by Knight, Dirk
He had a colleague, Jerry Glavine, who had gone into the private sector. Jerry’s clothes were nice. He drove a Maserati. He fucked a tiny little Japanese co-ed he’d met while doing law review, and they had a bucket full of black-haired babies with droopy eyes. They had a Chinese pug dog.
He was happy.
“You know, you could use a new wardrobe, Larry,” Jerry said over Scotch and peanuts at Callahan’s Pub. Larry had only given him a sideways glare, and cocked his brow.
“Seriously, though, why are you wasting your talent, hell your life, suffering under Huddleston? He’s not going anywhere, Larry. You know that.”
Larry remained silent.
“Neither are you, as long as you keep sucking at the teat.”
“You made your point,” Larry said.
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
“I went to school, took the bar and passed it on the first try. All those countless hours of law review . . . I did all that so I could uphold the law, Jerry, not pervert it. No offense, but defending those scumbags is not what that means to me.”
“Oh, none taken. I mean, how could I take offense to you telling me that I defend scumbags and pervert the law instead of upholding it, asswipe? You really think I’m not upholding the law? You think just because a guy makes a mistake he doesn’t deserve a fair trial? Because he shoots dope, he deserves to rot in prison as penance? Until proven guilty, Larry. If my client is proven guilty they do the time.”
“Not hardly.”
“You know, I don’t remember you being so jaded. You’ve got to get out of the DA’s office, bud, it’s tearing you apart.”
“It’s got nothing to do with the DA’s office. You know as well as I do, probably better. How many solid cases, how many clearly guilty shit-birds, walk on a technicality? It’s disgusting. Guilt and innocence don’t even come into play anymore. It’s all procedure.”
“The procedure is called due process and there is a reason for the checks and balances, and we both swore an oath on that, whether you respect my position or not. If not for due process neither of us would have jobs.”
“Listen, I’m not judging you, or hating on you, I just don’t think it’s right for me, is all, and you just keep asking.”
“I keep asking because you keep on being a miserable fuck all the time.”
“It’s just not right for me . . .”
But after years of the same or similar conversations, coupled with his mounting frustrations and his crippling caseload, Larry eventually followed the money and moved into the torrid world he so vocally despised.
The transition wasn’t as difficult as he had feared. A major factor had been the trial of Jared Lee Loughner, and the Tucson shooting massacre. Larry couldn’t fathom how anyone could represent him, the cold-blooded, venomous snake. It was a case he knew would be coming through his office, a case he would get no real part in, and a case that would be highly publicized. He decided then and there he was going to leave. He also found new inspiration in Judy Clark, counsel for the defendant. She had known the case was hopeless, that the snake would lose its head in a public execution. You just don’t shoot a member of Congress and get away with it. (However, if you are a member of Congress and decide to shoot and kill . . . let’s say a prostitute or something . . . well, you can get that swept under the most elaborate of Persian rugs.) Still, she had vehemently and courageously defended him, deflecting the looming edge of the executioner’s sword. In the process, she had garnered attention and infamy, and this was something a far sight more valuable to Larry than was moral virtue. He was over it.
Whesker’s first high-profile case, which fermented his infamy over newscasts and headlines, like yeast in a home brew, had been the representation and subsequent acquittal of Ron and Litha Hudgins, burned-out junkies who had killed an elderly couple in their home while spun on crystal meth.
It was all over the news.
Paradise Valley Couple Slain in Home Invasion, the headlines had read. The buzz over this case was what had piqued Larry’s interests, not a deep-seated feeling that the dopers had been railroaded; he wasn’t seeking justice.
Straight-faced and convincingly, he speculated that the junk in their veins had led to a state of temporary insanity. He made his name known in the Phoenix Homicide world, but not in a way that would win him a commendation or invitations to parties—infamy. At least they knew his name, now.
Ever since that case, the scumbags just keep calling. His moral compass is not a factor any longer; he closed that door, and never looked in the rearview at the brokenness left in his wake. Today is as good a day as any to get them off.
Larry begins to scan his email. His secretary’s most recent message, the one calling for his immediate attention on a Saturday, is relayed to him from the homicide detective, Staley. Why is he trying to track down Foster? That had been the most open and shut case Larry had dealt with in years. But just seeing Staley’s face again, when he had gone to see Foster, brought back the blood feud the men had begun during the trial for Ron and Litha Hudgins. He understands that Staley is going to be a bug up his ass until one, or both, of the men retire. What he doesn’t understand is why the sudden interest in his mild-mannered client. Truly, Foster is the most innocent man Larry’s defended since moving to Phoenix.
Pulling up his file on Foster, and making sure to note the time and date of the call, he enters the digits to reach Dennis’s phone. The extension rings just once before the call completes and the line opens up to a piercing scream. The call ends.
Was that a scream? he thinks.
Maybe it was just a network noise, like an old modem. There’s no way that was a scream, he thinks.
Larry dials the number again. This time more ringing and then voicemail. He leaves a message.
