Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones

by Levine, Paul

  I couldn't help myself. My eyes darted to my client, just as did the jurors'. I didn't know what they saw, but to me, he looked like a big, fat crook.

  "You see a thief, a con man, a deceiver," Socolow said, lest there be any mistake. He was dying to mention Baroso's criminal record but he couldn't get it into evidence because I had kept Blinky off the stand. A prior conviction can only be used for impeachment, and that was enough reason to keep Blinky at the defense table during the trial. So was the nervous twitch that made Blinky look like a pathological liar when he was giving his name and address.

  "So on behalf of the people of the state of Florida ..."

  All of them, I wondered?

  "...I ask that you convict both defendants on each and every count of grand theft, fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy. Thank you and God bless you."

  Socolow gathered his notes from the podium, took down

  his Technicolor charts that detailed various feats of grand larceny, and lowered himself majestically into his seat at the prosecution table. I stood up, cleared my throat, and thanked the jurors for their rapt attention to the case, but I left God out of the equation. Then I pointed to the U.S. flag behind Judge Gold and started talking about the Constitution, Mom, and apple pie. I wasn't about to let Abe out-folks me.

  "Our great democracy depends on citizens like you, leaving your homes, your jobs, your loved ones and serving as the last bastion of protection for your fellow citizens ..."

  I always try to make jury service sound like joining the Marines.

  "We have the greatest legal system in the world ..."

  Excluding trial by combat, of course.

  "Now Mr. Socolow and I have other cases to try, other fish to fry…"

  Other fish to fry? Did I say that? Sometimes the mouth moves faster than the brain.

  "But Louis Baroso has only one case ..."

  Pending, that is.

  "It is here and it is now. This is Louis Baroso's case. This is his life, his fate, and it's in your hands."

  I shot a look at my client. He blinked at me. Thrice.

  "Our Constitution provides certain rules that protect men and women accused of crimes. Anyone accused is innocent until proven guilty, innocent until you say otherwise, innocent until and unless you conclude after considering all of the evidence, after searching your conscience, after using all your powers of common sense and intelligence and fairness, that the state has proven guilt beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt. A jury's job is not to presume evidence where there is none. It is not to assume evidence, to fill in evidence, to believe there must be evidence just because the prosecutor says so. We don't guess people into jail. We don't assume people into jail.

  No, the jury's job is to look critically at the evidence and ask, 'Did the state prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt?'

  I blathered on for a while about reasonable doubt. That's what you do when you don't have much of a defense. When I have favorable evidence, I use it. Hell, I hoist it up the flagpole and salute it. Lacking a defense, I tap-dance around the state's evidence and say it just isn't enough.

  "Now, Mr. Socolow told you the evidence indicates that Mr. Baroso conspired with Mr. Hornback. The evidence implies that Mr. Baroso profited from Mr. Hornback's endeavors. The evidence suggests that Mr. Baroso knew what was going on. Well, there's a phrase for that kind of evidence, and you've all heard it. It's called circumstantial evidence ..."

  The jurors nodded en masse. Good, they'd heard the phrase on Larry King.

  "...And I'm going to tell you a story about circumstantial evidence. A mother bakes a blueberry pie and puts it on a shelf to cool. She tells her little boy not to touch that pie, but he climbs up on the shelf and digs in anyway. Now he hears his mom coming into the kitchen, so he grabs his pet cat and rubs the cat's face in the pie. The mother walks in and yells for the boy's father. The father takes the cat out to the barn, and then, boom! There's a shotgun blast. The boy is still there in the kitchen licking off his fingers, and he says, 'Poor Kitty. Just another victim of circumstantial evidence.' "

  I paused just long enough to let the jurors chuckle. Then, becoming serious, I lowered my voice and said, "I'm pleading with you not to let Louis Baroso be another victim of circumstantial evidence."

  This time, only two jurors nodded, and one of them might have been asleep. I wrapped it up with an appeal to the basic decency of the American people, then sat down. Blinky gave my arm a good squeeze and patted me on the back.

  I looked into the gallery again at Jo Jo Baroso, who avoided my gaze.

  "We were never close," Blinky said, watching me. "I was hot-wiring cars when Josie was still making mud pies. She always thought she was better than me."

