Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

  She was pretty sure he had to produce her lawyer if she asked for him. Ritter was just sitting in the next room. He could smooth it over. He could get them to let Tamara testify without handcuffs. She had to be able to walk in there under her own power, with no restraints, so that the jury wouldn’t be prejudiced against her.

  “Just get them on,” the guard argued. “If they decide in there they want to take them off…”

  “No! I’m not going in there in handcuffs. My lawyer is in there. Ask him. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  “There are extra security measures in place because of your previous incident. We have to protect the public.”

  “Go ask him!”

  “I’m not in the habit of asking lawyers what I can do as part of my job. He’s not my boss.”

  “I can’t go in there chained. I’ll give my testimony. But not in chains.”

  Snipes scowled. He looked at the other guards to see what their thoughts were.

  “Talk to her lawyer and the judge,” one of them, a white-haired man, suggested. Tamara hoped that his venerable appearance meant that Snipes would listen to him.

  There was silence.

  “What’s it going to hurt to ask? Chances are, they’re on the side of public safety over one witness’s reputation, and they tell you to take her in handcuffs.”

  Snipes threw his hands up in disgust, and walked up to the door to the courtroom. He talked through the crack to someone inside the courtroom, and then waited while, presumably, that man then spoke to the lawyer, or the judge, or someone else who passed the message along. Eventually, like a game of telephone, the answer would come back to Tamara.

  After a minute, Snipes went into the courtroom. The minutes ticked by. Tamara shifted. It was good that the judge hadn’t made a snap decision. The fact that he was taking time to consider the issue was a good sign. She hoped.

  Eventually, Snipes returned to the holding room. He shook his head and blew out his breath. “Judge says forego the handcuffs. But if you cause me any trouble…” he patted the gear on his belt, “I will use whatever measures I deem necessary to protect the public from a threat.”

  Tamara nodded and kept her eyes down, trying to convey to him how cooperative and non-threatening she was. She might be a convicted killer, but she wasn’t someone who just went around attacking people for no reason.

  It wasn’t the same judge as had heard the other trial. Tamara didn’t imagine that he would have allowed her into his courtroom again without handcuffs. Tamara was escorted to the witness box and she looked at the two tables as she was sworn in.

  McClure at one table. He was recognizable, but not the same man as she had known at school when she was out on bail. Then he’d been an adult with authority over her. Coaching her, telling her how to train, yelling when she screwed up. He’d seemed a lot bigger than he did sitting at that table, hunched over, his grey hair very short, so that Tamara could see red scars snaking over his scalp. His face, too, was scarred, and one eye bulged like it was going to pop out of its socket. He looked at her on the stand, and his expression was inscrutable. Did he hate her for her part in the attack? For being the one to expose his secret? Or did he forgive her because she wasn’t the one who had hurt him and had tried to stop the attack?

  Maybe his brain was damaged and he didn’t even know what was going on.

  He had a woman lawyer. Tamara supposed that made sense. Show that he wasn’t a predator. That she supported him and wasn’t afraid of him.

  Tamara’s eyes drifted to the other table.

  Glock.

  They had done their best to make her over. They had dressed her in conservative street clothes like Tamara, rather than her prison jumpsuit. Clothes that covered up most of her ink so she didn’t look as scary to the jury. Her hair had been trimmed.

  But she was still Glock. They hadn’t given her any makeup, so she still had some tats showing and her features were hard, the lines not softened with expert colors and brushes. Her eyes were bloodshot and red rimmed.

  Tamara swallowed and tried to keep the thumping of her heart under control. She thought that everybody in the courtroom must be able to hear it. Must be able to read her face when she looked at McClure and Glock. Everyone’s eyes were on her, curious about her and what she had to say.

  “You may be seated.”

  Tamara didn’t move.

  “Miss French. Please take your seat.”

  Tamara wished that she could remain standing. She was stronger on her feet. It put her above the people seated at the two tables, giving her an advantage over them. She obeyed and sat down. Snipes relaxed visibly. Other guards discreetly stationed themselves around the courtroom.

