Isolated Judgment

by Jonathan Watkins

  “Alright.” Luther sighed in relief and positioned himself back at the keyboard, his fingers poised above it. “Give me the names of the lawyers.”

  “Hold on,” the man replied. “I gotta ask him.” The man’s voice got far away, but Luther could still make out what he was saying. “Names of the two lawyers, Chief. Right now.”

  Then a small and tortured voice, stammering something unintelligible. Luther caught his own reflection in the monitor as he listened. He ran a hand over his chin, felt the first rough touch of whiskers and decided he’d shave again before lunch.

  Something made a pounding sound over the phone, and the tortured voice leapt to a howl.

  “Now, Chief. I cannot stress that hard enough.”

  Whatever the man had done, it worked. Luther heard the names that leapt sobbingly into the air and through the phone.

  “Darren Fletcher! Issabella Bright! Please! Please, just stop...stop doing this.”

  Luther’s breath caught in his throat. He withdrew his fingers from the keyboard. He slumped bonelessly in the chair, and tried to see how what he had just heard could be true. Nothing occurred to him.

  “You get that?” the man said over the sobbing in the background.

  “Hmm. Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Great. So it’s a go?”

  “Wait.”

  “Look, I know you’re calling the shots on this, but—”

  “Hold,” Luther snapped, and tapped a key, sending the call back into the system. The receiver against his ear clicked and went to dial tone. He dropped it back on its cradle and stood up. He was a tall, lanky man. All the men in his family were.

  Across the office, he opened the cabinet in the wall and plucked a glass down from the shelves. He filled the glass with ice and whiskey.

  Darren. Darren and his girlfriend. Again.

  Luther drank the whiskey in one long swallow, and set the glass back down. A stinging warmth ran its way down into his stomach.

  He paced back to his desk, but did not sit down. He pushed a button on the phone.

  “Farah, is Mr. Link in the building?” he said out loud.

  Farah’s voice came across the intercom, a pleasing mixture of perfect diction wrapped in silk. Of the thirteen women he’d interviewed for his personal assistant, he’d settled on Farah primarily because she managed the seemingly impossible feat of sounding both seductive and professional at the same time. That, and because her past as an exclusively high-end call girl meant she knew how to keep very dark secrets.

  “He is, sir,” she said.

  “Tell him to come see me, would you?”

  “Of course. Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Undersecretary Fitzgerald is holding for you.”

  “Tell him I’ll call back. Make apologies. Thank you, Farah.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  There it was, in the “sir.” The slightest undercurrent of suggestion. An unspoken You’d be welcome to a lot more, sir, if you’d only make the demand. That it wasn’t true didn’t diminish its effect on him. Farah was not on the menu, and he wouldn’t have hired her if she had been. But the hint of availability in her voice and in her interactions with both himself and clients was invaluable. By and large, the clients were men. Powerful men. Farah handled them like a cat handles a mouse.

  Still not sitting, Luther plucked the receiver back up and cradled it between his ear and his shoulder. He dialed a number from memory and waited through five rings before receiving an answer.

  “What is it?” Darren said, no effort to disguise the annoyance in his voice. There was music playing in the background, and the sound of women talking.

  “Brother,” Luther greeted. “How are you?”

  “Busy. What is it?”

  Luther frowned and resisted the urge to shout, “You’re inconveniencing me again, Darren! As ever, as has always been your nature, you are inconveniencing me!”

  But that sort of conversation wasn’t within the scope of their relationship. If he uttered anything in any way personal, much less intimate, he knew Darren would simply hang up. It had been long understood that the only issue upon which they would communicate was money. Luther and Darren were co-beneficiaries of the Fletcher Trust.

  “There was a question about the monthly disbursements,” he lied. “I felt it prudent to make certain your lifestyle hadn’t been interrupted by an accountant’s oversight.”

  There was a long pause, and Luther listened to the thumping music and chattering women. He thought he heard the word unicorn, but couldn’t be certain.

  “Darren? Are you there?”

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “And I wonder why you just lied to me. What do you want?” Darren’s voice was hushed, and Luther suspected his brother was trying to conduct the conversation without the people around him hearing it.

  Luther pinched the bridge of his nose, and inwardly cursed at himself. Darren had always known when Luther was lying. His younger brother was many things—a fool, a wastrel and a romantic—but he was never oblivious.

  “Where are you?” he said, settling on just coming out and asking the only thing he needed to know. “You sound like you’re at some...frat house party.”

  “I’m in a stretch limo with two beautiful women and a chauffeur who assures us he has a full back tattoo of Tupac in a Jesus pose,” Darren replied. “Though, to be honest, I’m skeptical about that. We’re going to a medieval fair, not that it’s any of your business. What do you want?”

  Luther felt relief pour over him, and his brother’s goading tone didn’t elicit the customary ire from him. Darren wasn’t anywhere near the Wailing Isle. For the slimmest of moments, he considered pressing for more information. Information was never without value, and he would have felt far more at ease if he knew exactly what Darren and his girlfriend were doing with this Judge Prosner. But he did not press. Any nibbling around the edges of that issue would be like sounding an alarm in his brother’s mind. It would be the surest way to send him and this Issabella racing down to see the Judge.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I want nothing. Just ensuring the accounts are in order. Enjoy your frivolity. Though I’m sure you don’t need my encouragement on that front.”

