“There’s not much emotion in a piece of paper. I wanted Flagg on the stand so the jury could feel the fear Nickel inspired.”
“So what about the pastor?”
“He’s the only character witness I’ve got,” Martin said. “He’s a big name—something to get those brain-dead jurors to perk up and listen.” Martin stabbed the corner of the box and chewed his bottom lip. “I’m down by three runs in the bottom of the ninth—I’ve got to swing for the fences.”
“But you’d still be down by two.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“Shouldn’t you work the count? Get a few men on base and extend the inning? Make Dillingham go deep into his bull pen?”
“My perfectly fine metaphor assumes the bases are loaded.”
“With two outs, a double to the gap would score three,” Carol said. “It’s better to play for the tie at home and then win in extra innings.”
Martin sighed. “There’s only one out.”
“All the more reason to work the count.”
“Do you enjoy torturing me?” he asked. “When do I ever torture you?”
“Every week in my paycheck.” She laughed.
“Got a goddamn answer for everything,” Martin mumbled, shooting her a smile and a sly glance.
He wormed the ruler through the tape and slit open one side of the box.
“My hope,” he said, abandoning his metaphor, “is that Pastor Guy doesn’t care what I ask him—that he just wants to get the better of Dillingham. I’ll get him to say that Peter was the most respectful, courteous, nonthreatening student of the Bible you’d ever wanna see. Then for the pastor, the cross-examination with Dillingham can be the first debate of the campaign.”
“… The entrenched politicians of this state are part of a dysfunctional political family of hacks, retreads, and wanna-bes, each of whom got where he is today because he happened to be related to some other hack, retread, or wanna-be. Political hacks breed like germs, and it’s time this state elected somebody with the guts to disinfect the culture.…”
“I suppose he’ll be running as the outsider,” Martin deadpanned. He slit more tape, pulled open the box, and recoiled as if it had been electrified.
“Jesus, Mary, and the junk man!” he yelled.
Carol bolted up.
“Ants!” Martin said.
“Oh, you wuss.”
“What the hell—
Martin pulled out an orange prison jumpsuit stained with blood. He read the name printed above the pocket and then set the item on his desk. He took blood-encrusted sneakers from the box, one Holy Bible, and one hunting knife with a vicious serrated blade.
“What’s all this?” Carol asked in a whisper.
“No note, no nothing,” Martin said.
He checked the return address on the box again.
“Oh shit,” he said, suddenly understanding. He thought for a moment, then said, “Get Dillingham on the phone. He’ll need to test DNA on this stuff and compare it to what they have on J.R., the bum in the boathouse.”
Carol dialed. “What should I tell him?”
Martin blew twenty black ants off his desk blotter.
“Tell him that Garrett Nickel cut J.R.’s fucking head off.” He sighed and added ruefully, “All that work to keep the body out of the trial, and now this. It puts Peter and Garrett in the boathouse that same night. We need to change strategy—Peter has to explain this to the jury. But first he’s got to explain it to me.”
thirty
Peter lay faceup on the concrete floor, his bent legs on the lower bunk, as if to do sit-ups. Martin nodded to the guard. He grimaced when the door boomed shut.
Peter barely glanced at him. The young convict locked his fingers behind his head and stared at a ceiling so brown with nicotine, you could have scraped off a pinch to put between your cheek and gum.
“We’re losing,” Martin said.
“You did good with Home.”
“You’re going to have to testify.”
Peter shot him a hard glance but said nothing.
Martin folded himself on the floor, grunting all the way down, lay on his back, and put his feet up, as Peter had done. The floor smelled like mildew. “This would be more comfortable if I get you transferred to a padded room.”
“The floor is good for my back,” Peter said.
“You’re too young for back problems.” Hmmm, Peter was right: It did feel good on the back.
Peter rubbed his palm on his face, as if wiping tears Martin could not see. “Sleep on a one-inch mattress every night and then tell me about back problems.”
“Nobody can find Flagg.”
“You check the shelters?”