  “You’re here today to tell us about what happened the day that Quentin McClure was assaulted,” the lawyer said.

  Tamara nodded and wet her lips. “Yeah.”

  “Tell me why you went to the school that day.”

  “I wanted to talk to Coach McClure. To… get him to talk about what—” Ritter caught Tamara’s eye and she remembered what he had told her repeatedly. Don’t try to throw the blame back on McClure. Don’t try to make him look like the bad guy. No accusations. No hint that he’d been molesting the girls in his care. “Yeah. To talk to him.”

  “You were angry with him?”

  “No. I just wanted to ask him about something.”

  “Something school related? You were on his volleyball team, weren’t you?”

  “I was… but it wasn’t about that. It was just… something personal.”

  “I see. And did you go alone?”

  “No. I went with Glock.” Tamara nodded to Glock.

  “And by Glock, you mean the defendant, Kayla Spielman.”

  “Yeah. Spielman.” Tamara could call her Spielman. She’d never been Kayla as long as Tamara had known her.

  “Why did she go with you?”

  Tamara tried to construct an answer that was true, but didn’t reflect badly on her or make it sound like she was accusing Coach McClure of something.

  “She was there… for moral support. She said she’d come along to watch my back. Make sure everything was okay.”

  “Why would you need someone along to watch your back to talk to your volleyball coach?”

  “I was scared…” Tamara inadvertently looked over at Glock, who had one corner of her lip curled up in a sneer. She flashed back to that day. Approaching the coach, thinking that all she had to do was ask him questions and he would conveniently answer on tape, implicating himself. “I just needed someone with me…”

  Glock towered over her, wielding the big trophy as a weapon, bringing it down on McClure’s head again and again, the corners and edges slicing into his skin, cast-off blood spattering everywhere, the thuds coming over and over again. McClure fought long after he should have been beaten senseless. Tamara’s own pleas rang in her ears again.

  “No, no, no…”

  “Miss French.”

  “Stop. Stop!” Glock’s eyes were pools of black, swallowing Tamara up. “No! Stop it, please!”

  Both corners of Glock’s mouth curled up. She smiled at Tamara, lips parting to reveal her uneven teeth, like a shark.

  “You have to stop her!”

  Several seconds of silence passed. The screams faded away. Tamara was again looking at Coach McClure, head scarred, as he stared back at her. Tamara gulped the air.

  “We are trying to stop her,” the prosecutor agreed. “If you could just focus on answering my questions…”

  “She tricked me.”

  The other lawyer jumped up, objecting at Tamara’s words. Tamara just kept going.

  “She told me she wanted to help me, that it would fix everything if I could just get him on tape. But that’s not what she wanted. She wanted me to get her in there so she could beat him, kill him. That was what she wanted. That’s why she wanted to be there.”

  The judge was sustaining the objections, motioning for Tamara to stop. He order
ed her testimony stricken from the record. But the jury would remember. They wouldn’t be able to disregard what she had said that easily.

  “Miss French, why did Kayla Spielman say she wanted to go with you.”

  “Glock said she’d help me.” Tamara deliberately used her name. The name that reminded the jury just how dangerous she was. “She said she’d protect me.”

  “And is that what she did?”

  “No, she—”

  “Coach McClure never attacked you, did he? He never hurt you or threatened you?”

  “No. Glock just came in. She just started hitting him.”

  “I didn’t protect you?” Glock demanded from the other table. Her lawyer tried to silence her. Snipes took a couple of steps closer to Glock, preparing to deal with her if she got violent or needed to be removed. “I made sure that perv would never touch you, didn’t I? I did exactly what you wanted me to. Exactly what we were there for.”

  “No,” Tamara said faintly, shaking her head.

  There were objections from both sides, orders from the judge, excited chatter among the jury and the spectators. Tamara couldn’t take her eyes off of Glock.

  “I was there to protect you, just like I always protected you!” Glock stood up at the table. Her lawyer tried to get her to sit down. Several of the guards moved toward her.

