Jack Daniels and Associates: Snake Wine

by Bernard Schaffer

  "You're still short," Ceparullo said. The deputy reached behind his gun belt to remove a set of handcuffs.

  "Come on, your honor," Roth whined.

  Jack turned in her seat to search the audience for friendly faces. She saw two uniformed cops and waved them over. They came up with a combined total of sixty-three dollars and seventy two cents.

  It wasn't enough.

  The deputy said, "Turn around and put your hands behind your back, sir."

  Roth whimpered, doing as he did as he was told and the judge said, "Let this be a lesson to you and every other attorney in this county. When this court gives you an instruction, it expects it to be followed. You can be released when someone from your office brings you the rest of the money."

  Judge Ceparullo reached for his gavel and Joel looked down at Alan Davidson. Davidson had been quietly smiling the entire time as the events unfolded, a happy spectator. Roth groaned and said, "Alan, can you please help me out?"

  "You want me to help you out?" Davidson smirked.

  "Yes. As a professional courtesy. Please."

  "Will you let me win?" Davidson said.

  "No. But I promise that when I beat you, I'll only humiliate you a little instead of a lot."

  Their eyes met and Davidson sighed as he reached into his pocket and said, "Your honor, I've got the rest of it as a professional courtesy to the prosecutor here." He held up the money toward the deputy and said, "Anyway, I think the court has suffered enough shenanigans as a result of this trial already, don't you agree?"

  "Quite," the judge said.

  The deputy un cuffed Joel Roth, who rubbed his wrists and inspected the red marks ringed around them, wincing as he sat down in his seat.

  Keenan Marvin leaned forward in his chair from across the aisle and said, "Hurts, don't it?"

  Mr. Ford was back on the stand, in full view of the jury, as Alan Davidson finished questioning him about the particulars of the incident. "Just to summarize, Mr. Ford, for the benefit of the jury, can you please state for the record whether or not the bullet holes found in the walls and in the bodies of the deceased victims can accurately be attributed to a Glock nine millimeter model nineteen?"

  Ford leaned forward in the podium, turned to face the jury, and said, "No, it cannot. Not with any degree of scientific accuracy or certainty."

  "Is it fair then to say that the bullet holes could have been made by any nine millimeter?"

  "Yes, that is correct."

  Davidson turned to glance at Joel Roth, eyeing him carefully. Roth had been uncharacteristically silent during Mr. Ford's testimony. In fact, he hadn't raised a single objection. "Your honor, I have no more questions for this witness."

  Judge Ceparullo waited for Alan Davidson to cross the aisle and then looked at the prosecutor. "Do you have any cross-examination, counselor?"

  "I do, sir."

  "You may proceed."

  Joel Roth stood up and walked around the table, buttoning his suit coat as he came to stand before the jury. "Mr. Ford, yesterday I asked you how many cases you had worked where you examined a Glock nine millimeter model nineteen, do you remember?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "And you said, five hundred, true?"

  "I said that I believed it was five hundred, give or take."

  "And when I asked if you could back up your claim you said you could, that you were certain of it. And then today, you testified as an expert on behalf of Keenan Marvin and said we could not prove his gun was the one used to kill both victims."

  "Yes, I did say that," Ford replied.

  "Did you say it with the same degree of certainty?" Roth asked.

  Ford shrugged and said, "There's really only two degrees of certainty, I suppose. You either are or you aren't."

  Joel Roth nodded and raised his hand in the air and snapped his fingers over his shoulder like a magician giving a signal to his assistant. The courtroom doors opened and three young women came through, each carrying boxes of the same files Ford had delivered the day before. Joel thanked the women as they deposited the boxes on the prosecutor's table and he waited for them to leave before he turned again to look at the witness. "Then can you please tell the jury why you lied about how many cases you'd examined?"

  "Excuse me?" Ford said indignantly.