“Without Flagg, we’ve got nobody else to help paint Garrett Nickel as a monster who intimidated you into joining the escape,” Martin said. “That was our strategy, Peter. You were the patsy; he was the ringleader. You didn’t want to break out, but what choice did you have once threatened by the Nickel-Plated Outlaw?
After a few moments of silence, Peter said, “Are we really losing?”
“Our best juror killed himself. One of our witnesses has vanished. Ninety percent of the jury hates you, me, or the both of us. Your Bible-study teacher is running for governor against the prosecutor, which means calling him as a character witness is playing Russian roulette with a machine gun. My pretrial strategy is in tatters, and I’m yanking out what little hair I’ve got. So—fuck, yes!—I’d say we’re losing.”
Martin paused, let the bitterness drain from his tone. He needed Peter’s cooperation to save him, and he needed some truth. “I busted my ass to exclude any mention of the headless bum in the boathouse from your trial,” he said calmly.
“I was so fucked-up that night—I didn’t even know that guy was up there.”
“I’ve gotten some anonymous information that suggests Garrett Nickel killed that guy, the night you were there.”
Peter gave a tiny shrug.
“You told me that after you left Home on the island, you bought a needle and some smack on some street corner you can’t remember and then shot up in an alley you couldn’t recognize.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And that you wandered in a haze and then stumbled into the boathouse at random.”
He shrugged again. He would not meet Martin’s eyes.
“You and Garrett were at the boathouse together that night.”
Peter rubbed away another invisible tear. “Like I said, man, I was so wasted.…”
“I need to know, or we will lose.”
Peter’s brow wrinkled. Without looking at Martin, he said, “You told me before that there was some stuff you couldn’t hear as a lawyer and still represent somebody.” Real tears gathered in Peter’s giant bug eyes.
Martin swore, “I won’t abandon you.”
A tear raced down Peter’s cheek to the floor. Funny thing, Martin thought—the kid didn’t wipe the real ones.
“When Home was in the shower, Garrett would talk to me,” Peter confessed. “He said Home was an idiot who couldn’t be trusted and would just get us caught if we didn’t do something about him. He told me to pretend I didn’t want to break out, to keep pissing on the plan. To act weak. To let Home bully me, so that he’d let his guard down.”
“So that bullshit from Home about Garrett forcing you to escape at knifepoint?”
“All bullshit,” Peter confirmed. “Playacting.” A second tear raced down the wet track left by the first. “On the night we broke, Garrett fixed it so me and Home would go for Home’s stash—he knew Home couldn’t get the stuff alone.”
“You had no use for Home, but you needed his stash.”
The wet bug eyes flicked to Martin for a moment and then back to the ceiling. “Garrett told me to take a shank,” he said. “To give it to Home in the ribs once I got the money.”
Martin’s throat tightened. “Did you take the knife?”
A third tear tracked to the floor.
“I didn’t want to use it—I never done anything like that,” Peter said. He closed his eyes and pushed another tear out. “I had Home totally snowed, man. He gave me his fuckin’ gun? How stupid do you gotta be?” He opened his eyes. “Once I saw how scared he was of the water, it was easy just to leave him on the island.”
“You met Garrett after that?”
“Right where he left us off,” Peter said. “He had all this coke, smack—all sorts of shit in the car. Garrett told me to help myself.” His eyes widened and rolled in their sockets. “It never hit me like that before.”
“You had detoxed in prison,” Martin said. “Your tolerance was back to zero. That’s why you overdosed and nearly died.”
“Garrett said we had to stop at a boathouse—to make some quick money before we split for Maine. He had this big fuckin’ knife, and a picture of some guy, I didn’t recognize.”
“Did he say who was in the picture?”
“Some buddy of his,” Peter replied. “Garrett said we were going to look the guy up.” He finally wiped his face, and then looked at Martin. “I just assumed it was the person who left us the car.”
Martin nodded gently.