  “Nope,” Darren said, and the line went dead.

  Luther leaned forward and tapped the keyboard. His connection to the man from Cleveland resumed.

  “You’re a go,” he said. “This Lou is the priority. The Judge is irrelevant, so deal with it however you see fit. There can be nothing to trace you. Nothing.”

  “No shit?” The man chuckled. “What about the lawyers?”

  “They won’t be there.”

  “Uh-huh. And if they are?”

  “They won’t.”

  “Let’s play pretend, okay?”

  Luther closed his eyes and pictured his brother in his mind’s eye. He saw him as he always did—a long-legged boy running beside Luther in the woods behind their father’s estate. Even then, struggling to keep up, Darren’s eyes had flashed with life and his crooked grin had been a line that promised some witty, teasing observation.

  Luther pushed it out of his mind and sat in the chair.

  “They are not to be touched,” he said. “That’s not a suggestion. No harm—none, is to come to them.”

  “Sacred cows?” The man laughed softly in his ear.

  “Something like that,” he said, and hung up the phone.

  Luther again slumped in the chair, a dreary heaviness seeping into him. He thought of Darren, out there in the world. His younger brother had a distressing knack for gravitating toward trouble. He had made headlines with his idealistic little criminal defense work. He had been shot. He had been kidnapped. And, if his ongoing association wi
th this Bright woman was any indication, he was in love. And through all of this, the boy with the crooked grin and quick tongue had only ever reached out to Luther once—and only then to use the services of the firm’s investigator, Joe Link.

  Luther swiveled around to face the windows again, his eyes moving over the towers of downtown without really looking at them.

  He despises me. He despises what I do. What Father did, and his father before. He’s never coming back. I need to make peace with that and forget him. Let him go. Let the world swallow him up, if that’s what he wants.

  Because it would. That much was obvious. Darren was making a habit of thrusting himself into dangerous situations. Sooner or later, the odds would play him out of the game.

  And here I am, looking out for him, still. Protecting him. And if I told him that, he’d just sneer and tell me not to bother. To stay away.

  Bitterness twisted his handsome features, and Luther scowled at the idea of Darren’s precious autonomy. Freedom wasn’t free, and Luther was the one who had to keep track of its costs.

  “What’s the rush, Boss?”

  Luther stood at the sound of Joe Link’s gruff voice. He smoothed his slacks and forced his face into a mask of placidity before turning around.

  “A delicate issue,” he answered, and walked back over to the liquor cabinet.

  Joe Link took a seat on the leather sofa nearby, crossing one leg over the other’s knee. He was a brutish man in appearance and temperament—not tall, but extremely thick, with a frame composed of heavy bone and naturally bunched muscle. He was bald, but from the few times Luther had seen Link in the locker room of the firm’s gymnasium, all of the hair that had once decorated his scalp had migrated to the man’s back and shoulders. Being stuffed in a black suit and tie, even as finely tailored as the one he wore now, did nothing to diminish his appearance as a heavy-handed thug.

  Around the office, his nickname was the “Missing Link,” though it wasn’t spoken in his presence.

  Luther sat in the overstuffed chair across from Link, a whiskey in either hand. He passed one across, and Link grew a grin.

  “Lunch already?” he quipped, and took a sip.

  “It’s been a long morning.”

  “Not for me,” Link replied. “I got in some time with the weights, surfed a little porn and been staring at the new intern’s butt ever since. I want to bite it. Just once, to see if it’s ripe yet.”

  “She’s Councilman Green’s daughter.”

  “Just looking.”

  “Even that’s too much.”

  Link sipped his whiskey, but the glass wasn’t large enough to hide his smirk.

  “So, what’s the deal-ee-oh? Farah seemed to think it was important. Didn’t even purr at me.”

  Luther nodded. He didn’t know how to broach the topic, so he rattled the ice in his glass and looked at his fingertips.

  “Boss? You got something for me to do? Or we just drinking here until the bars open?”

  “Do you remember that job I told you to never tell me about?”

  “Yup.”

  “I need you to tell me about it.”

  Link rubbed a palm over his face, as if scrubbing away sleepiness. He looked skeptically at Luther.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright. Your brother needed to know where to find a guy and the guy’s gal. Guy was the father of your brother’s girlfriend. I found ’em easy enough. They bought a little piece of land down in the Caribbean. Cash. Daddy was wanted on a few different warrants, some of them tied in to that business with your brother getting himself kidnapped. So I passed that info to him. Met him on the beach down where Daddy was hiding and let him know where to find him. Where’s this going?”

  As he spoke, Link reached into his suit coat and came out with a little round plastic tin of chewing tobacco. He thumbed out an improbably large wad of the stuff and wedged it down behind his lower lip. Luther stood and retrieved a plastic cup from under the bar. He handed it to Link, who promptly spat a long black line into it.

  “You’ve got to break that habit,” Luther said and sat down again.

