Page 1 of Pro Bono

1

AUGUST 2007

McKinley Lawrence Stone was the name he had given himself in the court papers he’d filed three years ago. When the change had been certified he held a party for himself with a few cronies using the last of the money he had left from his time as Steven Wallace. He called it his Launch Party. He had played with variations on the new name, and the one he felt most comfortable with was Mack Stone. The name Mack Stone would mark him as an unpretentious man, and the McKinley had a subtle scent of historical priority and maybe even inherited wealth, with the possibility of some education that he would be far too modest to mention. The party guests included several of his favorite people—Dickie O’Connell, who ran a card game and could deal any hand he wanted each player to have, a pair of women friends named Tracy and Faith, who operated an escort service offering housewives supplementing their incomes, and Ike Potter, a thriving dealer in mail-order pharmaceuticals who had often filled orders for him. It was a memorable party for sure. He was remembering it three years later.

He was thinking about it because at the moment he was at about the same point in the cycle where he’d been at that time, only better. He was driving a beautiful new black BMW 7 series sedan with a load of optional features. Inside the trunk was a leather carrying case that held new socks, underwear, casual shirts, and pants, and a portfolio of stock and bond accounts bought with money that had recently been the property of Linda Warren, but were now in his own permanent name, the one he’d been given at birth. He had never divulged this name to anyone since his family had moved to a new town when he was eight and they’d all made up new names.

He was already far north of Los Angeles, heading east across Nevada. Professionals like him knew enough not to head for Las Vegas. It was the first place the hunters looked. It was exactly the tempting distance from Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or San Diego to make a stupid person think he had left the police and his victims far behind and could relax. Vegas was nowhere near far enough. It was a bright, sunny, sparkling trap.

He had spent the day settled back in the scientifically designed, ergonomically perfect, expertly crafted leather seat while he looked out the window at the jagged, rocky, skillet-hot hellscape of the southern part of Nevada. Now he was enjoying the smooth, silent ride watching the mirages pool ahead on the highway, then dissolve as he approached. The afternoon sun seemed to be throwing its light ahead of him on the future. He had swung north, taken Route 50, and was in northeastern Nevada and moving fast but still barely above the speed limit on the two-lane highway.

A vehicle was coming up fast behind him. He stared at the mirror. He saw it was a gray passenger car with only the driver in it. He had a certain envy, because if he hadn’t been driving with three or four milliondollars on paper that he didn’t want to be asked any questions about, he’d be going the same speed.

Mack kept his speed exactly as it was—not fast enough to prompt a cop to wonder why so fast, or slow enough to wonder why so slow. He’d had the throttle on cruise control for nearly two hours. He watched the other car approach in the mirror, holding himself back. He didn’t want to start racing some idiot, when winning meant nothing, and a tiny mistake could be fatal. He had heard that the only ambulance service in the empty parts of Nevada was manned by convicts from the prisons. He’d heard other people say that wasn’t true, but he had decided he’d better believe it anyway to keep himself cautious. Right now, he had everything he had ever wanted—almost too much money, a good car, freedom, and his next woman writing him long, passionate emails every day, with pictures intended to make him choose her house as his next address.

He kept his eyes on the road for a few minutes, but the other car kept coming, and whenever he looked, the car was closer. It wasn’t just on the straight, level stretches. No matter what the road looked like, the car was gaining on him. After a few more minutes, the car was nosing its grille up to his back bumper, like a race car drafting to defeat the wind. The yellow light on his left mirror began to blink to indicate the car was going to pass. Why didn’t it?

Mack couldn’t stand it anymore. He couldn’t see the other driver very well, but he was slight, probably young. Mack very gently touched his foot to the brake pedal, just to make the brake lights glow and maybe shave a mile an hour off the speed to remind this kid what he was doing. The kid wasn’t the only one whose life was in his hands when he was driving.

The gray car slid forward and bumped the rear of the BMW, jolting Mack’s seat so the back of his head tipped hard against the headrest. Thebump didn’t hurt, but it shocked and addled him for a second until his eyes found the horizon again. He was instantly angry. He hadn’t carried a gun in years. He had stopped because a couple women he’d been with had gotten so enraged when they learned about the money that if they’d found the gun, they might have used it. Right now, he regretted selling the gun.

He decided to force the driver to pass. As he was letting his speed decrease, the gray car began dropping back slightly.Damn right, he thought.You’d better. He kept going at the reduced speed for a few seconds, searching ahead for a place where they could both pull onto a flat shoulder and have a frank discussion. Then a jolt made him look up into the rearview mirror. The gray car had slowed to build an empty space between it and the BMW, but then the driver stepped hard on the gas pedal, shot forward, and hit Mack’s car again.

Stone’s BMW received the force with a bang, punched forward by the gray car. His eyes opened wide and he uttered a cry, and when he heard his own voice, he realized he sounded terrified. This kid was some kind of road rage case, out of control. He was trying to hurt Mack, maybe kill them both. Mack wondered if he could have done something to set this kid off without knowing it, maybe cut him off way back on the highway. He stepped on the gas pedal and pressed hard to get some distance from the threat.

