1 Motor City Shakedown

by Jonathan Watkins

  There was silence on the line.

  “Darren, you’re not.”

  When his voice came back, the playfulness was gone.

  “Chelsea, I need this. And I need your help. I have to…I have to try. You understand that. I know you do.”

  “You can’t do it alone,” she said, and realized she’d just conceded. Whatever this was, she was going to help him with it.

  “I know,” he answered, enthusiasm creeping back into his voice. “And I think I’ve got that covered. That’s not what I need help with.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I need you to yell at this cop I’ve got with me here.”

  Despite her summer cold and her misgivings over the idea of Darren handling a serious case again, Judge Hodgens smiled. She wanted to believe he was pulling himself out of his self-destructive and self-imposed exile from the world. He had lived mostly inside a bar for far too long. Long enough, she realized, that she had begun to write him off without realizing it. Like Judy, she’d begun to just think of Darren Fletcher as a lost cause.

  But here he was, his voice animated with the prospect of a case. Saying he was going to try. Begging to be given the chance to try. Despite herself, she allowed a slender bit of hope to light up inside her—hope that a man who had once saved her was now going to save himself.

  Castigating a faceless cop was a small price to pay for the soul of a friend, she decided.

  “Alright,” she answered. “Tell me why.”

  Darren’s voice got louder, and she realized he was suddenly speaking up for the benefit of the police officer he was with.

  “Your Honor, I’m just trying to get in to my client’s hospital room. This officer is barring the door. Have we suspended the sixth amendment in Detroit? I think someone ought to let us lawyers know these things.”

  Judge Hodgens cleared her throat.

  “Alright,” she said. “But you can’t do it alone. You’re giving me your word?”

  “I am, Your Honor.”

  The earnestness in his voice was as welcome to her ears as a song once favored, but long unheard. He sounded like the man she’d known before his world had fallen apart around him.

  “Then put him on,” she said, “and watch how quickly a forty five year-old judge with a roaring bitch of a head cold can melt an officer of the law into quivering goo.”

  THREE

  Vernon Pullins was unconscious. Darren looked the huge man over. A square bandage was taped over his left eye and the left side of his jaw was considerably swollen. Across his forehead, just beneath his hairline, a nasty gash had been sewn shut. His left arm was sheathed in a cast from shoulder to wrist. Dark, yellowing bruises stood out all over his exposed skin. He looked about as broken as a man could, and still be in one piece.

  Lines ran out from his great mass here and there, some taking in fluid, some feeding the beeping machinery cluttered around his bed.

  “Mr. Pullins?”

  Vernon didn’t suddenly leap to consciousness, and Darren frowned in consternation. Suddenly confronted with nothing much to do, he crossed to the window and pulled the curtains open. Sunlight poured in.

  He paced about, staring at the machines and tubes connected to the client he was, apparently, not going to meet after all.

  “Well, what did you expect?” he whispered, feeling very alone. “The world wasn’t waiting for you to wake up and stumble out of that bar, Darren. Trumpets don’t sound every time a guy decides to get on with things.”

  He pulled a chair over close to Vernon and sat down in it.

  “I’m Darren Fletcher,” he said after a long while of staring at the comatose man. “And I think maybe you’re in a whole lot of trouble. That’s an understatement, isn’t it? I mean, you know that already…”

  He trailed off and stared at his hands in his lap. For a second, he entertained the idea of just standing up, getting out of there, and heading straight back to the booth in the back of Theresa’s bar. He’d brush off her questions with some glib, deflecting joke and order a drink. She wouldn’t prod or pry, and after a few hours and a few drinks, everything in the world would be back to the way it had been before Eugene Pullins had called him about helping his brother.

  He didn’t stand up, though. Instead, he straightened in the chair and looked right at Vernon.

  “I’m not much of a lawyer,” he said, his voice growing thick. “I was. I was actually really good at it for a while there. But I…ah, I had a bad turn. That’s a nice way of saying it, isn’t it? A nice way of saying I fell to pieces and decided to get drunk for a few years. And, look, that’s nothing to you. I know that. You’ve got enough troubles, you don’t need me dumping mine all over you.”

