Jane's Baby

by Chris Bauer

  “Lock all the doors, Owen.”

  “What the hell? C’mon, Judge, she’s my girlfriend…”

  “Do it. Lock ’em and stay away from them. Now.”

  Judge quick-stepped around the side door in the kitchen, twisted the lock, did the same with the door to the garage, both of them steel, like the front door. Owen griped but followed his lead, latching the door to the basement.

  “Family room?” Judge asked.

  “I think I locked the sliders,” he said. “Look, dude, relax, that’s Mary Veronica’s car. She’s probably on her way around back.”

  They entered the family room. Geenie was still on the couch enjoying her finger food. She stopped mid-bite when she saw her boyfriend with a finger to his lips. Judge worked his way over to the sliding glass door, checked to make sure it was locked. He reached behind his back, drew his Glock and hugged the wall with it raised, stood there listening, an ear beside the closed drapes, Owen behind him. Quiet, on both sides of the sliders, inside and out. He opened the drapes a little with his gun barrel, and there was Mary Veronica in a Cowboys jersey, still short, still top-heavy, her dark eyes staring back at him. They brightened when she recognized him then got serious when she noticed the gun. Owen reached past him, jerked the drapes back to expose the glass door in full.

  “See, Judge, it’s my girlfriend. Put that thing away, you’re scaring her…”

  Owen pushed past, unlocked the door and slid it open. “M-V sweetie! Come on in, we’re…”

  A hard shoulder-shove knocked M-V off balance, her space now occupied by a woman in camo pants and a sleeveless jacket holding a Tec-9 in one hand. She poked inside the door with it, jerked the barrel up quickly against Judge’s Adam’s apple. They were close enough to swap spit.

  “If you raise your gun one millimeter,” she said, “your gray matter ends up on the ceiling.”

  She backed him up, giving her and M-V room enough to step inside the family room. He was now face to face with a person who looked a lot less like the mug shot of Larinda Jordan, less like a woman at all, and now more like what had to be her assassin persona. Harsh, lean and angular, her face was scarred, her hair military, and some fingers on her left hand were missing, like a survivalist after the Big One hit, or a meth head, or a sixty-year-old diabetic on the streets, or all of the above, but with freckled cheeks.

  “Toss your gun outside,” she said, “then put your hands behind your head. Do it, now.”

  The gun skittered across the patio, into the dirt. Judge put his hands where she said. She shoved him an arms length away, continued to walk him backward, the arm doing the shoving in a ragged cast ending with a gangrenous-looking left hand on his shirt. They ran out of room when she’d backed him against the wall, his hands still folded behind his head. Behind her, Mary Veronica closed the screen door. The glass slider and drapes remained open.

  “Don’t move,” Larinda Jordan said, spraying spit at him, then, to Geenie, “Fold your hands behind your head just like your friend, stand up, and join him.” Geenie complied. “Now you,” she said, nodding at Owen. “You little degenerate. You ‘hero.’ Hands the same way, then stand next to her.”

  The three of them stood as directed next to each other, lined up in firing squad fashion against the family room wall, their hands behind their heads. “Now slide down the wall with your hands still folded and sit on the floor, your backs still against it.”

  When his ass hit bottom Judge found himself next to a wall shelf two feet off the floor, the shelf eye level from his seat, the right height for Owen’s everyday use. On the shelf were four urns in a row, Owen’s mother in one of them, if memory served. Closest to Judge at the end of the shelf was Owen’s phone.

  Owen’s upturned face pleaded. “M-V honey, talk some sense into her…”

  M-V’s sneer was smug and exaggerated given their respective vantage points. “I’m not your honey, you disgusting little man.”

  “But M-V honey…”

  “Shut up!” Larinda said. Her chest heaved, her lean face scowling. She was not calm.

  “I’ll be brief. Abortion…is a sin. Judges do not get to decide differently, and neither do women, and yet, even with our efforts, that murderous law could still remain in place, in defiance of God’s will. I tried to influence the outcome, was a good Christian soldier. That pagan judge should be dead! In the ground. In Hell! But I’m too much of a mess now to make that happen.”

