by Scott Pratt
The bus pulled out, and a few minutes later we were on Interstate 40 headed west. We passed Interstate 75 about twenty minutes later. To get to Atlanta, we would have gone south on I-75. We were headed toward Nashville. My feet and hands were both tingling in less than an hour because the cuffs and shackles were so tight. I heard men talking in quiet tones around me. Most of them were speculating on where the bus was going and when it would stop next. Others were complaining about their hands and feet. After we’d passed through Nashville and were near Jackson, a marshal came down the aisle and started dropping white boxes in everyone’s lap. I opened the box and looked inside. There was a bologna sandwich on white bread, a small orange, and a half pint of milk.
“You best be careful what you eat,” the guy next to me said.
“Yeah? Why’s that?” I said. It was the first time I had spoken to an inmate since I’d shared a cell with Hillbilly.
“I heard the man say diesel therapy. You gonna be on this bus eighteen, twenty hours a day for a while. What goes in gotta come out, right? You eat too much and you’ll be sittin’ in your own shit.”
“Are you serious?” I said.
“I don’t know what you did, but you must’ve pissed somebody off bad. I’ve known dudes they done it to. They gonna drag your ass all over the country, man. Where you supposed to be going?”
“Atlanta.”
“You’ll probably hit LA and Oklahoma and lord knows where else before you get to Atlanta. You better just hunker on down and get yourself ready mentally, because they tell me there ain’t nothing quite like it. It’s worse than the hole because you got the cuffs and the shackles on all day every day. You’re gonna be in holding cells in different jails and prisons for a couple hours a night, then back on the bus for another eighteen or twenty. You ain’t gonna see a hot meal or a shower or phone for weeks, maybe months. I heard of one dude they kept on the bus for more than a year, man. Damn near killed him.”
I shook my head and looked at the floor, wondering what else Clancy could do to me. He’d taken my freedom, and now it appeared he wanted my soul.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Grace Alexander watched Steve Morris walk through the rows of long tables toward her. He was a stocky, powerful man of forty or so, medium height, dark-brown hair parted on the side and cut like a politician’s. He was wearing a charcoal gray suit with a gray tie and a white shirt. Very professional looking. Businesslike. She’d never met him, although she’d seen him many times and had heard him speak through sound bites on television screens. She’d read his quotes in the newspaper, and she knew him to be, like nearly all prosecutors, politically conservative. He had been, back before he unseated Ben Clancy, an effective trial lawyer who handled complex medical malpractice cases. Grace wondered how much of a pay cut he’d taken when he was elected district attorney general of Knox County.
“Interesting place for a meeting,” Morris said as he approached and offered his hand.
“It’s a shame, really,” Grace said. “There used to be people in libraries. This one is like a ghost town now.”
The branch library was on the outskirts of Knoxville, a rarely used depository of printed information. Grace had called Steve Morris the day before and asked if they could meet. He’d agreed immediately.
“I’m sorry about Darren,” Morris said as he sat down across from Grace. “I’m sure he understands why I couldn’t reach out to him, but from everything I read and heard in the media and from people around the courthouse, you did an excellent job.”
“I’m convinced he’s not guilty,” Grace said. “Clancy used perjured testimony to convict him. The entire thing was set up. I think Clancy may even have had something to do with the murder itself.”
“Can you prove any of that?”
“Not yet. That’s why I called you. Darren needs a friend. A real friend who has power and is willing to use it to help him.”
“He was convicted by a jury, Miss Alexander, after a very public trial. That isn’t something that’s easily undone.”
“I need to find out what Clancy had on his star witness, the man named James Tipton, Junior. Tipton lied through his teeth in court, but I couldn’t expose it because I’m not sure why he did it. Our investigators are slammed, they have more work than time, and besides, they’re not really that good. I can’t go to the feds because asking the feds to investigate an assistant US attorney is like asking the army to investigate a general. If they find anything, they’ll just cover it up and Darren will rot. But you have access to investigators, don’t you? Do you have anyone you can trust who can look into this?”
Morris folded his arms across his chest and looked out the window to his right. He pondered the scenery for a minute or so and then looked back at Grace.
“I don’t really see myself getting involved,” Morris said.
“Why?” Grace said. She felt anger rising in her chest and told herself to remain calm. “Why don’t you see yourself getting involved? I thought Darren was your friend. Didn’t he help you beat Clancy? Wasn’t he the difference in the election? Because from everything I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot, he was extremely influential. He practically put you in the district attorney’s job.”
“And I’ve thanked him for it a hundred times over. But Darren didn’t help me get elected so he could take advantage of my power or influence or whatever I may have. He helped me because he thought I was the best man for the job.”
“And he despised Ben Clancy.”
“Yes, yes he did, and for good reason. But what you’re asking me to do is extremely dangerous in a lot of ways. If you think about it, I could possibly wind up with a federal obstruction of justice charge if Clancy somehow got wind that I was second-guessing him and going behind his back talking to his witnesses.”
“So don’t let him find out. Be discreet. Use informants. Lie, cheat, misdirect. Do that law enforcement thing.”
