The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry Page B

hand in hand. They said nothing. They stopped at the end of the block, at the Iron Horse, where they drank in a reckless way despite the hour, straggling out at dusk, then stumbling up the hill, into bed, into each other’s drunken arms.

ELEVEN
    A week after the judge had set bail, the money had not yet been raised—and Owens was still in jail. He sat in a meeting with his attorney and his wife and the legal representatives of a liberal financier by the name of Walter Sprague.
    â€œIt’s a lot of money,” said Owens.
    The guards had retrieved Owens from his cell about a half hour earlier and had brought him down the long hall to this gray room. In the three weeks since he’d been arrested, he’d been out of the cell a number of times—for the arraignment, for the bail hearings, for the indictment—but a kind of disconnect had happened. He felt himself in a kind of nether land, a gray zone in which he could not accept the reality of his immediate situation. The world outside felt increasingly remote. He had done time before—almost two years, for his alleged role in Sanford’s escape from prison—and had not found it easy.
    No, he was not someone who did easy time.
    Owens knew the labyrinthine turnings of the justice system, especially in a case like this, with its political overtones, the rulings and counterrulings, a world populated by documents filled with names, pictures, connections imagined and real, arranged and rearranged.
    All of those names … those photos and affidavits … the details of the trial, then the appeal … The longer you were on the inside, here, the more your other life vanished, the more you became one of those names on paper.
    This meeting today had been hastily arranged, and the guards had not let him change clothes. He wore an orange suit and his leg was cuffed to an immovable bar below the table. His wife and the others had been searched before they came—and he would be searched again before they took him back.
    â€œYes, the bail is high. It’s a lot of money,” said Jensen.
    Jensen had been his attorney back then as well. A burly man, hair in a ponytail, wide hazel eyes that seemed to take in everything you said. The first time they’d met had been in a basement in the Haight, and Owens had spoken freely, maybe more than he should have. But he had been underground then, he and Rachel, his first wife—both of them wanted for their association with Sanford, with the SLA, various antigovernment activities, pipe bombings—every unsolved crime in the book including, as it happened, the robbery in which Eleanor Younger had been killed. As a result, Jensen knew things that no one else knew.
    Names … affidavits … More names …
    Meanwhile, Jill focused on the attorney who had come here on behalf of the financier. “As far as the bail,” she said, “we don’t have that kind of equity in our house—and even if we throw in our retirement money—”
    â€œIt bankrupts us,” said Owens.
    â€œAnd there’s no money left over for the defense.”
    â€œNone.”
    Everyone at the table knew this already, including Sprague’s lawyer and his assistant. Their boss had liberal leanings, it was true—he’d funded something called the Sprague Foundation—but his interest in this case, Owens knew, was on account of one of those names from Owens’s past.
    Jan Sprague.
    She’d had a different name then, before she married Walter Sprague, but that didn’t matter now. Like Owens, Jan had been affiliated with the old radical underground. A tall, good-looking woman with a desire to speak out—to prove herself. She had been captured on a surveillance film at a suspected SLA safe house. She and a friend of hers, a San Francisco radical by the name of Annette Ricci.
    They were always together. Annette and Jan. Jan and Annette.
    Annette with