1
The Killing Season
By Lewis Shiner
1998
Distributed under Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
Overnight the clouds had rolled in and the summer was dead. I sat at my office window and drank coffee, looking out on a dirty brown Saturday that smelled like rain.
Somebody knocked at the door and I swiveled around to see Pete McGreggor from down the hall. "Busy?" he asked.
I shook my head and he came in, closing the door behind him. He poured a cup of coffee and sat down across from me.
"Big shakeup last night," he said. "I just got a call to defend one of the Preacher's errand boys."
"So they finally got to him," I said, remembering the furor that had raged in the newspapers a few months before. The law had never been able to break up the Preacher's drug operation, even though it was notorious as the biggest in Texas. "How'd they do it?"
"It's very hush-hush," he said, steam from his coffee making his hair seem to ripple. "They squelched the story at the papers, hoping to pull in a couple more fish, I guess. But what I gather is that the thing was pulled off from the inside, from somebody high up in the organization. But nobody knows exactly who it was that sold out."
"It'll all come clean at the trial, I suppose."
He nodded. "Sooner than that, I expect. The DA told me confidentially that they'll have everything they need by five o'clock tonight. You'll see it all on the evening news."
A sharp rapping came at the door and Pete stood up.
"You've got business. I'll leave you to it."
"It's probably bill collectors," I said. "I'll ye