“I’m glad to hear you think so highly of what we do, Miss Alexander.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “I’m getting upset. I need help. Darren needs help, and nobody is willing.”
“It sounds to me like you’ve allowed your relationship with your client to cross over the line from professional to personal.”
“My relationship with Darren is irrelevant here. An injustice has been done, and I believe a crime has been committed by a federal prosecutor. Maybe more than one crime. I’m simply looking for some help in holding him accountable.”
Morris stood and gave Grace a patronizing smile.
“A federal grand jury heard the evidence against Darren and indicted him,” Morris said. “A federal petit jury of twelve men and women heard the evidence in court, heard the arguments of counsel, applied the law to the facts, and found Darren guilty of first-degree murder. If you think the jury got it wrong, your remedy is to appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And forgive me for saying so, Miss Alexander, but trying to convince me to begin a clandestine investigation of a federal prosecutor on what amounts to a hunch, or perhaps intuition, is just plain stupid. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. Have a nice day.”
Grace wanted to leap up and claw his eyes out. Instead, she said, “Do you have any children?”
“What? What does that have to do with anything?”
“I was just wondering. Since you don’t seem to have any balls.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
James Tipton had changed his security system. He used to rely on the dog, but he’d upgraded. The dog lived in the house now with him, although it went against his grain to have the animal inside. James liked his house orderly, and the dog shed and occasionally vomited, especially if James got drunk and fed it pizza or a greasy cheeseburger.
James had spent some money and hired a security company to install motion detectors around his trailer. He’d trained the dog to keep silent and wait for a
command if an alarm tone sounded. The tones weren’t loud. James didn’t want the intruder, if one came, to run away. He wanted the intruder to come into the house. Once he breached the front door, James knew that under Tennessee law, he was fair game. A man’s house was his castle in Tennessee. Violate the sanctity of my castle, and I can use deadly force against you. I can kill you deader than dammit.
He wasn’t positive something was going to happen, that someone was going to come for him, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Ben Clancy wasn’t the kind of man to leave loose ends dangling. Clancy had been in contact with James nearly every day for a month leading up to the trial. They’d met at safe houses all over Knoxville and in small restaurants and bars in the tiny mountain communities around Strawberry Plains, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg. Clancy had scripted every word of James’s testimony, and James had followed the script to the letter during the trial. The trial had been over for a month now, and he hadn’t heard a single word from Clancy. It made him uneasy, not knowing what Clancy was doing or thinking.
On this Tuesday night, James had just come in from watching the Tennessee Smokies—the Chicago Cubs’ Double-A organization in Pigeon Forge—play the Birmingham Biscuits. He had picked up a six-pack of tall boys from the BP station, a pizza from a honky tonk about two miles from his place, and had walked in the door of his trailer just before midnight. He’d let the dog out for ten minutes, retrieved him, fired up a joint, and was sitting in front of the television, half-drunk and half-stoned when an alarm tone started buzzing around one forty-five. The dog, who was lying on the floor in the kitchen, growled menacingly.
“Zeus, come,” James said. The dog walked over quickly, still growling. “Quiet.”
The only light in the trailer was coming from the television and James quickly flipped it off with the remote. He reached beneath the couch and pulled out a sawed-off, automatic shotgun that was loaded with five shells of double-ought buckshot. He unlocked the safety. The shotgun was ready to fire. James heard soft footfalls on the front porch. Someone was coming. James heard the doorknob jiggle. It was locked. There was silence for several seconds, then a loud pop and the door flew open. A second later, a bright flashlight filled the empty doorway.
“Go, Zeus!” James said, and the dog hurled itself toward the intruder. The doorway exploded with automatic rifle fire. Behind the muzzle flash, James saw what looked like the outline of a storm trooper. Bulked up in a vest. Black helmet. James knew his dog was dead. He fired one shot from the shotgun and then turned and ran as fast as he could down the narrow hallway toward his bedroom at the back of the trailer. Before he reached the bedroom, he dived through the door that led to the small backyard and the mountain beyond. He could hear the rifle fire behind him, hear the bullets blasting through the trailer’s thin walls, hear the whiz as they passed by him.
James was across the backyard in three steps and into the woods. A thin cloud cover barely obscured the full moon, so there was enough light to enable James to see. And he knew these woods perfectly. He’d been in them since he was a small boy. He knew the trees and the roots and the paths and the caves and the creeks. He headed straight up the mountain and didn’t stop for a full five minutes. His lungs were screaming and his thighs burning when he finally stopped, knelt at the base of a white oak, and listened.
At first, he could hear nothing but his own breathing and his own heart, but after a couple of minutes, he flinched as two quick rifle shots rang out from below. The flashes put the gunman in James’s backyard.
“You’d better run!” a voice called from the darkness. It was, unmistakably, Ben Clancy. “You’d better run as fast and as far as you can! You’d better crawl into a deep hole, my friend, and you’d better stay there for the rest of your life! Because if you ever come out, I’ll be waiting!”
James leaned heavily against the tree and slowly shook his head. He’d given in to Ben Clancy. He’d made his deal. And now life as he’d known it would never be the same.
