The Trees Beyond the Grass (A Cole Mouzon Thriller)

by Reeves, Robert

  Wier looked sadly down at the wood table and wiped it with his hands as he spoke. “You see, my life has been devastated. I can’t do my job. I’m behind in my child support…all because your client dumped a tanker of oil in my front yard.” He was avoiding eye contact. “It’s really quite horrible, Colin. I had a great life before this, but now…well, I’ve lost everything.” Mr. Wier’s gaze on Cole deepened with his last words.

  Cole turned and reached into his red well file holder to withdraw a document. He didn’t need to look at it. Its image had been saved, like every other document in the case, safely in his head. “Let me show you what’s been marked Exhibit 13. Do you…”

  Before Cole could get out his question, Wier interrupted. “What the… Those are my Facebook pictures. How did you get those?” Mr. Wier’s face now matched his lawyer’s, red and inflamed. He shot Cole a look full of hate.

  Cole glanced over to the court reporter who was apparently enjoying the show as she typed. It was her turn to get in on the action. “Sir, I’m going to remind you again. I cannot take down two people talking at the same time. Please let Mr. Mouzon finish his question before you answer. Okay? …OKAY?”

  Wier gave a half-hearted, “Yes.”

  Cole continued, this time speaking slower. “Mr. Wier, is that your picture, a picture of you snowboarding just two months ago in Vail?” Cole gave a Cheshire cat smile. He had this guy and he knew it. Cole’s intensely green eyes glowed with excitement from the heated exchange. Wier lurched across the table to attack, but his lawyer caught him with his right arm extended.

  “Objection! Now, sit your ass down, boy. Just sit here and hush while I say something to Mr. Mouzon.” That seemed to have awoken Wier’s lawyer, Henry Babbick, a large, red-faced man with bulging pale blue eyes and bad skin. His butter-yellow dress shirt was unkempt, and the layer of dandruff on his shoulders could pass for snow, but for it being the middle of May. In his late 40s, the lawyer came across more as a first-year associate than the experienced partner his wrinkles suggested.

  Cole pushed on, ignoring the objection. Wier’s skin was turning ‘oh shit’ red, signaling that he knew his story of having the perfect life just before this accident, only to have it come crumbling down, was falling apart. “And you lost your job, not because of respiratory failure as you claim in this case, but because you got your butt kicked when you picked a fight with your boss on the job, then showed up with the cops and tried to press charges. All because you called him…a ‘fuckwad?’”

  Babbick tried to slow down the interrogation. “You’re badgering my client. Asked and answered. Lack of foundation.”

  Cole smiled again as he turned to the lawyer. “I think the only objection you forgot was ‘calls for speculation.’ Would you like to add that one? Your client is here claiming $500,000 in damages because my client got in an accident and five gallons of oil, five, leaked into a ditch two hundred feet away from his front door.”

  Wier stood to lurch again. “You’re an ass! That bastard had it coming to him. Just go fuck yourself, I’m done here.” Defeat covered Wier like smoke settling in, choking his ability to play victim any longer.

  Looking up to the still-standing man across the table, Cole responded. “Is that a yes?” In an effort to put the final nail in the casket, Cole pressed forward. He knew this case would settle for nuisance value in a month if not sooner, but he had to have the admission on the record.

  “Yeah, that’s a yes, and yeah, you can go fuck yourself. I’m done!”

  Moments later, the red-faced lawyer trailed behind Cole as he walked out of the old office. Cole wasn’t paying attention to the man’s pleas and proffering of why Wier presented so poorly in his deposition. “Mr. Babbick, save it for a jury. You and I both know the claim is bad, your client is worse, and your reputation will be left stinking unless you convince him to get reasonable. I’ll be sending over an offer of judgment tomorrow. I’m thinking three thousand dollars. It will cost me that just to draft a motion to dismiss this case. Decline it at your client’s peril. My clients love it when you pay their fees.” Cole opened the glass door and left.

