Beach Road

“Stay down,” he says. “Stay still.”

Chapter 54. Tom

“I GET THE picture,” I say. “I get it, all right?”

But I’m thinking, A surfer with two bodyguards. How rad is that? It’s almost fu

So I grab the foot in my face and twist it around like little Linda Blair’s head in The Exorcist. The ankle makes a satisfyingly u

Break even might have been a slight exaggeration on my part. When I get back to my car one eye is closed already. And back at my house, a half hour later, there’s some blood in it. But I’d be feeling worse if I let those jerks scare me off my own beach.

Besides, one eye still works fine, so I go back to the notes from my last interview with Dante.

In addition to the aching ribs and the eye, I must have taken a blow to the head, because I swear a woman who looks exactly like Kate Costello just walked into my backyard. The woman in question wears blue jeans, a white Penguin shirt, and black Converse sneakers, and she comes over to where I’m sitting at a wooden table and takes the chair next to mine.

“What happened to you?” she asks.

“A couple of bodyguards.”

“Belonging to whom?”

“Oh, some guy on Beach Road I tried to talk to about the murders this morning.”

Kate wrinkles her nose and sighs. “You haven’t changed, have you?”

“Actually, I have, Kate.”

Then this woman, who I’m pretty sure actually is Kate Costello, says, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to help you defend Dante Halleyville.”

And as I sit there too stu

“You know there’s no pay, right? No perks. No medical insurance. Nothing.”

“I’m feeling healthy.”

“So did I when I woke up.”

“Sorry about that.”

“And you’re okay working as an equal with someone who couldn’t even get hired by Walmark, Reid and Blundell?”

And then Kate nearly smiles. “I consider your unworthiness of Walmark, Reid and Blundell an important point in your favor.”

Chapter 55. Kate

HE’S JUST A kid.

A very tall kid who looks frightened.

Those are my first unformed thoughts when Dante Halleyville, bending at the waist so as not to bang his head, steps into the tiny attorney’s room where Tom and I are waiting. Now I’m thinking that it’s one thing for an eighteen-year-old to hold his own with men on a basketball court but another to do it at a fifteen-hundred-man maximum-security jail. And Dante’s eyes definitely reveal he’s as terrified as my kid, or your kid, or any kid would be who suddenly found himself locked up in this terrible place.

“I’ve got good news,” says Tom. “This is Kate Costello. Kate is a top New York lawyer. She’s just taken temporary leave from her job at a major firm to help with your case.”

Dante, who has already gotten way too much bad news, only grimaces. “You’re not backing out on me, are you, Tom?”

“No way,” says Tom, straining to make himself understood better. “Defending you is all I’m doing and all I will be doing until you’re out of here. But now you’ve got yourself a legal team-a shaky ex-jock and an A-list attorney. And Kate is from Montauk, so she’s local too,” he says, reaching out for Dante’s hand. “It’s all good, Dante.”

Dante grabs for Tom’s hand and they embrace, and then Dante very shyly makes eye contact with me for the first time.

“Thanks, Kate. I appreciate it.”

“It’s good to meet you, Dante,” I say, and already feel more invested in this case than any I’ve handled in the last few years. Very strange, but true.

The first thing Tom and I do is talk with Dante about the murder of Michael Walker. He’s close to tears when he tells us about his friend, and it’s difficult to believe he had anything to do with the killing. Still, I’ve met some very convincing liars and con artists in my day, and Dante Halleyville has everything to lose.

“I got another piece of good news,” says Tom. “I tracked down the guy who was at the basketball court that night-a Cuban named Ma

As Dante’s young face brightens slightly, I can see all the courage that’s been required to keep it together in this place, and my heart goes out to him. I think, I like this kid. So will the right jury.

“How are you holding up?” I ask.

“It’s kind of rough,” says Dante slowly, “and some people can’t take it. Last night, about three in the morning, these bells go off and a shout comes over the intercom: ‘Hang-up in cell eight!’ That’s what they say when an inmate tries to hang himself, and it happens so often the guards carry a special tool on their belts to cut them down.

“I’m in block nine, across the way, so I see the guard race into a cell and cut some guy down from where he’s hanging. I don’t know if they got him in time. I don’t think so.”

I haven’t read through the materials yet, but Tom and I stay with Dante all afternoon to keep him company and give him a chance to get to know me a little. I tell him about cases I’ve worked on and why I got sick of it, and Tom recounts some NBA lowlights-like the night Michael Jordan dunked the ball off his head. “I wanted to ask the ref to stop the game and give me the ball,” says Tom, “but I didn’t think it would go over too well with my coach.”

Dante cracks up, and for a second I catch a glimpse of his smile, which is so pure it’s heartbreaking. But at six, when our time is up, his face clouds over again. It feels awful to leave him here.

It’s after eight when we get back to Montauk, but Tom wants to show me the office. Our office. He grabs the newspapers lying on the first step and leads me up a steep, creaking staircase. His attic space-with dormer walls slanting down on both sides so he can only stand up straight in half of it-is a far cry from Walmark, Reid and Blundell, but I kind of like it. It feels like rooms I had in college. Hopeful and genuine, like starting over.

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” says Tom, “every piece in the room is original IKEA.”

Tom leafs through the Times while I look around. “Remember,” he says, “when I used to just read the Sports? Now all I read is the Metro section. It’s the only part that seems co

He stops midsentence-and looks as though he’s been kicked in the stomach.

“What? What’s the matter?” I say, and walk around to look for myself.

Near the top of the page is a picture of a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Candles have been set out and lit in front of a makeshift shrine, an attempt to mark and protest one more pointless street killing in the neighborhood.

Beneath the picture is a story with the headline HIP-HOP FEUD CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM.

The name of the vic is right there in the first paragraph, staring up at both of us-Ma