by Scott Pratt
OTHER TITLES BY SCOTT PRATT
JOE DILLARD SERIES
An Innocent Client
In Good Faith
Injustice for All
Reasonable Fear
Conflict of Interest
Blood Money
A Crime of Passion
Judgment Cometh
DARREN STREET SERIES
Justice Burning
Justice Redeemed
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Arthur Scott Pratt
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542049689
ISBN-10: 1542049687
Cover design by David Drummond
This book, along with every book I’ve written and every book I’ll write, is dedicated to my darling Kristy, to her unconquerable spirit, and to her inspirational courage. I loved her before I was born, and I’ll love her after I’m long gone.
CONTENTS
START READING
PART I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
PART II
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
PART III
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
—Aristotle
PART I
CHAPTER 1
I looked around at the circle of empty chairs. There were two empty seats to my right and two to my left. I was back at Farragut High School outside Knoxville, Tennessee, in the classroom assigned for in-school detention. I’d been there several times in my youth for fighting, but this seemed more serious. The doors were made of iron bars, the walls were concrete block and painted Old Glory Blue, the same color as that on the American flag.
Hovering over me at the front of the class was Mrs. Judge, a woman I’d dealt with before. Her appearance had changed dramatically, though, since I’d last seen her. Her face was as gray as bone ash, and she was staring at me through tinted glasses that were as thick as the bottoms of old beer bottles and looked almost like goggles. She was wearing a red silk robe with a white lace collar. In her right hand, she held a set of pan mechanical balance scales, and in her left she carried a double-edged sword that looked, from where I was sitting, to be razor sharp. When she’d come into the room a few seconds earlier, she hadn’t walked like a normal human. She’d floated across the floor like a ghost.
I was trembling. There wasn’t much in the world that I feared, but this version of Mrs. Judge terrified me. She seemed to radiate power and danger, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that she could incinerate me with one blazing look from her eyes. And if she was quick with the sword—which I was certain she was—my head could be rolling across the floor at any second.
“Where are your friends, Mr. Street?” Mrs. Judge said in a slow, gravelly Southern accent.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
She raised her hands, the sword and scales gleaming, and fire began to swirl around my head.
“Don’t lie to me, Mr. Street. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Where are your four friends who are supposed to be sitting in these four seats?”
“They’re not my friends,” I said. I looked up at her hideous face and then back down at the floor.
“Do you dare trifle with me? I have no qualms about turning you to dust and blowing you to the far edges of the universe. You will speak the truth in this room.”
“I had to do something,” I said.
“You mean you had to take justice into your own hands. You had to become a vigilante.”
“Call it whatever you want. I’d do it again.”
“I want to hear you say it,” she said. “I want you to look at me and tell me exactly what you did.”
I forced myself to look at the face. It was the face of a person—no, an entity—that had been twisted and betrayed and misunderstood and beaten and defeated, yet stood defiantly and continued to fight.
“There is no such thing as justice, you know,” I said. “There are only random acts followed by revenge.”
“Tell me what you did!” Her voice was so forceful it nearly shattered my eardrums. “Confess! Right now! What did you do to the four men who should be sitting in these chairs?”
“I killed them,” I said. “All four of them. Are you happy? I shot Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane in a bar in West Virginia. I blew them to hell. They didn’t have a chance. I helped hang the former federal prosecutor, Ben Clancy, in a barn up by Gatlinburg, and then I fed his sorry ass to a pen full of hungry pigs. And Big Pappy Donovan? He wanted to kill me. He actually wanted to have an old-fashioned duel in the mountains near Petros. He was crazy. He’d gone completely off the rails. So I met him and we had our duel. He lost, and then he wound up in the same pigpen as Ben Clancy.”
“And you got away with all four of the killings,” she said. “You faced no consequences from the laws of man.”
“I got away with the killings.”
“Do you feel no remorse for the taking of human lives?”
“None. Frazier and Beane murdered my mother. Clancy falsely convicted me of murder and sent me off to prison for two years. Big Pappy was a sociopath, if not a psychopath, who wanted to kill me. It was him or me.”
“What makes you think you get to make these choices?” she said. “What makes you think you have the power to decide who lives and who dies?”
Mrs. Judge was judging me, and I wasn’t having it. I didn’t know whether or not I was dreaming, but what I was feeling was very real to me. My fear was suddenly replaced by anger, and I gave no thought to what might happen to me for confronting this powerful force.
