For the obvious reason, guards in prison did not carry guns on their persons, so in any one-on-one encounter such as this delivery, shackles on prisoners tended to be the norm. Hardy knew several attorneys who visited their clients here and most of them were happy to let the shackles stay put. A shackled convict was a controllable convict, and with many of these inmates, you couldn't be too careful.
The guard hestitated for an instant, then shrugged. "Your call." With practiced precision, he unlocked the handcuffs from the chain that was threaded through the Levi's belt loops encircling Evan's waist. The cuffs still dangled from the waist chain at his sides.
Now, though, his hands free, Evan rubbed at his wrists.
The room was four feet wide by about seven feet long. A heavy, solid, industrial gray metal desk squatted against Hardy's right wall and stuck out two-thirds of the way across the space; in a pinch it could serve as a first-line barrier in the event of a surprise attack. Folding chairs sat on either side of it. Hardy had a door with a wire-glass window in it behind him and another door just like that facing him. The guard who'd let him in had cautioned him to stay on his side of the desk, "just to be safe." He'd also pointed out the small button low in the wall in Hardy's side that could be pressed in the event of any trouble.
Evan's guard said, "I'm right outside the whole time," and then that's where he was, closing the door behind him.
Hardy said, "You want to sit down?"
Evan thanked him and sat. He put his free hands on the table, still looking through Hardy, until suddenly he focused. "You got a cigarette?"
"Sorry, I don't smoke."
"I didn't either," Evan said. "What a joke."
"What is?"
"Not smoking. Watching what you eat. Staying in shape. All that stuff outside. Then you wind up in here." Maybe he felt as though he'd given too much of himself away. As a cop or a soldier or at the prison or somewhere else, Evan had gotten good at the thousand-yard stare, and he reverted into it. After a minute inside himself, he came back to Hardy. "So who are you?" he asked.
"Dismas Hardy, your new attorney."
"Don't take this wrong," Evan said, "but it took you long enough."
"Yeah, well, it was a little complicated."
A beat. "What's that first name again?"
"Dismas. The good thief. On Calvary? Next to Jesus?"
Evan shook his head. "Don't know him. Dismas, I mean. I've heard of Jesus."
Hardy looked him in the face. If this was humor, it was damn subtle and wouldn't be a bad thing. But he couldn't tell. He could see, however, that his initial impression of the man's age was off-close up he came as advertised, thirty-one. Hard years.
"What happened to Charlie Bowen?" Evan asked.
"He went missing last summer. He's the equivalent of dead as far as the Court's concerned. My firm inherited his files, including yours. I got them about four months ago."
"You a slow reader?"
Hardy's glance came up at his new client again. The guy wielded words efficiently, short punches inside. First a wave at humor, then a cutting jab. A lot going on behind unyielding eyes. Hardy figured he deserved the rebuke-four months while he decided whether or not to take on the appeal himself must have felt a lot different to him than those same four months inside the prison had to Evan.
But Hardy was here now, and that's what mattered. Evan's trial had ended nearly two years before. Charlie Bowen obviously hadn't gotten too far with the appeal in the fourteen or so months that he'd worked on it. Nobody else had done anything on it for six months after Bowen disappeared. The four more months that Hardy had taken while he made up his mind after he got the files were the least of Evan's real problems.
So Hardy ignored the question. It was irrelevant now. He pushed his chair back from the desk, crossed his legs, started in a conversational tone. "I used to be a cop," he said. "Before that I was a Marine and did a tour in Vietnam. Sound familiar?"
"You enlist?"
"Marines," Hardy repeated. "They don't draft Marines."
"How old were you?"
"Twenty."
"Yeah, I was twenty when I joined the Guard, still in college."
"That was pre-nine-eleven?"
"Pre-everything," Evan said. "Different world. The Guard looked like easy money at the time. A good way to keep in shape. Who knew?"
"Did you go right into the Police Academy after school?"
"Pretty much. Couple of months off, maybe. You can only drink so much beer and do nothing else before it gets old."
"I don't know. I spent ten years doing that. I had a kid who died."
