“Take it easy? Take it easy? You take it easy when this bitch, this cunt, comes after your family… I wouldn’t run you as a whore, Warshawski, you stink so bad.”

The guard was summoning help. Someone came in with manacles for Johnny.

“The Innocence Project, huh?” I pulled my papers together. “About the only thing you’re innocent of is the smarts to keep your sorry ass out of jail.”

I went through the search even lawyers undergo on their way out of Stateville. I hadn’t brought anything in with me, and I was leaving empty-handed, too: Johnny and I certainly hadn’t exchanged anything in our forty-five minutes together. Just to be on the safe side, the guards searched the trunk of my car.

As soon as I was clear of the prison grounds, I pulled off the road to stretch my arms. Tension builds in the calmest muscles when those gates close on you, and nothing about time in the Big House made me calm.

Joliet, where the prison stands, lies on the far side of Chicago’s heaviest exurban sprawl, and I’d be hitting the road at the same time everyone in the western suburbs was going home. The thought of the traffic knotted my shoulders even more. As I crept forward, I jotted a note in my time log. Forty-five minutes on the Lamont Gadsden inquiry. I’d long passed the point where I was making money on the case, but I couldn’t let the inquiry go, not as deeply mired in it as I’d become.

I oozed through the I-PASS lane at Country Club Plaza and finally found myself near streets I recognized, where I could take shortcuts around the expressways. It was almost seven, and the September sun was close to the horizon, blinding me every time the road curved west.

I needed to run in the fresh air with my dogs. I wanted to blow Stateville out of my lungs and hair, then curl up with a drink and the Cubs-Cardinals game. But I had two reports to finish for my most important bread-and-butter client. Best swing by my office and get them done so I could enjoy the game.