“We’ll call that fifteen minutes,” he says to himself.
Yeah, that wasn’t a scream; your mind is in the wrong place today.
Nevertheless, after the call, he can’t keep his thoughts from wandering the dark alleyways of his mind. Perhaps one of his more useful characteristics: he explores and conjures the slightest of possibilities.
The road rage killing had been a layup. That’s what made it strange. He didn’t have a past relationship with Dennis Foster. Hell, Foster didn’t have any record to speak of. The murder wasn’t premeditated, it couldn’t have been, yet Foster had the number to Whesker’s office saved in his phone. At least, that was his statement. Most people would have been utterly confounded and frazzled, in shock, or belligerent. Foster was none of these.
Foster had called Whesker’s office, asking for him by name, and had arranged for representation, all before the first patrol unit arrived on the scene, as if it were a conditioned response. It was something that someone would have had to prepare for, by having the forethought to seek out and acquire the number and program it into his Blackberry.
That one thing stuck in his craw. Why had Dennis prepared for a murder defense? Was he just a total Boy Scout who prepared for any and all scenarios? Either way, why?
As odd as it had seemed to Larry, he didn’t hesitate a minute to take the case, or the money. He did his best not to think about the coincidences surrounding the instant call for legal support to a firm that pretty much only represents accused murderers. He didn’t think too much about the calm and collected mannerisms of the client who should have been in shock.
In the same fashion, he tried not to think too much about the sound that was clearly a woman screaming on the other end of the line.
Libby Alone Again
Pressing her face firmly against the door and wistfully hoping the men will come back to ask her some more questions, Elizabeth Langston experiences a tactile and sensual explosion from the Xanax tablets.
Having already gotten herself worked up over the murderous news about Dennis, she then tipped past her fulcrum seeing the boys in blue. Though they weren’t wearing blue, this was still who they had become, in her mind, when sh
e saw their badges. She felt the stares of lust from the younger, good-looking cop, which caused her to focus even more attention to her pulsing nethers. She saw the other man straining to maintain eye contact, and not look as she hiked up her long shirt to reveal more thigh, which is perhaps what made it more appealing to flirt instead with the older, more hardened officer. He seemed more of a challenge to Libby. Besides, she has a thing for older men. She also has a thing for making men jealous over her. Dennis had taught her that about herself.
He had shone a light deep into her, inadvertently, and she was able to see herself more clearly because of his abuse.
As the men round the corner and she realizes with disappointment and relief that they will not be doubling back to question her—or anything worse—she settles back into her leather-clad seat and continues the text message to Dennis. She presses the corner of the cop’s business card into the pad of her index finger, lightly tapping, bending and softening the edge of the card much like she had hoped to do to the tough guy cop.
She types the officer’s name into the message, pauses a minute while saying his name in her mind, then sets the card on the desk and hits send.
—Hey, some cop just came by here asking for you. Wants you to call him. Says he has a question. His name is Staley— Libby wonders how much more about Dennis she doesn’t know. Truth be told, up until now she hadn’t wanted to know too much about him. He had approached her in a gas station and asked about her tattoos. He had feigned interest in meeting her tattoo artist, and asked if she would introduce them. She knew he was full of shit: that was the oldest line in the book. It was the oldest because it worked. Not to mention, she had noticed his expensive suit and the impressive vehicle he drove. In spite of the obvious truth that he was full of shit, and because she felt like being a little dangerous, she supplied him her number and agreed to meet him for dinner.
When the dinner date came, he asked her to meet at his house, so they could ride in the car she had seemed to like so much. She had felt uncomfortable with the idea of going to this man’s house. She questioned his age, looking for a reason to cancel, and he told her he was twenty-five, which she now knew was an outright lie and that he was thirty-four instead. She could have guessed he wasn’t just twenty-five just by looking at him, but again, she was living dangerously and met him at his apartment.
He met her outside, on the street, and said he would need to grab a few things, and that the valet could take her car. This all made her more than a little suspicious, but she wanted to see the view. He told her he lived on the twenty-third floor, invited her to follow him up for a drink, to which she had also agreed.
Inside his apartment, he offered her vodka, these wonderful Xanax pills, and even had a small glass pipe full of some primo weed. By the time that drink was finished and that bowl was cashed, he had lifted her skirt to her beltline, pulled her zebra print underwear to the side, and entered her confidently enough to convince her it was what she wanted.
Living dangerously: she guessed she had agreed to that at some point, too.
Aside from his aggressive pace, he was very docile the first night; compared to some of their later drunken smash-fucks. The more often she came around the worse things got with him.
He had begun to say things that offended her, even grossed her out, like “look at that eighteen-year-old pussy,” and, “you give such good head for a teenager.” She wasn’t sure why these things hadn’t freaked her out completely, or why she let a stranger treat her like such a slut, but suspected it had something to do with the magnificent view, the free drugs, and the man himself. Perhaps she was taking his abuse as penance, subsidizing her guilt about her brother’s suicide.