  CHAPTER 14

  BACK AT HIS Sixteenth Street office, Cole walked into a half-empty space—everyone seemed to have had out-of-office work to do. Perfect, he thought, I can get out early and be at the airport with enough time to grab a Fat Tire. Between work and the bad dreams, he needed his vacation and the sooner it started the better.

  Kathy, the office assistant, came walking into his office with her hands full of documents just as he was settling down in his chair. “How did it go?”

  Cole threw his jacket over the back of one of his guest chairs and loosened his tie. “Ah, it went… Same story, different day. He gives injured parties a bad name. Draft an Offer of Judgment for three thousand dollars and let’s get that out. That way if they decline it and the jury gives them that or less, he has to pay our costs.”

  “You got some mail. That crazy Mr. Kreepers filed something again. Looks like he’s been reading Peanuts this week.” Mr. Keppermoore, Mr. Kreepers to Kathy, was pro se, representing himself in a case outside Atlanta against one of Cole’s clients. His claim was that the laying and spreading of woodchips had been toxic to his sensitive system and he demanded justice. “Respect my a-thor-a-tay,” as Cartman from South Park would say, popped into Cole’s head every time he thought of good ‘ol Kreepers.

  Kathy yelled from the front desk, “When’s your flight to Charleston?”

  Looking down at the stack of mail in his in-box as the image of his ticket flashed across his mind, he shouted back, “Oh, two-thirty. That should get me in by eight p.m. or so with the connection through Atlanta. It’s Friday after lunch, so it shouldn’t be too busy at the airport.” It had been five months since he’d been home and Cole was excited to return to see his family, even if that meant subjecting himself to their form of cross-examination about all things Cole. He didn’t know why, but the constant turmoil in his head was always better when he was home. He always brushed it off as just being around family.

  Walking out of his office into the reception area with the piece of mail Kathy had just handed him, he laughed. “Ha! I love Kreepers! Look at that, he cut and pasted a mini version of the Magna Carta in this brief. I guess I better get licensed in the U.K. if we’re going to start arguing English law.” Kreepers’ pleadings were always a mosaic of cut and paste. A Xerox copy of some criminal code pasted here, the judge’s signature pasted there, with just the right touch of lawyer comic strips sprinkled throughout—all in support of his opinion that justice was being denied him. The court in Cobb County, Georgia had a handle on the situation, having dismissed all claims and found Kreepers in criminal contempt for his continued filing of frivolous pleadings against the court’s order. Apparently he hadn’t got the memo that his case was dead.

  BRINGING HIS ATTENTION to a box full of emails, he saw little of importance. He double-clicked on the Google Earth icon on his computer’s desktop and a large image of the world popped up and spun. It was obvious to Cole that someone at Google believed Kansas was the center of the world by the map’s default center always landing on the state at start-up. He typed in ‘Charleston, SC’ into the search box and hit enter. The globe spun and zoomed in to his hometown, grey with development on his screen. As he moved the mouse around the map, numbers at the bottom of the screen changed to note the longitude and latitude of the marker. He zoomed in further to note the distance between his hotel and the Dock Street Theater, where he had tickets for Saturday night. The map was saved in his mind. That’s walkable.

  Closing out the program and turning, the capital building outside his window caught his eye. He took a second to enjoy a mental break. He had come to Denver almost a year and a half earlier after living in Atlanta for six years. He loved Atlanta, but it housed too many bitter memories. He accepted that a move would be best and Denver offered a ‘life with a view.’ That it was a state that provided the opportunity to get
licensed to practice law without taking the dreaded bar again was an added bonus.

  Looking out the window and thinking about his past pushed up against his inner wall. He took a deep breath and shifted his thoughts back to work. Cole shot off a few more emails and decided to get out while the getting was good. Grabbing his jacket, he said, “Okay, I’m out of here. I’ll see you in a week and a half.”

  Kathy looked up from the pile of documents she was indexing and responded. “Have fun! I’m so jealous, I’ve heard Charleston is just beautiful. I bet it’s very romantic.”

