The Four-Night Run

by William Lashner

  “After a summation of the evidence by the Sentinel,” says Squirrel, “and a plea by the defense, the Inner Circle, as the elected representatives of the entire Fury membership, will vote on the defendant’s fate.”

  “What about witnesses?” says the defendant.

  There is a loud, wet intake of breath from atop the crate. “The accused has asked for witnesses,” says Squirrel. He takes off his spectacles, his tiny eyes blinking into the light as he examines the lenses before he bows his head to wipe them clean. “That seems a fair request. We’ll put it to a vote.” He replaces his spectacles and raises his voice. “Who among us thinks we need witnesses?”

  There is a dark silence.

  “Who thinks,” shouts Regina, “we know what the hell happened to our town the last four days and we don’t need no fool to tell us lies?”

  First, one voice from the circle says, “No witnesses,” and then another, and then a third, until it is a chorus of denial that surrounds the defendant in a rising pitch of hatred.

  When it quiets, Squirrel says, “The Court of the Furies has decided. We don’t need no stinking witnesses.”

  “What about due process?” asks the defendant.

  “I promise you, Stifferdeck,” says Regina, “all the process you’re due.”

  “What about the right to a lawyer?” says the defendant. “My Sixth Amendment right to counsel.”

  “The accused wants a lawyer,” says Squirrel. “We see no reason to deny him this privilege.” Squirrel breathes in loudly and laughs. “We are short bar-certified attorneys here, but the Court has chosen the next best thing for the accused. At least we got the bar part right.”

  From outside the ambit of candlelight steps a shadow, hesitantly, awkwardly, one painful step after another, until the shadow steps slowly into the light. An old woman, hiking up her filthy rags and hobbling slowly, her body stiffened like a single rheumatic joint. Her face is sunburned and lined and whiskered; the harshness of the streets covers her like a cloak. A few more painful steps and she is standing next to the defendant. She lifts her swollen hand to place it on the defendant’s shoulder.

  The defendant smiles at the old woman. “Hello, Blixen. We meet again.”

  “I’ll take care of you,” croaks the old woman. “I will. Like my own child, I will. Count on it. Yes, I will.”

  “Enough of this crap,” shouts Regina. “Let’s get it on.”

  48

  IN THE DOCK

  J.D. Scrbacek, exhausted and in pain, knowing himself innocent yet burdened with a despair that had burrowed so deep into his bones it seemed a part of him, felt, more than saw, the anger aimed at him from the circle of shadows. The fatalism that coursed through him was like a paralytic agent, stilling every muscle in his body while driving his brain into a frenzy.

  So this is what it is to be reviled, he thought as the Inner Circle prepared to decide whether he live or die. This is what it is to be hated, feared, to be deemed worthy of exclusion and death. In all my time as a criminal lawyer, I had never truly imagined the torment of being on this side of the line. And yet along with the anguish and fear, I can’t help a thrilling sense of justification. Despite every perversion of justice taught me by DeLoatch, better a life on the side of the despised than to be an instrument of hatred, a reaper of the persecution.

  For who are they who claim the right to judge me? Squirrel, the failed medical student who saved my life only so he could preside over my death? And Regina, relishing with an unseemly glee her role of prosecutor? And big Ed from the eponymous diner, acting as the foreman of this jury of the damned? A man of few words, Ed, but enough, I’m sure, to say “Guilty” and join the others in sentencing me to die. I see the stunted silhouette of Aboud, with a huge shadow standing behind him, Sergei, that wild and crazy Russian, ready to dance like a Cossack on my grave. And sitting on that crate, over there? Et tu Donnie? And beside Donnie, the woman with the glowing cigarette, must be Elisha Baltimore. And there, in the deep shadows, high on a tower of boxes, the squatting silhouette of the Nightingale, once my protector, now my prison guard. This then is the different route preached by Malloy. To form a vicious gang of vigilantes, taking no sides but their own in the great battle over the future of Crapstown. To use any means necessary to protect the interests of the unprotected against their most hardened of adversaries, among whom they count one J.D. Scrbacek.

  And on my side, who do they present as my one lifeline, my last hope, my lawyer? Blixen says she will defend me like her own child, and we know how well that turned out. They’ll probably dump my body off the very same pier that claimed her daughter, dump my body after Squirrel has taken all he wants from it, unless I can figure out a way to rebut every one of their charges.

