Bench Trial in the Backwoods

by Maggie Wells

  Harry nodded. “Be right back.”

  She moved toward the door, her hand hooked around the strap of her bag, but her gaze strayed to the streaks of powder trailing into the hall. Guilt twinged in her gut. If she hadn’t picked the stupid envelope up and brought it inside, some richly deserving porch pirate might have swiped it and gotten a poof in the face and an hour of panic for their perfidy.

  “You’re sure you don’t want help cleaning up?” she called toward the back of the house.

  “No, I’m good.” Harry reappeared, a plastic grocery sack dangling from his fingers. “I had some electrolyte water. It might help. I threw it in with a couple bottles of regular water. And the crackers, of course.”

  Alicia accepted the offering, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth when she spotted an entire box of saltines nestled in with three large bottles of water. “It’s only a little over three hours’ drive.” She let the grin grow. His hazel gaze was sincere. “If I drink all this, it’ll be over four hours with stops.”

  Harry rolled his eyes. “Sip, don’t guzzle.”

  He moved past her to open the front door. She stood there a moment, taking in the sight of his handsome face bathed in the warm light. The night beyond him was dark and still. The breeze had died down, but the air was now crisp and cool. Beyond his front porch, the citizens of Pine Bluff were all nestled in for a long winter’s evening of television and other indoor activities.

  She was about to say something insane about what a pretty street he lived on when she heard a sharp crack and saw a puff of brick and mortar explode beside his head. Alicia dropped the bag and grabbed the front of his jeans—the first handhold she could get on him—and yanked him down to the floor.

  Rolling her body on top of his, she flailed a foot out to kick the door closed. The heavy oak swung shut on well-oiled hinges. The moment of breathless suspension was shattered by the crack of another shot. Through the glass pane set in the top of the door, they watched as Harrison’s porch light exploded in a shower of sparks.

  Chapter Four

  Gunfire. Someone was shooting at his house. They were under fire. And he was under Alicia.

  Alicia Simmons was covering his body with hers while one of the unhinged hillbillies he’d dealt with his entire life took potshots at his house. Again.

  Alicia thought she was saving him. She thought she was saving him by dragging him down to the floor and covering his body with hers. Her much smaller body. Her pregnant body.

  The second the thought popped into his head, his body reacted. Hooking his leg over both of hers, he wrapped his arms tight around her and rolled until their positions were reversed.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, breathless.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he panted back.

  “There’s someone shooting at the house.”

  No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a rain of pellets sprayed the house and the narrow pane of glass beside his front door splintered into a spiderweb of cracks.

  “What the hell?” Alicia huffed, straining to look toward the door. “Get off me.”

  “No.” He backed his refusal with action. Digging his bare toes into the floor, he slid them about three feet away from the door.

  “Damn it, Harry, someone is shooting at your house.”

  Beneath him, she wriggled and squirmed, and at one point balled up her fist and struck his shoulder. He shook his head, and she retracted her arm again. Thankfully, she telegraphed her punch by staring too hard at his jaw. He ducked his head at the last second and her knuckles glanced off the side of his skull.

  “Ow! Damn it, Harry, let me up.”

  “Not on your life,” he muttered.

  His foot brushed something solid, and he looked back to see it was her purse. Flexing his foot, he caught the bulk of the bag and scooted it toward his outstretched hand. He could feel her body coil and tensed for another blow. “Hang on a sec,” he ordered. “I have your purse.”

  “Good,” she huffed. “I need my gun.”

  Harrison felt his eyebrows shoot up, but as he groped around in the soft leather bag, he hoped he didn’t grab hold of a firearm. The moron spraying the front of his house with birdshot wasn’t looking for a firefight. They only wanted to get his attention. A gun was the last thing they needed, but he didn’t trust himself not to fire back if the weapon fell into his hand.

  He stilled for a moment, listening closely. No more shots fired. Whoever it was had probably run for the woods. Probably feeling triumphant. After all, they’d taken out a perfectly good porch light and a whole window. He was shaking with rage when, thankfully, his hand closed around her cell phone.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the instrument into her flailing hand. “Call Ben. Tell him someone is using the house for target practice again.”

  “Again?”

  He looked down to find her staring up at him, her eyes wide with alarm. Nodding, he said, “I’m guessing buckshot this time. Someone used birdshot before, and it didn’t do much more than mess up the paint on the porch.”

  To his relief, he saw her thumbing the screen. “Does this happen often?”

  He heard the quaver in her voice, and something in him unraveled. “No, not often,” he assured her. “It’s just...there’s been some trouble. I won another motion today. It’s not unusual for tensions to escalate as we get closer to opening arguments. People don’t need much of an excuse to get riled these days, and Coulter has kicked over more than a few dead logs around here.”

  “You weigh a ton. Get off me,” she complained, but then Ben must have picked up because she jerked her attention to the call. “No. Uh, not you, Ben. Listen, someone is shooting at Hayes’s house.” She listened for a moment, her face slackening in incredulity before she rolled her eyes. “Yes, again. He says to tell you it looks like buckshot this time, but I’m pretty sure something higher caliber took out the porch light,” she said, sliding a pointed glare at Harry. “The first two shots were rifle fire.”