  “Better for the lungs,” Link assured him with a wink. “So what’re we talking about? Your kid brother in trouble again?”

  Luther shrugged. “I’m not sure. You’re familiar with the Israel account?”

  Link nodded. “Yeah. Greasing one of their bigwigs with a personal favor so the boys over at Variance Aerospace get their early warning systems bought up and screwed down along the Golan Heights. I scratch your back, you buy half-a-billion in poorly tested prototypes. That’s about it, right?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Won’t mean shit if Iran ever drops a nuke on them. Ain’t no warning early enough for that.”

  It was Luther’s turn to smile over the rim of his whiskey glass.

  “That’s not really our concern, is it?”

  “I guess not. So, what’s this Israeli big shot have to do with your brother?”

  “Nothing, really. Well, I guess that’s not true. The Israeli wants some family heirlooms back. A brooch and hairpin that are important to him. And he wants someone to pay for some bad business back during the Second World War. Family members marched to the camps, and now some of their jewelry has shown up on an internet auction site. Which means whoever has them isn’t familiar with just how persistent those people are about tracking down the valuables the Nazis confiscated before gassing them. There isn’t an auction site in the world that isn’t constantly getting poured over by those guys. It was up maybe half an hour when the client put a call in to us. He’s exceptionally eager to get the brooch and pin back. And to see someone pays. Darren, somehow, has gotten himself involved. On the wrong side of things, of course.”

  Link arched a brow, and his fleshy lips pursed cautiously.

  “What’s he doing, exactly? Mucking up the works?”

  “Who knows? Tilting at windmills, most likely.”

  Link shot a thick, stubby thumb over his shoulder. “You want me to grab some college kid from out in the hall who maybe understands what that means?”

  Luther set his empty glass on the table between them and stood abruptly. Link remained where he was and spit another line of black into the cup. He used the sleeve of his fine suit to wipe at the brown dribble on his chin.

  “I want you to go babysit him,” Luther said. “Twice, he’s come on our radar. Three if you count the service you provided him. This time, he’s too close to our business. I want you to clear your books and sit on him until I say stop. Look but don’t touch. I don’t need him knowing I’ve sent someone to see what trouble he’s getting himself into.”

  Link’s crude features bunched up in confusion, and he stared at Luther in silence for a long moment.

  “I know it’s not what you usually do,” Luther admitted.

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “This is important to me, Joe.”

  “I got a lot of guys could do it just as easy as me. And none of them cost as much as I do.”

  “It’s personal. That’s why it has to be you.”

  Link seemed to think it over. When he stood, his grin was back in place and he gave Luther one short nod of his head.

  “Oh, what the hell?” he said. “I haven’t fought off a carjacking in forever. Maybe this’ll be like a training exercise, you know? Wrestling junkies might get me back in fighting shape.”

  “It isn’t that bad. Detroit’s still in America.”

  “You need to fly down out of this perch sometime, Luther. Take a peek around. America ain’t what it used to be.”

  “So you’re on board?”

  Link nodded. “It’ll take a week or so to clean my plate up,” he said. “I’ll put Gil Sharps in charge of my desk
and hop a plane out to Detroit. That all sound right?”

  It did, and the two of them shook hands before Link lumbered out of the room. He heard the man say something loud and obscene to Farah before the office door silently shut and cut him off. Luther sat back down behind his desk. He closed his eyes and let his mind slow down.

  For several minutes, Luther concentrated on throwing away the concerns and complications of the morning. He tossed the man from Cleveland away, confident that the situation was in hand. He forgot Joe Link, certain that he had selected the correct tool for the job. Finally, he turned to Darren. He saw him barreling around Michigan in a limousine, grinning, laughing. That was fine. Carousing around some medieval festival meant Darren would be safe from whatever happened out on Wailing Isle in the next several hours. Any trouble his brother found, it would be his own problem, and not Luther’s. He let his brother slip away from his mind, satisfied that he had done what he could.

  Calm, and warmed from the whiskey, Luther opened his eyes. He leaned forward and pushed the button on his phone.

  “Farah, be a dear and get the undersecretary back on the line, would you?”

  Chapter Ten

  Chief Fish watched the sparse cloud cover drift by from the bottom of his father’s little aluminum fishing boat, while the pompadoured man smoked cigarettes and kept one hand on the stick of the puttering outboard motor.

  Fish had been more than a little surprised when his tormentor had managed to get the motor running. Fish hadn’t been out on the lake in his own boat in years, and the thing had been forgotten under a tarp in the backyard for that long. While the pompadoured man shoved him down the slope of lawn toward the boat, Fish had explained as much.

  “Some of us know how to fiddle with engines,” the pompadoured man shot back, and waved a hand in the air. That hand was gripping two screwdrivers and a crescent wrench taken from Fish’s basement.

  And he’d been right. Working with a calm, easy self-assurance, he’d taken off the motor’s housing and “fiddled with” the thing. Pieces of the engine’s guts got laid out in the grass, and Fish could tell that the man was setting them down in an orderly configuration, so that the reassembly would be performed in reverse order, with little chance of an errant bolt or screw being forgotten. A can of WD-40 was sprayed around in short, exact bursts.