“And I was telling the truth about the dead guy upstairs,” Peter said. “I don’t remember much about what happened once we got inside, but I know I had nothing to do with his death.” He looked away. “Though later, when I found out that somebody was killed there with a knife, I assumed Garrett had done it.”
They both lay there in silence for several minutes.
“I didn’t shoot Garrett,” Peter blurted, as if suddenly remembering he had forgotten something important.
“Mmm,” Martin said. He was thinking. His pretrial strategy to make Peter the patsy had been naive. He had hoped to get Peter off without any extra time on his sentence, but that was no longer possible. Truth was against them. Even if they could hang the jury on the murder charge, Peter would have to do three years for the escape—every second of it in punitive segregation as an escape risk. Peter had a tough dozen years ahead of him, at a minimum.
But Peter didn’t kill Garrett Nickel—Martin believed him. He said, “You have to testify. You have to admit your role in the escape and the plan to rob Home. Dillingham will kick our ass over the body in the boathouse unless we steal his thunder and lay it out in direct examination. We’ll shake things around and put you as the first defense witness—as if you can’t wait to get up there and deny you killed Garrett Nickel.”
Peter smacked his lips. “Okay,” he said in a tiny voice.
“Can you tell it to the jury just as you told it to me here?”
Some tears would be nice, too.
“I can do it.”
Peter yanked the tourniquet with his teeth and then tapped the vein. Plump and firm after so long without the needle, almost a virgin again.
Garrett raced the Oldsmobile along the highway.
“Hold it still while I do this,” Peter said. He gasped softly when the needle went in. He pushed the plunger and cooed. Whoa. The rush was almost instant, a pins and needles feeling, as if he had traded his blood for carbonated soda. A sense of heavy weight formed in his stomach. By the time he pulled out the needle, he was euphoric. He has stunned the world to win Olympic gold. A billion fans are screaming his name across the oceans. Peter soon grew drowsy and settled into the world’s warmest and safest embrace, as if nuzzled into the bosom of God. They were on the run from prison? A thousand cops on their tail?
Who gives a fuck?
Garrett was yelling at him, “Hey, you fucking scag addict, I’m talking to you!” He jerked the wheel back and forth and jostled Peter to attention.
“Huh?”
“Did you waste Larry?”
Peter chuckled, thinking of his cell mate marooned on the little island. “I took care of him,” he said.
“Is he dead?”
“He won’t bother us.”
Garrett growled, “That’s not what I asked. Is he fuckin’ dead?”
“Sure,” said Peter, lying, “he’s bled out by now.”
“No chance he crawls for help, or somebody finds him?”
“He’s dead, man.” He leaned back and sighed.
Garrett chuckled. “ ‘He’s dead, man,’“ he repeated cheerily. “You’re a mean little double-crosser, ain’t you?”
“Mmmm.”
“You like the feel of that Mexican shit? I thought you’d like that. That’s why I arranged to get a few grams. Old habits die hard, don’t they, little double-crosser?” His tone sharpened. “Hey—is that Larry’s gun in your belt?”
“Mm.”
“Don’t shoot your dick off.”
Peter said nothing. He was dancing cheek-to-cheek with a ghost made of nothing but love and the wind.
“Or mine,” Garrett said.
Peter listened to the engine’s raunchy purr. The car jostled him as it left the highway and zipped through neighborhoods that seemed familiar but which he could not place. They drove for what seemed a long time, though Peter did not mind. When they stopped, time suddenly seemed to compress, and Peter realized they had been in the car only a few minutes.
He watched Garrett stuff clothing into a garbage bag. He put a knife in there, too. Then Garrett studied a photograph of a man Peter did not recognize.
Garrett whispered to no one in particular, “ ‘And when they had found him, they said unto him, All men seek for thee.’ ” He grinned and tucked the photo into his shirt. He turned his Bible upside down and shook it. Nothing came out but dust. He put the book in the bag.
“Get out and shut your door, but be quiet,” Garrett ordered. “Holy Jesus—look at them eyes. Can you fuckin’ walk?”
Walk? Sure, why not?
“Mm-hm.”
