Longhorn Law 2: A Legal Thriller

by Dave Daren

  The wooden barricades the deputies had used to partition off the busy road were painted a garish, bright yellow. On both sides of the divide, cars lined up in an almost laughably long stretch. If the situation wasn’t so detrimental to me, I’d have found it hilarious that Thompson had gone to all this effort to stop me.

  As I approached the small herd of deputies, I was able to pick up on their conversation.

  It wasn't about anything important, and I didn’t care to exert any more energy listening, but as soon as I heard his voice, I felt my blood run cold.

  I let myself spare a glance over toward the small grouping of men in their brown uniforms as I tried to pick out the correct man. I remembered the sound of his voice as it cut through the darkness the night before and was punctuated with the shot of his gun.

  He stood near the middle of the pack with his hands braced on his heavy-looking belt as he continued to talk about something mindless and inane, but I knew then that that was the deputy who’d tried to end my life.

  He didn’t look like a would-have-been killer. If anything, he looked nauseatingly normal with a normal haircut, a normal face, and a normal build.

  The sight of him made me feel sick, but I didn’t dare let my gaze linger on him. So I turned my focus back to the sidewalk ahead of me as I approached the intersection.

  I took a deep, gulping breath as I forced myself to run faster. I didn’t know what time it was and didn't want to waste a second to check my watch.

  I kept my focus on the intersection ahead as I worked through the best way to break through. Luckily for me, the sheriff’s department hadn’t dragged the barricades up onto the sidewalks as well and were only partitioning off the street.

  The barricade came closer and closer as my feet thundered against the sidewalk, and I knew I had to have the deputies’ attention by then, but I didn’t dare stop. I pushed myself to go faster, faster, faster as I burst past them in a frantic scramble.

  A few voices broke out in angry shouts as they tried to call me back, but all I did was run. I ran until I couldn’t make out the sounds of their shouts past my own breaths and the blood that roared in my ears.

  They hadn’t recognized me, I figured, because I doubted they’d have let me go so easily if they had. I didn’t allow myself the time to dwell on that, however, as I finally brought my wrist up to check the time.

  Shit.

  I only had a few minutes left, and I could feel each one slipping through my fingers as I barrelled down the sidewalks that led toward the courthouse. I shouted out apologies without thinking to the people I nearly knocked over as I passed them by, but I didn’t pull my focus away from my goal.

  When I turned the corner to catch sight of the courthouse, I felt like my lungs were going to burst in my chest, but I didn’t let myself stop. I pumped my arms harder and moved my legs faster as I summoned up a last burst of energy I didn’t even know I had.

  I darted across the street as soon as I was certain traffic was clear, and I stumbled into the parking lot of the courthouse. For the first time since I’d started my run, I let my pace slow as I gulped in needy breaths like I was a fish out of water.

  Calhoun’s car was still in the parking lot.

  I felt a wave of triumph wash over me as I bounded up the large, stone steps of the courthouse and pushed in through the door Calhoun had unlocked earlier in the day.

  I sprinted down the wide corridor with its strange light and shadows cast across the floor and toward Judge Calhoun’s chambers. I didn’t need to look at my watch to know that my time was ticking down faster than I could catch it.

  I shouldered my way into his chambers and finally slowed my steps to a jog as I skidded around the corner and into the doorway of his office. My chest heaved as I swallowed down desperate breaths of air, and I tried to catch my words.

  Calhoun was standing at his desk with one thick hand stretched out toward the lamp that sat on the left-hand corner.

  His bulldog face contorted as he passed through an entire series of emotions one after the other. Confusion, surprise, annoyance, back to confusion again, and finally, curiosity.

  I held up one finger as if to silence him and took a final deep, shaking breath before I straightened up.

  “I’ve--” I started only to pause to take another breath. “I’ve got the information for the injunction.”

  My words came out thin and harsh as I pressed my weight into the doorway to keep me upright. I watched as Calhoun dragged his eyes over me, and I could tell he was wondering why I suddenly looked like something the cat had dragged in.

  I hadn’t even realized how overheated I was until I stepped into the air-conditioning of the courthouse, and right then, I felt like sinking down into the floor to savor the feeling.

  “Should I even ask?” he questioned me with a dry air to his tone. “You’re nearly late.”

  He nodded toward the clock on the wall, and I followed his gaze to see that it was 1:59 in the afternoon.

  I’d just barely made it in time.

  “Police barricade,” I breathed out the words in lieu of a more detailed explanation. “Had to run.”

  I assumed he’d been able to pick up on the fact that I’d been forced to run, however, based on how sweaty and out of breath I was. It wasn’t that I was out of shape or even a bad runner, but running what had to have been three miles in the mid-day Texas heat while dressed in a suit after a sleepless night wasn’t exactly the metric I’d use for athletic prowess.

  Maybe it should have been, though, because it sounded a little impressive once I thought about it. But I forced my focus back on the Judge when I saw Calhoun’s heavy eyebrows knit together.

  “Police barricade?” he asked with a huff following his question.

  He didn’t seem displeased by that information, however, and I assumed it was because it gave him an excuse to stay away from home even longer.