“What makes you think you have that same power?” I said. “You’re nothing but the product of the wealthy protecting themselves from the poor. You’re a hypocrite and a false idol, and as far as I’m concerned, you can take your hypocrisy and go straight to hell.”
I felt the air go out of the room and heard the metallic whoosh of her sword being raised into the air.
I looked up at her and stood.
“I don’t hit my knees for you or anybody else,” I said. “If you’re going to take my head, you’re going to do it while I’m standing.”
Her smile revealed pointed, yellowed teeth.
“Have it your way,” she said, and the sword dove toward me at the speed of . . .
I felt the hand on my shoulder, and my eyes immediately popped open. I looked around the den, heard the television, and couldn’t believe I’d dozed off.
“Is it time?” I said.
“Are you all right, Darren? You sounded like you were having a nightmare.”
“I’m fine. I was dreaming about this teacher I had in high school named Mrs. Judge. It was strange. What about you? How are the contractions?”
“I think we should go,” Grace said. “They’re about sixty seconds, and they’re coming every three or four minutes.”
“Do they hurt?”
“Ever had somebody push on your lower abdomen with an anvil?” she said.
“Can’t say that I have.”
“That’s what they feel like. The longer they get, the heavier the anvil.”
Grace’s contractions had begun the day before, but they’d been intermittent. Over the past several hours, however, they’d become more intense and had come at much shorter intervals. I looked at the clock next to the couch. It was 7:45 p.m. on Friday night. We were both dressed and had everything packed in my car. Grace called her mother and father—both of whom lived in San Diego, California—and told them we were heading to the hospital.
The thought struck me that it was rather pitiful that I didn’t have anyone to call. My son, Sean, who was nine years old, had just returned to Hawaii after having spent the summer with Grace and me. He knew Grace was going to have a baby and seemed excited by the fact that he was going to have a sister. But I knew if I tried to call him, his mother, Katie, would ignore the call, so I just let it go.
Grace took my arm, and we walked out of the building into the mid-August heat and humidity. Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the birthing center just south of Knoxville, Tennessee. Everything was prearranged. Grace had been the perfect mother-to-be. She’d taken good care of herself, gotten plenty of exercise and rest, and eaten well with the exception of an unusually large intake of french fries that she chalked up to cravings. She’d worked her job at the federal defender’s office until the previous week and was planning to take a month off after our baby girl—her name was to be Jasmine Cathleen Alexander—was born. Grace had chosen the name, and I liked it. Since she and I weren’t married and had no immediate plans in that vein, we’d agreed the child would take Grace’s last name. If we decided to take the vows at some point, we’d talk about names then. What we called the child didn’t really mean that much to me. All I wanted was a healthy, happy baby girl, and I planned to love her with everything I could muster.
A nurse told me to take a seat in a small waiting room and she’d come to get me when Grace was settled into her birthing suite. I sat down and began to reflect.
Grace and I were getting along well. She’d kicked me out of her apartment when she suspected I’d been involved in killing the two men who’d murdered my mother, but her stance had eventually softened. I’d finally opened up and been honest with her about what had happened to Ben Clancy and Big Pappy, and she had allowed me back into her life with the stipulation that I see a psychiatrist on a weekly basis, both to overcome Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from my time in prison and to try to make sense of the violence that had been visited upon me and my reactions to that violence. Eventually, Grace became akin to a wife whose husband had volunteered for a combat tour overseas and had taken lives and seen terrible things in the line of duty. She didn’t really understand the things I’d done, but on some level she accepted that in my way of thinking, I’d really had no choice. I had to avenge my mother by killing the men who had killed her. I had to force justice upon Ben Clancy because the system that was in place wasn’t going to do a thing to him, and I had to protect myself from Big Pappy Donovan because he was a dangerous killer.
I’d been a criminal defense lawyer for more than a decade and knew the judicial system inside and out. It had failed me again and again, so I’d taken matters into my own hands and used my knowledge of the laws of evidence and the individual protections afforded by the Constitution not only to dole out my own brand of justice but also to do so in such a manner that the police and the lawyers and the judges never got a chance to hold me accountable. Grace still looked at me strangely sometimes, but I believed she had forgiven me.
I’d visited a shrink for months—never mentioning any of the murders I’d committed—before Grace allowed me to stop. It was good she let me stop when she did, because the doctor was beginning to annoy me so much that I’d begun to fantasize about strangling her and hauling her up to Granny Tipton’s pigpen.
