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  PRAISE FOR PAUL LEVINE

  TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD

  “Move over Scott Turow. To Speak for the Dead is courtroom drama at its very best.”

  —Larry King

  “An assured and exciting piece of work. Jake Lassiter is Travis McGee with a law degree . . . One of the best mysteries of the year.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Paul Levine is guilty of master storytelling in the first degree. To Speak for the Dead is a fast, wry, and thoroughly engrossing thriller.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  NIGHT VISION

  “Levine’s fiendish ability to create twenty patterns from the same set of clues will have you waiting impatiently for his next novel.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sparkles with wit and subtlety.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Breathlessly exciting.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  FALSE DAWN

  “Realistic, gritty, fun.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “A highly entertaining yarn filled with wry humor.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A dazzler, extremely well-written and featuring so many quotable passages you’ll want someone handy to read them aloud to.”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  MORTAL SIN

  “Take one part John Grisham, two parts Carl Hiaasen, throw in a dash of John D. MacDonald, and voila! You’ve got Mortal Sin.”

  —Tulsa World

  “Recalling the work of Carl Hiaasen, this thriller races to a smashing climax.”

  —Library Journal

  “Wonderfully funny, sexy, and terrifying.”

  —Dave Barry

  RIPTIDE

  “A thriller as fast as the wind. A bracing rush, as breathtaking as hitting the Gulf waters on a chill December morning.”

  —Tampa Tribune

  “A tale involving drug smuggling and murder, windsurfing and murder, multi-million-dollar thievery and murder. The action never stops.”

  —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “One of the best mystery writers in the business today. The story fairly leaps with enthusiasm toward the finale. Riptide is Paul Levine’s finest work.”

  —Ocala (FL) Star Banner

  FOOL ME TWICE

  “You’ll like listening to Jake’s beguiling first-person tale-telling so much that you won’t mind being fooled thrice.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A fast-paced thriller filled with action, humor, mystery and suspense.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Blend the spicy characters created by Elmore Leonard with the legal expertise and suspense made famous by John Grisham and you have Paul Levine’s Fool Me Twice.”

  —Lake Worth (FL) Herald

  FLESH & BONES

  “The author keeps the suspense high with innovative twists and touches of humor that spice up the courtroom scenes.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Filled with smart writing and smart remarks. Jake is well on his way to becoming a star in the field of detective fiction.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “A well-focused plot that stresses in-depth characterization and action that is more psychological than macho. The author keeps the suspense high with innovative twists.”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  LASSITER

  “Since Robert Parker is no longer with us, I’m nominating Levine for an award as best writer of dialogue in the grit-lit genre.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Lassiter is back after fourteen long years—and better than ever. Moving fast, cracking wise, butting heads, he’s the lawyer we all want on our side—and on the page.”

  —Lee Child

  “Few writers can deliver tales about sex and drugs in South Florida better than Levine.”

  —Booklist

  SOLOMON VS. LORD

  “A funny, fast-paced legal thriller. The barbed dialogue makes for some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. Fans of Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry will enjoy this humorous Florida crime romp.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The writing makes me think of Janet Evanovich out to dinner with John Grisham.”

  —Mysterylovers.com

  “Hiaasen meets Grisham in the court of last retort. A sexy, wacky, wonderful thriller with humor and heart.”

  —Harlan Coben

  THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI

  “An entertaining, witty comedy caper with legal implications . . . sparkles with promise, humor, and more than a dash of suspense.”

  —Blogcritics.org

  “A cross between Moonlighting and Night Court . . . courtroom drama has never been this much fun.”

  —Freshfiction.com

  “As hilarious as The Deep Blue Alibi is, it is almost possible between the cleverly molded characters and sharp dialogue to overlook that the novel contains a terrific mystery, one that will keep you guessing.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  KILL ALL THE LAWYERS

  “A clever, colorful thriller . . . with characters drawn with a fine hand, making them feel more like friends than figments of the author’s imagination. Levine ratchets up the tension with each development but never neglects the heart of the story—his characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Levine skillfully blends humor, a view of Miami, and the legal system into tidy plots.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “Another successful fast-moving, highly entertaining mystery. Irreverent to juveniles, judges, and the judicial system, but does it all with a wink. Encore . . . encore.”

  —ReviewingTheEvidence.com

  HABEAS PORPOISE

  “Steve Solomon and Victoria Lord are smart and funny and sexy in a way that Hollywood movies were before comedies became crass and teen-oriented.”

  —Connecticut Post

  “A Moonlighting crime novel. Great fun.”

  —Lansing State Journal

  “Entertaining and witty with lots of laughs.”

  —MysteriousReviews.com

  IMPACT (ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARDCOVER AS 9 SCORPIONS)

  “A breakout book, highly readable and fun with an irresistible momentum, helped along by Levine’s knowledge of the Supreme Court and how it works.”