  Darren knew there was something he wanted to get out, but the words weren’t coming. He wasn’t accustomed to that. Normally, words were the easiest thing in the world for him. They were his stock in trade.

  Frustrated and glum, he rose and walked over to the window again. Outside, beyond the parking garage, the sky was clear, untroubled. He leaned his forehead against the glass and closed his eyes.

  “I’ll tell you something most people would probably laugh at,” he said. “Some people—not many, mind you, but some-- they get into the law because they want to help people. Not for the money. Not for status or praise. It’s a simple and beautiful thing, if you really have it inside you. It makes you strong if you can put someone’s interests above your own and do everything you can to get them out of dire straits. It gives you a sense of dignity.”

  Some of the dour pessimism seemed to have passed out of him now that he was articulating how he felt.

  “I had that kind of dignity, Mr. Pullins. I did my best for people who were stuck in a really brutal system. And then I…I made a mistake.”

  Behind him, a series of ruffling sounds. Darren jerked around and found himself staring at the pretty young lawyer from the hallway.

  “I’m so sorry,” she blurted. She was down on her knees, furiously scooping up from the floor what looked to be all of the contents of her briefcase. “The clasp is going bad. Everything just spilled out. I am so sorry.”

  Without thinking, Darren walked over and bent down. He started gathering up loose sheets of paper and handing them to her. She smiled hesitantly, a rush of blood turning her cheeks scarlet.

  “Here, let me help you.”

  “I’m sorry, I was—“

  “You were eavesdropping,” he said mildly, and she blushed deeper. She snapped the briefcase shut once the papers were all back inside it, and both of them stood face-to-face.

  “I really am sorry,” she repeated. “I tried to be quiet because I thought you were talking to Mr. Pullins.”

  “I was.”

  “No, I know. I know. I meant…I don’t know what I meant,” she stammered, and there was something endearing in her flustered discomfort that made Darren want to lean forward and plant a kiss on her forehead.

  Instead, he put his hand out between them and gave her his crooked grin.

  “Darren Fletcher.”

  “Issabella Bright,” she said, and they shook.

  “Well, Izzy, if you came here to—“

  “Issabella. Not Izzy.”

  Darren’s crooked grin grew wider and he cocked his head in curiosity.

  “Yeah? Izzy’s such a cool name, though. Really? No room for Izzy?”

  “When I was a kid, yeah. But no, not anymore. Why are we talking about this?”

  Darren put his hands on his hips and regarded her for a beat. He noted her clean, unadorned appearance. She was lovely, with long chestnut hair worn straight and simply. Her business suit was well-pressed but cheap. Her nails were not long and had no polish. She wore no jewelry and her face seemed like an open book, her expressions genuine and guileless.

  ‘This is what the girl next door looks like after she grows up and gets a law license,’ he thought, and chuckled to himself.

  “Hmm,” she said, and a wrinkle of consternation
appeared between her eyebrows. “You just laughed at me, didn’t you?”

  “Not derisively, no. It was an appreciative chuckle. Complimentary chuckle? Can a chuckle be complimentary? Let’s say it can and move on. How’d you make it past that big cop?”

  Issabella glanced at the door through which she’d come, then back at him.

  “I’m not sure, actually,” she admitted. “I was going to start blathering at him about the Constitution, but I didn’t even have to. He just waved me through. I think you scared him or something.”

  “Are you with a firm?”

  “Me? No. I’m solo. You?”

  “Same. You’re new. Right?”

  Issabella stiffened, and he realized the question was probably easy to interpret as a slight. Older lawyers weren’t above pointing out someone’s inexperience in order to score points in an argument, or to establish pecking order.

  She was opening her mouth to say something when the door to the room swung open and three men crowded in. A gray-haired man in doctor’s scrubs was in the lead, followed by Big Cop.

