The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.

  Except Knox Hilliard.

  “Get CSU up here to clean this up,” he muttered as he stuffed the gun in his waistband at his back, then stepped nonchalantly over the thug’s corpse. “Just what I need—more feds and more paperwork. You all right, Hicks?”

  Hicks was not all right; he trembled and he could barely stand. “Oh, yeah,” he said on a forced chuckle, toughing it out. “I’m fine.”

  Knox Hilliard nodded once, curtly, then turned on his heel before stopping abruptly when his gaze met Justice’s. She knew terror shone from her eyes and she knew she should suppress it, because fear could be smelled. She couldn’t look away from him, even though she wanted to. She wanted to run away from the horrifying reality of what she had just witnessed.

  I should’ve googled.

  “Who the hell are you?” he barked, making Justice jump out of her skin yet again. She blinked and began to shake as she clutched her messenger bag to her chest, glad now that he didn’t remember her.

  Justice struggled not to look past him at all the blood and shredded flesh. Her tongue and throat were frozen and all she could manage was an “Um—”

  “Justice McKinley,” Mr. Cipriani answered calmly, as if that should say everything—because it should have.

  “So? Who is she? Why is she here?”

  “She’s the girl you told me to interview, remember?”

  He cocked one hip and planted his hand on it. He swiped the other hand down his face. “Shit,” he muttered as if he were merely disgruntled. “Now I have to hire her.”

  That moved Justice’s vocal cords immediately. “No! No, that’s all right. I’ll go.” She fairly leaped out of her chair, her briefcase still plastered to her chest and turned, but froze when he spoke.

  “Sit. Down.”

  She did, but she couldn’t look at him.

  “Well, Miss McKinley, welcome to the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office. I’m Knox Hilliard, your new boss. May I assume you know how to keep your mouth shut?”

  Justice closed her eyes and a tear escaped.

  “I asked you a question.”

  You have to walk barefoot through fire on broken glass.

  “Yes,” she choked.

  “Good. I expect to see your ass planted in that chair over there at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. If I have to come looking for you—and I will—I will be very pissed off. Got that?”

  She gulped. “Yes.”

  “And heaven help you if you aren’t a decent lawyer.”

  * * * * *

  Justice wanted to cry when she looked at her watch: 8:30 and she couldn’t budge the last lug nut on her flat tire. An enormous dark green SUV pulled up behind her on the shoulder on I-29 and he got out. She flinched when she heard the door slam.

  “Miss McKinley.”

  Her eyes closed and she choked back a terrified sob when she heard Knox Hilliard’s voice behind her. Would he remain angry once he saw predicament? She said nothing as she went on trying to loosen the stubborn thing. She felt him sit on his haunches beside her and stiffened at the current of electricity that shot through her when his knee made brief contact with her hip. Cars whizzed past them at eighty miles an hour and at the moment, Justice imagined that death wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  “Need some help?”

  Justice didn’t respond to his facetious question. What could she say to a man she’d seen kill another man? “Go away” was not a conversational option.

  She gave the tire iron another good yank and heard the rusty parts scrape together as the nut loosened. Expertly, she held the iron in one hand and spun it so fast it blurred. Almost immediately the lug dropped onto the ground, and she put it with the others.

  “I’m impressed,” he said after a second, while Justice arose. He rose, too, and she dusted off her dress.

  “I don’t care,” Justice muttered, almost to herself. She hated his superciliousness after what had happened the day before, but she didn’t figure it mattered much if the man took a notion to kill her. Surely, this wasn’t the man who had championed her all those years ago, caressed her face with his fingers, connected with her?

  She pulled her tire off the car and turned to him. “Excuse me,” she murmured. “I need to put this in the trunk.”

  He didn’t move, regarded her with speculation. That worried her.

  “Do you mind?” she snapped, feeling reckless all of a sudden. “It’s very heavy.”

  “Give it to me.”

  She stared at him a moment and, driven by that same recklessness, she tossed it at him. He caught the tire easily but scowled at her, and she swallowed as he put it away and dusted himself off.

  Justice turned and picked up her full-size spare, put it on, quickly and efficiently put the nuts back on, tightened them, and tapped her hubcap back in place.

  “Where’d you learn how to do that so fast?” he asked as she let the car down and put her jack and tire iron neatly in the trunk.

  “I live on a farm,” she muttered as she wiped her hands on a rag. She looked down at her dress. What she wouldn’t give to be able to go home, shower, and change clothes. Fortunately, her chintz dress was busy enough to hide any smudges of dirt. Her white collar and hose were not so lucky.

  “So . . . are you saying that people who live on farms know how to change tires better than people who don’t?”

  Justice stared at him. “No, that’s not what I meant at all,” she replied in confusion.

  “Then your leap in logic doesn’t bode well for your courtroom skills.”

  She gulped at the rebuke and felt, curiously, worse than if he’d just told her step out in front of speeding traffic. “I didn’t know junior attorneys went into the courtroom at all for a while.”