  Roth laid his hand over the top of one of the boxes and said, "I went through all these last night. In fact, I stayed up until three in the morning and slept through my alarm, just so I could be certain. But in every single one of the boxes on this table are files and files of cases where you examined a Glock seventeen. Not a nineteen. Can you explain that?"

  The faces on the men and women sitting in the jury panel displayed varying expressions of surprise, from outright shock to a single cocked eyebrow. Mr. Ford shifted nervously in his chair and sputtered, "Well, that's an honest mistake, see. They're extremely similar weapons, and both nine millimeters, and it hardly makes any difference, really. That shouldn't affect anything."

  "Shouldn't?" Roth said sharply.

  "They're similar enough to provide an accurate profile."

  "I asked you if you were certain, and you said there were two degrees of certainty, Mr. Ford. Certain or not. Similarity didn't come into it!"

  Alan Davidson called out several objections as the witness and prosecutor both shouted over one another, all of them raising their voices loud enough that Judge Ceparullo finally smacked his gavel and said, "Order."

  When everyone fell silent, Ceparullo looked at Joel Roth and said, "Do you have any further questions for this witness?"

  "No, your honor."

  The judge looked at Alan Davidson, "Do you have any redirect?"

  "No, your honor," Davidson said, glaring at the flustered-looking witness. "But I would like him to wait outside for me until I have a moment to speak with him."

  "I am sure you would," Ceparullo said. He dismissed the witness and the jury, then waited until they filed past him and out of the room before he loosened his tie and took a deep breath. He looked at Alan Davidson, "Your next witness is an expert on blood spatter, correct?"

  "Yes, your honor."

  Judge Ceparullo looked at Joel Roth, "And since your little gambit paid off, I'm assuming you are going to want to review all the cases this witness claims to have examined?"

  Joel looked sideways at Jack Daniels and she muttered, "You can bet your sweet patootie."

  The judge dismissed them early for the weekend. He made it a point of apologizing to the jury, but was equal in his blame of both the prosecutor for being lamentably overzealous and of the defense for not better qualifying its experts. All the jurors heard were that they were being let out early on a Friday. A few of them even smiled.

  As Joel Roth followed Jack out to her car, he said, "I don't suppose you want to get together over the weekend and help me look through those cases, right? I about used up all my favors last night making everybody in the office stay late."

  "I'd love to, Joel, but I can't. I have too much other work to do."

  He tried not to look disappointed. "Did you ever hear from Herb Benedict?" he asked. "Nobody has seen him in the witness room. I checked. He's technically in violation of his subpoena."

  Jack grabbed her keys out of her pocket and said, "I'll see you Monday morning, Joel. Get some rest. You look tired."

  "I sleep better next to someone," he said quickly, before she could walk away. "Maybe you would too."

  Jack looked back at him and shook her head, "You are persistent. I'll give you that much."

  "When it's a worthy cause, yeah."

  "I’m not a worthy cause, Joel. Trust me."

  Whiskey?

  No, too typical, she thought.

  Rum, then?

  She was out of Coke.

  She walked into the wine section and started to browse. There were signs for French wine, South American wine, dessert wine, fruit wines, chilled white wines, saki, and Napa Valley specials. The aisle was crowded with couples who all stoo
d gazing at individual bottles with their arms draped around one another, like they were envisioning the greatest of all evenings spent in front of a fireplace while snow lightly drifted down the mountainside.

  Bastards, Jack thought. She went back to the whiskey.

  The store was crowded, even for a Friday night, which meant the cops were going to be unusually busy. She wasn't on call because of the trial, and she had nowhere to be on Saturday. Passing out from being drunk is one way to fall asleep, she decided, and picked up a bottle of Jameson's. She got into the line and reached into her pocket for her cash, only to realize with sudden horror that she'd never turned her phone back on.

  Jack immediately put the bottle on the counter and whipped out her phone, pressing in the power button so rapidly it came on and shut off twice before she finally forced herself to stop and wait for it to cycle. The clerk swept the bottle of Jameson's under his scanner and told her how much it was. Jack absent-mindedly handed him a twenty and didn't pay any attention to how much he gave her in change.