Grace hadn’t renewed the lease on her apartment when it came time two months earlier and had moved in with me. I had an extra bedroom, and she slept in there. There was no sex, but we’d become closer than ever during those two months. I found myself doting on her, which she enjoyed. I was a perfect gentleman, holding doors and holding hands and saying please and thank you. I felt the baby moving in Grace’s womb, listened to her heartbeat. I also listened intently to everything Grace said, and if she asked me a question, I gave her a thoughtful and honest answer.
I hadn’t said “I love you” to her since before she kicked me out of her apartment, but it was the first thing I planned to say as soon as the baby was born. I thought it would be a good start to our lives together as parents. I didn’t know how she’d react, but I was going to say it, anyway. Like I said, I still sensed just a bit of distrust from her. I knew she wanted me in Jasmine’s life, but I wasn’t sure at this point whether she’d totally committed to our relationship as husband and wife. Grace cared for me and she let me know it, but I sensed that she also regarded me warily sometimes, the way a trainer of dangerous lions regards the animals. I wondered occasionally whether she stayed with me out of an old-fashioned sense of duty. She’d made the choice to sleep with me, she’d become pregnant, and now it was her duty to stay with me and to attempt to successfully hold the family together. Maybe she didn’t want to disappoint her parents. I barely knew them, but from what Grace had told me, they were conservative and old-school. Her father was a career marine corps officer, and her mother was a journalism professor. Maybe Grace didn’t want them to have the stigma of a bastard grandchild, so she stuck with me in the hope that I would be able to resist some of my behavioral and emotional urges and we’d eventually marry.
A nursing assistant opened the door of the birthing suite and motioned me to come in. I settled in on the couch while a nurse attached leads to Grace so they could monitor her and the baby’s vital signs. The nurse attaching the leads was pretty, maybe thirty-five, with black hair and dark-brown eyes. She’d written “Jenny Diaz” on a board that hung on the wall near the bed.
“Who’s on call?” Grace said to Jenny.
“Dr. Fraturra.”
Grace crinkled her nose.
“Is that a problem?” I said.
“It’s fine. I’ve seen him twice at the office. He just seemed a little distracted.”
I expected a comforting phrase from the nurse, something like, “Oh, Dr. Fraturra is excellent. You’re in good hands.” But none was forthcoming. She just continued to adjust the monitors.
“What do you think of Dr. Fraturra, Jenny?” I said.
“I’ve been a labor-and-delivery nurse for ten years, but my husband and I just moved to Knoxville,” she said. “I’ve only been here six weeks, so I’m not very familiar with the doctors yet. I’ve already paged him, though. He should be here soon.”
“He isn’t in the building?” I said. “We called before we left the apartment and were told he’d be here.”
“He must j
ust be running a little late. Nothing to worry about. We still have a little while. She’s dilated six centimeters.”
The door opened, and a thin, dark-haired, midthirties man with a receding hairline walked in.
“Ah, here’s the magic man,” Jenny said.
“I’m Dr. Sams,” the man said, nodding to both Grace and me. “I’m the anesthesiologist, and I’m here to administer your epidural.”
“Thank God,” Grace said.
They asked me to leave the room again, and ten minutes later, Dr. Sams walked through the door.
“You can go back,” he said. “I’ll check on her regularly.”
I found a different woman when I returned, one whose face was no longer pale and drawn. She looked relaxed, almost angelic.
“Anesthesia is the bomb,” Grace said. “It was like he walked in here and sprinkled fairy dust all over me.”
CHAPTER 2
In a trendy bar near Turkey Creek on Knoxville’s West Side, Dr. Nicolas Fraturra raised a glass of fifteen-year-old bourbon in a toast to the blonde sitting on the bar stool next to him. His pager vibrated against his side again, but he ignored it.
“To your good health, your beautiful face, your gorgeous body, and my prospects of getting you out of that very sexy dress in the near future,” he said beneath the din of young professionals who crowded the bar every Friday night.
The blonde, a financial analyst from Nashville named Danielle Davis, who was at least ten years younger than Fraturra, raised her eyebrows.
“Don’t believe in wasting time, do you, Doctor?”
“That’s something I learned early on as a doctor,” Fraturra said. “Life is short, and it is precious. There is absolutely no sense in wasting time.”
“There is such a thing as decorum, though, don’t you think?” Davis said as she clinked her glass of Chardonnay against his bourbon.
“You said you were here to close a deal with one of your firm’s biggest clients,” Fraturra said, ignoring the question. “Where’s your client?”
“We’re close to getting it done,” she said, “but it’s his thirtieth wedding anniversary. I’ll have to wait until Monday.”