  Which didn't exactly put her in an exclusive club. "So what's she doing here?" I asked for the second time.

  "She hates me," Blinky answered, as if that said everything.

  Looking back now, I know that wasn't it at all.

  #

  "FOOL ME TWICE" and the entire Jake Lassiter series are available on Amazon Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords.

  Free Preview: Ballistic

  A Nuclear Missile…

  A Band of Terrorists…

  And Only Two People Who Can Prevent Armageddon.

  When a doomsday cult captures an U.S. Air Force missile base, it's up to a lowly sergeant and a female psychiatrist to prevent a nuclear holocaust. That's the setup of "BALLISTIC," the chilling new thriller from the Edgar-nominated author of the Jake Lassiter series.

  "BALLISTIC is 'Die Hard' in a missile silo. Terrific!"

  — Stephen J. Cannell

  1

  Are You Ready for the Apocalypse?

  Times Square, New York City–September 1994

  The young man who calls himself Zachariah blinks against the neon of a megawatt Manhattan night. Cocks his head and hears dueling symphonies in his brain. A thunderstorm of Wagner on the port side, a cannonade of Tchaikovsky to starboard. Schizophrenia in stereo.

  Zachariah steps off the curb and pulls up the collar of his trench coat. Rain pelts him. Cleanses him, he thinks, as clueless tourists and scummy gutter rats surge by on both sides. Yokels and locals. Sinners all.

  Hookers in halter tops, goosebumpy in the wet chill. Gangbangers in leather, pimp-rolling, toe-walking, trash-talking skull crackers. Corn-fed, name-tagged conventioneers, heehawing across the big city, checking out the bars, Singapore slinging watery drinks at nine bucks a throw.

  Lifting his face to the rain, eyeglasses steaming, he splashes through a puddle. Stops at a kiosk filled with filthy magazines. The devil's own diaries. Creamy breasts and pouty lips. Who will save them?

  Splashing through a puddle, wagging his finger at Bernie behind the counter, telling him, "All the animals come out at night."

  Bernie looks at the young man through rheumy eyes. "You're telling me."

  Zachariah sweeps his arm across a panorama of lustful sinners. "Some day a real rain will come and wash this scum off the street."

  "How many times you seen Taxi Driver? 'Cause I gotta tell you, Zack, it's making you even weirder, if that's possible."

  A radiant light amps Zachariah's mind, a divine glow inspired by the Truth and heavenly doses of mescaline. He reaches into his trench coat and hands Bernie a pamphlet. On the cover, a drawing of an ornate temple exploding, pillars shooting into the air like flaming spears. Zachariah levels his gaze. "Pilgrim, are you ready for the Apocalypse?"

  "Hell yes." Bernie tosses the pamphlet aside. "But to tell the truth, I thought it already happened."

  Outside the store, the neon flashes ADULT XXX. Inside, the pot-bellied clerk with the retro sideburns hacks up a wad of phlegm, cursing the weather and his own clogged sinuses. He empties an ashtray, counting the butts, and curses himself for his three-pack a night-shift habit. He switches channels on his seven-inch black-and-white, then looks up to see a clean-cut young man stroll into the shop, trench coat spotted with rain. Wiping raindro
ps from his wire-rim glasses with his tie, another accountant or salesman copping a cheap thrill.

  The clerk glances at the bland, nothing face. Always check them out, watch for a thug with an attitude and a Saturday night special. Trench Coat tries to flip through "Salt and Pepper Studs," but it's stapled shut. Peeper doesn't even know the rules. He loops around a free-standing display of dildos and cockstraps and approaches the counter.

  "If you're looking for the video booths, they're in the back," the clerk says.

  "My visions need no video," Zachariah answers.

  "So whadaya want, buddy?"

  "Salvation for all eternity."

  The clerk shrugs. "Eternity's expensive. We charge a quarter a minute for video. Fifty cents for live peeps. Ten bucks for the live sex theater."

  "Sodom and Gomorrah are upon us, and you, sir, are the gatekeeper of hell."

  Ah, one of those. The clerk hacks again, then spits into the trash can. For minimum wage and no health plan, why put up with this shit? "Hey, buddy, if you wanna buy…buy. If you wanna look…look. If you wanna preach, haul your ass out to the street corner."

