"I'm listening."
"If you give my brother bail, I'll quiet down and you'll regain control."
"I want you out of town."
"No, I won't agree to leave. As long as he's locked up, I'll continue yelling and screaming. We're not asking you to drop the charges, just free him on bail. You'll still have a suspect under arrest, and I can settle down and concentrate on helping Jerry Kagan prepare a defense. You won't be running into me every time you turn around."
"I've already offered bail at a half-million."
"Too much, we want $250,000, and I don't leave town."
"I see what you're getting at, but I'd still have the problem of the new information coming out in the paper."
"I'll make that go away."
"You'll do what!"
"I'll contact Linda Call and tell her I'm not willing to stand behind everything I told her. And if the paper prints it, I will deny it."
"So my only remaining problem is explaining why I'm letting my suspect out of jail."
"I'm sure you can handle that. You've lost interest in him anyway. Just hint that more developments are on the way. I also promise you, Linda will not make an issue of you giving your suspect bail."
"You can also promise that?"
"Linda and I are very close."
"I suspected that. Well, it's interesting. Now if you don't hold up your end, I'm going to announce it was all an administrative error, and I'll slap him back in jail fast."
"Fair enough."
"Give me a few minutes to think this over."
Kagan came back on, "They went off into a big huddle here. It doesn't look good to me. I'll phone you back."
Ray sat, put his elbows on the table and held his head looking down. "My stomach can't take much more of this."
"While we're waiting, Raymond, I must ask when did you develop your 'Knight in Shining Armor' syndrome? If they hadn't arrested you, you'd still be out there running around trying to rescue fair maidens; assuming you could recognize who was fair and who was foul. That isn't how you acted when you were younger. If you had, I might have benefited when I needed you."
"Maybe guilt about not helping you was somewhere in my subconscious. Perhaps I was trying to save all the damsels in town to compensate for my failure to come to your rescue, when you were in rehab and needed me."
The phone buzzed and Ray answered. It was Kagan.
"I'll be damned. We got it," Kagan said. "I don't believe it. We got it. And only $250,000 bond! Just pledge twenty-five thousand of stock. Sandy can stay in town. You'll still be under arrest although out of custody."