  There were two voicemails.

  "Jack, it's Phillips. The Crime Scene Unit called looking for you. I told them you were in court."

  "Shit, oh shit," Jack muttered.

  The next message was a woman's voice. "Lieutenant Daniels? This is Beth Armstrong from CSU. I analyzed your cellphone. We found something."

  Jack ran all the way up to the front door of the Crime Scene Unit, stopping to catch her breath in the lobby before she knocked on the intake window. It was the same guy from the night before, wearing the same 'what now' expression. "I'm here to see Beth Armstrong," Jack huffed.

  "I'll see if she's still in."

  Several minutes later, the front door buzzed and Jack pulled the handle, letting herself in. A heavyset, short woman with spiky black hair came walking down the hall in a white overcoat. "Lieutenant Daniels?"

  "Yes," Jack nodded. "You said you found something on the cellphone?"

  Armstrong smiled strangely and said, "You can say that again."

  "Well?" Jack said, losing her patience. "Well?"

  Armstrong waved her hand for Jack to follow her and said, "Let me show you something."

  Jack followed the woman into one of the lab rooms where there were a series of images displayed on a whiteboard with multiple hand-drawn notes and symbols scribbled around it. One of the images was a tall blue and red coil of DNA marked Ophiophagus Hannah.

  Armstrong stopped in front of that picture and tapped it with a proud smile. "It took a bit of doing, but this is what I found on your cellphone."

  Jack squinted at the twisting genetic strands and the name and said, "Is this supposed to mean something to me?"

  Armstrong walked over to the desk and slid on a pair of rubber gloves before she picked up a glass microscope slide and held it up to the light. "This was on your phone. It was in powder form and cut with a few other substances, but this is the main ingredient, right here."

  Jack leaned forward to see it and said, "What is it?"

  "Don't get too close and don't touch it," Armstrong said. "Ophiophagus Hannah is toxic even in this small of a dose."

  "Look, not for nothing, but can we skip the biology lecture. What is Oreo Hannah Montana, or whatever you call it?"

  "King cobra. The most poisonous snake in the world. Specifically, this is the powdered form of the king cobra's venom."

  Jack turned from the slide to look back at the diagram on the wall, thoughts turning in her head so quickly that she felt like the room was swaying. "The rat," Jack whispered. "When I found the phone a rat licked the surface and went into some sort of convulsion."

  "I'm not surprised," Armstrong said. "For something that small, this amount would be almost instantly fatal. For larger animals, it has various effects."

  "But…why the hell would powdered cobra venom be on Herb's phone?"

  "Was he sick?" Armstrong said.

  "Not that I know of? He's a big guy, so I'm sure he's not in the best of health. What does that have to do with anything?"

  Armstrong shrugged and said, "Believe it or not, powdered cobra venom is a homeopathic drug used in many parts of the world. People use it to prevent kidney failure, treat addiction, all sorts of things."

  "I thought the whole point of venom was that it killed you," Jack said.

  "It normally has to be injected subcutaneously. That means under the skin."

  "I know what that means," Jack said. "So a snake has to bite you for it to really take effect."

  "Exactly. In powder form, it could be for a dozen different beneficial things. They think it might even kill cancer cells or act as a pain blocker."

  "None of this makes sense," Jack said. "If Herb was sick, he would have told me. We have the best health insurance plan money can buy. Why the hell would he use some third-world mumbo jumbo instead?"

  "Who knows? Maybe he doesn't trust modern medicine." She raised the slide into the light and said, "Most people import it from India, but this stuff is far too potent. It hasn't been cut with any of the normal preservatives. Whoever made this milked a snake directly."

  Jack took a deep breath, trying to slow things down so she could get a better look at them. "This whole thing just gets weirder and weirder. What else can powdered venom do?"

  "No one really knows," Armstrong said. "I can tell you this much. It depends on the size of the dose and the size of the person ingesting it. The bigger you are, the less chance you have of it being fatal."

