Mercy

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It’s hard to sit still when your client is scheduled to die in fifteen hours.

Alex Sedaka felt gripped by that all-too-familiar urge to stand and pace up and down like a caged lion. But he knew he couldn’t do so. It would be undignified — and hardly befitting the governor’s office. So instead, he sat there tensely in the brown leather-upholstered mahogany armchair, as his client’s life hung in the balance.

“I know he had a fair trial, sir. That’s why I can’t get the courts to reconsider the case. But justice isn’t a game. It’s a search for the truth — at least it should be.”

Alex felt the gaze of suspicious eyes upon him, his shoulders hunched against the strain of the task that awaited him. Since hitting fifty, he had become somewhat self-conscious about his appearance, despite the fact that tennis and rock climbing had kept him lean and fit, as well as tanned.

But it was not the ravages of time that had aged him: it was his work. Three decades of professional cynicism, defending scum and lowlifes, had worn away the youthful charm from the face that Melody had fallen in love with — or given it character, as she liked to say. Only this very morning, he had stared at his wedding picture with a mixture of joy and pain and had been surprised at how much he had changed.

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