1 Motor City Shakedown

by Jonathan Watkins

  Her breathing was coming back to her, and the dizziness was subsiding. Issabella opened her eyes and stared down at her hands planted on the trunk.

  “That sounds terrible,” Darren said.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “Yeah, it sucks. It makes me feel like I’m broken. And then that makes the panic worse. And the only way to deal with it is like this. I stare at it and admit it for what it is and talk myself through it. That’s why I’m talking. For me, so I’ll calm down faster and get on with things.”

  “I understand.”

  Issabella wondered. How could he understand? As far as he knew, she was some unethical huckster who’d swept in and tried to solicit a client in a hospital bed. And now she was dumping all her problems on him and disclosing way too much personal information about herself.

  She was certain he was just being kind. He saw a woman in obvious distress and was being gentle with her, because that was the quickest way to get her to shut up, get in her car, and drive away. He was placating her.

  ‘Stop.’

  She threw those thoughts away before they could spiral and grow stronger, an invitation for the waning storm to return.

  “Anyway,” she sighed, “I’m sorry I barged in on you. I was really down this morning. I guess I seized on the idea of grabbing up a big case because it might…I don’t know.”

  Darren squeezed her shoulder and she looked at him. She was searching for some sort of sign of judgment in his eyes, an indication that she was right and he was just trying to get her to calm down enough that he could walk away without feeling guilty.

  That’s not what she saw. There was no thinly-veiled criticism in his patient stare.

  He smiled encouragingly at her and said “You thought maybe you could change your life with one case. You saw the headline and you started building all kinds of ideas around it, and talking yourself into coming out here. You blew it up in your mind until you were certain that coming out here and volunteering to save a stranger would somehow save you. That’s what you did.”

  She blinked, the storm of panic remote now, receding to the horizon under the inexplicable kindness this stranger seemed intent on bestowing.

  “Yeah,” she admitted, confused. “That’s what I did. That is exactly the series of stupid lies I told myself in order to end up here, breaking down and dumping everything on you. I’m really sorry about all of this.”

  “Sorry enough to say yes to lunch?”

  Issabella snorted a laugh, went red, and laughed again.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Totally serious.”

  “No. But thanks.”

  She climbed into her car and he followed her around, so she rolled her window down. He stooped, his mop of dark curls straying over his eyes. He looked suddenly boyish. Before she could form the thought, she reached out and brushed an errant curl back into place with a finger.

  They both were looking at each other now, their faces very close.

  “I have no idea why I did that,” she admitted.

  “You’re having a weird morning, aren’t you?”

  “The weirdest.”

  “I’d like you to help me defend Vernon Pullins.”

  “And it’s crazy that you would say that. You don’t know me.”

  “That’s what lunch is for.”

  “I think having you watch me eat is one humiliation too many,” she quipped, and turned the ignition. “See you. Sorry about the scheme to steal your client. And the eavesdropping. And the panic freak-out.”

  “You should stop apologizing to me.”

  “Okay,” she said, and backed out of the space.

  As she pulled away, she watched him in her rearview mirror, staring after her with his hands in his pockets. Despite his charming smile and his seemingly easy confidence, there was something in his eyes that looked lost, even lonesome.

  She remembered what he had told the unconscious Mr. Pullins in the hotel room.

  “I did my best for people who were stuck in a really brutal system. And then I…I made a mistake.”

  She turned a corner, looked again, and he was gone.

  *

  Issabella was back behind her desk in her office beneath the Bingham Tower’s shadow, trying her best to concentrate on the stack of files piled in front of her. She would read a paragraph of a motion, her red pen poised and ready to make corrections. Her mind would drift and go over the events of that morning and she’d realize she’d read that same paragraph several times without making a mark.

  “Shut up,” she whispered, and re-doubled her efforts, intent on getting something that could be could called ‘work’ completed before the day was done. But it was no use. She couldn’t just shut her mind off.

  Of all the moments her thoughts kept returning to, it was her panic attack in the parking garage that bothered her the most. The memory of suffering through it in front of Darren Fletcher was like having a loose tooth she couldn’t stop prodding with her tongue. Again and again as she tried to let her impulsive morning escapade recede, she’d come back to that moment and replay it.

  His hand on her shoulder. It had been offered so freely and reflexively, as if he’d somehow known that one simple physical connection would serve as a point of grounding. It had kept her from being carried away on the winds of her personal storm. His presence there, his physical presence, had allowed her to gather her wits and begin to talk herself down from the swirling chaos of her own thoughts.

  “Ugh,” she moaned and stood up, beginning to pace the room. “Stop. Just stop and let it all go.”

  That was the problem, always the problem. She couldn’t stop dwelling over every little detail of a frustration, whether real or imagined. She knew that was her nature, and that it was one of the reasons the bouts of anxiety grew until they were tempests.

  “You’re too fussy,” her mother was fond of telling her. “Life’s messy. You can’t put everything into a neat little pile, Bella. You have to let it be messy sometimes and just move on.”

