew I’d meet my share of dirt bags. But I also pictured the occasional innocent person I could really help. Most of the time the son of a bitch is probably guilty and lying his head off, but everyone deserves a fair trial, presumed innocent untilprovenguilty, right?”
“Right.”
She shook her head. “That assumption is rapidly evaporating. Now I look at a defendant and the first thing that pops into my mind is, ‘What the hell did this one do, and what line of bull is he going to feed me?’”
“You could go into a different type of law practice.”
“I already have. I used to do civil law. Lots of nasty divorce cases.”
Konrad groaned. “Don’t tell me. Now you think all men are scum.”
“Not anymore. It took a while to find the old die-hard romantic in me, but I eventually did. Now I think all men are criminals.”
Konrad laughed, but there was a nervous edge to it. He scratched the back of his neck, uncrossed his long legs, and crossed them the other way.
Roz stretched to get comfortable too. “So what do you do?”
“For a living?”
No, for kicks, nervous boy.“Yeah. What kind of work do you do?”
“I work nights. In security.”
“You’re a security guard? Well, you have the size for it, but that wouldn’t have been my first guess. You sound so well educated. I mean, who uses the wordravishingthese days? Oh! Not that you couldn’t be extremely intelligent and still be a security guard. I didn’t mean to—”
