Justice Lost

by Scott Pratt

  I lifted him and threw him back over my shoulder, skirted his ridiculously expensive swimming pool, and started down the slope to the river. I stayed close to the trees. Ronnie had the jon boat tied to Fraturra’s dock when I got there, and he helped me get Fraturra in the boat. We covered him with a canvas tarp, I removed the ski mask, and we untied the boat, fired up the small outboard engine, and headed back to the boat ramp at the park. We were there just minutes later.

  “You’re sure he won’t wake up?” I said to Ronnie.

  “No way,” he said, and we pulled the boat onto the trailer with Fraturra still covered in the tarp. We put restraints on Fraturra’s wrists and ankles just in case, secured the restraints to the supports beneath the jon-boat seats, strapped the tarp down, climbed into the truck, and headed for the mountain. I was confident we hadn’t been seen by a soul.

  When we got to the Tiptons’ place, Eugene opened the barn door, and Ronnie drove the truck in. The three of us pulled Fraturra out of the back and dumped him onto the dirt floor, and Ronnie backed the truck and trailer out. By the time Ronnie returned, Fraturra was starting to wake up. He was moaning and trying to lift his head. Ronnie cut the restraints off him while I picked up a bucket near the pigpen, walked out back to the creek, and filled it with water. I carried the bucket back inside and dumped it over Fraturra’s head. He started spitting and sputtering and shaking his head, and then he started cursing. I picked him up by the hair and dragged him to a post near the center of the barn. I had a fifteen-foot length of hemp rope, and Eugene and Ronnie helped me stand him up and tie him to the post. I wrapped him like a mummy. He was completely immobilized.

  Then I went back outside and got another bucket of cold water. I threw that in his face, too. I wanted him awake, at least semi-clearheaded, so he would understand that he was losing his life for a reason. I wanted him to know that my brand of justice was being served upon him, that revenge was being taken, and that he’d brought this on himself by being an irresponsible, drunken piece of shit.

  “You!” he said after the second bucket of water.

  I nodded. “That’s right, Doc. Me.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to kill you, just like you killed Grace and my daughter.”

  “I didn’t kill them!” he cried. “I didn’t kill anyone!”

  “Were you on call that night?” I said.

  “I tried to get someone to cover for me. I’d been having a hard time. I called Bernie Weinstein, but he wouldn’t cover my call. He’s the one you should be after. Or Jenkins! Bill Jenkins! He’s the one who actually botched the surgery.”

  “He didn’t botch anything. He just didn’t get there in time. And that’s on you. You know the baby suffocated, right? And Grace? She bled to death. I can’t kill you both ways, so I’ve decided to kill you a little at a time.”

  I was standing ten feet away from him. He looked pathetic with that rope wrapped around him.

  He started to cry. “Please. I’m sick. I just need to get well. I have family that cares about me. I have an autistic child.”

  “To whom you pay zero attention, from what I understand.”

  “I’m sick! I have a disease!”

  “And what disease would that be?”

  “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “There’s a cure for that, you know,” I said. “Stop drinking.”

  “I can’t. It’s a disease, I’m telling you.”

  “My father was a drunk,” I said. “Every time he lifted a can or a bottle or a glass to his lips, he was making a choice, and that choice was to drink. He used to beat the hell out of my mother and me. Then one day he didn’t beat the hell out of us anymore because I grew up enough to beat the hell out of him. I kicked him out of the house, got rid of him, just like I’m going to get rid of you. A couple of years after I threw my father out, he got drunk and ran his car into a tree. And you know what? Nobody cared. Nobody missed him.