  I nodded and gulped down another breath of air before I pushed myself off of the doorframe and moved into Judge Calhoun’s actual office. I dropped myself down into the chair across from his desk with as much dignity as I could muster. When I could do something other than pant finally, I wiggled my phone out of my pocket and pulled up the email that the kid at the Oakwood Apartments leasing office had sent to me about Race’s residence and slid it across the desk to Calhoun.

  Calhoun looked between me and my phone with a bit of a wariness to his gaze before he sighed and lowered himself back down into his seat.

  He reached down, snagged the glasses from the front of his t-shirt, and hooked them back over his nose with another little huff. He then grabbed my phone and held it up and away from his face as he peered through his glasses at the screen. He reached one thick finger out to scroll down the email before he extended my phone back toward me again.

  “Well,” he began, and it already sounded like a concession. “It appears you were correct about the need for an injunction. Let your client know that she should be getting her things back very soon.”

  I felt like shouting in glee, but I didn’t have that sort of energy.

  Instead, I just shifted forward in the chair and offered Calhoun a wide smile. I reached out to shake his hand but he took one moment to look between my admittedly sweaty hand to my definitely sweaty face and raised his eyebrows in response.

  I gave him a sheepish grin and a shrug of my shoulders as I dropped my hand back into my lap.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” I said and I meant it.

  This injunction didn’t put a stop to Thompson’s corruption, but it still felt like quite the victory. I hoped it acted as a blow to the sheriff’s damn ego, too. He’d tried to stop me, but he hadn’t succeeded. All he’d done was waste his time and resources for no reason at all.

  Hell, I’m sure the random police barricade that was blocking people from entering and leaving town on a church Sunday probably wouldn’t endear him to very many of the people of Crowley, either.

  “Now, I’d like you t
o leave,” Calhoun said with a deep huff as he relaxed back into his chair. “But thank you for letting me know about the police barricade. I’d hate to get stuck in that. I’ll have to let my wife know I’ll be missing dinner with her sister, after all.”

  He looked as pleased as the cat who ate the canary, and I had to laugh as I slowly pushed myself up to my feet again. Now that I wasn’t running off adrenaline and panic, I noticed just how much my muscles ached, my feet hurt, and the sudden lightheadedness that threatened to keep me in the chair.

  “Happy to help,” I said with a grin as I nodded in his direction.

  Calhoun waved me from his office, and when I felt steady enough, I climbed back to my feet. I didn’t linger in his office any longer and briskly made my way to the door. My pace was slow as I walked from his office to the exit of his chambers, though, and back into the long corridor.

  I wanted to savor the coolness of the air-conditioning before I plunged back into the suffocating heat outside. I liked this suit, and I was clearly going to need to get it dry-cleaned to get rid of all the sweat. I filed that away for later and added it to the to-do list I’d been accumulating once all of the trouble with Thomspon was taken care of.

  The case was over now, and Natalie would get her ring, her television, and whatever else the sheriff’s department had taken back soon.

  But I knew that my anxieties would continue to run high until after David had been able to go toe-to-toe with Thompson in the public eye. The city of Crowley desperately needed a good man free of corruption to stand up for what was right.

  I kept my pace slow as I walked down the sunlit corridor. My steps echoed against the tiles as I pulled my phone from my pocket to send a text to Natalie while I was thinking about it, but when I unlocked my phone, I saw that I already had a message waiting.

  My brow furrowed, and I clicked on the messaging app.

  I’d missed a text from David at some point during my sprint. I tapped on the message and skimmed my eyes over the words once, and then twice as a smile broke out across my tired face.

  Town hall debate against Thompson’s been scheduled for Friday :)

  Chapter 20

  Evelyn took three days before she forgave me for abandoning her car on the side of the road.

  It didn’t matter that I’d gone back to get the vehicle as soon as I’d left the courthouse and had filled the tank all the way up with gas, or that I hadn’t actually abandoned it considering I’d always planned on coming back to get it again. It didn’t matter how many times I pointed all of that out to her. I think she was just happy to have something mundane to be upset about after her scare with the deputy.

  Despite her grudge, Evelyn had still filed the petition for me to get my own car released from impound, even though the papers were certainly locked up and lost in bureaucratic hell. I was almost certain she’d done it just so I wouldn’t have to borrow her car for any longer, and I couldn’t quite blame her for that.

  Trouble just seemed to have a way of finding me.

  The handful of days since we’d been granted the injunction had passed by in a blur of city politics and diving ever deeper into Thompson’s corruption. We all knew that to square off against Thompson and his hounds, David was going to need every advantage we could find for him. And so while Brody scoured through the local public records in a search for anything remotely incriminating, Evelyn and I had both reached out on the local forums to see if anyone else was willing to come forward to share their own misadventures with the local police.

  By Friday afternoon, Evelyn had stopped glaring at me every time I walked past her office, and I counted that as a victory all of its own. I knocked on her doorframe as I poked my head into her office. Her head was bent down in front of her computer monitor, and all I could see was her helmet of gray hair to indicate her presence.

  “Did you hear back from that woman, Debbie or something, the one who said she had a bunch of wrongful tickets?” I asked instead of offering a greeting.

