The Advocate's Daughter

 

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For Jake, Emma, and Aiden

 

PROLOGUE

Misawa, Japan

Thirty Years Ago

It all started with a bottle of Nikka whiskey and a cold stare.

Sean set the bottle on the counter and smiled at the old woman who glowered at him from behind the register. The liquor store was quiet but for the buzz of fluorescent lamps, which cast a flickering haze over the narrow aisles and faded cardboard signs scrawled in Japanese.

Sean didn't know if she could tell that he was only fourteen years old. Maybe his height, six feet, and perhaps cultural differences would make it difficult for the woman to discern an American's age. But he glanced at Kenny, who'd sauntered over with another bottle. Short, floppy mess of hair, mouth full of braces. The old lady had to realize they were teenagers. And the disdain in her eyes—a wrinkled look of disgust—said that she not only knew, but hoped the boys would drink every drop, pass out, and choke on their own vomit. That's how it was outside the military base. The locals hated them. Sean's dad said it was because Americans corrupted and polluted everywhere they went. The community surrounding a base was always filled with two things, his dad would say: bars and whores. He would know.

Sean dug out the money from the front pocket of his jeans and handed the ball of sweaty bills to the woman. She smoothed them on the counter, mumbling something to herself. She packed the bottles in a single brown sack.

“Domo,”
Sean said. He scooped up the sack and headed toward the door, Kenny trailing after him.

The woman said nothing.

Another storekeeper, probably the old lady's husband, narrowed his eyes as Sean marched past him toward the door.

“Hey, get your fucking hands off me.” It was Kenny's voice.

Sean spun around and saw the old man gripping Kenny's arm. Kenny wrenched it free and kept moving.

“Thief!”
the storekeeper bellowed in a thick accent.
“Thief!”

The woman joined in, screaming words Sean couldn't understand.

Kenny sprinted out of the store, and Sean instinctively tore after him.

“Thief! Thief!”

The boys raced past a blur of pachinko parlors and bars on the shuttered main drag. Kenny disappeared around the corner up ahead. Sean kept running, the sting of sweat dripping into his eyes, the sack a clumsy bundle in his arms. He veered right, following Kenny, but his friend was nowhere in sight. Sean risked a quick look over his shoulder. The storekeeper hadn't kept up, but Sean didn't slow down until he heard a loud whisper from an alleyway.

“Seany boy.”

Sean ran over to his friend. Kenny was bent over, a hand on each thigh, breathing raggedly. Kenny looked up and flashed a smile.

“What the hell?” Sean's voice was labored, his chest heaving up and down. “You stole something? Why?… We had money.”

“They had it coming—treating us like that, thinking we'd steal something from their shitty store.”

“We usually
do
steal something from their shitty store.”

“Yeah, but it's the principle of the thing.” Kenny pulled a flask-sized bottle from the front of his jeans. “It's their own fault.” He untwisted the bottle's cap and took a swig, followed by a quiver. “You know how hard it is to run with this in your underwear? My dick nearly broke off.”

Sean smiled in spite of himself. “Small loss.”

They left the alley and walked a maze of side streets to another alleyway, this one lined with vacant buildings. Sean stopped in front of a boarded-up former nightclub sprayed with graffiti: their clubhouse. He pried at the door until it gave way and the two ambled inside. The smell of damp and rot filled the air. They walked to the stairwell, went up to the second floor, and out onto the crumbling terrace. There was an explosion of flapping wings as crows squawked away into the sky. They sat on a two-foot ledge, feet hanging over the side.

Sean opened a bottle, took a long pull, and passed it to his friend. The sun was setting as they stared out over the alleyway. There was a bar wedged between two abandoned buildings. The place had no customers out front and was as run-down as the clubhouse, but muffled music seeped out from the cracks in its walls. Behind the bar, Misawa Air Base's tall perimeter wall. Beyond the wall, an overgrown lot.

“You think he's coming?” Sean asked.

Kenny shrugged. He took another drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He then pointed his chin to the alley below. “Here comes the dipshit now.”

Sean was about to call out to Juan, but Kenny shushed him. As Juan approached the clubhouse door, Kenny held out the bottle, set his aim, and let it fall.

The glass shattered noisily on the pavement and Juan jumped back with a yelp.

Kenny burst into laughter. “You look like you about pissed yourself, you dumb Mexican,” he called down.