  She paced out of the office, through the pretend reception room, and into the bathroom. She splashed cold water from the sink over her face. She stared in the mirror at her drawn, tired reflection. There was no mistaking the stress that tightened her features. She looked like she felt, unraveled and haggard.

  “You made a deal,” she whispered to the tired woman in the mirror. “Remember? If it gets like this, you get back on the prescription. Not for a day or two. For real. You put up with the way it makes you feel and get on with things. Right? Right, Issabella?”

  She knew what that woman looking back at her wanted to say.

  ‘Oh, sure. Make yourself drowsy and disinterested. Take the pills. Go ahead. You’ll be a passenger in your own life, sedate and passive. Why confront your fears, when you can dispel them with a little serotonin regulation? Good thing you didn’t let him talk you into taking that case, Bella Dear. Opportunities are only good for people who are willing to seize them. Go ahead. Go get pharmacologically sleepy.’

  She left that woman in the mirror and walked back into her office. Her purse was dumped on the client chair. She stared at it for a long while.

  “You have to let it all go,” she whispered. “No more flailing around and grasping at big ideas. The only thing that can rescue you is you. Not a headline. Not a case. So stop.”

  She grabbed up her purse and sat down behind her desk with it in her lap. The pills were inside. She’d take one today, and one more each day after. Tomorrow, she’d be yawning even though she was wide awake. The day after that, an afternoon nap would seem like a reasonable thing to do. After a week, getting through a pile of files from other firms wouldn’t seem like a bother at all. She’d be able to see clearly that she was lucky to have the “drudge work”. What was there to feel bad about? She’d gotten her bar card and was working as a lawyer. It would be that simple to her.

  Inside the purse, her fingers found the slim, orange plastic bottle with the white child-proof lid.
She held it up in front of her and read her name on the label, Bright, Issabella, typed out in a clean little bold script, as if the pile of chemicals arranged inside the bottle was somehow specifically significant to her-- as if a stranger could read the contents of the bottle and, in so doing, know some elemental truth about her nature.

  ‘Issabella Bright? Sure, she’s that panicky little broken thing, right? Yeah, I read her story. Well, twenty milligrams worth of it. It gets pretty boring after a couple doses, so I put it down. But you know where the whole things going anyway after you get past the label.’

  The memory of Darren Fletcher pushed its way up to the fore, and she heard him telling her something he had no business knowing about her. ‘You blew it up in your mind until you were certain that coming out here and volunteering to save a stranger would somehow save you. That’s what you did.’

  That memory replaying in her mind, she was startled when her office phone rang. She looked at it, then down at her hands. The bottle was in one, a little white pill in the other.

  The phone rang a second time. She put the pill in the bottle and the bottle on the desk. When she lifted the receiver from the cradle, she pushed all the obsessive dwelling aside and adopted her professional voice.

  “Issabella Bright, attorney at law. How can I help you?”

  The voice on the other end of the line was smooth in its authority, self-assured.

  “Oh, good, you’re in. Ms. Bright, this is Judge Chelsea Hodgens. When I order you down to my chambers, which I’m doing right now, how fast do you guess you can get here?”

  *

  The Brewster Williams Housing Projects were two red-brown monoliths squatting in the heart of an empty plain of dead grass, broken sidewalk flags, and unused roads. The wind whipped freely across the deserted plain and climbed into a banshee-wail as it shot throughout the empty depths of the towers.

  Malcolm Mohommad strode alone across that broken length of Detroit. He was a sturdy, broad-shouldered intimidation cast in the clothes of a working man—a mustard-yellow Carhartt jacket, jeans, and work boots. Malcolm’s wide face and clean-shaven skull lacked any single characteristic that could be easily described to someone who had never seen him in person. His brown skin was of a medium hue, neither dark nor light, and the absence of wrinkles across his face gave him an agelessness, a disquieting impression that Malcolm had been breathed into creation fully formed as he now appeared, without history or future touching him.

  Beneath his broad forehead, the little black stones that stared out at the world betrayed the carefully guarded intelligence that lurked behind them.

  As he was wont to do, Malcolm kept his eyes peeking every which way as he stalked toward the distant towers. Except for the occasional junkie on the nod, he was the sole remaining occupant of Brewster Williams. Detroit and her denizens had unconditionally surrendered the brick-and-cement cradle where he had been born.

  As he closed in on the towers, almost to the line where their shadows darkened the earth, his cell rang. Malcolm paused. He did a slow pirouette as he thumbed at it, his deep-set eyes scanning. Nothing human moved as far as he could see.

  “Hmm,” He grunted into the cell.

  The only voice that ever spoke through his phone said the same thing to him that it always said before hanging up: “Shit, wrong number, brother. My bad.”

  He shut off the phone and altered the trajectory he’d been maintaining before the cell phone call. He marched through the shadow of the southern-most tower. There was a large concrete trash can outside the front entrance. It hadn’t been emptied in years, and only ever accumulated new contents when someone needed to reach Malcolm.

  Again, he paused and scanned.

