Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  He squinted and turned away slightly from the light, which Jason had shined in his eyes.

  “What are you doing here, boy?” Jason demanded.

  “Jason, I’ve got this,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. Then, not that I wanted to, but because I felt it would calm Jason a bit, I added, “Thank you. You can stand down.”

  I knelt by the young man. His jeans were dark with blood. The bullet had caught him in the thigh, leaving a surprisingly neat hole. I couldn’t see the wound underneath. It was difficult to tell how much blood he was losing.

  “What’s your name, young man?” I asked.

  “Bobby,” he said quickly. “Bobby Rowe, sir.”

  “Okay, Bobby Rowe. Now, please tell me: What are you doing on my property?”

  “A guy gave me five hundred bucks to put an envelope on your front porch. I swear, that’s all, sir.”

  An envelope. It had to be from the kidnappers. “Where’s the envelope?”

  “I don’t know. I think I dropped it when that”—and here he offered an indelicate description of my brother-in-law—“shot me.”

  Jason bristled at the word and made a move like he was going to kick the kid again. “Just take it easy,” I told him. “Give me a second to look for the envelope.”

  A minute or two of diligent searching turned up nothing. Jason still had the flashlight shining bright. It ruined my night vision and made it difficult to make out anything else that might have been lying nearby on the grass.

  “Okay, forget the envelope for now,” I said. “You said a guy gave you five hundred bucks. What guy?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t from around here. He sounded like he was, I don’t know, Russian or something. And he had a beard.”

  An accent. A beard. That sounded like one of the so-called scratchy-faced men Sam had described.

  Bobby grunted and grasped at his leg again.

  “Do you think we should call an ambulance?” Jason asked.

  I was about to list all the reasons we couldn’t—EMTs who would call sheriff’s officers, ER doctors who would be required to report a gunshot wound—when Bobby piped up.

  “No, sir, please, sir. If my probation officer hears about this he’ll bust me back to prison. I got, like, five years hanging over my head. I can’t go back there. I’ll be fine.”

  He put his hand back on the wound, squeezing his eyes shut.

  “Do you think we can get the bleeding stopped?” I asked Jason. “I don’t want this kid dying on my front lawn.”

  “I wasn’t using hollow-tipped rounds or anything,” Jason said. “It was a bonded bullet.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it probably passed right through.”

  Jason said this with the breeziness of someone who had never been shot, as if bullets that pass through don’t hurt as much.

  I looked down at Bobby, his chest heaving in and out.

  “Jason, can you do me a favor and run into the mudroom? There are some old sheets above the washing machine. They should be clean. Tear them into strips for me. If Alison asks anything, just tell her to stay with Sam.”

  Jason, always happy to follow orders, trotted off.

  “All right,” I said. Then, more to reassure myself, I added, “You’re going to be okay, Bobby.”

  He nodded, then closed his eyes. Jason had taken his flashlight with him, leaving only the lights from the porch to illuminate us. My night vision was slowly returning. I still couldn’t see the envelope. I would have to look for it again once the sun rose.

  “Take me through this again,” I said. “Start from the top: Some man with a beard and an accent wanted you to put an envelope on my porch.”

  “Yeah. I was just, you know, coming out of Walmart and he was, like, hey, kid, how’d you like to make a thousand bucks?”

  “A thousand. I thought you said five hundred.”

  “It was five hundred to put the envelope there, and another five hundred if I came back with a bird feeder. He said”—he gritted his teeth and clutched at his leg—“he said you had a bunch on your porch.”

  That explained the two previous missing bird feeders, which had been snatched by two previous deliverymen, neither of whom was Bobby Rowe. The kidnappers had obviously been familiar with the decorations on our front porch. Returning with a bird feeder was tantamount to proof of delivery of the package.

  “So you’re supposed to grab a bird feeder and meet this guy back . . . where? At the Walmart?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He said he’d be waiting for me.”

  Sure he was. If I was a kidnapper, would I really hang around a Walmart parking lot, fully exposed, waiting for some twenty-year-old tweaker to deliver a bird feeder to me so I could give him money?

  Not a chance. I would burn rubber to get out of that parking lot, knowing that someone else on my team was watching the house and would see the delivery completed.

  “You can go back there if you want,” I said. “But I’m telling you it will be a wasted trip. That guy is long gone.”

  Jason had returned with the sheets.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” I said. “Lift his leg for me.”

  Bobby groaned.

  “Shut up,” Jason said. “Kidnappers are nasty people, boy. You should have known better than to mess with them.”

  “Kidnappers?” Bobby chirped. “Y’all are kidnappers?”

  “No. That’s not . . . Just mind your own business.” I was furious at Jason for saying too much. This was the kind of loose talk that could have dire results for Emma.

  I fixed Jason with a stern look and said, “Keep a lid on it.”

  We kept at our task and soon had the wound bound tightly enough that there was only the slightest dapple of blood on the second layer of sheet. Jason and I gave him a ride out to his car, then sent him away.