  Cole grinned. "It is, though when you’re from there it gets lost on you.” Cole was only half serious. No, he didn’t walk around the cobblestone streets of the Holy City, as Charleston was known, looking like some crazy tourist. But he did take pride in the city, its history, and all its eccentricities. And it had an ample supply of those. “Later ‘gator, just email or call me if you need anything. I have my iPad and I’ll be doing some work.” The sad reality of being a lawyer—you’re never completely off the clock.

  CHAPTER 15

  COLE TORE OFF his suit in the building’s first floor gym, crawled into his gym shorts, and hit the pavement outside for a short pre-flight run. Shirtless, he noticed his recent busy schedule was wreaking havoc on his six-pack. From his view, two beers were missing. Traveling down Lincoln Street, he picked up the pace in an attempt to reclaim those beers as he merged onto Speer Boulevard and the Cherry Creek bike path. This routine cleared his mind daily, and the cool wind off the creek that ran down the spine of the path provided needed relief from the heat wave that had descended on Denver. In his ‘running zone,’ Cole thought of his trip. It had been months since he had been back to his hometown, and the trip was a reunion of sorts for his friend Ann and himself to enjoy Spoleto.

  Every year at the end of May the Holy City hosted an international arts festival which showed off the most exclusive, preeminent musical, visual, dance, and other art displays. For seventeen days, operas, art installations, jazz bands, and artistic dance descended on the peninsula, clogging its streets and buildings with crowds from around the world salivating at not only the art but the city stage it was being hosted in. As a child, his Granny would take him and the rest of the grandkids to one event, each separately. Each child got to pick his or her event and then go alone with Granny. She always called it ‘our’ time. Cole tended to pick big productions with singing and dancing over any music concert or art display.

  Like the city itself, the event wasn’t without secrets and controversy. It had come to Charleston in 1977 when Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti decided to start a counterpart to his Festival dei Due Mondi, or Festival of Two Worlds, in Spoleto, Italy. Menotti chose the city for its charm and the plethora of venues. His lack of understanding of Charlestonians and their innate sense of defiance immediately placed the event in financial and interpersonal turmoil.

  Menotti was accustomed to exclusive control of the company’s limitless expense account. Much like the city perceived the North’s actions, Menotti’s attempts to dictate and spend the city’s money was met with a long, heavy thud, followed by revolt. By 1993, Menotti was run out of town, but not without attempting to take the festival with him. Seeing him as a carpetbagger, Charlestonians armed themselves with muskets loaded with lawyers and drove him off, never to return. The festival endured, and had grown ever since.

  Thinking about his trip, Cole realized he missed his hometown deeply. Images of his family, Charleston and its marshes flickered in transparencies across his vision of the sidewalk he was jogging. His family was a mix of love and pain like most out there. But he always sought to focus on the love and craziness that made them his own brand of family.

  She said ‘romantic.’ Kathy’s words had unintentionally popped back into his head mid-step. The Peninsula, another nickname for Charleston, oozed romance that rivaled Paris or Venice. Add the tropical, palmetto-studded atmosphere and you had the makings of a Hemingway romance. Cole hadn’t thought much of romance since Atlanta and he had no interest in starting now. He could feel the mental conversation once again crashing against the wall that kept him stable. Stop thinking about it. You’re damaged goods. Visualizing his emotions as a dirty rag, he manipulated it in his mind, shoving and packing it into the crevice from which it came until the emotions were back behind the wall. He took a deep breath and focused on the last mile back toward his office.

  Seven miles completed and showered, Cole arrived at DIA with ample time to check in and grab two Fat Tires. It had been a long week of depositions, and a couple of beers helped him transition into vacation mode. He ultimately plopped down into the cramped blue fabric seat of the United Airlines flight and set his iPod playlist to ‘Trip.’ He was in the habit of making playlists for every event worthy of music. Hitting play, Empire of the Sun blared, deemed by him as appropriate travel music since discovering them while road-tripping between Sydney and Cairns. He lay back and closed his eyes.

