Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  “It’s a loser,” said Miles.

  “You’re crazy,” Percy added.

  “We just need one member of that panel to see the view from where Xelina is sitting. And we need to get other people thinking the same way. People outside the courtroom. That’s what the client wants.”

  “Well, you’re definitely starting to get some coverage,” said Percy. She turned on the TV Miles had installed in the wall and cued up a talking head clip. “I burned this from the afternoon feed.” There was a chyron headline across the bottom.

  TERROR LAWYER SAYS COP-KILLING IS THE WAY TO THE FUTURE

  “You know it’s true,” said Donny.

  “I wish I had gone to Washington,” said Miles, shaking his head.

  “Were the oral arguments today?” asked Donny.

  Miles nodded. “I hear they went well. But you can never tell.”

  “What do we do if they reverse?” asked Percy.

  They all stared at each other. After a long silence, Donny finally answered. “We keep fighting,” he said. “One case at a time.”

  They nodded, but you could tell they weren’t entirely convinced.

  “And we start by winning this case,” he added. “Speaking of which, should we start with the Zorn depo?”

  “Broyles’s clerk just called about that,” said Miles. “Said Broyles already watched it. In camera, with the censor. Evidently he got a call from the CSO’s boss, in Washington. He has reconsidered his decision. He’s going to exclude it.”

  “Fuck!” said Donny. “Are we ever going to get a break in this case?”

  “Yes,” said Miles. “Or maybe I should say kind of. Because the other thing that happened while you were out is the notice came in from the U.N. Court of International Claims. They received your crazy petition. And if you can believe it, they took it.”

  “Sweet!” said Percy.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Donny. “That’s a long way off, and the chances of it going anywhere are between slim and none.”

  “I agree,” said Miles. “Let’s get to work. You have four witnesses to prep.”

  They moved to the conference table and started working through files.

  They were about an hour into it when Donny got the call.

  60

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” said Donny.

  “I was feeling guilty,” said Joyce.

  “Why? I was acting like a freak that night.”

  “I’ve been following the coverage. What they’ll let out. Not much, and you have to read between the lines, but enough to get an idea of what you’ve been dealing with.”

  “My client has it a lot worse than me. So are you in Mexico already? You sound so close.”

  “No,” she said. “Had to reschedule. Needed to wrap up some loose ends here. Should be able to hit the road Friday. Have you thought any more about riding along?”

  “I assumed the offer was revoked.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it over dinner tonight?”

  “I’d love to, but I can’t. I’m in trial. I need to work.”

  “What if I told you the place I want to take you is the President’s election defense fund-raiser?”

  “I would not believe you.”

  “For real. My department head asked me to go. He had to head out of town on short notice, and says it’s important we have someone there. And I am up for tenure.”

  “You’re about to flee the country.”

  “And what better way to make it seem like that’s the farthest thing from my mind.”

  Donny thought about who else would be there. It wasn’t just Bridget.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  61

  A new suit was not in the cards (specifically the credit cards), but Donny did put on a clean one for the event, and a nicer tie, silver with black polka dots. He was still underdressed. Most of the other men wore black tie. Some even wore this season’s runway versions, with their structured variations on tails and crazy collars, and a few that looked like they were made of those new designer Kevlars. Donny wondered how much it would cost to get a bulletproof business suit, and whether it would produce better or more reckless behavior on his part.

  The ladies mostly wore black as well, because it was that sort of crowd. Joyce wore green, because she was not afraid of pissing people off. She said he’d seen the dress on her before, but he said I am pretty certain I would remember it if I had. She let Donny drive her old Mercedes to the event, which elicited only a tiny bit of restrained derision when they dropped it with the valet at the Four Seasons.

  “Are you ready for this?” said Joyce, pointing to the sign welcoming them to the event.

  INDEPENDENCE PARTY OF HARRIS COUNTY

  PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION INTEGRITY LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

  SECURING THE AMERICAN FUTURE

  They arrived when the cocktail crowd was at full steam, loitering and hand-grabbing and laughing outside the ballroom. Joyce took him by the arm, except when she broke away to grab two flutes of champagne from a passing server. It was the good stuff, and as they drank it and the bubbles started popping inside their heads, they traded who’s who notes on the gathered crowd of power brokers. The Governor’s speechwriter, the CEO of Brown Burton Elf, the daughter and sole heir of the water purification inventor John Siddiqui, the partner in charge of the Houston office of McKinsey. Donny saw faces from the newspaper and the bar journals, two members of Congress, one state representative, a radio talk show host, and the Texas Railroad Commissioner, who contrary to what you might think from her job title was in charge of setting the price of oil, and was soon to be regulating the price of water.

  The weirdest thing for Donny was that people seemed to be noticing him, something he was sure he was imagining until Joyce made the same observation.

  “Everyone’s following your trial,” she said. “But I don’t think they’re fans.”