  The lights from above narrowed onto the figure of Regina, who stood alone now in the center of the circle, her dreads a wild mane about her angry face.

  “Y’all know I didn’t think much of Malloy when first he showed his face in these parts,” she said, with the artifice of a natural dramatist. “I didn’t trust that Malloy wasn’t just out for his lonesome like ever’one else in this town. It was only after all of what he said came true that I started listening to the man some say is our prophet. And this is what he told us. That we could be more than we were. That our dreams for our home could be made true through the workings of our collective wills. That apart we are but feeble excuses for life, but that together we are near unstoppable. And he told us from the fire a leader would rise to turn dream into reality and we need to wait for such a time. And so that is our lot. To play off our enemies one against the other, to survive and wait for our day. And he also said beware the dancing fool, for he will wreak havoc and change everything. I point to J.D. Scrbacek, and I say to y’all, beware. What is he doing here? What is his purpose? We can’t just up and ask him—he’s a lawyer, every word from his lips is lies—but I tell you this: he ain’t here to help. He’s here to destroy. He is a fool for stepping into our world. Beware the dancing fool.”

  Is that what I am, a dancing fool? I didn’t bring this on myself; it came to me and I’ve reacted as best I could. From inside the tumult, it seems I’ve done pretty damn well with what I’ve been handed. I’m still alive, I found some answers, I even found something I lost long ago, something that might be love. From inside it all, I’m a goddamn hero. But here I am being called a fool and, somehow, I can’t help the suspicion that it’s not so far from the truth. What is life but something brought to us, an obstacle course in which every decision, even the most disastrous, makes perfect sense at the moment we make it? Every man is the hero of his own life, but what man, from a distance, can’t be painted the fool?

  “What do we know of this here man? That he’s a lawyer. Isn’t that enough? That he was lawyering for Caleb Breest, who has been torturing us slow all these years. Isn’t that too much? That wherever he has gone, ruin and death, they’ve followed. Back home in New Orleans, the rules was same as here: one strike, two strikes, three strikes, you’re out. I say this fool, he is out.”

  Is that why I’m going to die, condemned for the destruction that followed me like a plague? Might as well condemn Surwin’s woodchuck for running through the woods with his tail on fire. Is that justice, to shoot the innocent woodchuck? And when did being a lawyer become a capital offense? What about the great lawyers of our age: Lincoln, Cardozo, Holmes, Darrow, Marshall? I’ll hitch my star to theirs. Kill me, I’ll say, only if you would kill again the noble Lincoln. Just be sure to leave out DeLoatch. But mark, if I am to die as a lawyer, I’ll fight like one, too. My only chance is to listen to what she says—Regina, my persecutor in her black leather vest, like one of DeLoatch’s vengeful wraiths with bleeding eyes and snakes writhing from her head—hear her words and out of them use DeLoatch’s precious imagination to craft a lie I can sell to this jury, a lie big enough to save my life.

  “But what he’ll say is he is no longer Caleb Breest’s tool. What he’ll say is he himself is on the r
un. And he knows good well not a one of us wouldn’t lend a fugitive a helping hand. But is he really running? Where is his proof? His car, it blew up, but he wasn’t sitting in it when it did. Inside instead was a boy named Ethan Brummel. And his house and office burned to the ground. How convenient for him, all his records gone, any chance of digging through his papers to find his true purpose destroyed. And surprise, surprise, what do they find in the basement? Guns. Explosives. Whatever he is, he ain’t no innocent. Finally, he was shot, running. Was he shot in the kidney? In the heart? No. Shot in the fleshy part of the arm. Squirrel will tell you it was a miracle that no serious damage was done. A miracle, or else a carefully aimed self-inflicted wound whose purpose was to do no serious damage except to us. Is he a spy? He says no, but what can we trust from a lawyer?”

