Indefensible by Lee Goodman

of names, but you’re letting it play out several more hours before moving?”
    â€œCorrect.”
    â€œAnd the forensic team hasn’t yet found anything of obvious interest, but it’s still early. So, listen, Tina and Upton are on call for this if you have probable-cause issues or anything else, okay?”
    â€œHow much do we know about this guy Scud?” Upton asks.
    â€œI got some stuff on him,” Chip says. “I’ll put a file together if you want. Give me an hour. How shall we—”
    â€œI’ll send Kenny to the FBI building to pick it up,” I tell them. We end the call.
    Upton stands and takes one slow-motion stride, then swings his leg in an impressive arc, the sole of his well-shined shoe just tickling the carpet on its way through the vertical and up to where it hovers briefly at eye level. He stands watching for a second, then his arms shoot up for the field goal, and he prances around in a circle. “Prediction,” he says. “We are about to rain down some major shit upon the disrupters of our urban utopia.”
    Upton Cruthers was an NFL kicker. “Best job in the world,” he tells people. “Money, babes, celebrity, travel, and a bench pass to lots of great games. And all this in exchange for about a half hour’s worth of work per year.” His professional football career was brief. I’ve seen footage of the fateful game. It was a playoff of some kind, Upton standing alone on the twenty-second-yard line, watching as the ball wobbled to the left and missed the goalposts by an easy twenty feet. The commentator was apoplectic, the crowd bellowing in rage and grief. A home game, of course. And Upton dejectedly walked off the field.
    Upton is my favorite of the assistants. We’re close to the same age, and he’s a shrewd and confident lawyer, which is no surprise. It must take the same kind of confidence to walk onto the gridiron in the last thirty seconds and to become, with one quick kick, the hero or the goat.
    Upton started as an intern during my first year here, and I hired him officially as soon as he was out of law school. He’d already played football for several years by then, so he was older and more worldly than most of the lawyers who come knocking on my door with résumé in hand. I had to pull some strings to get his application approved because DOJ flagged it; Upton had a juvenile record of minor offenses—vandalism, assault, minor-in-possession. That’s why we connected from the start, because whatever drove his youthful rebellion had left him feeling like a pretender in the conventional world of law enforcement. And I was fresh from a personal tragedy in my own life, leaving me with a similar sense of separateness. We were both local boys and both kind of surprised to find ourselves representing the government.
    After Tina and Upton leave, I call Kenny’s cell phone. “Where are you?”
    â€œIn my office,” he says without irony.
    I walk to the law library and find him at his usual table, where he can keep an eye on who’s coming and going and where he can chat with the librarian. They’re good friends, Kenny and Penny, and I haven’t given up hoping they might someday lock the library door and create a little vortex to stir the dust that lies so heavy on all those dreary shelves. They would have to adjust their standards, though; Penny is a potato-shaped young woman hoping for a man of erudition; Kenny is an intellectually incurious young man hoping for a supermodel. But they’re both good-hearted.
    â€œQuick job for you, Kenny,” I say. “I need you to pick up some documents from Chip over at the Bureau.”
    â€œWell, I got all this copying to do,” he says, not complaining so much as making sure I don’t think that all he does is sit around all day—which is exactly what I think.
    â€œLizzy’s still up north,” I say.