  Zachariah pulls two quarters from a pocket. "I shall buy. But, as it is written in Revelations, 'I know where you live. It is the place where Satan has his throne.'"

  "You got that right, fella. I live in the Bronx."

  A whorish red sign with a flashing arrow points to LIVE PEEPS. Hallucinating now, Zachariah feels as if his feet are slogging through a wet slime, the vomit of hell. He enters a dark booth the size of a toilet stall. Latching the door, his senses hypertuned, he inhales the tang of disinfectant barely masking the ocean saltiness of semen. Through tinny speakers, he hears the Red Hot Chili Peppers urging, "Give it away now!"

  He slips the quarters into a slot. A shutter slides up and light streams through a window from the miniature interior stage where a bored stripper bumps and grinds, her backside facing a booth directly across from him. She chews her gum and pastes on a smile of slutty sincerity, smacking the other guy's window with her mushy ass. Naked except for her red spiked heels, she dances across the stage toward Zachariah.

  Come to me, Jezebel. The angels screech her name in his ear.

  He steeples his fingers under his chin, studying her. A scar, fibrous and purple, jags across her belly. She is pale under the glare of the lights. Her hair is dyed a coppery red, top and bottom. Shaved into a design down below, what is it? A cross! Blasphemous bitch. She will pay. They will all pay.

  She wiggles and pouts. Then, boom! The music stops, and so does she. Stands there a moment, hip shot, then points to the tray in the window, waiting for her tip. He folds a pamphlet over twice and places it in the tray.

  On the other side of the glass, she picks up the pamphlet and unfolds it, her eyes going hard as she read aloud in a Southern twang. "'Are you ready for the Aypo-ca-lipsee?' You think I can pay the rent with this shit?"

  She looks up, ready to shame a couple of bucks out of him, but he is gone.

  Zachariah climbs the stairs to the second floor. Two middle-aged men pass him on their way down, averting their eyes. Confront your sins, heathens!

  He hands a ten-dollar bill to a burly Hispanic man with a ponytail and the tattoo of a snake wending across his knuckles, then enters the small theater. Four geezers are spread out, one to a row, hands disappearing into their laps, watching the stage where a naked punk is slipping it to a skinny woman on a soiled mattress.

  The woman's bare, dirty feet are wrapped around the punk's pimply back as he listlessly pumps away. Neither makes a sound, though the mattress is wheezing, and one of the scuzzbags up front is breathing so hard, he might go into cardiac arrest.

  Zachariah heads down several steps and hops onto the stage. The heavy breather in the front row huffs out a "Hey!" The couple untangles, the punk's pecker hanging forlornly at half-mast. "It ain't amateur night! Get outta here."

  Zachariah turns to the audience of disgruntled whackers and lets his voice slip into the sing-song of his beloved Brother David. "Babylon, mother of prostitutes, abomination of the earth, hear the Word!"

  "Aw, shut up!"

  "Chingate!"

  "What a meshuggeneh!"

  Forgiving the fools who know not what they do. "Behold a pale horse!"

  The door bursts open and Snake Knuckles hauls ass toward him.

  "And his rider's name was Death!" Zachariah unbuttons his suit coat and extends his arms. Jesus on the Cross. A battery pack hangs from his belt, and packets of Semtex are taped to his waist.

  Snake Knuckles leaps onto the stage but Zachariah sidesteps and calls out, "And Hell followed him!"

  He pushes a switch on the battery pack…

  At his kiosk, Bernie sees the orange flash before he hears the thunderclap. An explosion that spews glass and plaster across the street, barely missing him. Pedestrians duck and run as the shrapnel rains down, and where there had been a tawdry little porn shop, now there is a gaping crater of flame. A hot wind sucks piles of magazines from Bernie's counter, tumbling them down the street, plastering them against windshields, and inhaling them into the inferno.

  And still no one has answered the question, "Are you ready for the Apocalypse?"

  Ballistic is available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Smashwords.

