The Mercy Rule - Couverture souple

Lescroart, John T.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0755320050 ISBN 13 : 9780755320059

Editeur : Headline Book Publishing, 2003

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Dismas Hardy was enjoying a superb round of darts, closing in on what  might become a personal best.

He was in his office on a Monday morning, throwing his twenty-gram  hand-tooled, custom-flighted tungsten beauties. He called the game  "twenty-down" although it wasn't any kind of sanctioned affair. It had  begun as simple practice--once around and down the board from "20" to  bull's-eye. He'd turned the practice rounds into a game against  himself.

His record was twenty-five throws. The best possible round  was twenty-one, and now he was shooting at the "3" with his nineteenth  dart. A twenty-two was still possible. Beating twenty-five was going to be  a lock, assuming his concentration didn't get interrupted.

On his desk the telephone buzzed.
He'd worked downtown at an office on Sutter Street for nearly six years.  The rest of the building was home to David Freeman & Associates, a law  firm specializing in plaintiffs' personal injury and criminal defense  work. But Hardy wasn't one of Freeman's associates. Technically, he didn't  work for Freeman at all, although lately almost all of his billable hours  had come from a client his landlord had farmed out to him.

Hardy occupied the only office on the top floor of the building. Both  literally and figuratively he was on his own.

He held on to his dart and threw an evil eye at the telephone behind him,  which buzzed again. To throw now would be to miss. He sat back on the  desk, punched a button. "Yo."

Freeman's receptionist, Phyllis, had grown to tolerate, perhaps even  like, Hardy, although it was plain that she disapproved of his casual  attitude. This was a law firm. Lawyers should answer their phone crisply,  with authority and dignity. They shouldn't just pick up and say "Yo."

He took an instant's pleasure in her sigh.

She lowered her voice. "There's a man down here to see you. He doesn't have an appointment." It was the same tone she would have used if the guest had stepped in something on the sidewalk. "He says he knows you from"--a pause while she sought a suitable euphemism. She finally failed and had to come out with the hated truth--"your bar. His name is Graham Russo."

Hardy knew half a dozen Russos--it was a common name in San Francisco--but hearing that Graham from the Little Shamrock was downstairs, presumably in need of a lawyer's services, narrowed it down.

Hardy glanced at his wall calendar. It was Monday, May 12. Sighing, he put his precious dart down on his desk and told Phyllis to send Mr. Russo right on up.

Hardy was standing at his door as Graham trudged up the stairs, a handsome, athletic young guy with the weight of this world on his shoulders. And at least one other world, Hardy knew, that had crashed and burned all around him.

They had met when Graham showed up for a beer at the Shamrock. Over the course of the night Hardy, moonlighting behind the bar, found out a lot about him. Graham, too, was an attorney, although he wasn't practicing right at the moment. The community had blackballed him.

Hardy had had his own run-ins with the legal bureaucracy and knew how devastating the ostracism could be. Hell, even when you were solidly within it, the law life itself was so unrelentingly adversarial that the whole world sometimes took on a hostile aspect.

So the two men had hit it off. Both men were estranged from the law in their own ways. Graham had stayed after last call, helped clean up. He was a sweet kid--maybe a little naive and idealistic, but his head seemed to be on straight. Hardy liked him.

* * *

Before the law Graham's world had been baseball. An All-American center fielder at USF during the late eighties, he'd batted .373 and had been drafted in the sixth round by the Dodgers. He then played two years in the minor leagues, making it to Double-A San Antonio before he'd fouled a ball into his own left eye. That injury had hospitalized him for three weeks, and when he got out, his vision didn't come with him. And so with a lifetime pro average of .327, well on the way to the bigs, he'd had to give it all up.

Rootless and disheartened, he had enrolled in law school at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. Graduating at the top of his class, he beat out intense competition and got hired for a one-year term as a clerk with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But he only stayed six months.

In early 1994--the year of the baseball strike--about two months after he passed the bar, he quit. He wanted, after all, to play baseball. So he went to Vero Beach, Florida, to try out as a replacement player for the Dodgers.

And he made the team.

At the Shamrock he'd made it clear to Hardy that he'd never have played as a scab. All along, all he'd wanted out of the deal was for the Dodgers to take another look at him. The fuzziness had disappeared from his vision; he was still in great shape. He thought he could shine in spring training, get cut as a replacement when they all did, but at least have a shot at the minors again.

And that's what happened. He started the '94 season with the Albuquerque Dukes, Triple A, farther along the path to the major leagues than he'd been seven years earlier.

But he couldn't find the damn curveball and the new shot at his baseball career, upon which he'd risked everything, lasted only six weeks. His average was .192 when he got cut outright. He hadn't had a hit in his last seven games. Hell, he told Hardy, he would have cut himself.