  —USA TODAY

  “Sizzles the Supreme Court as it has never been sizzled before, even by Grisham.”

  —F. Lee Bailey

  “A masterfully written thriller, coiled spring tight. The plot is relentless. I loved it!”

  —Michael Palmer

  BALLISTIC

  “Ballistic is Die Hard in a missile silo. Terrific!”

  —Stephen J. Cannell

  “It’s easy to compare Levine to Tom Clancy but I think he’s better for two simple reasons—he’s a better storyteller and his characters are more believable, good guys and bad guys alike.”

  —Ed Gorman

  ILLEGAL

  “Levine is one of the few thriller authors who can craft a plot filled with suspense while still making the readers smile at the characters’ antics.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The seamy side of smuggling human cargo is deftly exposed by the clear and concise writing of the Edgar Award–nominated author. Illegal is highly recommended.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Timely, tumultuous, and in a word, terrific.”

  —Providence Journal

  BOOKS BY PAUL LEVINE

  THE JAKE LASSITER SERIES

  To Speak for the Dead

  Night Vision

  False Dawn

  Mortal Sin

  Riptide

  Fool Me Twice


  Flesh & Bones

  Lassiter

  Last Chance Lassiter

  State vs. Lassiter

  THE SOLOMON & LORD SERIES

  Solomon vs. Lord

  The Deep Blue Alibi

  Kill All the Lawyers

  Habeas Porpoise

  LASSITER, SOLOMON & LORD SERIES

  Bum Rap

  Bum Luck

  Stand-Alone Thrillers

  Impact

  Ballistic

  Illegal

  Paydirt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Nittany Valley Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477823101

  ISBN-10: 1477823107

  Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

  For Marcia

  from here to eternity

  and

  for Don Russo (1946–2014)

  football player, rugby player, trial lawyer, friend

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1 Dead Lawyer Walking

  2 Vigilante Justice Is an Oxymoron

  3 Spanked

  4 Inhaling the Devil

  5 Muck Is a State of Mind

  6 The North Star, the Burning Bush, the Holy Virgin

  7 Indicting a Sandwich de Jamón

  PART TWO

  8 Manure Is a Metaphor

  9 Touch My Chedda, Feel My Beretta

  10 A Trespasser and Troublemaker

  11 Home Remedies

  12 Shake and Bake, Jake

  13 Son of Muck City

  14 Zero Chill Dude

  15 Deep-Carpet Lawyers

  16 Obituary, Second Draft

  17 Hundred-Dollar Bills

  18 Dirt on Plaintiff

  19 All-Time Blooper Reel

  20 Henry the Eighth and Me

  21 Ground and Pound, Lay and Pray

  22 Stick with Socrates

  23 In the Coroner’s Cooler

  24 What about Lassiter?

  25 The Steeplechaser

  26 Bum Luck

  27 Eight Days to Oblivion

  28 Road Trip

  29 Meet Me in Havana

  PART THREE

  30 The Night That Never Was

  31 Love, Jake. Love.

  32 Depo, California Style

  33 Two Stags Pawing the Dirt

  34 Better Law Partner or Better Mate?

  35 Truth, Justice, Redemption

  36 Cottage Hospital

  37 World’s Worst Best Friend

  38 Hello Obit, Get Me Rewrite

  39 Of Mice and Men

  PART FOUR

  40 The Everlastingness

  41 Just Say It!

  42 One-Way Ticket to Palookaville

  43 Fight or Flight

  44 What Is Justice?

  PART FIVE

  45 I Bring Pain, Bloodstains on What Remains

  46 Understanding Muck City

  47 Silent Scream

  48 Tricky Cop Questions

  49 All Fall Down

  50 The Dark Side of Me

  51 The Truth

  52 Aristotle, I Am Not

  53 Mendocino Thunderhump

  54 You Can’t Play Half-Speed or Half-Assed

  55 Planting a Tree

  56 Redemption

  57 Final Words

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  “Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

  -1-

  Dead Lawyer Walking

  Thirty seconds after the jury announced its verdict, I decided to kill my client.

  Or maybe it was quicker than that. Maybe there was an instantaneous firing of neurons and synapses, or whatever ignites sparks in my bourbon-pickled brain.

  Did I mention the pounding headache? The thud of a pile driver ramming caissons into my cranium? I could barely hear the judge over the echoes.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honor.”

  “The clerk will publish the verdict.”

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Marcus Thurston, not guilty of murder in the second degree.”

  Yeah, him. Marcus “Thunder” Thurston, All-Pro running back for the Miami Dolphins. Charged with pumping five bullets into his wife. Now free to carry a football . . . and a nine-millimeter Glock, if he so desired. Hearing the verdict, and perhaps a chorus of cheerleaders singing, Thurston clopped me on the shoulder. An affectionate but hearty clop you might use for chopping wood. If I didn’t tip the scales at 240 pounds, I might have toppled face-first onto the defense table.