  Behind them both was a stern, hard-faced man who shouldered his way past the other two and up to the bed where Vernon Pullins’ silent mass lie. Darren watched him, and immediately decided he was a cop. The man was lean and compact, and moved with an athlete’s self-assured grace. More than that, it was his stare. He had the focused, bleak stare that cops get after seeing enough horrible things.

  When the man stared down at Vernon, there was no sympathy within those eyes. If anything, Darren noted, he looked at the comatose giant with unveiled anger-- an agitated and barely restrained hostility. Darren had the alarming notion that if the man had been alone in the room with Vernon Pullins he’d have marched up to the bed and immediately begun strangling Vernon to death.

  The doctor cleared his throat.

  “You really can’t be in here,” he said.

  “I’m that man’s lawyer,” Darren answered absently, still watching the man hovering over the bed.

  “I understand. But he’s in my care, and there is no expectation that he’ll be awake any time soon. He can’t have visitors. Not until I’ve cleared it.”

  Darren nodded vaguely and said to the man at the bedside “Who are you, exactly?”

  The man mumbled something.

  “What’s that?”

  He turned and fixed his furious glare on Darren.

  “I said fuck you,” Allen Phelps hissed. “That’s who I am. Who are you?”

  *

  Issabella watched the rumpled, unshaven lawyer beside her subtly transform. Darren rounded on the stranger with the spooky voice and the cold eyes. He grew a wide and playful smile, and Issabella didn’t know what to think. He seemed to have grown an inch, when all she wanted to do now was shrink down until she was invisible.

  She didn’t know why she was still in the room, really. It was as if the entire morning was a dream that she could now look back on with clear eyes. She saw herself rushing to the hospital with the intention of convincing Vernon Pullins to let her take his case. She saw herself making rationalizations about blatantly breaching the code of attorney conduct that forbade such solicitations. What had she been thinking?

  All she could come up with now, as she was surrounded by men who didn’t want her in the room at all, was that she had let desperation overrule her good sense. Her mother’s needling, the stack of depositions that never grew thinner no matter how furiously she ran through them, the ominous phallic tower that loomed over her crummy little office—all of it had conspired to push her into a wildly harebrained scheme to somehow solve all her problems by chasing a sensational headline.

  She took a step backwards, intending to simply slip quietly out of the room and back to her life.

  “Who am I?” she heard Darren say. “I’m that man’s lawyer. I’m also the guy who’s starting to guess maybe you’re one of the cops who put him in that hospital bed. Is that what this is?”

  The last question he shot at the doctor, who blanched and looked like he wanted to be as far away from the brewing confrontation as Issabella.

  “You let a cop involved in the case against my client come in here?” Darren snapped. “Is that what’s going on? No lawyers allowed, but all the cops on the case can just wander on in?”

  “What? No,” the doctor stammered. “I don’t know this man. I’m only here to tell you…that is, all of you, everybody, needs to leave. Please. Right now. Nobody can be here until I’ve cleared him for visitation.”

  Issabella, without realizing it, had stopped her surreptitious exit of the room to watch Darren’s reaction to the scary-eyed man. She saw Darren nod once as the doctor finished speaking. Whatever face off might have occurred, the doctor’s plea seemed to have been enough to snap Darren out of it.

  “Alright, Doc,” he said simply. “Sorry for the bother.”

  The next thing she knew, Darren had his hand lightly placed on the small of her back, and he was gently moving her toward the door.

  “Come on, Izzy.”

  It happened quickly enough that she didn’t have time to react. She felt his fingers pressed in the shallow dip of her back where all the nerve endings seemed to be bunched, heard him softly speaking to her, familiar, like they were old friends, and then they were out in the hallway.

  Behind them, she heard the big cop clear his throat and say “We should get going, Lieutenant Phelps. Don’t you think?”

  If there was more to that conversation, she would never know. One turn down the hall and she was alone with Darren in front of the elevators. She stood there beside him, this stranger, and held her briefcase in front of her, feeling like a schoolgirl with her lunch box waiting for the bus.

