“I don’t see your client,” he said. “Have you had any contact with him?”
I had to face Judge Most’s withering stare and explain to him what had happened. I was the least interesting man in the world, he stopped me after a sentence.
“So, you didn’t call your client before court?” he asked.
“Your honor, I was busy.”
Busy was the wrong word. He didn’t care that I was reunited with my son, didn’t care that I had two cases over the last few days. He didn’t care about any excuse. I was so busy thinking about being a father I wasn’t being a lawyer. Instead of taking my kid shopping and hiking, I should have been on the phone with my client.
“Busy?” he asked. “As an attorney you should never be too busy to zealously represent your client. You’re personally responsible for all costs of the trial!”
“Personally? But this is a court appointed case, I’m only getting a few hundred for this.”
“How much you get paid is immaterial,” he said. “It’s what you’ve cost taxpayers who have already paid for a jury, and for expert witnesses to be flown in from Australia and God knows where else.”
“How much did I cost the taxpayers?”
He took out a notepad and an old-school calculator, that also sported the Caldera Academy seal. The judge explained the cost of mailing two notices to the one hundred potential jurors. Each potential juror would also be entitled to one hour’s pay, possibly two, at minimum wage, which would be several hundred dollars. Finally, the state had flown in DNA and drug recognition experts all the way from the Australian lab, as this “counterfeit Crotaladone” was a special kind of drug. The state had also flown in their spouses.
My client had run, but I was left holding the bag.
The prosecutor, Jane Dark, threw salt in the wounds. She opened her computer as if opening a trap door. I noticed the Shoftim logo on her screen. I vaguely remembered that Luna’s old company, Dragon Moon, had been developing a court look-up system on steroids, but it had never been released. Or had it?
“Your honor, it is my understanding that Mr. Shepard has had two unfortunate incidents in the last few days in his other matters in New Mexico.” She already had all the raw data from the last two courts right in front of her via Shoftim. “We will be asking for disciplinary sanctions.”
“Your honor,” I protested. “It was my client who ran, not me.”
“It was your duty to make sure he was here. It is not my issue or Miss Dark’s issue, or even your client’s issue. You are the lawyer. You are the grown-up.”
“I thought he was in custody. He didn’t tell me he had bonded out. I can’t read minds!”
“Maybe you should find someone who can.”
Where was Marley when I needed him?
The judge looked at a calculator one more time, double-checking how much I would have to pay the State of New Mexico. One thing was for sure, the new Cratercross video game on the latest game console was not going to be in Marley’s stocking. There would be no feliz navidad or even a feliz dia laboral.
“I’m going to take this under advisement,” the judge said. “We will forward this up to the New Mexico Supreme Court to let them decide on appropriate sanctions.”
Let the New Mexico Supreme Court decide on sanctions? Could a judge do that?
That might just be a nasty write-up in the Bar bulletin. I sure hoped it wasn’t anything worse than that.
I slunk away, glad that I had the gray tie that blended in with my gray suit. Could this day get any worse?
After the judge went back into the courtroom he excused the hundred jurors. “The defense attorney,” he said in that beautiful voice, “failed to secure his client’s presence here today.”
The jury murmured their disappointment.
Marley and I sat alone in the courtroom after everyone left. After a short time, Marley took a phone call on his cell. “Mom wants me to come home right now. Can you drive me to the spaceport?”
“Does she want to revoke my joint custody because I am such a lousy lawyer?”
Marley’s silence spoke volumes.
• • •
It was during the heat of the day when we left Cruces, 108 degrees, with the heat coming from the hot tar on the roadway. Perhaps it was Fahrenheit 451, and I worried about the files in the trunk bursting into flame.
I wasn’t the Lincoln Lawyer. I was the Loser Lawyer. Because of the construction, we had to go back to Exit Zero again to get back onto the interstate, northbound. I looked over at my son, he hadn’t touched the file, hadn’t really used any psychic gifts to warn me of this impending disaster. Did he want me to lose?
As we sat in the Lincoln in the traffic, he grabbed my arm. “I’ve got the Marley official question for you. Why didn’t you fight harder?”
“For my clients?”
“No. Why didn’t you fight harder for me?”
“When I got the letter on that nice stationary from the solicitor from some international law firm based in London claiming that Luna wanted no contact, I got intimidated. I could barely understand the British legalese. Then came the thirty-page document with a yellow-post-it for the signature page at the end and faxed it back. I signed it without reading it. I’m not a lawyer in those international courts, I’m a defendant. I might as well be one of my own clients signing his life away.”
“Couldn’t you get a real lawyer to help you out?”
I ignored the tone of his voice. “There is no breakdown docket for divorces, by that I mean I wouldn’t get appointed a free lawyer for an international case. I couldn’t afford one over there, so I just signed the papers without reading all thirty pages. Your mother is smarter than I am. I was just a struggling lawyer and she had just married a knight, or whatever he was. I couldn’t compete with that. I thought you’d be better off without me.”
“Weren’t there hearings?”