  “You’re just like him, you know. Every time you drink or snort coke or smoke weed or eat mushrooms or whatever the hell else you do, you’re making a choice. The night you were on call and Grace died? You made choices that night, Doc. I know what choices you made because I went to that bar. I did what the cops should have done. I talked to the bartender. What’s his name? Bud? Yeah, Bud. He thinks you’re an asshole, by the way. I asked Bud what you did that night. I know what you drank, how much you drank. I know you were chasing a blonde named Danielle Davis. I know she ran like a scalded dog when you went into the bathroom. All those choices you made that night led to Grace’s death and Jasmine’s death, and now all those choices you made are going to lead to your death.”

  I looked over at Granny and Eugene and Ronnie. They were standing by the wall just inside the door, stone-faced. I’d fantasized about choking Fraturra into unconsciousness and then waking him up, choking him again and waking him up, just so he’d know what it felt like for Jasmine, although I had no idea what she’d really felt, if anything at all. I’d thought about waterboarding him. Then I was going to slit his throat and stand in front of him while he bled to death, the same way Grace had.

  But in the end, I couldn’t do it. I could kill, but I couldn’t become a barbarian.

  I reached into the pocket of my sweatpants and wrapped my hands around the Walther P-22 pistol that I’d used to kill Big Pappy Donovan less than a year earlier.

  “You’re the one who has a choice now,” Fraturra said in a tiny voice. Snot was running out of his nostrils and over his lips. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t have to do it, and to be honest with you, Grace wouldn’t want me to. But I choose to mete out justice myself when the circumstances warrant and the system fails me. Your buddy Morris isn’t going to prosecute you, but he should. At the very least, you should become intimately acquainted with some extremely unpleasant animals behind the walls of a penitentiary. And since you’re a doctor, they’d find ways to blackmail you, too, or bleed you for protection money. You’d be much poorer when you came out than when you went in. But that isn’t going to happen, is it? Morris made that quite clear.

  “Grace’s parents could sue you. I could sue you. But in the end, how do you put financial value on a human life? I mean, that’s downright sick. You took Grace’s life at a certain age, and she made so much per year and the lawyers would say she would be expected to make so much per year for another certain number of years. Then her income would peak and begin to fall as she got older. Toward the end, she wouldn’t be earning much, so the value of her life at that time would decrease. It’d be all about numbers, not about what Grace actually meant to other people. Malpractice defense lawyers place no value at all on that. It’s just too vague, too uncertain. It’s too human. You can’t quantify it. So tell me, Dr. Fraturra. What’s sicker? The way they do it, or the way I’m going to do it? At least with my way, you won’t feel much pain, it’ll be quick, and your family won’t have to go through all the heartbreak of a funeral and a burial.”

  “What will my family know?” His voice was trembling, breaking. He was truly pitiful with the tears running down his cheeks and the snot running over his lips.

  I felt nothing for him. I shook my head.

  “Hear those hogs back there? They haven’t eaten in a while. I don’t think you’ll last long once I toss you in there.”

  He began to scream, but I brought the gun up and silenced him with a shot to the forehead. Then I emptied the clip into his chest.

  I shot him a total of ten times.

  Granny brought me a mason jar filled with moonshine, and she and I and the boys took turns taking pulls from the jar while we waited for Fraturra’s bleeding to slow. As the corn liquor warmed me, I felt satisfaction in knowing that I had ended the life of the man who, in my eyes, had killed Grace and Jasmine. I also got another dose of the addictive power that one feels when taking a human life. I basked in the glow of the power for a few moments;
then I dragged Fraturra to the pigpen and dumped him over the railing while Granny, Eugene, and Ronnie set about cleaning up the rest of the mess.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 10

  Eugene dropped me off three blocks from my place around two in the morning, and I moved carefully around the apartment building until I knew I could get in without anyone seeing me. I’d left my car there and a light on in my apartment. As far as any of my neighbors knew, I was home.

  When I drifted off to sleep a little while later, I had a dream in which Grace was standing in the bedroom just a few feet away from me. Behind her was a veil of white mist that looked like a cloud. She was holding a baby wrapped in a pink blanket in her arms. I looked at her and reached out to her, but she shook her head and frowned at me.