  Lies, lies, planted evidence, false innuendos, and lies. Oh, how bitter to be at the mercy of such lies. That I would blow up my own truck, kill a young man with the world ahead of him, burn down my house, shoot through my arm, all to insinuate myself with a bunch of ragged Crapstown losers. How can she get away with such lies? I should stand and object. Your Honor, she’s lying through her yellow teeth. Overruled, Mr. Scrbacek, overruled. This is argument and she is interpreting the evidence, as you very well know. If I remember correctly, Mr. Scrbacek, you yourself are the master of twisting the evidence to fit the lie. But that was my job, Judge. That is what defense attorneys do. It’s right there in the Constitution, spelled out in black and white: any lie in defense of the client. It’s the Sixth Amendment, or the Fourth, or the Twenty-Third—somewhere in there, I know it.

  “So he says he is a man racing for his life. And where does he run? To a hospital, to fix his wound? To the police, to help the hunting of poor Ethan Brummel’s murderer? To the bright lights of Casinoland, where he had lived and plied his deceitful trade? No. He runs to Crapstown. To us. And in all of Crapstown, he just so happens to run straight to Donnie Guillen. Why Donnie? Is it because, as he said, he just happened to remember an address? Or is it because Donnie Guillen had created the blueprint of our transformation?”

  From outside the circle came a sound, a creaky rolling sound. The spotlight shifted until it was dead on Squirrel, pushing a rusted metal cart toward the center of the circle. Atop that cart was Donnie’s cityscape, the great metal relief of Crapstown’s future that Scrbacek had seen in the house on Ansonia Road. But the sculpture was no longer glossy with shine. It no longer sparkled along its sharp and precise edges. It was blackened and twisted and defaced. It had survived the fire, but barely, and if it now served as a vision of the future, that vision was apocalyptic.

  “This is what we’ve been dreaming of, ever’one of us, a new place, a place of our own, shiny and bright, sturdy and stainless. This was the vision we protected and intended to make real. Malloy told Donnie to build the story of our liberation, and this is what he gave us. Hope. So answer me this, if Scrbacek is not a spy seeking our ruin, not out to destroy our dreams, why, when he runs into Crapstown, does this fool head straight to Donnie Guillen? Why, by the time he leaves Ansonia Road, has our vision of the future turned to this?”

  It was not like she’s making it out to be. How can she twist my truth to serve some evil end of her own? I am not a spy, I know it. But to hear her tell it, I can’t help but doubt myself. Was I an unwitting spy? Was I duped by DeLoatch to smoke out the opposition so they could be destroyed? Maybe DeLoatch let me escape to follow me here. Maybe, at this very moment, they are on their way, Bozant and his killers, dashing through the sewers to destroy us all. Stop. If I doubt myself, I am lost. But what does that mean, to be lost? Wasn’t I lost before ever I stepped into Crapstown? Wasn’t I lost before ever I lay eyes upon Caleb Breest?

  “Need I trace the destruction that has followed in his path? Freaky Freddie Margolis, a founding member of the Furies, burned to death along with his business. The home of Donnie Guillen, burned to the ground, Donnie’s great blueprint blackened and defaced. A swoop of violence into the Marina District, with even a dog being shot to death. A dog. Beware the dancing fool who endangers even dogs. And finally, just this afternoon, the bus terminal, refuge and home, our bus terminal burned to the ground. More dead bodies, more destruction, a fire that he himself set with his devious lies and a borrowed cell phone. How much more of this fool can we survive? And is he doing this on purpose? I hope to God yes. Heaven help us if it is all an accident.”

  But it was an accident, all of it, or, if part of a design, not my design. What she says is true, yes, I grant her that, but to blame it on me is obscene. What about mens rea, the cornerstone of criminal law? See the woodchuck with his tail on fire, running through the forest, setting fires in a blazing path behind him. Does the poor woodchuck deserve to die because his tail caught flame? Isn’t his state of mind pure of evil? But is that my justification, that I have the innocent consciousness of a woodchuck? He runs, feeling the pain of his burning tail, a burning inescapable no matter how fast he races. He gives into the fear, running for safety, seeing only the narrow path before him, one tree at a time, while acres disappear behind him.

  “He was Caleb Breest’s lawyer. He met late at night with Thomas Surwin, the first assistant county prosecutor. He rousted that fat fart Trent Fallow, PI, and met with Cirilio Vega in the early morning hours, both on the payroll of Frances Galloway, who has done as much as Caleb Breest to step on our hopes. And moments before Aboud brought him here, he was meeting with a muck-a-muck high in one of Diamond’s towers in Casinoland. How is it possible for him to argue that he is not a spy? Tell me, which of our enemies is he not working for?”