  * * *

  I relieved Jason from duty, then returned to the house. Alison was asleep in Sam’s bed. They were curled up together, the boy as safe as could be, wrapped in the embrace of his momma bear.

  It was the kind of sight that made me think there was no way—no possible way—Alison had any culpability in this, cigarettes or no cigarettes, Paul Dresser or no Paul Dresser.

  Retiring to our bedroom, I lay on top of the bedspread for a while and closed my eyes. I figured after all the adrenaline wore off, the pills would kick back in.

  In reality, I was still far too keyed up. I soon gave up, went down into the kitchen, brewed some coffee, and waited for the sun. I shut off all the lights, both inside the house and out, to allow my pupils to dilate fully.

  After a cup and a half, I had the sense that the blackness outside was no longer total. It was more of a smudgy gray now. Dawn was on its way. I finished the last half a cup, sipping deliberately, then went outside.

  It didn’t take long to find what I had come outside for. Maybe twenty feet from where Bobby Rowe had bled on my grass, there was the slim manila envelope he had been paid to deliver.

  The outside was blank: none of the block-letter writing like the previous correspondence. It had a stiffness to it, like there was a piece of cardboard inside.

  I took it back into the kitchen, turned on a light, and tore it open. Inside was a piece of cardboard, which served as a backing for a piece of photographic paper. I slid out the paper.

  It was a picture of Emma. Her hair was gone, mowed down to a blond stubble. It made her head—all of her, really—look small and strange, almost embarrassed. Her shoulders were slumped, her face dejected. She was holding a printed sign in her doll-like right hand.

  The sign said, RULE 16B? SPEED IT UP, DADDY. MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

  I sagged against the kitchen counter. Emma’s feelings were all over her face. Just one glimpse at her fright, confusion, and torment was more than I could bear. I bur
ied my head in the crook of my arm and wept. It was only after a few minutes that I willed myself to look at the picture again, to study it for any clues about her location or her captors.

  There were none. They had photographed her standing against a backdrop of beige drywall that could have been the house next door or somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

  I went back to staring at my daughter’s desolate little countenance. She had been reading since kindergarten. There was no question in my mind that she could make out the words on the sign she held.

  What her six-year-old mind would make of a death threat, I couldn’t say. But the way she stared at that camera, coupled with the dour downturn of her mouth, told me she had parsed its message quite accurately.

  We all eventually figure out that life is a gift, not a guarantee, and that there’s only one way it ends. This epiphany, however, is usually saved for some time after the first grade.

  I wanted to reach out and hug the photo. I wanted to rail at its callousness. I wanted to reassure my daughter that her daddy would find a way to protect her. I wanted to strip the thorns off the world so they couldn’t tear at her. I wanted to do what daddies the world over were supposed to be able to do: make things okay.

  Speed it up, Daddy. I could do that, of course. But why did Emma’s captors want it? Ordinarily, in patent cases, speed favored the plaintiff, yes. It was why the rocket docket got so many of them.

  But if this was the work of Roland Hemans or someone else on the plaintiff’s side, why would he even need the extra advantage? He already had the ultimate edge: a judge in his pocket.

  Or did the captors simply not want to draw this thing out any longer, knowing that every day brought risk with it? Risk that Emma might escape. Risk that they would be discovered.

  And, yes, the chance of something going awry on any one day was small. But with every day that passed, it added up. That was why they wanted this to speed up. It was one area in which our interests were, for once, aligned.

  I wanted this to be over far more than they did.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I was barely functioning later that morning as I showered, dressed, and girded myself for work.

  Alison had demanded a full recounting of the night’s activities. Then I showed her the picture. She was full of anger and tears, just like me, and I wanted to believe the mini collapse she suffered was so unscripted and so visceral that it had to be genuine. No actress could have faked the way her fists balled, the way her body shook.

  Or was I just allowing myself to be manipulated? If she knew I was about to find that picture, because she was the one who ordered it to be sent, could she have practiced how she would respond?

  I was no closer to making up my mind about any of it by the time I reached the courthouse.

  The only person in my chambers when I arrived was Joan Smith. She was bustling about with a watering can in her hand, giving some of our office plants a drink.

  After what I had seen at Kensington Mews on Saturday morning, I was looking at Mrs. Smith in a new light. Was this woman—wearing a skirt that went midway down her calf, the world’s most sensible flats, and a sweater set—really the object of Roland Hemans’ desire? Or was her allure simply that she could give him access to the judge who would decide the biggest case of his life? Had she, knowingly or unknowingly, supplied him with details about my life that aided the kidnappers?

  “Good morning, Judge,” she said as she drained a few last drops on top of a ficus plant. “Saw a picture of you in the paper this morning.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “It’s on top of my desk if you want to look.”