  Jack sighed and said, "Well, I don't think that's going to be an issue."

  8.

  He came to slowly.

  His chest bubbled up a deep, rumbling cough from the pit of his enormous belly. The sound of wheezing filled his ears like someone had cupped their hands over them, the same way children do when they want to hear the ocean.

  Herb Benedict's head dropped down to his chest again, and he groaned, letting a mouthful of stale spittle slip over his chin. He spat that out in disgust and listened to it hit something with a sharp, plinking sound.

  He was blindfolded.

  A sopping wet piece of cloth was bound tight around his face, letting only the slightest amount of light inside from the fabric's edges.

  He moved and his shoulders screamed in agony.

  Both his arms were raised over his head and bound together at the wrists. He was high enough above the ground that only the edges of his toenails scraped the smooth, unknown surface below. All of his weight was on his shoulders and his upper back. He could feel the tight steel claws of the handcuffs around his wrists ruining the nerves in his hands, making them so numb they felt dead.

  Pain.

  Pain was a bright flaring burst of light that helped yank him out of his stupor, while simultaneously punishing him terribly. The handcuffs were hooked through the center on something. He moved again, listening to them scrape the metal of whatever they were hooked onto.

  He tried to speak, but his mouth had not moved in so long the words came out as one long, slurred garble. He groaned until someone tapped on whatever he was inside of and the sound filled the chamber surrounding him, echoing in his ears. It sounded like glass.

  The voice that followed was muffled and sounded far away. "Are you awake already? My, my, you must be strong."

  Herb tried to speak but his mouth was too dry. He could not get his lips wet with his tongue. It felt like a dead snail sliding over barren desert. He shook his head up and down slightly and groaned more.

  "Lift your head up," the voice said.

  Herb heard more of the plinking sounds, and then footfalls. Things were becoming clearer now. Every noise seemed louder than it should have been, probably accentuated by his lack of vision, he thought. As he came to, his thoughts clarified, and with them came the sudden, wretched panic that he'd been taken. Captured by someone he didn't know and couldn't remember. The other senses improve when you lose one of them, he thought.

  Isn't that what they say? How long does that take to kick in? How can I
use it to help? Oh God, where the hell am I?

  "I said, look up!" the voice shouted.

  Herb lifted his head and a bucket of cold water slapped him in the face, filling his nose and open mouth until he gagged and vomited it back up.

  "Again!"

  He tried to raise his head again and the water splashed him once more. This time he braced himself and leaned forward, catching as much of it as he could as it ran down his face and leaked onto his lips. He greedily swabbed his tongue around his lips and chin, trying to get as many of the droplets into his mouth as he could. The process helped him clarify his thoughts, like a man tossed into the sea by a shipwreck, trying to gather as many scraps and planks as he could to form a raft.

  Cold liquid ran down his arms and sides and waist and thighs, and Herb realized he was naked.

  Whoever had done this to him had stripped him while he was unconscious. He lunged forward in outrage, swinging by the hook until his feet cracked into whatever he was inside of. It was hard as hell and smooth as glass, but just far away enough that he could not get a good foothold on it. The forward movement made his right shoulder socket pop and he stopped moving, afraid that it was about to dislocate.

  His toes made splashing sounds now and he lowered his head and tried to take at least one good breath. He'd always heard that people who'd been crucified died from asphyxiation. It was the enormous pressure of their body being supported from the shoulders that killed them. Breathing became impossible, the lungs unable to inflate. Herb stuck his toes downwards on the floor, trying to push himself up enough to take the pressure off his chest.

  Just enough, he told himself. Just enough for one good breath and I'll worry about the rest later.

  He strained to straighten his legs as much as he could and was able to gulp the air just once, but that was enough. It was a momentary respite and he savored it, taking the time to lick his lips more and gather up the remaining water droplets.

  That was when he realized it wasn't water at all. It was wine.

  But the wine was cold and sweet, so he drank as much of it as he could, the dry and shriveled cells of his body craving hydration. "More," he gasped. "More!"