  Malcolm settled back on his heels, lit a Newport and proceeded to loiter at the entrance. He held his cell to his ear like he was talking on it. His eyes moved along the shadowed depths of the tower above him, then across the distance to the other, identical tower. He inhaled smoke, let it out through his nose and slowly felt more and more confident that nobody was nearby.

  He reached in and withdrew a thick, folded newspaper. He peeked under the top fold just enough to confirm that there was a two-inch thick orange envelope nestled between the pages. It looked right, though Malcolm would still count the bills once he was inside. His fee was flat and was not open for negotiation. Negotiation involved communication and meeting with his client, and he was not ever going to make those sorts of mistakes.

  He glanced at the headline on the front page and the accompanying photograph. A yellow highlighter had been used on the face of a person in the photo and again on the man’s name underneath the photo.

  Malcolm stuck the paper under his arm and disappeared inside the dark, whistling depths of the tower. Someone had just hired him to kill a man named Vernon Pullins.

  *

  Judge Chelsea Hodgens watched the young woman Judy ushered into her chambers nervously take a seat across from her. Issabella Bright looked frazzled and uncertain. She glanced around at the certificates and plaques that hung on the paneled walls, then at her hands, and finally at the Judge.

  Chelsea favored her with a thin smile and leaned back in her swivel chair.

  “I have a cold and I don’t want to pass it around,” she said. “Otherwise I would have stood and greeted you with a handshake.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “You’ve never practiced in front of me, have you?”

  “No, Your Honor. Not yet.”

  “Good.”

  A wrinkle of consternation appeared between Issabella’s eyebrows.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t be. It helps that I haven’t had you in my court. I’ve sent a note up to Chief Judge Summers asking to keep any case you’re handling off my docket for the foreseeable future, until the case against Vernon Pullins is concluded.”

  She watched a series of expressions, one more confused than the next, play across the pretty young woman’s face. Chelsea coughed into her fist twice, settled back, and waited for a response.

  “I don’t understand,” Issabella said. “I’m not representing Mr. Pullins. If this is about this morning…”

  Chelsea arched a brow.

  “This morning when you attempted to solicit business in a hospital? Yes, it is about that. That sort of nonsense isn’t the way to build a reputation worth having, you know.”

  Issabella flushed red and sank her head down into her hands. She mumbled something into her palms.

  “Speak up, Ms. Bright. I don’t tolerate mumblers in my court, or in chambers. You’re a lawyer. Get your head up and say it clearly.”

  “I made a very bad decision, Your Honor.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t have an excuse worth hearing.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t entertain it.”

  Judge Hodgens was beginning to doubt this frazzled, apologetic girl in front of her. She didn’t need a mousy, passive lawyer. She needed someone she could believe had a backbone and enough assertiveness to keep Darren Fletcher from self-imploding.

  As she was contemplating dismissing Issabella from her presence and putting in a phone call to Darren, the girl seemed to glean on to something. Issabella’s flush of embarrassment subsided, and her eyes narrowed with calculation.

  “You Honor?”

  “Yes?”

  “How, exactly, do you know about where I was this morning?”

  “Darren Fletcher called me. He was impressed with you. He thinks you should be appointed co-counsel for Mr. Pullins. Wasn’t I clear on that?”

  “No. No you weren’t.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Chelsea said, and looked up at the wall clock hanging behind Issabella. She picked up a pen and began writing on the back of one of her business cards. “My afternoon docket begins in half an hour. Darren has the case file from the prosecutor’s office. This is his number. Also, don’t worry about not yet being approved for the felony appointment list. Darren’s still on the list
for life offenses, so appointing you as co-counsel won’t cause a fuss with whoever your judge winds up being.”

  Issabella took the offered card with Darren’s number, stared at it, then at the Judge.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  Chelsea blew her nose into a tissue and felt her sinuses throbbing with pressure.

  “I can see that. Why don’t you give me all your questions, so we can make this fast. I have to prep my docket and guzzle a pint or so of cough syrup. Summer colds are the worst. I hope I haven’t passed it to you. If you wake up tomorrow feeling like someone ran you over and left you in a ditch, consider yourself apologized to, yes?”

  Judy appeared, peeking her head in the door. When she saw the Judge nod her head, Judy smiled and hustled into the room. The court reporter set a cup of steaming beef broth down in front of the Judge, gave her a supportive wink, and just as quickly hustled back out.

  Chelsea took a tentative sip of the broth, gladdened at the scouring heat running down her throat. She grinned and said “I’ll tell you something you might not know yet. The key to happiness as a lawyer is the person who answers your office phone and keeps everything organized. The same is true for a judge.”

  Issabella didn’t return the grin, and the Judge wondered if maybe there was some grit in the girl after all.

  “Why?” Issabella said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you involving yourself in this? Why are you appointing me to a potential life-sentence case? You don’t know me, Your Honor.”

  Chelsea didn’t answer, letting Issabella answer the questions in silence for herself. The young lawyer eventually clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and her face hardened with recognition.