Page 10 of The Evening Wolves

A buzzer sounded, and the door opposite John-Henry opened. He glimpsed the hallway beyond, the deputy standing guard—a self-important dud named Glover, who was probably loving this—and then Aniya Thompson stepped into the room.

She was Black, her hair in short, beaded braids, and wearing a neat gray suit. Over the years, Aniya had helped John-Henry and Emery with the occasional legal trouble, and seeing her now—a familiar face, someone who was here to help—John-Henry felt a rush of affection and gratitude disproportionate to his actual relationship with Aniya. He smiled as he stood, almost grinning.

“Aniya, thank God. I mean, thank you. Thank you for coming.”

She nodded. A reflexive smile appeared and then was tucked out of sight again, never touching her eyes. Motioning for John-Henry to sit, she took the chair opposite him. “How are you doing?” she asked.

“Fine. I mean—” He laughed and heard the unhinged sound of it. “—horrible. This is a nightmare. But I’ll survive.”

“Yes, you will. And you’re going to need to keep telling yourself that because this is going to be long and ugly, and I want you to know that from the start.” She watched him, her braids clicking as she moved her head. “If it’s not the worst thing you’ll ever go through, it might be close. But we’re going to beat it, and you’re going to come out the other side.”

She waited long enough that John-Henry realized a response was required so he nodded. “These charges are bullshit. I’ve never—and I mean never, Aniya—come anywhere near—” He stopped, fighting another of those fraying laughs. “I can’t even say it. Jesus, I’m going to throw up.”

Raising an eyebrow, she made like she might get the guard, but John-Henry waved her back into her seat.

“Never,” he said. “Not a video. Not a picture. I would never touch that stuff. I would never go anywhere near it. For fuck’s sake, I know how bad it is, what they do to those kids. I have a son and a daughter. I would never—” He’d heard this all from the other side of the table: the repetition, the cycling, someone stuck in a loop. He forced himself to corral his thoughts. “I would never look at that stuff.” He firmed up his voice. “Much less have it.”

Aniya nodded. John-Henry wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—assurances, conviction, a passionate declaration of her belief in him—but in the wake of that single nod, all he could do was sit back as confusion and disappointment bled together.

“You’ll be arraigned tomorrow,” Aniya said, the words clipped and professional. “I imagine Diana will ask for you to be held without bail, but that’s not going to happen. She’ll talk about your pattern of avoiding arrest, and that’s not going to help you, but we’ll focus on your long service to this community, your roots here, your family.”

“My father,” John-Henry said. The grin on his face felt dead. A rictus. That was the word.

“That might hurt us, actually. We’ll see what Diana does and play it by ear.”

That sense of disorientation came again at hearing Diana referred to so casually, at understanding—in a way his brain had avoided until now—that the county attorney he’d worked with on hundreds of cases was now actively involved in prosecuting him. Another realization came on the heels of that one.

“My father,” he said again. “He’s got to be furious.”

“That’s one way of putting it. I passed him in the lobby; he was tearing strips off Neecie Weiss, and I bet he was about five minutes away from getting himself arrested.”

“Did Emery—” John-Henry didn’t know how to finish that question.

“Believe it or not, he was being the reasonable one.”

A laugh escaped John-Henry. Then his eyes stung, and he rubbed them and blinked, trying to rein himself in.

“You’ll be out on bail by the end of the day tomorrow. You’ll be suspended, of course, so you’ll need to find a way to occupy yourself. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said this is going to be long and hard, and you’re going to need to find a way to keep yourself healthy and stable throughout the process. In a couple of weeks, we’ll have the first set of discovery materials, and we can start figuring out our defense.”

“In a couple of weeks?”

Aniya hesitated a beat too long.

“You know something,” John said. “You know what they’ve got on me.”

“Right now, you need to be thinking about tonight and tomorrow. You need to sleep if you can—they’ll put you in the isolation unit to keep you safe—”

“And look how well that worked for Dalton Weber.”

He hadn’t meant the words to be loud, but they bounced back from the cinderblock walls. The dead man’s name echoed between them.

“You need to sleep if you can. Because tomorrow, you need to look like a solid citizen who’s been wrongly accused, and you can’t do that if you’re a wreck.”

She wasn’t meeting his eyes. And John-Henry thought about how long it had taken her to arrive. Even after he’d spent all that time being booked and processed into jail, he’d still waited—how long? An hour? Longer? And it wasn’t like Wahredua was busy on a Sunday night.

“What is it?” John-Henry asked.

Aniya opened her mouth and shut it again.

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