  Tamara’s mind flooded with memories of how Glock had protected her. Painful bruises, broken nose, broken ribs, sprains and strains she had reported to Dr. Eastport as accidents, when he and the guards had no doubt where they were actually from. Other insults to her body that she kept quiet about, suffered through silently.

  Yes, Glock had protected her from the gangs and the other juvies. But always for a price.

  “You didn’t come to protect me,” Tamara snapped. “You tricked me. You were there because you wanted to hurt someone. McClure was just a good target!”

  “Be glad it wasn’t you!” Glock shot back, her face suffused with blood.

  Not that time.

  Tamara’s blood was boiling with rage at how she’d been treated by Glock for two years. Over how Glock had talked her into going to see McClure that day, promising Tamara it was her one chance for redemption.

  Glock’s lawyer and Snipes finally succeeded in making Glock sit back down. The judge was banging his gavel, no one taking any note of it. The sleeve of his robe caught on an expensive-looking silver pen, sending it spinning across his desk toward Tamara.

  “I will have order in this courtroom!” the judge demanded. “Everybody will stay seated, or I will have you removed!” He glared at Glock. “This is not a forum for you to express yourself!”

  Glock leaned back in her chair, smirking. She folded her arms across her chest and stared directly at Tamara. “I didn’t have to trick you. You would have gone if I told you to. Just like you always did what I told you to.”

  A swell of hate surged through Tamara, blinding her to everything else. She grabbed the pen from the judge’s desk and jumped out of the witness box all in one movement. Before the guards could process what was happening, Tamara vaulted the defense table and launched herself at Glock. Glock saw her coming and was faster to react than anyone else in the courtroom, trying to get to her feet before Tamara landed on her. Tamara stabbed down into Glock’s throat with the pen, but ran into too much gristle and bone. Shifting her grip as she and Glock fell together to the floor, Tamara tried again, stabbing the pen up into the soft of Glock’s belly.

  “Is this doing what I’m told?” Tamara asked through gritted teeth. “Kayla?”

  Glock grunted as the pen went in. She wrapped her arms around Tamara in a bear hug, as if the pen were only an annoyance. She clinched Tamara to herself so she was unable to move.

  “Look at the little hellcat I raised.” She chuckled in Tamara’s ear. “How ya been, Princess?”

  Tamara attempted to free herself, even though she knew better, knew that it would only make Glock tighten her grip. She twisted the pen, tried to dig it deeper.

  One of the guards deployed a taser, which attached to Tamara and made her convulse in Glock’s arms, but it failed to affect Glock. Glock was on the floor on her back with her face presenting to the guards, so one of them sprayed her. Glock howled as the capsaicin hit her eyes. She released her hold on Tamara to clap her hands to her eyes.

  Tamara was hauled back by her shirt. They threw her to the floor of the courtroom and wrenched her hands behind her. Someone stripped the sticky pen from her grip. They were not gentle about securing her. Tamara could hear Snipes’s bass voice yelling over a phone or radio for assistance.

  “We need medical! Weapon in courtroom three! All parties secure, but we have injuries.”

  Tamara’s brain was still surging with adrenaline. She didn’t fight back against the guard pinning her down, but her skin was crawling and her heart was pounding. She wanted to get up and fight, to put Glock down for good. She turned her head, trying to see Glock, trying to see the rest of the courtroom, which appeared to be in the midst of being evacuated. Glock had been secured and was lying on her back, hands cuffed beneath her. Her shirt, stained with blood, was pulled up away from the wound for examination.

  Tamara flashed back to Zobel, his blood everywhere. To Tabby and Waterson, their bloody bodies tangled together. To Glock’s assault on McClure, bludgeoning him over and over, his blood spreading and spattering.

  “You have to stop her,” Tamara insisted, stuck in the wrong timeline. “She’s killing him! You’ve got to stop her!”

  “Shut up.”

  Tamara squirmed. “She’ll kill him! She’s going to kill him!”

  “Can’t you shut her up?”

  “There’s going to be hell to pay over this!”