  He pressed up on his hands, relieving her of some of his weight, but not enough for her to slip out from under him and start running down the street with her gun in hand. To make her feel better, he conceded her point with a nod. “Could have been more than one of them. These guys rarely fly solo on missions.”

  Alicia’s forehead puckered as she listened to Ben issuing opinions and instructions. “Okay. Yeah. Okay, I’ll stick.” She ended the call and met Harry’s eyes again. “He said you’re probably right—he’s going to cruise out to somebody called Arnie Smithson’s place, and I’m to hang here until he calls back.”

  “Good idea.” Pressing into a full push-up, Harry lifted a hand and flipped over off her. Alicia immediately scuttled into a sitting position, but he had trapped her handbag behind him against the foyer wall. “No need for the gun,” he informed her, his voice calmer than he felt in his gut.

  She glowered at him as she crossed her legs like a kindergartner and pushed her hair away from her face. “I am a trained law enforcement officer,” she reminded him.

  “I’m aware. You also just told me you’re pregnant,” he retorted a shade too sharply.

  “It’s not a disability. I can still do my job,” she shot back.

  He raised both hands in surrender. “I’m only saying you might try to remember the change in status the next time you throw someone to the floor and cover them with your own body.”

  Her cheeks flushed a pretty pink, but Harry refused to be drawn in by it. At least, he did his best not to. Lord, she looked beautiful with the color riding high on her cheekbones and her eyes gleaming with determination.

  “I could always use the whole ‘My body, my decision’ argument.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “It was your decision to come here and make sure I was aware of what was happening with your body.”

  “But I di
dn’t give you a say,” she countered.

  He leveled his most stern “speaking directly to one juror” stare on her. “I’m asking you, please do not do anything to place you or your baby in harm’s way on my behalf.”

  She seemed to sag, the fight seeping out of her bones. For the first time since she’d stepped through the door, he noticed how tired she looked. Dark smudges under her eyes. Her skin pasty under all her bluster. The starch in her spine softened and all traces of defensiveness disappeared. Maybe because he referred to the child she was carrying in the singular possessive? He wasn’t sure. As long as it kept her from charging out his front door and into the night, he didn’t care.

  “There are some groups of people who go looking for trouble,” he said quietly. “They’re loosely organized gangs of thugs, but Ben refers to them as militia. Coulter made friends with a couple of them, and now they feel the need to take up the fight for him.”

  “Oh.”

  The single syllable slipped out of her on a whisper, but it spoke volumes in understanding. He nodded, confirming every scenario he feared might be running through her head. Ben had clued in to the big picture fast enough when things started getting personal in the past few weeks. But the fact that the envelope had been dropped on his doorstep on the same night someone else decided to do some target shooting disturbed him.

  The thugs Arnie Smithson ran with were not the brightest bulbs, but they were savvy enough to spread their mischief out over a stretch of time. Make it last. Rotate perpetrators so no single person could be brought in on multiple charges. Harry and Ben understood what many city slickers failed to grasp. The people they were dealing with might be uneducated and uncouth, but they were far from stupid.

  “Ben is a good cop. We need to sit tight and let him do his job.”

  Not surprisingly, Alicia reached into her bag again and came up with her gun and a slim leather ID case. “It’s my job too,” she said, lifting a challenging eyebrow.

  He wasn’t entirely certain if he wanted to hug her or shake her. Instead, he stared her down, though it took almost every ounce of energy he had not to reach for her.

  “Listen, Dirty Harriett, unless you spotted someone doing a deal on my front doorstep, you have no jurisdiction here.” He extended the first two fingers of his right hand and pushed the barrel of her firearm to the side. “I have more right to discharge a weapon on these premises than you do.”

  To his relief, the corner of her mouth lifted in a smirk. “Dirty Harriett? You need to get some movie references from this century...Harry.”

  Her pointed emphasis of his name made him smile in return. “You understood the reference,” he retorted.

  To his relief, Alicia shoved her weapon and credentials back into her bag. “Do you keep a .44 Magnum handy, in case some punk feels lucky?”

  “No, but I have my granddad’s old .22 for when I want to put the fear of God into a few squirrels.”

  “You hunt squirrels?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. “I thought you said you didn’t like hunting.”

  He found the girlish reaction oddly enchanting. She was such a straightforward, capable woman. It was funny to think of her getting grossed out by anything. “I haven’t since my granddad passed, but I think I can manage to defend the homestead if the need arises.”

  “How do you defend against stuff like this?” she asked, her voice rising with exasperation as she gestured toward the front porch.

  “By putting bad guys behind bars,” he replied without missing a beat. At her skeptical snort, he shrugged. “Those yahoos are simply looking for something to get riled about. The Coulter case—and me by extension—is their flavor of the week. Don’t worry. They’re bound to latch on to whatever is the latest conspiracy theory coming out of news talk radio, and by next week they’ll have forgotten all about me.”