  “Way to go, bro!” Thunder smacked me again.

  “Don’t ‘bro’ me, and don’t touch me.”

  “Whassup with that, Jake?”

  “I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. I just need a minute to get the stains out.”

  “Hey, lose the ’tude, dude.”

  My headache was approaching the red line. On a scale of one to ten, we’re going to need more digits. The thud-thud-thud of the pile driver subsided just long enough for an ice pick to stab deep into my skull.

  “You’re a narcissist, Thunder. With a Hall of Fame ego and a total lack of empathy.”

  A storm cloud hooded his eyes, and for the briefest moment, there was the same fearsome look Eva Thurston must have seen in the last seconds of her life. Then Thunder barked out a laugh and grinned. It was the thousand-watt smile he flashed on cue for his Nike commercial. The one where he jitterbugs the length of the football field, dodging mammoth defenders, then sprouts wings and soars skyward.

  Like a god.

  Or a demon.

  I wanted to rip off those wings, watch him fall to earth.

  Splat.

  Bones splintered, organs crushed, arteries spurting.

  Killing my client would be an act of justice, I told myself. Justice rooted in truth and fairness. Not justice bought and sold, bartered and compromised. A courtroom should be a holy place, our secular church. A palace of integrity and morality. But the palace has been sacked by the Huns.

  Call me Attila.

  Already reporters spilled out of the gallery and crowded the bar, firing questions.

  “Thunder, will the NFL lift your suspension?”

  “If you had it to do over again, would you still shoot your wife?”

  “Lassiter, did you trick the jury with the Stand Your Ground law?”

  I hadn’t expected to win. And now that I had, victory tasted like swill. “Head straight to your limo,” I ordered Thurston. “No talking to the press.”

  “Why not, bro? We won. Nothing I say can mess that up.”

  My eyes squinted through the pain, interfering with my ability to pack my trial bag, much less plan a murder. I could kill Thurston right now. Grab my fountain pen—a Montblanc Skeleton, a gift from an ex-lover whose name escaped me—and jam it straight through his left eye and into his brain. Sure, I could easily kill him. I just needed to figure out how to get away with it . . . the way Thurston did.

  Of course, he had a damn good lawyer.

  Me.

  Jake Lassiter. Defender of the Bill of Rights, or at least a few of them. Purveyor of justice, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Last bastion between freedom and forty years in a steel cage. In other words, the guy you call when you’r
e guilty as hell.

  I never intended to be a hero . . . and I succeeded. But all the trickery, all the gamesmanship had caught up with me. Thurston was the tipping point. How far had I fallen? Surely not from the mountaintop. More like the curb to the gutter.

  Back in night law school, they taught us right from wrong, black from white. But they didn’t teach us shades of gray. For twenty years I’ve made my living in the gray. Now I felt blanketed by a poisonous fog, a shroud that protected the guilty and shielded evil and cruelty from view.

  A deep baritone startled me. “Gonna kill you, Thurston! Kill you hard and slow.”

  I turned to find Clyde Garner waving a thick index finger under my client’s nose. A ruddy-faced man in his sixties, built like an oil drum, Garner owned a tree farm in Homestead. His daughter, Eva, had been a Junior Orange Bowl Princess, then Citrus Queen, and more recently the wife of Thunder Thurston. A thousand people attended her funeral, but Thunder wasn’t one of them.

  “Back off, old man.” Thurston glared at Garner, menace in his eyes. “Only did what I had to do.”

  “Feed you to the wood chipper,” Garner said, “one leg at a time.”

  So now there were at least two of us who wanted Thurston dead. If I didn’t leave my business card at the murder scene, maybe I could get away with it. Who knows how many folks in Miami—other than Dolphins season-ticket holders—thought Thurston should be chopped into bite-size pieces?

  “Mr. Garner,” I said. “Please don’t make things worse.”

  He swiveled toward me, his neck overflowing the collar of his white dress shirt. “Worse, shyster? What do you know about worse?”

  “When I look at you, Mr. Garner, I see a good man.”

  “Don’t kiss up to me, sleazebag.”

  “Please don’t do anything that will come back to haunt you.”

  “You have no idea what haunts me, shyster.” His eyes narrowed; his cheeks flushed. His hatred washed over me, a toxic tide. He leaned closer, gave me a whiff of boozy breath. “Gonna kill you, too. Maybe first, I dunno.”

  “The last thing Eva would want would be for you to—”

  “Don’t you mention her name, bloodsucker!”

  His burning anger had shifted to me.

  “All I’m saying, Mr. Garner—”

  “You had your say! You know what you are, Lassiter?”

  I didn’t, though the words shyster, sleazebag, and bloodsucker still hung in the air.

  “Dead lawyer walking. That’s what you are. You’re a dead lawyer walking.”