  “You could have made something worthwhile of our deaths, Darren,” she said. “You could have resisted your urges, shown some growth, but you disappointed me again. Goodbye, Darren. You’ve disappointed me for the last time.”

  Then she turned, stepped into the mist, and disappeared.

  I sat up on my elbows and reached toward the mist.

  “Worthwhile?” I said. “How could I possibly take what Fraturra did to you and the baby and turn it into something worthwhile? Killing him wasn’t an urge, Grace, it was a necessity. It was what I had to do to balance things. How could you fault me for that? What can I do, Grace? What can I do to make you understand? Come back, please. Come back and talk to me.”

  The white mist slowly darkened, and a fissure appeared suddenly. Mrs. Judge emerged with the silky red robe billowing around her and her thick, dark glasses. The scales were in her hand and the sword in its scabbard.

  “Another one bites the dust at the hands of the assassin,” Mrs. Judge said.

  I lay back and covered my eyes with my forearm. “Go away. I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

  “I’ll get you eventually,” she said. “Justice always prevails.”

  “That’s a load of crap. Take your platitudes and shove them.”

  “Do you think you’ll get away with this one, too, Mr. Street? Maybe someone saw you. Maybe you left something in that garage. Maybe you made a mistake. Or maybe your hillbilly friends will turn on you and rat you out.”

  “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Justice loves a rat. I’m surprised you don’t keep a few of them around, maybe carry one on your shoulder. It’d be a good look for you.”

  She made a horrid sound, a sharp cackling that I realized was laughter. “You’ll make a mistake soon. And when you do, I’ll be waiting.”

  My eyes opened, and there was only darkness. I listened to the hum of the bedside fan and thought about what I’d done and the utter lack of emotion or empathy I felt when I was pounding rounds into Fraturra. It was like I had tried to tell Grace: I killed out of necessity, but I also had to admit that I took some pleasure in it. It wasn’t like a duty. It wasn’t like I was akin to a soldier who had been ordered to clean a latrine. I chose to kill.

  I managed to drift off, slept fitfully, and climbed out of bed at five in the morning. I spent the next day cleaning the house and running errands—doing mindless tasks just to keep myself busy. I listened to newscasts all day, wondering when and if they would report Fraturra missing. That night, I drank a pint of bourbon and sat in front of the television. There was a baseball game on, but I had no idea who was playing and didn’t care. I passed out sitting on my couch around eleven o’clock, woke up at four in the morning, and staggered into the bedroom. Grace and the baby didn’t appear that night. Two hours later, at 6:00 a.m., I heard a loud knock at the front door, and I immediately thought to myself, Cops.

  I looked through the peephole on the door. Someone was covering it, so I walked into the kitchen and leaned forward over the sink. I could see the front stoop. There were four of them standing out there, all men in ill-fitting suits and sporting bad haircuts. I was right. They were definitely cops. I went back to the door and said in a loud voice, “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,” a deep, rough voice said. “Open the door.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Open the fucking door or we’ll kick it down.”

  I walked back to the bedroom and grabbed up my cell phone, turned on the video recorder.

  “Go ahead,” I said as I came back to the door. “But just so you know, you’re going to be on audio- and videotape. Got a warrant?”

  “Open the door, Street. We’re not dicking around with you.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Do you have a warrant? Because if you don’t and you kick that door in, I’ll sue all four of you and everyone else I can think of.”

  “You’re wanted for questioning,” another voice said.

  I almost laughed out loud. “Wanted for questioning? That’s nice. Wanted by whom? The TBI? And what would the TBI like to question me about?”

  “We’ll talk about it at our place.”

  “No, we won’t,” I said. “I don’t want to be questioned by you or anyone else. Even if you had a warrant, which you obviously don’t, I wouldn’t talk to you. I have this constitutional right to remain silent. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  “We have reason to believe that you may be holding someone against their will in your apartment,” the first voice said.