Outside, the moonless black sky was brilliant.
Garrett walked with the bag. Peter followed one step behind. He watched Garrett’s feet and kept in step. Left, right, left. They walked for what seemed a long time, down dark streets, cutting across light to safety in the shadows.
They reached a boathouse that looked like wreckage washed ashore by a murderous storm.
“What a dump,” Garrett said.
Peter laughed into his hands. The entire world lifted itself up, spun once clockwise, and slammed down without a sound. Peter gasped and grabbed for the railing at the front steps of the boathouse. He stumbled up the stairs behind Garrett.
Garrett whirled, clenched Peter around the throat, and warned him in a spit blast, “Watch the fucking noise.”
Inside, the room was dark and cluttered with trash.
Peter relieved himself in a corner. His listened to his piss patter on an old newspaper. When he had finished, he grabbed for a dirty sofa. He was nauseous, dizzy, starting to sweat.
Garrett appeared beside Peter, spun him roughly, and pushed him onto the sofa. “Stay here until I’m done,” he said. “And no noise.”
“Mmmm.”
Peter listened to footsteps tap up some stairs. The floor above creaked. He leaned his head back and watched copper wires dangle from a hole in the ceiling. They just dangled there.… He waited for them to do something. It seemed he had been waiting a long time. He felt the slightest vibration from the sofa, as if a spirit had sat down beside him. He turned toward it.
A rat.
Peter gasped. Never had he seen such a tremendous greasy gray rat—a mop head from a sewer plant, slicked back with Vaseline. Its slithering pink tail was like Satan’s limp cock. The rat’s fleshy nose pinched the air in Peter’s direction.
“Leave me be,” Peter whispered to it.
Voices upstairs drew the rat’s attention. It rose to its hind legs, nose twitching.
“Dear Jesus, it’s as big as a cat,” Peter said.
The world spun again, taking the blurred rat with it. Peter grabbed for the gun in his belt. When the world stopped spinning, the rat had advanced on Peter. It reached its dirty snout toward him.
Pet
er aimed the gun. The weapon weaved unsteadily. It seemed to float. Peter had trouble keeping his hands on it. “I’ll shoot,” he warned the rat.
The rat climbed slowly up the sofa and stood on the backrest. It was the same height as Peter.
Peter closed one eye and stared down the barrel.
The world spun, slowed, stopped, spun again. He blinked hard. Sweat poured down his face. He worked hard to breathe, as if the old boathouse had spun itself to the top of a high mountain. The rat taunted him with its twitching nose.
“One move and I’ll shoot,” Peter said.
A scream of terror ripped through the house.
Peter pulled the trigger.
Blam!
The gun kicked in his hand. The rat vanished. Peter inhaled the weapon’s hot smoke. The world spun in a blur.
He heard Garrett shouting in anger, “What the fuck—”
Peter pushed himself to his feet and stepped onto the spinning planet. He staggered through trash. He had lost the gun.
He panted, sobbing, confused, his insides convulsing with dry heaves. He heard Garrett’s voice again: “Are you crazy? I’ll kill you for that.”
Peter staggered toward a black rectangle on the wall.
He fell through it and tumbled down stairs to blackness.
“Pretty much the next thing I remember was hearing a woman’s voice,” Peter told the court from the witness stand.
“What did she say?” Martin asked.
“She was like, ‘Can you hear me? Are you hurt?’ Stuff like that.” Peter leaned back and rubbed the stubble on his neck. “I remember a bright light and I thought I had died.” He paused. “But I think she was just shining a flashlight in my eye.”
“What happened next?”
“Then I remember I was outside on a stretcher. Red lights were flashing. I overheard an argument. I didn’t understand at the time, but I think a cop was arguing with an EMT over whether I should go the hospital in handcuffs.”
“Did you?”
Peter shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Martin paused a moment. Peter had done well on the stand—calm, believable, personable. He had explained the gunpowder residue on his hands. He had held the jury’s attention.
This was the moment to ask the jury to believe him.
Gravewriter Page 19