  One of them gripped the back of Tamara’s head and pressed her face hard nose-down into the floor so she couldn’t see Glock. “Shut your mouth. Understand? Shut your face!”

  Tamara’s teeth cut into her lips and she grimaced, trying to pull them away. She tasted blood.

  “I have to stop her!” Tamara insisted, barely able to form the words. “If you don’t let me go, she’s gonna kill Coach McClure!”

  “She’s off her head,” one of the guards said.

  “Get her into the holding room.”

  Two of them levered her up to her feet.

  “She’s going to kill Coach McClure,” Tamara insisted, hearing the dreadful sound of the trophy crashing into McClure’s skull over and over.

  “McClure isn’t even in the room, you moron!”

  “No point trying to reason with a lunatic.”

  “I have to stop her,” Tamara repeated. “Just let me go, I’m the only one who can talk to her.”

  Snipes, holding on to her right arm, snorted. “Well, you know how to speak her language, all right! I haven’t seen her turn a hair before now.”

  “I can stop her.”

  “You’ll need more than a pen for that.”

  She should have gone for one of Glock’s eyes. That was the only way she could have gotten a fatal blow with her improvised weapon. If she could just try again, rewind and go for Glock’s eye instead of her gut…

  “Let me… let me go back…”

  “Not on your life.”

  They pushed her through the door into the holding room.

  “Do we take off the cuffs?”

  “No way. We’re going to have to treat her face. I say we shackle her feet too. I don’t want to take a chance of that one coming at me.”

  “Not you,” Tamara moaned. “I just want to kill her. It’s the only way.”

  “You’re probably right,” a young guard agreed. “Did you read in the paper about Spielman’s record?” he asked his colleagues conversationally. “Talk about a sicko. The only way to stop a psychopath like that is to put her in the ground.”

  Together, they grabbed Tamara and laid her on the tile floor, moving in concert like synchronized swimmers. She squirmed uncomfortably, but didn’t try to kick them
as they held down her legs and shackled her ankles. They shuffled her into the cell, lying on her side.

  “Where’s Zobel?” Tamara demanded, looking around the holding room. “Where’s McClure?”

  “McClure’s not coming in here and I don’t have a clue who Zobel is.” Snipes pulled on a pair of blue gloves and held Tamara’s face still, looking at her lip. “Well, you’re not going to bleed out from that. You’re lucky that’s all you got, going after someone with a weapon in the courtroom. Lucky you got tased instead of shot.”

  “Zobel got stabbed,” Tamara told him urgently. “He’s bleeding real bad. If someone doesn’t get to him, he’s going to die!”

  “A lot of people are apparently going to die in your little world. How about you just lie here and cool down. Maybe if you decide to be a good girl and stop trying to kill everyone, we’ll have a nice doctor bandage that up for you.”

  Tamara rested her head on the tile, exasperated. “I want to sit up.”

  “I think you’re better off resting. Just stay there and we won’t have to use any further measures.” Snipes patted his taser, but he could have meant any of the ordnance on his belt.

  “You gotta let me kill her,” Tamara entreated one last time.

  “No.” He put his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “Now just calm down and stay put.”

  22

  TAMARA THOUGHT THINGS would happen quickly. The police would come and take her to jail or Eli would bring the juvie bus to take her back home. But time moved slowly, with no one talking to Tamara or removing her from the cell. The panic and chaos that had ruled in the courtroom had only lasted a few minutes. The judge sent the jurors their lunch. After they had eaten, the trial reconvened without Tamara. Tamara didn’t know if Glock was back in there, treated for a superficial stab wound and released. Tamara doubted she’d been lucky enough to hit anything vital. She could only hope she had punctured a major blood vessel or nicked the liver. Something that would cause Glock to bleed internally for a long time before they realized she was seriously hurt.

  The guards came and went, mostly talking in lowered voices and throwing glances in her direction to make sure she wasn’t listening in on their conversations. A few of them mocked her or threw insults in her direction. Tamara didn’t care. It wasn’t like they were inmates at juvie and she had to defend her reputation.