  “Holding someone against their will?” I said. “Are you kidding? Don’t take offense if I start laughing.

  “Listen, guys, the intimidation thing didn’t work, okay? It isn’t going to work. I’ve been there, done that many times. And if you really had evidence that I was holding someone against their will, you would’ve already kicked the door in. You also would have brought a warrant and a tactical team. So just go on back to your office and tell your supervisor I wouldn’t let you in and wouldn’t talk to you. I’m going back to bed now. I have a headache.”

  “Morris isn’t going to let you get away with this,” the rough voice said.

  “Get away with what?”

  “You know damned good and well what I’m talking about.”

  And that’s when I decided to drop it on them. Granny’s suggestion. I knew it would freak them out, and I knew I’d get a kick out of it.

  “Morris is up for reelection in November,” I said through the door. “You guys go tell him he’s finished. Tell him Darren Street is going to be the new district attorney general in Knox County, Tennessee.”

  I could almost feel the air being sucked through the door as I turned, walked into my bedroom, and closed the door behind me. I sat down on the bed and began to smile. I wished I could have seen the looks on the cops’ faces when I said it. And seeing the look on Stephen Morris’s face when they told him? That would have been priceless.

  But as far-fetched as Granny’s idea may have seemed at first, the more I thought about it, the more it appealed to me. I actually had some things going in my favor. Morris was smug, not well liked, and a lot of people thought he’d done a lousy job as the district attorney, including me. I’d had much more press than he had, and much of it was extremely sympathetic. I’d been wrongly convicted of a murder and managed to get myself vindicated. My mother had been murdered. My girlfriend and baby had recently died in what most people thought was an unavoidable medical tragedy. Practically everyone—or at least practically every potential voter in the county—had heard my name on television or read about me in a newspaper. And the thought of actually beating Morris and taking his job, making him experience the humiliation of being rejected by voters in his own county, was appealing. I’d read stories about how emotionally and psychologically devastating political losses can be to candidates. It occurred to me that beating him might even be better than putting a bullet in his brain.

  On the other hand, the only time I’d been active politically was during Morris’s campaign when he took down Ben Clancy. I’d done a lot of grunt work during that campaign, but I didn’t really know anything about how to play the
game. I had no idea how to run a campaign. I had no idea how to organize. I had no idea where to even start. And I didn’t have a ton of money.

  Still, I thought, stranger things have happened. The district attorney general was arguably the most powerful law enforcement officer in the district. The only people in law enforcement close to rivaling him were judges and the sheriff, because they were also elected, but if a judge or a sheriff told an elected district attorney to do something and he didn’t want to do it, he could tell them to go piss up a rope.

  Why not give it a shot? I knew I might take a beating in the press if the cops started feeding them stories that I was suspected in a bunch of murders, but the natural response to that would be: “Is that right? Why haven’t they arrested me? Do they have a single shred of evidence?” It could backfire on them and put the cops in a terribly uncomfortable position, and it could backfire on Morris and make him appear vindictive and inept.

  So again, why not try? I’d been bitching and complaining about the system screwing me for years. Why not become a powerful part of the system and see what happened? I didn’t know exactly what Granny wanted in exchange for helping me get elected, and I didn’t know how she planned to pull it off, but I was willing to give it a shot. Hell, I might even be able to do some good and start redeeming myself for all the killing I’d done. But if not, I’d just raise some hell and, like Granny said, have some fun.

  I lay back on my pillow and stared up at the ceiling, a smile on my face.

  “You’re crazy,” I said to the ceiling. “You belong in a loony bin.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Eugene and Ronnie Tipton were brothers, both roughly ten years older than I was. They bore the look of men who had seen more than their share of pain in their lives. They appeared tired, but they were tough, independent men, far from defeated by tragedy and the lack of opportunity typical of so many of the people who lived in the mountains around Knoxville, Gatlinburg, Sevierville, and Pigeon Forge.