  “That’s not the way I train my people, Miss McKinley. I have a staff of trial lawyers. That’s what we do—try cases. I throw my attorneys into the deep end as soon as possible and as of seven o’clock this morning, you have a stack of files on your desk that would scare most juniors and you’re due to arraign your first defendant in—” He looked at his watch. “—five minutes.”

  Justice’s eyes widened. He went on. “I wasn’t planning to hire you, but I do have a backlog of work I need to get off my other attorneys’ backs. It’s scut work—jaywalking, speeding, shoplifting, bad checks—but that’s your job now and I expect you to do it and do it well. Got that?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Good. And one more thing.” He leaned closer to her and she retreated only to be brought up short by her car door in her back. She gulped when his nose came within millimeters of hers and he braced himself against her car, one big hand on either side of her. “I hate tardiness,” he whispered. “It’s on my top ten list, right before people who turn a gun on me and expect to live.”

  Justice held her breath as he pushed himself slowly away from her. His gaze caught on her shoulder and he scowled. She didn’t—wouldn’t—flinch when he reached out a hand and attempted to scrape a speck of grease off her white collar.

  She couldn’t help her shiver.

  “Watch out, Justice,” he murmured. “Animals sense fear. Be very, very careful how you react to me because I could attack at any moment.” He looked at her head to toe, taking his time. “But then, you might like the things I’d do to you.”

  Justice gulped, fully expecting him to do something horrible to her, but he only turned and walked to back to his truck. He climbed in without another word and sped off down the highway.

  * * * * *

  55: MIDWEST FARMERS’ DAUGHTERS

  “Justice? Justice, where are you?”

  “In here.”

  Justice continued to muck out the stall even as her father invaded the gloom of the barn, but Justice didn’t stop or slow her rhythm as set by the pounding drums of Rush.

  “How was your first day at work?” he asked in a tone Justice recognized.

  “Okay, I guess,” she m
uttered, intent on forgetting about it. Forget about the cleaning crew still scrubbing the floors and walls clean of the blood. Forget about the crush of people in and out of the office before Knox had barked at her to get her ass downstairs to court and do her job. Forget about the fact that the rest of the prosecutors and county employees had simply shrugged the shooting off as if it were one of Knox Hilliard’s more minor idiosyncrasies.

  “Turn that music down. You know I can’t stand that shit.”

  Without a word, she dropped her pitchfork and stomped over to the stereo—a foot from him—to turn it off.

  “You don’t sound very happy.” He did.

  “I’m just tired, is all.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed, then?”

  That was a stupid question and she very nearly said so. “Too much to do.”

  “Suit yourself, then. I don’t care. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He cackled suddenly. “That asshole prosecutor not what you expected, huh?”

  Justice’s pitchfork halted in midair. How did he know that? It wasn’t like he paid much attention to anything about her life, other than what chores she needed to do.

  “No, he’s not,” she finally murmured before continuing with her work.

  “Look for another job.”

  “I can’t.”

  The next logical question, of course, was Well, why not?, but he wouldn’t ask it. He wanted her to fail. She could see his point of view, looking at all this work and not enough money coming in and needing her.

  He’d flip his lid if he knew about her life that was secret to him only because he didn’t pay attention.

  He didn’t know she had any “cachet” at all anywhere. He wouldn’t understand her political world or her place in it. He wouldn’t understand why the prosecutor of the second largest county in the state of Missouri had requested her endorsement of him as a senatorial candidate. He wouldn’t know why anybody would pay her money to express her opinion. He didn’t know she had an opinion about anything.

  “So what did you do today?”

  He didn’t care; he wanted to gauge how long it might be before she stopped all this lawyer foolishness and came home to stay and work. “Well,” she grunted as she tossed a pitchfork full of hay and manure onto the flatbed trailer in the middle of the barn, “I arraigned and plea bargained and reduced charges.”

  There was a long pause. “What’s all that?”

  “It’s stuff I shouldn’t be doing for another six months or so.” Not only that, but her boss hadn’t seen fit to let anyone guide her through the county’s protocols and culture, so she’d had to wing it. Some great trainer.

  “Like?”

  She stopped and sighed. He hadn’t a clue and she didn’t know how to explain it. “I just . . . I did what lawyers do, Dad.”

  “Well . . . how did you do?”

  Justice stood and thought, surprised by the question. She’d been so busy feeling sorry for herself that she hadn’t evaluated her own performance. Neither had her new boss, except to drop another stack of files on her desk and walk away without a word.

  “Okay, I guess,” she finally replied, her work pace picking back up again. “I didn’t embarrass myself in front of the judge or anything.”

  In fact, Judge Wilson, a kindly old man with half glasses perched on his nose, had only had to nudge her through a couple of rough spots and later had complimented her on her first day’s efforts.

  And only a week out of law school, yet. You listen to Knox, little lady. He’ll turn you into a fine prosecutor, just a fine litigator. He’s the best trainer in two hundred miles. Of course, he’s careful to hire bright people—that’s a lot of it. He may not say much to you at first, but don’t worry about that.

