The Millionaire's Convenient Arrangement

Serious Trouble

Ritchie leaned back in his chair. At 1:00, the verdict had come in on the product liability case he'd taken to trial when the insurance company for the manufacturer of a defective toy refused to settle. The two million dollar verdict would leave his client – a ten-year-old and his family – with plenty of money left over after the medical bills for reconstructive surgery. More importantly, the product was off the shelves.

Ritchie's partners were already down at their favorite pub waiting to buy him a late lunch and a celebratory beer before he took the rest of the day off and slept for about fifteen hours.

It had been almost a month since he'd seen Maria or Joey. They hadn't shown up at St. Theresa's the Wednesday after the baseball game, and the next two weeks he'd been immersed in a trial that had consumed every minute in his day. He'd called her once – okay, twice –left a message explaining that he was underwater in a case for a few weeks, but asked her to give him a call back and just let him know how she and Joey were doing. She hadn't called.

He tried to convince himself it was just as well. He'd looked up the file on Tito Martinez. He honestly didn't remember much about the case. It had been about a year before he left the State Attorney's office to open this practice with Jonathon and Sam. There'd been a lot of aggressive gang activity at that time. And a series of drug and weapons busts where the police had recovered guns that were used in a drive-by shooting that had gotten a lot of notoriety when a nine-year-old girl was killed. Ritchie had been at the forefront of an initiative in the State Attorney's office to crack down on gang activity, particularly drug-related.

He'd prosecuted Tito Martinez along with a whole group of gang members who'd been rounded up in a drug operation. Five kilos of cocaine and a kilo of crystal meth had been confiscated and kept off the streets of Miami. The police had also seized unregistered firearms. He tried to picture Maria's brother specifically, but he drew a blank. There'd been so many of them back then, and Ritchie had been proud of his reputation as a prosecutor who didn't cut deals with drug dealers or gang members. He took most of those cases to trial instead of pleading them down, and had a solid track record for getting the maximum sentence imposed.

Joey had claimed his brother had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ritchie doubted that was the case. You didn't just stumble into a gang house when a major drug and weapons deal was about to go down. Not and walk out alive.

That the kid had just turned 18 had been a tough break for him. But in Ritchie's experience, those kids were hardened long before 18, and he'd tried younger ones as adults and gotten convictions. Miami juries had been fed up with punks who tarnished their city's reputation, increasing the crime rate and driving down property values, screwing up urban renewal efforts and turning parts of the city into places the tourists were warned not to visit.

His jaw tensed as he thought about Joey. Shoplifting, vandalism, fighting at school. Maria had confided that much before she shut down at dinner. The kid was on a path that led right to where his brother was sitting. It wouldn't take much to straighten him out – that had been evident at the office when Ritchie had made it clear that mouthing off disrespectfully about his sister was out of line and wouldn't be tolerated.

He was basically a good kid, but he had lousy friends and too much time on his hands. He ought to be playing a sport, burning off some of that excess energy. A kid could learn a lot from being part of a team. Joey's excited interest at the baseball game made Ritchie think the kid would enjoy getting out there in the field with a bat and ball. No offense to the job Maria was doing, but the kid needed more people in his life he could look up to – someone other than a brother who was gang member serving time on drug and weapons charges. Kids that age were crying out for a role model. If an appropriate one wasn't available, they'd latch on to an inappropriate one.