“The hearings were in India, I waived my appearance on the form because I couldn’t afford to go. I then had to sign some papers at local courthouse in front of Judge Comanche where the other side’s attorneys appeared by Skype and that was it.”
I had signed away the rights to my son as if pleading no contest to a speeding ticket and agreeing to a deferred sentence. How many times had I done that for my clients? How many times had I done that for myself? My life was one big no contest plea, but it was a feeling of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that surged through my body. I wiped a tear away from my eye.
He didn’t say anything for the next few moments. I had missed most of his life because of that no contest plea. I had signed no contest to a life sentence, his life.
“Can you ever forgive me?” I asked.
“Will you be there for me from now on?”
Maybe it was being at the crossroads, but it was time to make a stand, there on the northbound off ramp to I-25. “I won’t back down again. I will fight for you, and I’ll never let you go.”
I looked at my phone and noticed that Luna had called, but we had missed it.
Chapter 16
Beltway to Beelzebub
It stayed hot as we headed north. A border patrol check point, twenty miles up the interstate, and fifty miles from the border, was unavoidable. Orange cones on the interstate directed us off the road and to pass through.
“Do we have to stop here?” Marley asked. “I want to get home.”
“Those guys have dogs and guns,” I said. “We have to stop.”
I gave Marley the look that meant calm down, but then my phone rang. It was Felix Feliz. He was not happy. He had been picked up in El Paso, Texas and was in the maximum security Federal prison north of town, the one next to the Wet n’ Wild Waterworld. Seeing a waterpark out the bulletproof jail window must make it far worse. Feliz had some kind of Federal fugitive hold now and blamed me for everything.
&nb
sp; “Can you get me out like right now?” he asked.
“The Cruces judge must sign off on conditions of release to cancel the warrant before the Federal judge even looks at it. I’m not Houdini here.”
“Who?”
I then had to explain that he could stay another thirty days in a Texas jail before New Mexico extradited him, picked him up, and brought him to court here.
“Thirty days is like thirty years!” He told me it was all my fault and threw a few “but you saids” at me. Apparently, he believed that once he bonded out, he no longer had to go to court for trial. He explained that his Las Cruces cellmate told him if he didn’t show the case would be dropped, and he had another friend who said the case should have been dismissed on speedy trial grounds, even though he had been arrested on another warrant. I couldn’t keep track of all his cellmate friends who seemed to know so much about the law, despite being in jail.
“Any of your friends happen to be lawyers?”
He kept going on about how I had ruined his life. He even mentioned that he heard of “some dude” who was accused of kidnapping a stripper in Albuquerque and got off, and how unfair it was that he was stuck while that other defendant had walked on far worse charges.
“What was the guy’s name? The kidnapper?”
“Sam Barlow?” he said. “Something like that. Then there was this truck driver who had cases all over New Mexico and some lawyer got all of his cases dismissed.”
“Those were all my cases,” I said.
Feliz was not very feliz. He kept ranting about other people who didn’t have to go to jail when there was a mistake on their paperwork. Whatever.
As I tried to stay patient on the phone, Marley grew more frustrated as we inched toward the border patrol checkpoint. I didn’t know if they could scan phone calls at this border patrol checkpoint but yelling at an absconding drug dealer could be reasonable articulable suspicion for law enforcement to do a body cavity search of both my son and myself.
After twenty minutes, and minimal progress though the check point, I hung up in rage just as we got to the agent. Then I opened the window to the heat, which was intensified by the exhaust of all the cars around us.
His dog started sniffing around the Lincoln, as if he smelled something dishonest in the car named after Honest Abe. Was my proximity to defendants at the courthouse earlier in the day sparking his interest? I coughed, and the dog alerted, coming closer.
“What country are you from?” the agent asked.
“United States of America.” I said with pride.
“And the boy?”
“Jakku,” Marley said, referring to Rey’s home planet in The Force Awakens. “But I have twin citizenship—I also come from Tatooine where I’m a nerf herder.”
The dog barked at the scent of nerf, well, the scent of fear. My fear. I looked the patrolmen in the eye. “My son is kidding. We are American citizens.”
I didn’t have his paperwork. Marley had been adopted by an Englishman in India, but then un-adopted. He was born in the US, to US citizens, but I didn’t have his birth certificate to prove that.
“He really is an American,” I said.
The patrolmen looked at us and the dog kept barking. Marley giggled. I told bad jokes, but there was a time and a place for everything. In front of a border patrol officer and his dog was neither the time nor the place. The dog had now gone around to Marley’s window.
Could the dog smell a skin-walker?
“Tell the nice officer and his nice dog that you’re an American,” I said to Marley. This felt like a test of my advocacy skills as a lawyer and as a father.
The dog opened his mouth, displaying a scary set of teeth. Marley waited a moment, as if contemplating the funniest answer. Would he go with a country from Game of Thrones, Star Wars or God forbid, the last crater from Cratercross World?
“American,” Marley said at last. I was never so happy to hear his New York accent.