  I wandered over to see a photo of Blake Franklin and me on the upper right corner of an interior page of the Daily Press’s local news section. It was a candid photo of us talking. He had his arm around me. I was even holding a glass of champagne, which made me cringe a little. It just made the whole thing look clubby and elitist. Associating with politicians was one thing. Hobnobbing was another.

  The photo was one of three under the heading, “Senator Franklin Hosts Newport News Fund-raiser.” There was no story, just a caption.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a moment to gather myself before I tossed out a casual: “And how was your weekend, Mrs. Smith?”

  “It was fine, thank you,” she said, getting herself seated, having finished her watering. “Pastor is doing Matthew.”

  I waited for more. Nothing came.

  “Did you . . . have any visitors or do anything social?” I asked.

  She looked up. I had just gone outside the bounds of our normal Monday-morning conversation.

  “I went to my sister’s for Sunday dinner,” she said.

  “Oh. And how was that?”

  “Fine, just fine.”

  Again, nothing more.

  “You live in Kensington Mews, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.” She was looking at me really strangely now. I continued as if I didn’t notice.

  “It seems like that would be a nice place for entertaining,” I said, really groping.

  “I suppose it is.”

  She wasn’t going to volunteer anything more. If Joan Smith was maintaining an intimate relationship with Roland Hemans and not saying anything about it, she’d know it was, at the very least, a breach of ethics. I had to push the conversation to see if I could prompt a glimmer in her eye with the right question.

  “Mrs. Smith, do you by any chance know an attorney named Roland Hemans?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “He’s representing the plaintiff in Palgraff.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  And, again, that was it. There was no glimmer. Mrs. Smith wasn’t giving me anything.

  “Well, off to work,” I said.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said.

  As I closed the door behind me, she was already humming the first few bars of a hymn.

  * * *

  Maybe twenty minutes later, I was making my run toward our little kitchen for coffee when I saw that Jeremy Freeland had arrived and was sitting in his office.

  I stopped myself short and tapped softly on the frame to his door. I had sent that e-mail turning down his request for us to recuse ourselves on Friday—well, technically, Saturday at 8:37 A.M.—and I wanted to make sure it was sitting okay with him. I really couldn’t make it through a case of this magnitude with a disaffected career clerk.

  “Hey,” I said. “Got a second?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course,” he said.

  There was a slight flush to his skin, which told me he had probably gone on a long run before work. I softly clicked the door shut behind me.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  “Not at all, Judge,” he said. “I was actually about to come see you.”

  I took one of the chairs in front of his desk and briefly glanced at the security camera monitor. The thing was sort of hard to take your eyes off, even when it showed nothing.

  Clearing my throat, I said, “About the e-mail I sent you Saturday morning—”

  “Let me go first,” he said, waving me off. “Look, I was thinking about it Friday night and Saturday morning, and even before I got your e-mail, I realized I was being silly. I was actually about to e-mail you saying, ‘never mind,’ when I got your e-mail.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I think I just . . . Sometimes I feel like these guys”—he pointed to Thurgood and Marshall, swimming aimless circles behind him—“like we’re in a fishbowl all the time. It’s just us in this little office suite, isolated from the rest of the world, and we render our decisions and who knows what everyone thinks? It’s not like there’s a comments box in the back of the courtroom. And then along comes a case like Skavron and suddenly we really do know what everyone is thinking, b
ecause they’re all talking about us behind our backs—sorry to say it, but you know it’s true.

  “And then you add that to this Palgraff thing, which is obviously going to be very high profile, and it’s like that fishbowl has gotten really small. And I think it just . . . it just messed with my head a little; that’s all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  And I did. A little. Frankly, the whole thing was pretty curious. But I didn’t have any leftover energy to ponder it.

  At the moment, I had to focus on the Rule 16B Conference. Ordinarily, a judge might only pop his head into such a gathering and then pop back out, letting his staff handle the details. After the late-night delivery to my house, I would clearly need to be more hands-on.

  “So are we ready for the Rule Sixteen this morning?” I asked.

  “I think so. Jean Ann’s got us set up in two-fourteen”—a conference room down on the second floor—“though I’m not sure if there are going to be enough chairs.”

  “Why not?”

  “Did you see the list of attorneys on the docket? I didn’t dare print it out. They’d have to kill a whole rain forest just to supply the paper.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Defendants with essentially unlimited pockets, like ApotheGen, treated lawyers like so much parade candy, throwing them at the case in liberal handfuls. With good reason. More attorneys are usually able to prepare a better case. And a better case usually wins. Money talks in every aspect of life. It just tends to be that much louder in a court of law.

  “I hadn’t looked yet. What’s the tally?”

  “Well, it’s Roland Hemans and two associates for the plaintiff. For the defense, Vernon Willards is in-house counsel for ApotheGen, but a man named Clarence Worth is sitting first chair. He’s a senior partner with Leslie, Jennings & Rowley in New York.”

  Last time I checked, Leslie, Jennings & Rowley was either fifth or sixth on the Am Law 100 list of the legal field’s largest firms.