Page 160 of The Lincoln Lawyer

“Detective Kurlen,” I said. “Can I talk to my client for a moment?”

Kurlen looked at me, seemed to measure something in me and then nodded.

“One minute. Tell him to behave himself and it will all go a lot easier for him.”

He shoved Roulet toward me. I took him by one arm and walked him a few paces away from the others so we would have privacy if we kept our voices down. I stepped close to him and began in a whisper.

“This is it, Louis. This is good-bye. I got you off. Now you’re on your own. Get yourself a new lawyer.”

The shock showed in his eyes. Then his face clouded over with a tightly focused anger. It was pure rage and I realized it was the same rage Regina Campo and Martha Renteria must have seen.

“I won’t need a lawyer,” he said to me. “You think they canmake a case off of what you somehow fed to that lying snitch in there? You better think again.”

“They won’t need the snitch, Louis. Believe me, they’ll find more. They probably already have more.”

“What about you, Mick? Aren’t you forgetting something? I have—”

“I know. But it doesn’t matter anymore. They don’t need my gun. They’ve already got all they need. But whatever happens to me, I’ll know that I put you down. At the end, after the trial and all the appeals, when they finally stick that needle in your arm, that will be me, Louis. Remember that.”

I smiled with no humor and moved in closer.

“This is for Raul Levin. You might not go down for him but make no mistake, you are going down.”

I let that register for a moment and then stepped back and nodded to Kurlen. He and Booker came up on either side of Roulet and took hold of his upper arms.

“You set me up,” Roulet said, somehow maintaining his calm. “You aren’t a lawyer. You work for them.”

“Let’s go,” Kurlen said.

They started moving him but he shook them off momentarily and put his raging eyes right back into mine.

“This isn’t the end, Mick,” he said. “I’ll be out by tomorrow morning. What will you do then? Think about it. What are you going to do then? You can’t protect everybody.”

They took a tighter hold of him and roughly turned him toward the elevators. This time Roulet went without a struggle. Halfway down the hall toward the elevator, his mother and Dobbs trailing behind, he turned his head to look back over his shoulder at me. He smiled and it sent something right through me.

You can’t protect everybody.

A cold shiver of fear pierced my chest.

Someone was waiting for the elevator and it opened just as the entourage got there. Lankford signaled the person back and took the elevator. Roulet was hustled in. Dobbs and Windsor were aboutto follow when they were halted by Lankford’s hand extended in a stop signal. The elevator door started to close and Dobbs angrily and impotently pushed on the button next to it.

My hope was that it would be the last I would ever see of Louis Roulet, but the fear stayed locked in my chest, fluttering like a moth caught inside a porch light. I turned away and almost walked right into Sobel. I hadn’t noticed that she had stayed behind the others.

“You have enough, don’t you?” I said. “Tell me you wouldn’t have moved so quickly if you didn’t have enough to keep him.”

She looked at me a long moment before answering.

“We won’t decide that. The DA will. Probably depends on what they get out of him in interrogation. But up till now he’s had a pretty smart lawyer. He probably knows not to say a word to us.”

“Then why didn’t you wait?”

“Wasn’t my call.”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell her that they had moved too fast. It wasn’t part of the plan. I wanted to plant the seed, that’s all. I wanted them to move slowly and get it right.

The moth fluttered inside and I looked down at the floor. I couldn’t shake the idea that all of my machinations had failed, leaving me and my family exposed in the hard-eyed focus of a killer.You can’t protect everybody.

It was as if Sobel read my fears.