  I’d learned over the last few months that it was easier to just dive into conversations with Evelyn as opposed to beating around the bush. Evelyn disdained smalltalk.

  Evelyn’s head popped up at the sound of my voice, and she looked at me suspiciously like she was just waiting for me to offer up some pleasantries about the weather.

  “I did,” she informed me curtly.

  I waited for her to continue on only to be met with silence. I heaved a deep, dramatic sigh of my own. She’d told me earlier in the morning that she forgave me, but I think she was enjoying watching me grovel.

  “And what did she say?” I fished for more information.

  While I knew that Evelyn and I were on decent footing now, I could tell she was still enjoying making my life more difficult than strictly necessary. Because I was a good person, I’d yet to pull the ‘attempted murder’ card, but I was rapidly approaching that point the longer this went on.

  Evelyn gave a large sigh of her own, and I couldn’t hide my snort at her dramatics as she leaned back in her seat.

  “She said that the local sheriff’s department just has it out for her,” Evelyn said with a shake of her head that seemed none too reassuring. “And so does the government, and the teenage cashier at her local supermarket, and also her neighbor Jill.”

  Evelyn’s lips pressed out into a thin line, and I gave a tired exhale as I leaned in her doorway.

  That wasn’t the information I wanted to hear. We’d managed to find a few people that had been wronged by Thompson and his deputies that we added to the stack for David’s debate against him, but plenty of people we’d both contacted on our own and others that had reached out to us of their own volition had been dead-ends.

  Apparently, some people couldn’t tell the difference between wrongful police work and things they simply didn’t like.

  “How many does that make that we can actually add to our previous seven?” I asked as a weariness crept into my tone I couldn’t disguise.

  Evelyn’s lips remained pursed as she bent her head back down, and I lost sight of her behind her computer monitor as she typed something on her keyboard.

  I’d have checked the number myself, but I wasn’t even certain that she’d shared the files she kept with me. She had a tendency to forget to do that, and if she wasn’t so damn good at every other part of her job, I’d have been marginally annoyed.

  Evelyn’s short nails clacked against the keys before her head popped up once again, and she looked at me from over the edge of her screen.

  “Three more people we could verify,” she said.

  I nodded and reached up to rub at my jaw. That meant we had ten citizens who were willing to let David use their stories in his debate with Thompson.

  We weren’t aiming for the debate to be a blowout, or for David to stomp Thompson into the dirt, though those were both good options. We were hoping for something easier and hopefully more attainable, however.

  We wanted David to use his platform during the debate to expose Thompson and all of his corruption. If he did that, and if the local news stations actually covered the debate like we all hoped they would, Thompson’s misdeeds could potentially be picked up on by state law enforcement and something could be done about his reign of terror.

  Or, at the very least, the citizens of Crowley would see this level of corruption and decide to vote him out of office, but that somehow felt less likely than the damn Texas Rangers swooping in to save the damn day.

  “Has Brody turned up anything new?” I asked in the vain hope Evelyn might know something else that I didn’t.

  Brody was out of the office that morning, and instead, he was in the Hall of Public Records to scour through documents in the hopes he could find something with a bright, waving red flag on it that signaled Thompson’s corruption. It was just as much of a longshot as the sort of research that Evelyn and I had been doing, but we were all grasping at straws to give David a fighting chance in the debate.

  The truth
was, we simply didn’t know how much financial backing Thompson had in Crowley or how much political sway he still retained after Knox vanished from the scene.

  Thompson didn’t seem to be overly liked by his constituents, but what did I know? I hadn’t thought that Thompson was the sort of crooked that would use local inmates to mow his lawn until we’d met his lawn crew.

  The real horror of the situation was how little we really knew about Thompson’s corruption. There were the concrete things we knew, like the inmates, the auctions, and the unlawful forfeitures. But there were plenty of things we couldn’t exactly prove.

  Sure, we knew in the abstract sense that Thompson had been one of Knox’s pawns, but we didn’t have a money trail to prove it. All we had was our word against Thompson’s, and David as a mouthpiece to get that word out.

  Evelyn gave a shrug of her shoulders, and I groaned in exasperation. It wasn’t directed at Evelyn, but at the miasma that seemed to surround everything Thompson did or touched.

  “Have I mentioned that I hate Thompson?” I asked without really looking for a response.

  Evelyn gave a small laugh anyway.

  “You can mark me down with that as well, Archer,” she assured me. “Now, leave me be. I have things I need to finish.”

  As if to punctuate her sentence, she waved her hand as if to physically brush me off.

  I held my hands up in surrender before I backed out of her office and into the hallway. I couldn’t help the anxious flutter of nerves that ran through my system, though. The debate was in less than four hours, and I felt like we were four or so months underprepared.

  I hadn’t looked at my phone in hours, but I knew that I would have a string of messages from David waiting for me as soon as I unlocked my screen and swiped into the app.

  He was somehow calmer than I was about the whole thing, but I chalked that up to the time he’d spent overseas that he’d yet to tell me about in any sort of legitimate detail. Despite his calm demeanor, however, I could tell he was still nervous. He was just a lot better at hiding it.