Graham had a lumberjack's shoulders and the long legs of a high hurdler. Under a wave of golden hair his square-jawed face was clean shaven. Today he wore a gray-blue sport coat over a royal-blue dress shirt, stonewashed jeans, cowboy boots.

He was leaning forward on the front of the upholstered chair in front of Hardy's desk, elbows on his knees. Hardy noticed the hands clasped in front of him--the kind of hands that, when he got older, people would call gnarled--workingman's hands, huge and somehow expressive.

Graham essayed a smile. "I don't even know why I'm here, tell you the truth."

Hardy's face creased. "I often feel the same way myself." He was sitting on the corner of his desk. "Your dad?"

Graham nodded.
Salvatore Russo--Herb Caen's column had dubbed him Salmon Sal and the name had stuck--was recent news. Despondent over poor health, his aging body, and financial ruin, Sal had apparently killed himself last Friday by having a few cocktails, then injecting himself with morphine. He'd left a Do Not Resuscitate form for the paramedics, but he was already dead when they'd arrived.

To the public at large Sal was mostly unknown. But he was well known in San Francisco's legal community. Every Friday Sal would make the rounds of the city's law workshops in an old Ford pickup. Behind the Hall of Justice, where Hardy would see him, he'd park by the hydrant and sell salmon, abalone, sturgeon, caviar, and any other produce of the sea he happened to get his hands on. His customers included cops, federal-, municipal-, and superior-court judges, attorneys, federal marshals, sheriffs, and the staffs at both halls--Justice and City--and at the federal courthouse.

The truck appeared only one day a week, but since Sal's seafood was always fresher and a lot cheaper than at the markets, he apparently made enough to survive, notwithstanding the fact that he did it all illegally.

His salmon had their tails clipped, which meant they had been caught for sport and couldn't be sold. Abalone was the same story; private parties taking abalone for commercial sale had been outlawed for years. His winter-run chinooks had probably been harvested by Native Americans using gill nets. And yet year after year this stuff would appear in Sal's truckbed.

Salmon Sal had no retail license, but it didn't matter because he was connected. His childhood pals knew him from the days when Fisherman's Wharf was a place where men went down to the sea in boats. Now these boys were judges and police lieutenants and heads of departments. They were not going to bust him.

Sal might live on the edge of the law, but the establishment considered him one of the good guys--a character in his yellow scarves and hip boots, the unlit stogie chomped down to its last inch, the gallon bottles from which he dispensed red and white plonk in Dixie cups along with a steady stream of the most politically incorrect jokes to be found in San Francisco.

The day Hardy had met Sal, over a decade ago, he'd been with Abe Glitsky. Glitsky was half black and half Jewish and every inch of him scary looking--a hatchet face and a glowing scar through his lips, top to bottom. Sal had seen him, raised his voice. "Hey, Abe, there's this black guy and this Jew sitting on the top of this building and they both fall off at the same time. Which one hits the ground first?"

"I don't know, Sal," Glitsky answered, "which one?"

"Who cares?"

Now Sal was dead and the newspapers had been rife with conjecture: early evidence indicated that someone had been in the room with him when he'd died. A chair knocked over in the kitchen. Angry sounds. Other evidence of struggle.

The police were calling the death suspicious. Maybe someone had helped Sal die--put him on an early flight.
"I didn't know Sal was your father," Hardy said. "Not until just now."

"Yeah, well. I didn't exactly brag about him." Graham took a breath and looked beyond Hardy, out the window. "The funeral's tomorrow."

When no more words came, Hardy prompted him. "Are you in trouble?"

"No!" A little too quickly, too loud. Graham toned it down ...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In Dismas Hardy, New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart has created one of the most complex and engaging characters in contemporary fiction. Hardy, the former bartender, loving husband and father, and reluctant defense attorney of Lescroart's blockbuster novel The 13th Juror, returns in The Mercy Rule to face his most challenging case yet.

Having vowed to spend more time with his wife and kids, Dismas Hardy is hesitant to take on the case of Graham Russo, a could-have-been-great baseball player turned lawyer indicted for the murder of his father, Sal. Everyone close to the Russos knew Sal was dying, and that he needed morphine injections to ease his suffering. Graham freely admits to administering those injections, but insists he wasn't there the night of Sal's overdose and resultant death. Was it suicide, murder--or mercy? With personal and professional tensions mounting, Hardy finds himself face-to-face with a terrifying truth: If this was a murder, he might well be the next person to die.

With his mastery of courtroom drama, and solid connection to the human element that makes his fiction so compelling, John Lescroart has created in The Mercy Rule an intelligent and richly satisfying thriller.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Headline Book Publishing
• Date d'édition: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0755320050
• ISBN 13: 9780755320059
• Reliure: Broché