Juan glared up at them. He was a skinny kid, and he seemed even scrawnier than usual from this height. He muttered something and went inside the clubhouse, soon joining them on the ledge.

As darkness crawled across the alleyway the boys finished another bottle. A light affixed to the bar clicked on.

“Shit,” Juan said. “What time is it? I gotta be home by eight.”

“Eight? Is
Sesame Street
on or something?” Kenny said.

“You know my dad,” Juan said.

Sean looked at his watch and then stood and brushed off his jeans. The booze had kicked in, and he clutched the railing to steady himself. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

The three stumbled their way out of the clubhouse. As Sean turned to jam the clubhouse door shut, a voice sliced into the night air.
“You!”

Sean whirled around. At the mouth of the alley, a silhouette. The figure stalked toward them and came under the bar's yellow light: the old man from the liquor store.

The storekeeper charged at Kenny, grabbing him by the shirt and ramming him into the clubhouse wall.

“Get the fuck off me, old man!”

The storekeeper's face was flushed and he shouted, a slur of Japanese, spittle hitting Kenny's face. Sean grabbed the storekeeper's arm, but the man—strong for his age and size and smelling of whiskey himself—pushed Sean away. As the old man fended off Sean, Kenny managed to break free. He barreled into the man. The storekeeper stumbled backward but got hold of Kenny's shirt, and the two fell hard to the pavement.

Sean looked around for help, but there was only Juan who just stood there, frozen.

Kenny tried to get up, but the storekeeper pulled him to the ground, eventually pinning Kenny down, straddling him. The old man raised a fist, but hesitated, as if just realizing he was about to punch a teenage kid in the face. Before the storekeeper could decide, Kenny kneed the man in the groin. The storekeeper doubled over. Kenny shoved him away, leapt to his feet, and kicked the man in the side. Rolling away, the storekeeper drew a sharp breath and moaned.

Sean ran over and hoisted the storekeeper up by the arm. He called for Juan to help and, after a long moment, Juan took hold of the old man's other arm. The storekeeper was on his feet now. He struggled, trying to rip his arms free. That's when Kenny ran up to him. Sean thought Kenny was going to spit in the storekeeper's face.

But then he heard it. An indescribable groan.

The storekeeper's body stiffened, and there was a gasp. Before Sean could react, Kenny made several quick jabs and pulled his hand away. The storekeeper's body went limp and slumped to the ground. Kenny's right hand—clutching a blade—was red with blood.

Sean and Juan stood there, stunned. Kenny closed the knife, jammed it into his pocket, and yelled at them to run. They raced across the alley, down a narrow path, to the back of the bar. Scrambling up some trash bins, they climbed over the base's ten-foot perimeter wall. Sean went last, his shirt catching on the barbed wire as he dropped to the ground.

Juan sat in the grass, his back against the cinder blocks. “He's dead.” Tears streamed down his face. “He's dead.”

“Shut up. We don't know that,” Sean said. But he did.

Juan hugged his skinny arms around his knees and began rocking back and forth. “He's dead…”

Kenny took out the knife, unfolded it, and wiped the blade on the grass. “If he's dead,” Kenny said, “he had it coming.”

*   *   *

For the rest of Sean's brief time in Japan, he never spoke to Kenny or Juan again. He left them and that ugly night behind. The world was a bigger place back then—no Internet, no Facebook, no Twitter. And for thirty years, Sean had no idea what had become of them, no reason to believe that their secret would come to light.

Until he was about to be nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

CHAPTER 1

Washington, D.C., Suburbs

Present Day

There should have been a sign. A feeling. Some sense of impending doom. But Sean Serrat's day started like any other.

“Daddy, guess what?”

Sean always felt a tiny rush of emotion when his children called him
Daddy,
a word that was fading to extinction in his home.

“Daddy,” Jack repeated. Sean glanced at his son, who was perched on a stool at the granite kitchen counter shoveling Cheerios into his mouth. Sunshine cut through the window and a shadow fell across the seven-year-old's round face. Jack's teenage brother, Ryan, sat next to him crunching a bagel.

“What is it, buddy?” Sean stood near the stove, bowl in one hand, spoon in the other, trying not to drip on his tie.

“I told my friend, Dean, about our family Money Jar.”

“Yeah?”

“I told him that some families have Swear Jars where you have to put money in if you say a bad word. But
we
have a Money Jar that has money in it and you say bad words into the jar.” Jack cupped his orange juice glass over his mouth and demonstrated with a muffled, “Butt, poop, ass.”