  That sense of recognition felt good, all the more so that people like these saw him as the enemy. Seeing them here in their private gathering, writing the checks that fed the monster, helped him know they were right. There was no sign of Bridget, which made him second-guess his decision to come to the event when he could be preparing for trial.

  “Let’s go find our table,” said Joyce, pulling at his arm to go away from the crowd.

  Donny pulled back, as he saw what she had seen. Amanda Zorn, burning a hole in him from across the room.

  Donny looked right back for a long minute, until Zorn turned and grabbed the arm of the man standing at her left. When that guy turned from the group he was talking to, Donny realized that the guy was Trey. Zorn leaned in and said something to Trey, who then looked across the room until he saw Donny, nodded, and pointed right at Donny with a smile that did not seem directed at him.

  “Come on,” said Joyce. Donny looked at her as she found their seats, and wondered if she was in on the game.

  Their table was low-profile, at the edge of the room, shared by others from Rice—a political scientist who had worked in the administration and his husband, the head of development and her husband, and the new provost, who had been recruited from the Institute. They were polite to Joyce, but not friendly.

  They ignored Donny.

  The speeches started too soon, and went on too long. The Railroad Commissioner gave a punchy one in her West Texas drawl about her plans to confound the world’s expectations and make Texas the water capital of the world. She was followed by some well-groomed Hollywood dude who screened a clip of his documentary about how the President was rebuilding the country’s strength. Working title: America Rising. Where other patriotic visual platitudes would be expressed through landscape shots of open prairie and Western canyons, this guy was all about industry, and armor, with a dark palette and a heavy metal soundtrack.

  As extra audience, extra security, and performative presence, a perimeter of private security guards stood around the outer walls of the room, wearing dressier
versions of the Texical uniforms Donny had seen on the guards at the camp.

  When Pastor Roger Loving took the podium and began his prayer for the assurance of the President’s victory through the wisdom of the Justices of the Supreme Court, Trey got up and headed for the exit. Donny thought he had the right idea, and decided to follow him.

  62

  When he pushed through the doors at the back of the hall, Donny was surprised to see how many more guards there were out there in the lobby. Watching the doors and stairs, watching the bar staff make each drink, crowding the kitchen to ensure none of the food was poisoned, and watching Donny every step. Trey was there at the bar, getting another round. They would have an audience.

  “Hello, Trey,” said Donny, joining him at the bar but giving him space.

  Trey took his time before he looked over. “Donny.”

  “I was hoping I’d run into you at this thing.”

  “You are a real piece of work, pal. I thought Joyce had come to her senses a while back.”

  “Just friends, Trey. I think she thought I’d benefit from seeing things from another perspective.”

  “For a guy who can barely get his ass out of bed in the morning you sure know how to fuck a lot of shit up.”

  The bartender brought Trey two whiskies, and asked Donny what he wanted. He ordered tequila.

  When he looked back at Trey, Trey was staring at him. You could see the stress in his eyes.

  “Can I talk to you about something, Trey?”

  Trey looked at one of the whiskies, picked it up, and drank the whole thing. Then he turned back to Donny.

  “What,” he said.

  Donny pulled the envelope from his inside pocket. He opened it, unfolded the sheet inside, and set it in front of Trey, next to the empty glass.

  It was a still from Xelina’s footage, the video of Gregorio’s lynching.

  Trey looked at the image. It was a close-up of one of the guys who led the mob.

  “What is this?”

  “Crime scene. A political assassination.”

  “You are so full of it,” said Trey, pushing the paper away.

  “If you don’t recognize that profile behind the mask, you must at least recognize that jacket.”

  Trey looked again. He picked the photo up and looked more closely. Then he crumpled it up and shoved it in the empty glass.

  “I thought maybe you could help me work out a deal,” said Donny. “I assume you know about Charlie’s little project out in the Zone. The one he needed Gregorio to approve. The one he evidently paid Gregorio to approve, only to have Gregorio welch on the deal after he realized it would burn too much political capital with his young acolytes. The ones whose support he needed to take his political career to the next level.”

  The red eyes were on Donny now, getting redder. You could tell some of the other eyes around them were watching, too.

  “I will assume you didn’t know Charlie and his prepster militia pals killed a guy. Or that the murder of Gregorio is only the most recent of the atrocities we can connect them to.”

  “That picture doesn’t prove shit.”

  “Whatever, Trey. We have recognition analytics that say otherwise. And we have witnesses. We know how far the network really goes. Who really did the dirty work they executed Jerome for. And I don’t care about that. We live in scary times, and scary shit happens. I just want it to end.”

  “That’s a sweet dream, Donny. What do you really want?”

  “I want them to free my client.”

  “What makes you think I have the power to do that?”

  “You’re the most connected guy I know, Trey. Even more than Lou. Even more than Broyles. And the power of a father’s love can accomplish amazing things.”

  Trey was tensing up now, both hands on the bar in front of him, trying unsuccessfully to summon the calm.

  “And I’ll promise to keep what I’ve learned quiet, as long as they drop this election fight and let the results stand.”

  He didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look.

  “Come on, Trey. Peace.”