  “The blessings of the twenty-four-hour news cycle,” she said dryly. “I don’t see how you can stand it.”

  “Stand what?”

  “Living out here with all these rebels,” she said derisively.

  “You forget—I am one of these people.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

  She snorted. “Hardly.”

  “I went to school with Andy Smithson, Arnie’s younger brother. I was born here. These people have been my neighbors my whole life.”

  Alicia exhaled long and loud, but her gaze never wavered. “Hard to believe. Anyhow, yes, Counselor, unless I’m in a bathing suit, you can believe I’m carrying. Even then, I probably have a gun in my beach bag.”

  He shrugged, then nodded to her purse. “I’m afraid to ask what else you have in there.”

  Her hair swung forward, partially shielding her face as she opened the purse wide for his perusal, then rummaged around in its cavernous depths. “Nothing unusual. Lipstick tubes, a Glock, a compact, my wallet, zip-tie cuffs, phone charger, granola bar, cond...” Her voice trailed away, and the last syllable hung there unspoken.

  A beat passed. Then he ran his hand through his hair with a harsh choke of laughter. “Sure, now you have protection.”

  “I bought them at the pharmacy downtown, uh, the morning after,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want to get caught without again.”

  He swallowed hard, a thousand unanswered questions bubbling up inside him, fighting to burst out. But he kept the lid clamped tightly. He swooped down and snagged the handles of the plastic bag he’d given her mere minutes before. Gesturing to the kitchen, he said, “Come back in and sit down. It’s going to be a bit until Ben sounds the all clear, and we need to talk.”

  Seated at his kitchen table with bottles of water and a package of saltines open in front of Alicia, he asked the one question swirling in his mind. “How do you think this happened? And not the technical stuff. I mean, we discussed birth control...”

  She nibbled a bit of cracker but didn’t drop his gaze. “I cut my finger slicing lemons. I didn’t think much about it, but a couple days later I noticed it was red and tender. I had an infection, so the doctor gave me antibiotics. I was taking them when I came down here.”

  Her pointed stare told him she thought she’d imparted sufficient explanation, but for the life of him, Harry was having a hard time connecting the dots. Tired of trying to figure things out, he made a motion for her to continue.

  “Antibiotics can sometimes impact the efficacy of birth control pills,” she explained, her delivery flat. “It’s usually recommended people use some form of backup contraceptive—”

  “Like a condom,” he interjected.

  She inclined her head. “Like a condom,” she conceded, “if they plan to have intercourse.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t plan to have intercourse, nor was I overly worried about the birth control failing because I have a condition... It makes my chances of conception lower than average,” she said, opening her hands in a helpless motion.

  “You mentioned something about a complicated medical background,” he prompted. “What condition?”

  “Yes, well...” She paused. “It’s called polycystic ovarian syndrome, but it’s kind of a moot point now, isn’t it? I’m pregnant, so what I thought couldn’t happen, or at least wouldn’t happen easily, has actually, uh, occurred.”

  She ducked her head for the first time, and all of a sudden, Harry was struck by how much it must have cost her to come here and tell him this news. She could have kept her secret, and he would never have been the wiser. Would being oblivious have been better or worse? He wasn’t sure.

  “I swear I would never have done something like this intentionally. I mean, you remember the whole discussion we had about consent, right?”

  Remember it? He still chuckled each time he thought about it. She’d been the initiator. At first. But the minute he’d caught up with her seduction and thrown himself into the action, she’d pulled back. She’d pulled bac
k and spelled out what was about to happen between them in no uncertain terms. Then, unsatisfied with his eager nodding, she’d demanded verbal assent. They’d gone through the same routine again when they realized they didn’t have a condom close at hand, with the addition of a curt briefing on medical and sexual history.

  As though she could read his thoughts, Alicia spoke. “It was an accident, Harry. It sounds lame, but it’s the truth.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze. “It’s a shock. I get it. Truthfully, it is for me too, but it’s a happy accident for me. It may not be for you, and I understand.” She closed her eyes as if mustering the strength to speak words she wasn’t entirely certain she could. “In truth, happy or not, my head is in a whirl. I have no idea what I’m going to do.” She gave him a wry smile. “I only want you to believe me when I say I have no intention of trying to derail your life. You may want nothing to do with this child once it’s born, and no matter what, I will respect your choices.”

  “How could you think I’d want nothing to do with my own child?” The words were out of his mouth before he’d even had time to process them. And since he’d always been a man to go with his gut reaction, Harry didn’t quibble with himself. “Wait. No. I retract the question. Of course, you couldn’t know how I would react. I wouldn’t have guessed how I’d react,” he said with a laugh.

  “We don’t know each other well at all.” She gave his hand another squeeze and he looked down at their clasped fingers. “Except in the biblical sense.”

  He chuckled at her blunt assessment, then shook his head. “I wish I’d reacted better.”

  “I think we could both use some time to let this...unexpected turn of events settle.” She gave him a shaky smile. “Probably not gonna happen tonight, though, right? We need time to be practical...think rationally about all aspects of what this can mean for both of us. And tonight isn’t turning out to be a night for calm consideration.”