  A smug smile creeped across her tortured face. “But, as you can see, it’s fairly easy to get to the people who enabled her.”

  She aimed the Tec-9 at Judge’s forehead, stayed just out of his reach. “You can start your prayers now, Mister Bounty Hunter, but I might not wait for you to finish them.”

  Judge could have closed his eyes or could have focused on the barrel or could have focused on what was behind it, and behind her, where a distant sirocco of airborne trail dust and dirt gathered in size on the horizon. The dust cloud advanced toward the house. So did Judge’s Tourette’s, moving up his throat…

  “Let’s work this…suck balls…out, Larinda, I’m sure we can get…”

  “NO! You ask God for His forgiveness! Pray! Now!”

  Holding back what was in his head, Our Farter, who fart in heaven…cunt!…he started praying. “Our Father, Who art in heaven…hallowed be Thy…cunt-balls!…name. Thy kingdom cunt…”

  At the back of the property a fence rail jettisoned sideways, dropping silently in the sagebrush. Some electrical wire snapped, coiling itself up.

  “…Thy cunt be done…”

  “Stop, you vile man, that is the Lord’s Prayer! Stop! You are blaspheming!”

  …more dust collected in the near distance and kicked up a cottony mist that reached the rear of the property, floating dreamily forward and filling the backyard beyond the patio with an expanding cloud of tan, sooty camouflage. It drifted farther, advancing toward the screen door.

  Her gun barrel pushed into Judge’s mouth, shutting his Tourette’s down, Larinda oblivious to the activity converging on the patio.

  Señor Q emerged from the tan dust as it settled, didn’t snort, loomed quietly, his eighteen-hundred-pound gray girth overwhelming the view outside, the girth more heavily distributed on his front hooves. He stepped closer to the screen door, his hooves clip-clopping once against the pavers, a single, cautious, light step, but not light enough that it didn’t catch Mary Veronica’s attention and Larinda’s ear.

  “Larinda!” M-V choked the name out, terror in her voice as she stared at the bull. Larinda stood her ground, acknowledged nothing other than the Tec-9 she still had down Judge’s throat.

  “Quiet!” she said with the slightest of gestures, a flinch, in M-V’s direction. “Him first!” She returned her attention to Judge. “To Hell with you, now!”

  The flinch was all he’d needed. On the shelf, Owen’s phone.

  The most dangerous eight seconds in sports…

  Judge ripped the Tec-9 barrel out of his mouth, pinned her gun hand against the wall, and snatched Owen’s phone from the shelf. He pressed the button for his ring tone. The rodeo air horn did not disappoint…

  …HAHHNNK…

  The spray of bullets from Larinda’s gun obliterated his hearing on their way past his left ear.

  The family room screen and doorframe ripped out of the wall as Señor Q bucked his way inside, bucked his way across the room, then bucked a horn through Larinda’s back, goring her from her kidneys up into her rib cage. He raised her body up near the peak of the cathedral ceiling, shook her like he might shake every bull rider who had ever gone that eight-second distance with him if he got the chance again, bucked and spun and kicked and reveled in his pent-up fury, Judge and friends still hugging the wall, until he dropped down on all fours, snorting and staring at Owen. Larinda was still attached, the bull’s horn protruding through her ribs. Q snorted again, remained frozen facing his tiny rodeo clown neighbor. Larinda’s limp arm slowly raised the Tec-9, blood gushing
from her mouth, her chest, her back. She peered down the barrel, Owen at the end of it. Judge’s gun was twenty feet away, outside, useless.

  “You will rot (unnhh)…in hell…for saving the judge, little man.” Her finger curled…

  Judge reached behind Geenie, grabbed the Glock from her holster, the gun this monster didn’t know was there, stood and emptied its entire clip into her pained face and head. Smoke, blood, gray matter, her Tec-9, all of it settled around the family room, all of it neutralized. Señor Q bucked and spun and galloped out of the house, stopped to get his balance on the patio, and to face the hundreds of acres of rolling fields and hills and prairie in front of him. He spooked Bruce the cat, and the two were off in the direction of Q’s never-ending pasture, Larinda Jordan’s flopping carcass still attached to his head.