  He put his hand on his old friend’s shoulder.

  The next thing he felt was Trey’s fist in his face.

  Donny went down.

  Ass on the carpet, he felt his face and looked up at Trey. He pushed himself up, and swung back.

  He whiffed bad, almost falling back down. But his swing gave the guards permission. They swarmed, taking him back to the floor and beating the crap out of him until Trey said stop.

  It took a few minutes.

  “No deal, Donny,” Trey said, standing behind his guards. “You’re too late.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Donny.

  Then he straightened himself up and walked back into the party, pocket square under his bloody nose, and suggested to Joyce that maybe they should leave early.

  63

  The animal night was in them when they drove off, as was the booze, so much so that having the gearshift of the Mercedes between them was too much, and they ended up pulling over into a parking lot and making out right there in the car, fogging the windows, both tearing off their nice clothes, and accidentally blasting the radio twice, like a pair of pent-up teenagers. And when that wasn’t enough, and they got back to her place, she invited him in. They were both hungry for it.

  Later, when Joyce was asleep, Donny couldn’t even close his eyes. Too amped up from it all, mind racing about what tomorrow had in store. So he grabbed the extra key and went for a walk.

  Down the block from Joyce’s house was a big empty lot where they had torn down an older building in preparation for the construction of a shiny new one, just in time for the crash that dried up the real estate debt markets like one of those barren farms up north. The lot was fenced off and dark, but there was a spot where the chain link was bent back enough for a human to get through, and when he walked across and checked it out, Donny could see it was a narrow dirt path, made by who or what knows.

  As he walked that way under the cold light of the city lamps, he realized how ridiculous his outfit was—a pair of insanely wrinkled suit pants with a small but evident tear in the crotch, suit coat over a white undershirt that he had sweated through three times during the preceding eighteen hours, and a pair of dress shoes with leather soles and no socks. He also realized that he didn’t give a shit, and almost felt overdressed, like he could feel the memory coded into his cellular proteins of his ancestors who walked without shoes and never wrote a single thing down.

  The ambient light of the city seeped into the involuntary park, aided by the arc of the waxing moon, and his eyes quickly adjusted. The path led through a stand of tall ragweed that brushed against him and then opened up into a little clearing of concrete with patches of grass coming up through the cracks. At the edge of the clearing was a shelter made of trash—a big tarp roof made from some industrial package stamped with the logo of a Chinese manufacturer, rope of varying gauges and colors, cardboard boxes, and rotting old lumber. Before the lean-to was a little fire pit made of broken bricks and chunks of concrete debris, still giving off warmth from the coals. There was a beat-up bicycle trailer that had been repaired with duct tape and parked against a scrubby tree. A cheap folding table on three legs and a stack of cinder blocks was between the fire and the shelter, and on it lay a dirty paper plate and an array of found objects in the process of being transformed into secret works of art—the severed head of a pink flamingo, the fins of a model rocket, three sharp shiny rocks, some electrical cable, a very old soda bottle, some blue glass, and the skull of some small fanged mammal, maybe a raccoon. There was a weird beauty to the thing the occupant of that tent was synthesizing from those fragments of other things, and some kind of secret message encoded about the world they came from. It felt like he had just stumbled into the future, a glimpse at the way people would soon live in the ruins conjured by the current generation.

  Donny was imagining what a lawyer would do to survive in the post-a
pocalyptic wasteland when he sensed the stare.

  He turned, and saw the coyote there across the little clearing, as still as some stuffed critter you would see in an old museum, but radiating life, the wild life that the city hides in plain sight through the partitioning of time and space. It was no bigger than a medium-sized dog, maybe fifty pounds, kind of lanky. The fur was a weird mix of red, brown, black, and grey, the grey really a silver, almost a quicksilver that picked up the stray beams and shined them back at you like some computer-generated baffling. And when Donny shifted, the coyote broke its gaze and moved, and the way it shimmered as it disappeared made you understand why the people who had lived here before the pavement thought perhaps it traveled across the dimensions. Because really, it did, if you thought about it the right way. It was another visitor from the future—one that portended how green that future would be, as all the life we had crowded out returned to the spaces abandoned by our collapse.

  For a moment after the coyote slipped away Donny soaked in the animal’s smell, a pungent but elusive musk, and wondered if he would now carry some of that scent with him. He thought that would be okay.

  He grabbed two sticks from the pile, squatted by the pit, and started rubbing them together to see if he could start a fire.

  By the time he heard the movement behind him, they already had the gun at his back.

  As they pulled the black hood over his head, he noticed the matches sitting there.

  64

  “Is this punishment or interrogation?” asked Donny, when they pulled off the hood an hour or so later, after they took him for a ride in the trunk.

  He was duct-taped to a wooden chair, in a dark room. There were two men standing there in the shadows. One was Trey’s son Charlie.

  “We haven’t decided yet,” said Charlie. He was shirtless, with a golf club in one hand and a bottle in the other. “Moody here’s going to flip a coin.”