Page 46 of Hush

“Villegas doesn’t like escort duty.”

“Villegas… doesn’t like much.” Mike tried to stay professional. He cleared his throat. “Are you still trying to convince the defense attorney to come to a plea agreement?”

“I’m trying to convince the AUSA to accept a more lenient plea agreement.” Tom sighed. “I think Ballard told them all to be hard-asses specifically on my cases.”

“But you’re the judge. Doesn’t what you say go?”

“I’m the arbiter of the law. The U.S. Attorney is the representative of the state, and if the state wants to pursue a hard justice, that’s what they’ll do. They’ll take the case to trial if they want to prove a point. To the community, or to me. That they want to toe a hard line.”

“Do you think it will go all the way?” Even though they were picking a jury today, if the AUSA bent, a plea agreement could still be finalized before Tom’s gavel fell on the first day of trial.

“I don’t know. Ballard is really pushing. He thinks he can make a statement with this one. Or he just wants to make my life miserable.”

“Okay. This is a case in flux.” Something turned over in his belly, and he squirmed as he pulled out his cell phone. “Can I get your number, Judge Brewer? We should keep in close contact about this case.”

Tom blinked, but he pulled his cell out. “Sure.”

Smooth, Mike. Real smooth.He berated himself as he punched in Tom’s number and sent a text. Tom’s phone buzzed, and then a text appeared on his own phone’s screen from Tom. A single smiley face.

“I’ll reach out to my contacts in the marshals and see if they have any insight into what’s going on. If they know anything from the detention center.”

“Thanks.” Tom stood, and Mike followed. Silence hung over the office.

He couldn’t ask Tom to lunch, not so soon after bringing him coffee and stealing his case from Villegas. There was coming on strong and there was being crazy, and he was verging on full-tilt crazy. “I’ll… leave you to your work.” He headed for the door.

“I’m glad you took over for Villegas.”

Mike stopped and turned back. Tom smiled at him, and he couldn’t help the goofy grin that spread over his face. “Me too.”

Tom brought him coffee Tuesday morning and stayed in his closet of an office to chat for thirty-seven minutes, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe and grinning the whole time.

Mike’s heart fluttered for two hours after.

His marshal friends at the detention center were a bust. No one knew whether Tom’s case would go to trial or not. It seemed stuck in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, like Tom said.

On his way back from grabbing lunch at the food trucks in the plaza, Mike spotted Tom and the law clerks all clustered together in the fourth-floor law library, laughing. Tom had a way with the young law grads, somehow able to make them smile and laugh, even though by now they should be ground down and dead-eyed. Tom was the only judge who could pack the law library full of clerks. The other judges got their own clerks to stick around for lunch, since that was good for appearances, and maybe their friends. But it seemed like most of the clerks actually wanted to be with Tom.

Well, not Chief Judge Fink’s law clerks. They were hard-asses like Fink.

Mike hovered in the doorway, watching as Tom told a story about one of the craziest cases he saw from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, when he was an AUSA.

“I watched a South Dakota man bring a lawsuit against the federal government—which brought the case here—because the FBI in South Dakota had raided his paleontology laboratory at the university. He, over the course of three years, dug up dinosaur bones for his university on a university-funded dig. Turns out, he was digging on federal land, and didn’t exactly fill out the paperwork perfectly. The FBI went and took the government’s bones back, years after the dig was through, and the bones were on display at the university. They charged him with violating federal law, trespassing, conspiracy, and theft, and wanted him to serve time in jail and pay a giant fine. He countersued, saying they were way out of line, and that since the dig was public for so many years and they didn’t do anything at the time, they lost their right to come crying about it after the fact. Way back when, the federal government even sent park rangers out to take photos of the dig, which were still up on the U.S. Park Service’s website at the time of the trial. It was Keystone Cops meets Three Stooges.”

The law clerks hung on his every word, captivated by the legal intricacies of dinosaur bones and the obstinacy of the federal government. It was like he was telling ghost stories by camp light.

Tom caught his gaze before he launched into the rest of the story. He smiled, before Mike beat a retreat. Tom’s voice followed him down the hall to his office.

Right at five PM, Tom appeared in his doorway, shrugging into his suit jacket and holding his briefcase.

“Leaving early tonight, Judge B?”

“Class at Georgetown is at six.” Tom smiled. “Have to get over there to teach.”

Oh. Right. Tomtaughtalaw classatGeorgetown. Was there another more obvious example of how out of his league Tom Brewer was? “What class do you teach again?”

“Constitutional Law.” He checked his phone and winced at the time. “I do have to run, but I wanted to ask you: when is your and Kris’s next volleyball game?”

“Tomorrow.” He swallowed.Ask if he would like to come. Ask if he’d like to check it out. Hell, ask if he’d like to heckle Kris at the very least.