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JUDGE HORTON ANNOUNCES A longer-than-usual lunch break—no explanation—so Norma Banks and I are having lunch at the Chefs Corner Café on Mineola Boulevard.

I order a salad. Norma orders a cheeseburger with bacon and sides of both onion rings and fries.

“Don’t judge,” she says when the food arrives.

“Hey,” I say. “Whatever you’re doing is working for you. And, let’s face it, I’d make a lousy judge, anyway.”

“How are you feeling, by the way?”

“In general, or today?”

“Today.”

“I’ve had better todays, frankly.”

“You need more color in that face,” Norma says.

“Maybe we can stop and pick some up on the way back,” I say. “I think we passed a CVS.”

I’m having an iced tea. She’s having a milkshake. Now she’s just taunting me.

“How do you think I did this morning?” I ask.

“You did swell,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter.”

She says it casually, as if she’s just asked me to pass the ketchup.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t get me wrong, kid,” she says. “You’re good. I’ve been at this a long time and you’re as good as I’ve ever seen. But you need to know you’re gonna lose this time.”

“That does it,” I say. “You’re buying lunch.”

“You want me to lie to you?”

“Maybe just a little.”

She seems to inhale a French fry without even chewing it.

“I’ve been reading juries since before you were born,” Norma Banks says. “It’s part of my job, and I’ve got a gift for it. And these people think he did it, with all the head fakes you threw at them this morning about DNA and the time stamps and the rest of your bullshit.”

My salad remains untouched in front of me. It’s probably because I’ve quickly lost what little appetite I had when we sat down.

“So what would you suggest I do about that?” I ask her.

“Listen,” she says. “I know how much you want an acquittal. The only one who wants one more is your sleazebag client.”

I tell her what I told Katherine Welsh.

“What I want,” I say, “is justice.”

“For him?”

I shake my head.

“For them.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me something,” she says. “You still believe he didn’t do it? And not because you need to believe it. Because in your heart you really do.”

“So help me God,” I say.

Like she’s just sworn me in.

“Then you and your buddy need to find out who really did it before it’s too late,” she says.

It isn’t that I’m suddenly feeling sick to my stomach.

It’s not that, I know that feeling, I’ve been living with it, off and on, for a while.

This is different. I read somewhere once where this old football player was trying to define choking in sports, and finally just said it really was nothing more than a cold rush of shit to the heart.

I don’t believe I’m choking away this case.

But sitting here across from Norma Banks in the diner, I feel as if I’m the one experiencing the cold rush of shit to the heart.

“Tell me what I need to do,” I say, too loudly, to the woman who’s become my surrogate mother, knowing it sounds as if I’m making a cry for help.

“I know what you need to do,” a man says.

I look up and see Rob Jacobson standing over our table, neither Norma nor I having noticed him when he walked in.

“Put me on the stand,” he says.

And in the next moment I hear myself say, “Okay.”