He drew her in with his confidence and dominating presence. She was enamored by him and intrigued, until he started to falter. He developed emotional attachments, began to wax sentimental, and started calling too much. He wavered between this powerful, seductive, take-what-you-want man, and a needy, insecure, where-have-you-been man.
She hated the latter and stopped coming over as much once he appeared. She had met other guys her age at the lounge where she worked. The eighteen to twenty crowd was fun because they got her, listened to the same music, and didn’t make her feel like she was in the company of a pedophile by constantly mentioning that she was eighteen.
Then something altogether unexpected happened. She called him drunk one night, asking if he could come get her. She made him meet her in an empty Hooters parking lot where Dustin, a guy she was fooling around with, had left her. She and Dustin had gotten into a heated argument just minutes prior and she told Dennis that she needed his help. She was stranded.
Dennis had arrived there in a flash.
For some reason, be it the alcohol, the embarrassment, or just a desire to inflict harm, she had started an all-out confessional with Dennis as her captive audience. She told him she was seeing someone else, and that they had been fighting. She told him that the argument was because she had given Dustin’s best friend a drunken blowie, and then another guy at the party, who had heard there was a brunette in the back room giving it up to everyone, and taken a turn. Dustin caught wind by the time there was a line forming, and decided to throw one last hate-fuck into her, before dumping her in a shitty neighborhood, plastered and alone.
She didn’t know who to expect: the insecure Dennis or the dominating Dennis. Quite honestly, she was loath to deal with either that day, at that moment, but she had no other ride. All of her guy friends had just taken their turn, like her snatch was an Xbox, and all of her girlfriends had seen or heard what she’d done.
He had been silent as he drove her back to his house, and though she could see his hand tugging at his pants gently and rhythmically, she paid it no mind at the time. She continued to blabber on the way women do when they drink, and he continued to tug, a little faster now, and had only said the occasional “yeah?” or “then what?”
Finally, pulling into his parking garage, he asked “How big were their cocks?”
She hadn’t wanted to answer, but he promised her he wasn’t mad. Just curious.
They were all bigger than you, she thought, but one was fucking huge.
“I don’t know, pretty big. I guess,” she said, understating it to mitigate the damage. It had filled her and stretched her so fully that it had literally made her hold her breath. She could still feel its phantom inside her the whole way home, longing to sit on it again. Aching from the emptiness.
Now she was rubbing herself, without noticing it. He had noticed, though, and smiled.
“I guess it was,” he said jokingly. “Can you walk, or do I need to carry you to the elevator?”
At this she had smiled, thinking this was a third side of Dennis, that she actually liked. Later in his apartment, he persisted in having her divulge all the details of her day with Dustin. He wanted to know if she was sore. Had she orgasmed? Had she swallowed all of them? She couldn’t believe she was telling him all of this. Dennis even made her admit that it was the best night of her life, up ‘til the fight. How could it not have been? All that attention, and always a hard one waiting.
It had been as if she were talking to a girlfriend about her first time, only more arousing.
After a few more minutes of the detailed interrogation, he suddenly stood and punched her squarely in the mouth. She had never been stuck so hard, her head echoed with the thunk and she was sure she was about to black out, but she didn’t. Part of her wishes she had. This was the first time he forced himself into her while she fought back. Their first night together she hadn’t said no, or yes, she had just let him because he was too confident and swift to challenge, but this night she did all she could to keep him at bay.
I don’t want to, she told him. I’ve just been with other men hours before, she told him.
She couldn’t dissuade him.
He choked her, slapped her face hard, spit on her, called her ‘whore’ and ‘nigger lover,’ and then he spread his cum and
her blood all over her face.
When it was over, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry or do it again. He told her to take a shower and wash the smell of ‘whore’ off her.
That had made her cry.
Out of all that shit, calling her a whore and looking away had been the breaking point. Getting in the shower that first night, she felt the twinge of her self-respect dying. She has since taken many showers like that one. Sometimes her blood slides off her skin and slithers down the drain, with the scalding water, and sometimes it’s not so bad.
She’s still not sure why she keeps repeating the cycle, why she keeps letting him get rougher and rougher.
She’s just living dangerously, she guesses.
Terry Ragland
“Here, help me with this one!”
“Dad, they’re all empty. Just stop!”
The old man looks into him with empty eyes and says, “I’m not going to give up, you hear me? So, just grab your end!”
Terrance looks to his father, Ernie Ragland, with resignation and reaches for the rusted barrel’s lid. The steel groans in protest and exhales the red dust of oxidized metal from the rim. The barrel is empty, again, but Ernie is not deterred.
Scrambling for another barrel, he has a maniacal look of determination and blind faith that Terrance has seen before. Ernie will not give up. Nor will he let Terrance; that is not the Ragland way.
Taking a look over his shoulder, Terry sees the sun setting on a sea of opened, empty containers. There must be thousands they have already unfastened. How long have we been here?
Groan as another cask’s cover springs loose.