He turned his back to Clancy and continued running up the mountain.
CHAPTER FORTY
The diesel therapy was just as the black man had described it to me. I spent between eighteen and twenty hours on buses or vans each day with the black box between my wrists and the chains tight between my handcuffs and shackles. I learned to stretch both my toes and my wrists while the marshals were hooking me up in order to give my wrists and ankles just an extra fraction of an inch. Still, both wrists and both ankles quickly became raw and bloody. I’d do my best at each stop to clean them, but there was no first aid available, no bandages. I traveled all day and most nights with desperate, angry prisoners and robotic—and sometimes sadistic—guards. For eighty-nine days, I was not offered anything but bologna sandwiches, oranges, water, and milk. I became grateful for the food after a while, although I learned to eat sparingly. I can proudly say that I did not soil myself a single time during the entire ordeal.
There’s a saying in the legal profession that goes, “If you’re looking for Jesus, go to jail. Everyone there finds him.” I didn’t find Jesus during diesel therapy and I didn’t find God, but I did find peace. At some point around the halfway mark of the trip, I resolved that I wasn’t going to allow these people or this system to kill me. I simply wasn’t going to allow it. I resolved to survive, and I resolved to keep fighting for my freedom, no matter what it took. I would have faith in Grace. She would get my sentence reversed or get me a new trial. James Tipton would recant his testimony and tell the truth. He would tell the world why he lied, and then everyone would know that I hadn’t killed Jalen Jordan. I didn’t know who’d killed Jalen and I didn’t know why James had said I bought a rifle from him. I suspected that Ben Clancy was responsible, but I had no idea exactly what he’d done to put that kind of pressure on James. My only hope was Grace. Grace would find out. Somehow, she would find out and I would be able to go back to my son and my mother and I’d be able to practice law and I’d rebuild my life.
Once those thoughts began to dominate my mind, I formed them into a mantra and repeated them over and over to myself. Before long, I began to believe, and once I began to believe, all of the anxiety I’d felt during the previous months suddenly melted away. I remained quiet and cautious, I didn’t smile and try to engage other people, but I no longer harbored the constant fear and hatred of my captors that I had developed. I accepted them for what they were, misguided miscreants, sadistic but apparently employable, and I rode out the days in peaceful, tortuous discomfort.
Finally, the bus made its way to the United States Penitentiary at Atlanta, a foreboding hellhole more than a century old. My group was taken to the detention center that served as a pass-through point for prisoners who were either new to the federal system or being transported from one prison to another. The lighting in the hallways when we shuffled in was dim, and small cells stuffed with three or four men each lined the walls. We heard catcalls and insults, but I looked straight ahead and kept my expression neutral. After being strip-searched for at least the sixtieth time of my journey, I was eventually put in an eight-foot-by-seven-foot cell with three other men. It had a stainless steel toilet bolted to the wall but no sink. I noticed that nearly all the guards in Atlanta were black, reflecting, I supposed, the racial majority of the population near the prison. Most of the inmates were black as well, many of them with their faces covered in tattoos. I had seen my first man whose entire head and face was covered in tattoos while riding through Texas. He was a muscular white man with a shaved head, and one of the most terrifying human beings I had ever seen in my life.
An hour after we got to our cell in Atlanta, we were served a small plastic bowl of cold oatmeal and a boiled egg on a Styrofoam tray. I ate the food and, grateful to have the cuffs and shackles finally off me for an extended period of time, laid my head back against the concrete wall and passed out.
I had no idea how much time had passed when I woke up. There was a commoti
on of some kind, and when I opened my eyes, the other guys in my cell were walking out the door. I climbed to my feet and followed, expecting to be directed to a cell where I would again be shackled and handcuffed. Instead, we were herded down the dim hallway to a large recreation room and told we had one hour to shower, use the phone, or watch television.
I desperately needed a shower. I hadn’t had one in nearly three months, and not only did I smell like a wild animal, the wounds on my wrists and ankles needed to be cleaned. I got in a line of more than fifty men waiting to use one of three working shower heads. When I got to the stall, I was directed by a guard to strip out of my jumpsuit and slip on a pair of shower shoes that was on the floor. I had no underwear. My only pair had become so rancid that I’d abandoned it weeks earlier. I slipped into the shoes and was allowed approximately three minutes beneath the cold water. There were water bugs as big as my thumb on the floor and no soap. When my time was up the guard said, “Turn the water off and get the fuck out.” I was told to leave the shower shoes where I’d put them on and to put my jumpsuit back on. There were no towels, so I squeezed as much water as I could out of my long hair and beard before the guard ordered me to get dressed and get out of his shower room.
I lingered for a couple of minutes at the fringe of a large group of men watching a television newscast. Radical Muslims were continuing to kill as many innocents as they could. Republicans and Democrats were sniping at each other over the economy and health care and who was to blame for the country’s massive deficit. I shook my head and walked away. Nothing had changed since I’d last seen a television newscast the night before I was arrested nine months earlier.
Just a few minutes after I’d gone back to the cell and they’d closed the door, a single guard came walking up.