  CHAPTER 16

  BLADES OF MARSH grass prickled the tips of his fingers as he walked the line between mowed and undisturbed marsh. Perhaps two or three years old, judging from his size, the darkness engulfed him as he stared on along the artificial line that defined nature from man. Thick, salty air filled his nostrils with the damp, organic odor of the sea. A cinderblock building rested yards to his right, with the marsh grass inches to the left. This place was strangely calming to him in that moment. For being alone, the place was noisy with life in the darkness. Cicadas buzzed in the distant Spanish-moss draped live oaks and top-heavy pines. He took in the busied nocturnal life around him.

  His mind was too preoccupied by the nature to hear the approaching steps from behind. As his hands brushed the tops of reed and grass, a sudden need to run came across his body, brewing in his shoulders before lightening down to his feet. It was too late. A hand had grabbed his outreached arm and pulled him down, into the marsh. He could feel his throat clench as he involuntarily attempted to scream. No one came.

  Pulling, pulling; there was no escape. His eyes turned ahead to see what, who had grabbed him, but all that could be seen was a hand, nothing more. The rest was a blur, like he had entered a dark underpass. It pulled him deeper into the marsh, leaving him looking back to see the brick facade of the school building drifting away. Reed and oyster cut, their sting emphasized by the salty marsh water. Pain and pressure conjoined in his shoulder as he was dragged deeper into the darkness. “Stop. Help, help!” His voice tensed and resisted being heard, as he was swallowed by the blackness and into the trees. “Momma!”

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS EASY enough to break in. The home adjacent to Mouzon’s hid the view of nosy neighbors. A slip of a knife under the window’s edge and Poinsett was in the house. She had visited the spot the night before to watch as she had done with the others, but his dog barked, requiring her to cut off her observation prematurely. Standing outside again, she had returned to issue her warning, to commence the game with Mouzon, but by looks of the vacant dog bed and the Amazon package on the front porch, he was gone.

  Slowly stepping across the pine floors, Poinsett looked for any sign as to where he could have gone. A quick inspection showed no signs of a phone or answering machine. Pictures of him were spread throughout the house, with scenes of the Iron Lung in Sydney, the Gherkin in London, and others with tropical beaches in the background. The thought of him enjoying life at her expense sickened her. How dare he. Her rage simmered deep inside her, threatening to boil over into chaos. She hated him. His permitted existence had caused the damnation of her own life. For thirty years he loomed, torturing her without her ever knowing. But now she did know, and the time had come to show him the damage he’d inflicted, to show him how his existence destroyed her childhood and life. Only by ridding the world of those taken and released by the Taker could she find peace.

  Poinsett’s heart raced as she ran a hand across an old walnut desk onto the keyboard of Mouzo
n’s computer, causing it light up. Opening the Safari internet browser, she typed in Facebook.com. Bingo. The computer was still logged in. Several clicks away, a picture of her prey filled the screen along with his wall of posts. The latest entry was, “DEN => CHS.”

  CHAPTER 18

  COLE AWOKE DRENCHED in sweat again, his heart racing with panic, still seated on the plane. Faint tears lingered in his eyes. It took a few seconds to recall where he was and where he was going. “Fuck,” Cole murmured under his breath while trying to regain his bearings and resituate in his cramped seat. His refusal to pay full ticket price for anything frustrated even him at these moments.

  He had unfortunately brought two carry-ons, his bag and that stupid dream. Too bad United didn’t shove that shit into check-in. He liked the idea of leaving it on the carousel and never claiming it. The dream was on a repetitive loop lately, replayed every night for the past three weeks with no off button to hit. If he fell asleep it was there.

  It wasn’t the first time. It had haunted his dreams as a child before being all but forgotten in recent years. Between the ages of three and ten it was a given whenever he slept. The routine was fixed. Fall asleep by nine p.m. Wake up in a panic by two a.m. Then get up and watch black-and-white reruns of Lassie and Dennis the Menace on Nickelodeon until it was time for a shower and school. That is, if he showered…

  Then, like his mind had outgrown it, it stopped without warning. His sleep went undisturbed for years, until three weeks ago when it reappeared in all its dark vividness. Why? What was causing him to dream like this? And why now?