  Justice snorted. She’d pay for her boss to ignore her. There was only one reason she was in that office and that was to keep her from talking about what she’d seen him do the day before.

  If she were honest with herself—and Giselle Cox had told her explicitly that she must be honest with herself—she had to concede that what her boss had done was in no way murder, illegal, unethical, or anything else wrong.

  But he’d been so blasé about it, with no remorse, stepping over the body like nothing had happened—that rattled her badly. Yet there was no crime in that, either.

  “Well,” he finally said when Justice didn’t reply, “if you’re that unhappy, maybe you should just hang it up and come back to the farm.”

  That was his answer to everything.

  He ambled off when she didn’t bother replying. She worked in the stalls long into the night, turning up the Rush and, when she got tired of that, Nugent, Pink Floyd—things nobody her age listened to or even knew existed.

  It was almost midnight when she put her pitchfork away and got ready for bed. She opened her laptop and, for the first time that day, smiled when she read the comments made in response to one of her random glimpse-of-life blog posts:

  *

  hamlet writes:

  name that quote j- Any property that’s open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.

  JMcKinley writes:

  Neal Stephenson. That was way too easy, hamlet. I’m disappointed in you.

  hamlet writes:

  doing things the easy way doesn’t give you a sense of accomplishment - adversity is what makes life worth living - try this one: is not this the true romantic feeling—not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?

  JMcKinley writes:

  Okay, that took me a while. Tom Wolfe.

  hamlet writes:

  admit it, you googled

  JMcKinley writes:

  Busted.

  *

  Going on two years now, that particular fan arguing with her, challenging her assumptions, encouraging her and making her laugh so much she felt she knew him. And suddenly, she wished she had the courage to email him, to lay out her situation for him, see what he would advise her to do because he’d always displayed a curious wisdom.

  But no. She’d emailed him once and he hadn’t replied. No matter how much that disappointed her, she had other things to do, a gazillion other things to think about, and didn’t have time to indulge in an online . . . well, anything with individuals. As long as she could hold on to hamlet and his little game of quotes to illustrate his philosophies, she thought she’d be okay.

  She didn’t dare go through the rest of her nightly routine because then she’d feel the lack of her daydreams all that much more acutely. She knew that her days of staring mindlessly at her wall and sending herself off to slumberland by spinning images of Professor Hilliard gently, sweetly slipping into bed with her in the dead of night were over.

  The Chouteau County prosecutor had killed a man yesterday.

  And he didn’t care.

  * * * * *

  56: WALK DON’T RUN

  The following few days didn’t differ much from the first. She doggedly worked her way through the files Eric gave her, because as executive assistant prosecutor, he controlled assignments and workload. Nobody paid her much attention or even seemed to know who she was, especially Knox. He came and went, spending his days in court, as did half the staff—and that was okay with her.

  Richard Connelly, the man who didn’t wear expensive suits and who had been kind to her, was the only person who talked to her more than he absolutely had to. After he had watched her eat alone her entire first week, he had invited himself over to her desk to eat with her and tell her how the office worked.

  The staff consisted of no more than eight assistant prosecutors. Four were core staff: Thomas Hicks, the man taken hostage, was close to retirement. At thirty, Eric Cipriani, the executive assistant prosecutor and staff manager, was the youngest member of the core staff by far. Patrick Davidson, affable enough with everyone else, had not yet seen fit to speak to Justice
. And Richard had become her lifeline.

  New law school graduates filled the other four staff slots, the current attorneys in various stages of their course in the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office. It ran a bit like a medical school residency; in fact, those attorneys were actually called “residents.” They usually left around their second or third year and went on to do other things. If they wanted to stay they could, but nobody ever did.

  Three residents would leave soon; one had three years, another two, and the third a little over a year, but he was a quick study. Justice had replaced the fourth, who’d left to work for Bryce Kenard, a name she’d heard over and over again since her first week of law school. If she hadn’t wanted to work for Knox so badly and had not been tempted by the various other plum offers extended to her, she might have considered commuting to Kenard, PC after all the great things she’d heard.

  Amongst all these people, nobody said anything about her work, good or bad, so she had to assume that if she’d screwed up, somebody would’ve yelled at her by now.

  People came and went constantly: victims, witnesses, defendants; county deputies, state troopers, Kansas City police officers and detectives; defense counsel. Justice drew a lot of surprised looks, especially from the female officers and attorneys, as if she were a mirage; she supposed she could understand that, since she was the first and only female assistant prosecutor Chouteau County had ever had.

  “Why aren’t there any women here?” Justice asked Richard, low.

  “Because the sheriff is a pig. Raines,” Richard explained after he caught her puzzled look, “likes to harass anything with two X chromosomes to call her own and he’s not shy about it. He got elected during Nocek’s time, did Nocek’s dirty work, and still gets elected every cycle. Either Knox hasn’t figured out a way to get him out or doing it will just bring more heat down on his head. So . . . he doesn’t allow women in the office. He can’t control the hiring anywhere else in county government, but he can here.”