  “Darren?”

  “Yeah?”

  “My name’s Issabella. Not Izzy.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  The elevator chimed and the doors opened in front of them.

  “Darren?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can take your hand away now.”

  He did, and they stepped into the elevator. She pushed the button for the ground floor while he leaned back into one corner and fixed her with a playful look.

  “What?” she said.

  “I guess we should go get something to eat. I was thinking Mexican Town. Have you been? There’s a tortilla factory right down there, so all the restaurants have the freshest tortillas you’ll ever find.”

  She looked a question at him.

  “No? Not a fan of Mexican?” he asked. “That’s fine. You can pick.”

  “I’m just wondering why exactly we’d be eating together.”

  “We’re partners on this, now,” he answered. “We should get to know each other, don’t you think?”

  The elevator whisked them down.

  FOUR

  In the parking garage, Issabella decided sanity needed to reassert itself. She stopped walking and fixed Darren with a level, pragmatic expression.

  “We’re not partners on this,” she said.

  “We’re not? Then why did you come out here?”

  “This is where I parked.”

  Darren shook his head and said “No, I mean to the hospital. You were going to scam your way into Vernon’s room. You got rebuffed once, and you came back a second time and got in. Now you’re out? Just like that? I guess I don’t understand. I offer you exactly what you wanted, and now you’re driving away?”

  Issabella peered over his shoulder and spotted her tired old Buick sedan down the lane.

  “I don’t know that I owe you an explanation,” she said, and walked around him toward her car. She had the trunk open and was stashing her briefcase inside when he appeared at her shoulder again.

  “I think you do.”

  “No, I really don’t. It was nice meeting you. See you in court some time, okay?”

  She pushed the trunk lid down, heard it latch shut, and kept her hands there. She didn’t move for a long moment, and was aware of him staring at
her. She wanted him to go away, to stop staring—to stop seeing what was happening.

  “You’re shaking,” he said, his voice suddenly soft, the way it had been when he’d put his hand on her back and guided her away from the hostility of Lieutenant Phelps.

  “I’m alright.”

  But she wasn’t. Issabella’s personal storm, the one that was never farther away from her than the horizon, was roiling through her. It had begun in the elevator, on the way down. Her fingertips had gone numb and her heart began to race.

  In the few minutes it had taken to get out here to her car, the storm of panic had blown itself into a frenzy. Her breathing was shallow and ragged. She felt weak all over, so much so that she was keeping her hands on the trunk because she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t fall down if she tried to stand straight.

  Worst of all was the persistent sense of doom that pervaded every thought. No matter what idea or image floated to the surface, the storm would take hold of it and instantly re-cast it as a sign of failure or stupidity.

  “Issabella?”

  She screwed her eyes shut and prayed he’d leave her alone. She didn’t want anyone to see her like this. It was humiliating.

  ‘Soldier on,’ she thought, concentrating on the feel of the metal under her palms. The Buick was real. The cement floor under her feet was real.

  His hand touched her shoulder, and that was real.

  “I’m going to say something,” she whispered, concentrating on getting the words out calmly. “And it’s for my benefit. Not for yours. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he whispered back, and started to withdraw his hand.

  “Don’t. Don’t take your hand away.”

  She forced herself to take a long, slow breath, then the words came in a rush as she stared into the storm of dread.

  “I suffer from panic attacks. It’s embarrassing, but there it is. They started when I was a kid. When my dad left for the last time and never came back. They just show up and that’s how it is. They show up and I have to deal with them because either I deal with them, or they deal with me. Lately, they show up a lot. Because of stress. Because I’m broke and my car is falling apart and I’m practicing alone in a crummy office in a crummy neighborhood. And my mind takes all those things and blows them up into big ugly things that make me think I’m failing at everything. It’s all irrational. It doesn’t make sense, and that just makes it all worse. It feeds on itself like that. I’m supposed to take medicine for it, but I don’t. I hate how the pills make me feel. So I have moments like right now.”