  2

  In the Belly of the Beast

  Chugwater Mountain, Wyoming

  Deep inside the missile silo, Sergeant Jack Jericho dangles at the end of a rope and pulley, a harness buckled around his waist. Above him, the sky is crystalline blue. He is a shade under six feet, broad of shoulders and shaggy of hair that has not been regulation length since basic training. He has slate-gray eyes and a nose that has been broken twice, once by a slag bucket that slipped its winch in the coal mine and once by a fist that found its mark.

  Jericho pulls in rope, hand-over-hand. Closes his eyes and imagines himself scaling a lodgepole pine in a shaded forest. Climbing up the hard, scaly bark, grabbing a sturdy limb overhead. Catching the crisp scent of the high timberland. White aspens, Douglas firs, and a thicket of snowberry and juniper. Bluebells, too, sprouting out of the rocky soil of an upland clearing.

  Mind over matter, it works for a moment. What had the doc called it? Creative visualization. "The mind's eye can see whatever the brain wishes."

  Yeah, and a lot the brain doesn't wish. Try not thinking of a brick wall. Or of a mine shaft filling with water, men screaming to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

  Jericho opens his eyes, reaches up and grasps the handle of the exhaust tube cover. He catches a whiff of the oily slickness of metal and hears the thumpa of the generators far below him in the sump. Damn. Tries to bring back the forest, tries to summon the sound of rippling water in a rocky stream. Thumpa-thumpa. Like the heartbeat of a leviathan.

  He looks up. The bluest of skies is still there, visible only because the six-foot thick concrete cap is open. He looks down toward the drainage sump and the polished steel floor of the silo.

  Jericho uses his legs to kick away from the silo wall, and the rope spins out of the pulley, giving him slack. He propels himself several yards, extends a soapy brush to a grimy spot on the wall, then begins scrubbing. Sweating now, though it's a consistent fifty-eight degrees inside Chugwater Mountain. Sweating not from the heat, but the confinement, the sense that the encircling wall is closing in.

  In the belly of the beast.

  He breathes heavily, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt just above the three stripes. Again, he unwillingly conjures up the mine. The creak of the timbers, the explosion, the rushing water and the darkness. Then the screams, and finally the silence. The doc knew all about the dreams. Had his own from Vietnam. He was a clinical psychologist, on retainer for the union. Wore a ring in his ear, tied his hair in a ponytail. Some of the older miners called him a pansy, until they got close enough look him in the eyes. Glacial ice. Jericho didn't want to know what those eyes had seen. He visited the doc in his office, a
trailer at a job site, and asked a question.

  "Will the dreams go away?"

  "Scars fade but never vanish. Create your own dreams, sing your own songs."

  "I can't go back in the ground. I need to get out of here, go somewhere far away."

  "There is nowhere far away."

  The doc had been right. Sleep came hard. Jericho bedded down with a bottle and a dreamscape of ghosts. Joined the Air Force, re-upped, and re-upped again. Now, two thousand miles from the West Virginia coal mines, he finds simple joys in the outdoors. An eagle soaring over the vast prairie, the haunting lunar landscape of a rocky basin, the startling quickness of a deer bounding through the grasslands.

  Jericho finishes scrubbing the acidic residue near the exhaust tube and spins around in his harness. His job is to clean up after a test firing of the LEGG, the launch eject gas generator. Unlike other intercontinental ballistic missiles, the one with the Orwellian name of "Peacekeeper" is cold launched, propelled out of the silo by a burst of compressed gas. The solid fuel of the first stage ignites only after the missile is in the air.

  Jericho drops his soapy brush into a pail built into his harness. He bristles when other airmen call him the base janitor, but even Jericho figures he is little more than the clown who follows the elephants with broom and pan. He looks up again at the brilliant sky, imagines himself in waders standing in the shallow water of a cool stream, whipping a fly toward a whirling pool where the big trout lurk. For a moment, he is out of the silo, out of the mine.

  He kicks off the wall again, a little too hard, and…clang! He bangs into the nose cone of the missile that is suspended from cables, the Longitudinal Support Assembly in Air Force jargon. The cables are attached to the walls of the hardened silo, and in the event of an enemy's nuclear strike above ground, the missile will sway, then steady itself, and be ready for launching. In theory. As with so much in the missile program, no one knows what really will happen in the event of thermonuclear war.