Fighting Chance(59)

There wasn’t a single thing Mark could think of to say to that.

The boy twisted in the single visitor’s chair. It was an uncomfortable chair. Mark wasn’t expected to have visitors.

Mark thought he was going to go crazy. The kid just wouldn’t get on with it. He was looking around the room again.

“All right,” Mark said finally. “You found this phone, and you found my name on it. And it’s got the video on it. Maybe somebody just downloaded the video from the Internet. Everybody else on the planet did.”

“No,” Petrak said. “It’s a video made on this phone. You can see it. You can tell when a video is made on the phone. It’s different when it’s been downloaded.”

Mark didn’t know if that was true. He did know where to go next. “Fine,” he said. “Show it to me.”

This time, the boy shot him a look of complete and utter contempt. “I do not have the phone with me,” he said. “I would not bring the phone with me. I have it in a safe place. I will give it to you—I will give it to you after.”

“After I give you money,” Mark said. “So far, you haven’t given me any reason to think it might be worth any money. To me, at least.”

“I don’t want money,” Petrak said.

“You don’t? What the hell else could you want?”

Petrak seemed to come to some great decision. “I have looked at the phone over and over again,” he said. “I have come to the conclusion that it is a phone belonging to Judge Handling—”

“You’ve said all that,” Mark interrupted.

“—I have listened to the messages on the voice mail. Three of these voice mail messages are from you.”

“So?”

“One of these messages talks about my brother, Stefan. You say you are sending her the picture. You talk about what my brother, Stefan, has done and that he should be locked away for long because he is a—” Petrak searched the ceiling. “—a psychotic.”

“Psychopath,” Mark said dryly. “And you still want to tell me you don’t want any money?”

“When Mr. Donahue told us that it would be Judge Handling who would be the judge for Stefan’s hearing, he said that there were many rumors that Judge Handling was taking bribes to send people to the juvenile prison for long times. I didn’t understand that exactly, but Mr. Donahue explained that your company, you and your company, you run the prisons as a capitalist company and the government pays you money for every prisoner you have in your jails. You gave Judge Handling money to put people in your prisons and that is a crime and you could go to jail for doing it.”

“Go on,” Mark said.

“In this I think I am entirely correct,” Petrak said. “Also I think that if I gave this phone to the authorities, they would look through it and they would find these things, and they would arrest you and send you to jail. I think you would not want this to happen.”

“Nobody wants to go to jail,” Mark agreed.

“I think that if you pay one judge to send people to jail, you must pay other judges to send people to jail,” Petrak said. “I think it is never just one. I think also if you can pay a judge to put somebody in jail, you can pay a judge not to put somebody in jail.”

“Why would I pay a judge not to put somebody in jail?”

“I think you could do that if you wanted to,” Petrak said. “I think I will give you back the phone if you will do that for my brother, Stefan.”

“From what I hear, your brother, Stefan, is on track to be deported.”

“Tcha,” Petrak said. “You are not about the deported. You are about the jail. You will pay a judge, the new judge for Stefan, so that he does not go to jail. After that, I will give you the phone.”

“After that, you’ll use the phone to get me to give you money.”

“No,” Petrak said.

Just that. No. As if that were all that needed to be said.

And maybe it was.

Of course, Mark didn’t actually have another juvenile judge in his pocket. Martha Handling was the only one he had found. Juvenile judges seemed to be a lot stickier than adult court kind. But he could see that Petrak Maldovanian didn’t know that, and Petrak Maldovanian had that damned phone.

“All right,” Mark said. “But first, you’re going to do something for me. You’re going to strip, and then we’re going to go through your clothes and that backpack. We’re going to look in the pockets and the seams and the book spines and everywhere. Because if you’re wired, I want to know it now.”

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