  Oh, I know it looks bad. Oh, how could it look any worse? And from their point of view, maybe my death is justified. How to stop the destruction, the death, the despair? Kill the woodchuck before the forest is utterly destroyed. Kill the woodchuck, save the world. So how do I escape? What lie can I use to turn them around? But isn’t that what got me here in the first place, lies? The lies that acquitted Caleb Breest. The lie I told Trent Fallow about having already looked at his file. And any lie I hand them, my judges, isn’t that further justification for my death? But how desperate can I be if all I have is the truth? And what truth could possibly be powerful enough to reach into this cave of darkness and save my life?

  “Malloy told us to hang on, to survive, and that is damn well what we’re going to do. Scrbacek’s death for us has become a matter of survival. It is him or us. Beware the dancing fool, for he will wreak havoc. And this fool, he is dancing like mad. Freaky Freddie Margolis would tell you, so would Ethan Brummel, so would those lying dead in the bus terminal. So would Malloy. When Scrbacek stood beside Caleb Breest, murderer of Malloy, he gave up any hopes for our sympathy. We can’t afford to let him leave here alive. Him or us? I say us. Kill him. Kill him. Do your duty. Kill him, and when he’s gone, lift up your heads and holler with joy.”

  Regina raised her arms and let out a howl that careened around the contours of the cavern. A stomping joined it, just one foot at first, one stomping foot, then another, then a third, until it seemed that the entire circle was stomping feet in a rhythmic dance of accusation. The sound closed in on Scrbacek, the stomping, the stomping. He hunched over from the force of it, as if they were stomping on his back, on his neck, on his very spirit. The tempo increased, the noise grew louder, the floor itself shook with the fury.

  Squirrel waited on his crate for the cavern to quiet. Waited and waited, standing still, doing nothing to stop the stomping. It slowed of its own accord, weakened by its own spiraling hatred, and then silenced as Squirrel finally raised his head to speak. He took in a wet breath as loud as a snore. “Time now to hear from the defense. Blixen, stand and do your worst.”

  The light from above shifted to the old woman who stood beside the seated Scrbacek. She turned around slowly, hobbling even as she turned, and croaked out, “Our fate. What to do? Can the fool help? Is the fool for us or against us? Three nipples. Show them.”

  The
old woman’s hand, swollen knuckles, nails lined and cracked, her hand reached out and pulled open the front of Scrbacek’s shirt, baring his chest.

  “Three. Don’t you see? Ignore the portents at your peril. It was in the moon, and I knew. Never go against the moon. You heard the Contessa? The fate of the world in his cards.”

  She stopped. The stomping began again until Blixen silenced it with the anger of her stare.

  “Speeches are crap. Four score or something something. Speeches are crap, but I heard it from the moon.”

  Someone from the circle yelled, “Then tell it to the moon, old woman,” the remark followed by laughter.

  “Trust him,” she said. “Trust the fool. My daughter died for all the fools. Three things I learned in this miserable world. Two I forget, the third I don’t believe anymore. Where else are we going? Hell. Trust the fool. My daughter is dead, but the moon told me to trust the fool.”

  The laughter that rose from the circle was thick with derision. Blixen opened her mouth to say more and left it open even as she remained silent in the face of the laughter and the scorn. She turned and mouthed to Scrbacek, “I’m sorry.”

  Scrbacek looked at the old woman’s rheumy eyes, saw the mark of defeat in them, the sadness of having lost a child. Scrbacek stood and reached his cuffed hands to grab the lapels of the old woman’s ragged coat and shook them gently. The circle silenced at the gesture.

  “It’s okay,” said Scrbacek. “It will be okay. Thank you.” Scrbacek watched as the words pulled tears out of the watery eyes.

  Then Scrbacek turned to Squirrel. “I have something to say.”

  A loud catcall came from the circle, then a flock of hoots.

  “Your counsel has spoken for you,” said Squirrel.

  “I have something to say,” said Scrbacek, hopping to the side of the table. The chair, still attached to his legs, bounced loudly across the floor with him. “But first I need my legs untied.”