The dog nodded and alerted on the next car. Did Marley use “the force” on the dog? I would never know. The guard waved us through, but both he and the dog kept their eyes on us. I heard one last bark. I turned around, thick black smoke came from the station. Had Marley started a fire? The smoke was out within seconds. Probably just a car radiator overheating, right?
“You’ve got to be cool during something like that!” I said.
“I tried,” he said. “It’s hard to be cool.”
“Try harder!”
We had done so well together earlier, but the checkpoint and the dog had clearly rattled him. The whole day had rattled him. Time for some tough love.
“You have to act like an adult when you’re in those situations.”
He said nothing. Would he take it out on me when we went back to his mom?
The back road to the spaceport wasn’t the Highway to Hell, more like the alternate route, the Beltway to Beelzebub. It wasn’t even paved. Other than a few increasingly isolated ranches, nothing was out here. It was windier up here, though. A hot wind tried to penetrate the windows.
Up ahead we saw various warehouses for the spaceport rising from the desert floor. No one manned the opened entrance gate. There was a lot of construction going on, so it felt more like a gritty rebel base in a Star Wars film than Cape Canaveral. The only thing going faster than the speed of sound were the tumbleweeds. With its dusty architecture and dustier spacecraft, this was Jakku adjacent for real.
I looked at Marley, who stared at the desert. I couldn’t read his face, so I had a moment of panic. Our new father-son relationship was in his hands. Did he want me to continue to be part of his life?
After a few missed turns in the desert, we finally found a collection of buildings and runways. There were more runways than silos, or whatever they called rocket launchers.
The main terminal was low to the ground and looked more like a turtle than Turtleback Mountain did. Then again, wasn’t a turtle in the desert a tortoise?
Several private and military contractors leased space here. Some must be fly-by night companies that somehow had convinced venture capitalists they had a business plan, along with a flight plan. Luna’s company, Dragon Moon, was one of the latter, even though their launches happened during the day.
A hand-written sign directed us to the Dragon Moon facility, which looked like the severed limb of the big tortoise. The major players here had the big hangars, while Dragon Moon’s facility was barely the size of a small high school gym.
We parked in the dirt lot in front of big hangar doors. This hangar felt like a half-abandoned military air force base in the Middle East after the best troops had left for their next invasion. Marley didn’t say anything. He was clearly nervous about seeing his mother. I wasn’t sure why.
We didn’t have to show a keycard to get inside; I just pulled open a sliding garage door. The inside of the hangar was spartan, if the Spartans had lasted long enough for space travel. Their rocket (or part of a rocket, I had no way of really knowing) had markings in Cyrillic with Dragon Moon, Shiva Petrochemical, Wagatsuma Conglomerate, and a half-dozen smaller logo stickers on it. This rocket could be entered in a NASCAR race.
Apparently, Dragon Moon didn’t make the rocket, or even the satellite. They bought it online, maybe from Amazon. Dragon Moon just programmed the satellite that went into it. The rocket was on a narrow train track that would take it to the launch site.
While a few people checked the rocket, most of the technicians dressed in white jumpsuits gathered around the black satellite on the other side of a wall of glass in a “clean room.” The satellite was the size of a beach ball. I could picture astronauts versus aliens in beach volleyball up on the moon, on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.
I was surprised to see Dew there in a lab coat, outside the glass. She was staring at a tablet computer that she held firmly in her left hand. Her face
was now clear of piercings. Which was the real Dew? She probably didn’t even know.
Luna stood next to her in a black business suit with sensible blue shoes. She looked over the shoulders of the techs as they made some adjustment. She nodded at them through the glass, but didn’t say a word. If she didn’t know what she was doing, she sure didn’t show it.
I recognized one of the engineers inside the “clean room” by his name tag. Dr. Yu, formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory, was supervising up close. He was a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon, and by all rights should be the one in charge here.
When Luna saw Marley, she launched herself toward us faster than the speed of sound. “Marley, how did you get along with your dad?” she asked in her judge voice.
It was time for Marley’s expert opinion on whether I should have visitation, custody, or whether I should even be in his life. I looked down at the floor. What would he say? Had I blown it by yelling at him at the check point? Was the fire there another warning sign?
I felt a slight surge of electricity pass through my body, as if I was getting a psychic scan at the TSA. I tried to convey my love for my son. Marley didn’t even hesitate. “I loved being with my dad. I learned so much, and I want to be a rattlesnake lawyer just like him.”
“You want to be a lawyer who screws up paperwork and doesn’t check to make sure his clients are there for a jury trial?”
“He tries. He really tries,” Marley said. “And once he’s in the courtroom he’s as good as anyone.”
“The problems come when he’s out of court,” Luna said. “Dan, let’s go to my office. Denise, where the hell are you?”
Denise, wearing a red Dragon Moon jump suit, appeared out of nowhere. She led Marley out to look at the rockets of the real companies. As planes flew overhead, Marley shot them down with his imaginary cratercross.
Rattlesnake & Son Page 14