  Owen lifted Mary Veronica up from the debris of the family room. She smiled sweetly at him, showing her dimples. “Thank you, Owen. Look, Owen honey…”

  Owen had Judge’s gun.

  “You are dead to me, bitch.” He raised the handgun, pointing it at her sideways like all good gangstas did. “Judge. Call nine-one-one and get Frannie Kitchens over here before I do something I’ll regret. Or would regret. Eventually.”

  Judge wasn’t particularly quick at punching in the numbers, his ears still ringing, plus he’d give Owen time to decide what was best for him. The police would have never known. Owen had been through enough, been hurt enough.

  He deserved the satisfaction, Judge thought.

  All us misfits do.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Naomi’s son and daughter were with her in D.C., mother and kids watching the Cowboys-Eagles playoff game on TV. Naomi took the call.

  Larinda Jordon was confirmed dead, this time for sure, in Texas. A woman with her, an alleged accomplice, was being held for questioning.

  She thanked the local Texas police chief for alerting her to the story before it went public. After she hung up the news outlets picked it up and fed the crawl at the bottom of the TV screen, the football game deep in the third quarter: “Breaking News. Missing domestic terrorist dead in bloody Texas encounter.”

  Naomi’s son and daughter were on Christmas break, spending as much time with their convalescing mother as possible, Cowboys fans all. She’d remained in Georgetown, a three-bedroom condo rental across town from her destroyed condo. Too much still hurt…the trauma played out on the deck, in the common area, and at a nearby cross street…the loss of Edward Trenton…for her to ever return there. She’d sell it when it was livable again.

  Another phone call, this one less of a surprise. She’d spent hours in conference with her Supreme Court peers on Thursday and Friday, discussing this topic in painstaking detail, but the weekend calls kept coming. The Court’s decision was to be read two days from now, on Monday. On the phone was yet another one of The Nine who had voted differently than she had.

  “Wishing your Cowboys luck, Madam Justice.”

  “Thanks so much. Today they need it. Philly’s young quarterback is having the game of his life.”

  “He certainly is. Listen, Madam Justice, about Babineau v Turbin…”

  Of course it was about Babineau. All today’s judicial calls were. Her vote had decided the case.

  She concentrated, needed to block out the game so she could focus on the conversation. An internal avowal gathered steam. It steadied and emboldened her.

  I am a Native American. I am a woman. I’m a mother, a daughter, a feminist. I’m a human being. I’m a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

  And, for a short time, I was Jane Roe’s baby.

  I am all these things, but only because I lived.

  “Yes. My fourth call today about Babineau, Your Honor. What’s on your mind?”

  “Monday is a big day, Justice Coolsummer. Anything I can do to have you rethink your vote?”

  Maybe in my heart I still am Jane’s baby, with all the complexity, guilt, and appreciation this identity entails.

  And this has changed me.

  “No, not a thing, Your Honor.”

  THE END

  About The Author – Chris Bauer

  “The thing I write will be the thing I write.” Chris wouldn’t trade his northeast Philadelphia upbringing of street sports played on blacktop and concrete, fistfights, brick and stone row houses, and twelve years of well-intentioned Catholic school discipline for a Philadelphia minute (think New York minute but more fickle and less forgiving). He’s had lengthy stops as an adult in Michigan and Connecticut, thinks Pittsburgh is a great city even though some of his fictional characters don’t, and now lives in Doylestown, PA. He’s married, the father of two, is a grandfather, still does all his own stunts, and he once passed for Chip Douglas of My Three Sons TV fame on a Wildwood, NJ boardwalk. As C.G. Bauer he’s also the author of SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD, an EPIC Awards runner-up for best in 2010 eBook horror, and the editor of the CRAPPY SHORTS short story collections.