The broken stripes on the road flashed under his car now, coming toward him like tracer bullets. As he glanced in the mirror again, he saw the kid was right behind. He knew the car he was driving was an incredible machine, capable of much more than the hundred he was going now—certainly faster than the gray car. But he had been driving on this road for over half an hour, long enough to have a feel for it. He could drive faster, but he doubted he could take a severe curve at these speeds without spinning out. There had also been heavy rains all overthe west this winter, and plenty of curvy mountain roads had been undermined or blocked by mudslides. What if—

The car behind him edged up close to nudge him again, but he would not allow that. He pressed the pedal harder, and as he did, the gray car was left behind. Mack was still accelerating when the BMW’s right front wheel hit a pothole and dropped to the right, bounced up, then launched itself a foot into the air, off the road, landed in a drainage ditch, and slammed into a tree.

Andy Minkeagan sat in the bus next to his friend Alvin Copes. It was a bright, clear, show-off day to be out traveling, and he supposed that someday one of them would remind the other what this was like after weeks of smoke and sweat-soaked masks. Alvin was good to sit with. They had known each other for years, so there wasn’t a lot of tiresome talk—just the easy, natural kind that made the mile after mile of road pleasant and restful.

They had been on the fire line in California for three weeks fighting the Prickleback Fire, a big one made worse by the weather, with temperatures in the hundred-and-five-plus range, and winds that would blow one way for a while and then reverse, like something big turning back because there was something alive back behind it that it had forgotten to eat. Sometimes the something seemed to be you.

Everyone on the bus was a model prisoner from Ely State. That was why they all got to spend the past twenty-one days on vacation on a fire line in California fighting fifty-foot flames with shovels on terrain so vertical and tough that the only way out was on the feet that had brought them there. The pay was ten dollars a day.

Minkeagan and Copes both had eventful criminal records with enough terms like “grand,” “aggravated,” “armed,” and “conspiracy” to have kept them in Ely for a long time, but neither had ever been convicted of homicide despite some experience with it, so they had been eligible to fight fires. Neither of them was lazy either, so they’d both taken other courses besides Firefighting Basic Training One and Two. Copes was Black and Minkeagan was white, and they’d spent some time vouching for each other with men of their races when they’d taken their first course, Automotive Technology, together, and they had found it a comfortable way to take other courses.

They had taken Commercial Driver’s License and Heavy Equipment Operator. These had been easy to agree on because they were practical, even though Copes and Minkeagan never expected to be out of prison young enough to get jobs. They felt lucky to have programs at all, because Ely was the designated maximum security prison. They took Arborist because it was an opportunity for outdoor exercise, and it was peaceful. They took Culinary because it was a rare chance to taste something besides prison food.

“Copes!” came the voice from the front. “Your turn at the wheel.”

Taking a shift driving the bus was one of the privileges of having a commercial driver’s license, but at times it was a drawback too. The driving could be hard, and it carried a lot of responsibility. Minkeagan stepped into the aisle to let Copes out of the window seat and make his way to the front as Stapleton, the current driver, slowed the bus and pulled off onto a gravel patch.

When Stapleton got up, Copes sat down in the driver’s seat, picked up the clipboard on the dash, and put his initials beside his name on the driver list. He strapped himself in, looked at the mirrors, signaled, shifted, and made the bus growl up onto the pavement of Route 50 and begin to gain speed.

Copes was pleased to see that there were no cars coming up behind, because the bus was climbing on this stretch. Driving a bus going home to Ely was complex. The average altitude around Ely was 6,788 feet, but within fifty miles the up-down variation was over 4,000 feet. It took time to bring the bus up through the gears to build up speed, and he didn’t want to tempt some fool to risk swinging into the oncoming lane to get around the bus and slamming into a driver coming the opposite way.

As though to prove his point, a sporty gray sedan shot around the next curve toward him so fast that the wind from it rocked the bus a little. Copes had stared right into the face of the gray car’s driver, and he had looked very young and very—what? Not scared. It used to be that a kid who was barely surviving doing something stupid would at least show some appreciation for the fact that his ass was still on the planet in defiance of the odds. These days they didn’t seem to feel that.

Copes blew out a breath and then took one back in and kept going, paying acute attention to the road ahead. It would have been a real joke on him to survive eight years in maximum security and fighting fires and then have some idiot turn his car into a torpedo and punch it through the front of the bus and into his lap.

Two miles on, the bus came to the spot where a new BMW had gone off the narrow shoulder into the ditch and hit a tree. Copes didn’t have to tell anybody. The wreck was in plain sight through the bus windows, and Copes slowed the bus down and pulled past a big pothole and a broken-off chunk of road, past the car, and everybody got a look while he eased the bus onto the shoulder.

The car was gouged along both sides, the front wheels were pigeon-toed inward, and the grille was wrapped around a tree so far that the headlights were looking at each other. The driver’s-side airbag was still inflated so it didn’t seem as though the driver could have gottenout. Copes pulled a few feet farther uphill so there wouldn’t be any gas trickling under the bus if there was a leak from the BMW, and opened both doors. “Okay, let’s see what we can do,” he called.

Minkeagan took a chemical fire extinguisher and others took shovels and ran out the two doors toward the wrecked car. Copes engaged the hand brake of the bus, but he didn’t turn off the engine, in case they needed to transport the driver.

By the time Minkeagan arrived, the men had stabbed the air bag to deflate it, and two of them were pulling the driver out of his seat. They laid him out on the ground. Minkeagan leaned in and turned off the BMW’s engine.

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