Color of Justice

by Gary Hardwick

  Cal saw Danny and put the barrel of his weapon into his mother’s eye socket. Then he lifted her to her feet.

  “Get away!” Cal demanded.

  Danny and Erik advanced slowly. Danny had both guns out. One pointed at Cal’s head, the other at his leg, but he still didn’t have a clear shot. If he hit the leg, Cal and Virginia would fall to their deaths. If he hit him in the head, Cal would die, but he would probably pull the trigger and kill his mother.

  Cal pushed his mother closer to the railing of the balcony. The rusted steel creaked. Virginia teetered close to the edge with Cal right at her side.

  Danny and Erik stopped. If Cal let her go, she’d fall, and he might jump over with her. As much as it pained Danny, he had to take Cal alive if he could, and he certainly couldn’t let him kill his mother.

  “Get out of here,” demanded Cal. “We have a right to take her life. She killed my brother. Murdered him because…”

  “I’ll make sure she gets punished,” said Danny. “I promise.”

  “Your promise means nothing,” said Cal, and he pushed Virginia closer to her death.

  Suddenly, Danny and Erik saw something move beyond Cal and his mother. A shadowy figure loomed down the hallway. Danny and Erik tensed as the shape came closer. It was Janis. She moved closer to Cal. Danny knew what he had to do. He needed to make noise so Cal wouldn’t hear Janis.

  “She killed your brother Colson because he was dark,” said Danny.

  Cal stopped. He looked at Danny with a mixture of shock and elation in his eyes. Cal’s grip loosened on Virginia and he pulled the gun away from her face. Virginia let out a deep breath and sobbed softly.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  “I put it all together. I’ve talked with her—anyone can see it.” Danny took another careful step closer, lowering his guns.

  “No,” said Cal. “You’re with her. I know it. Look at you, you look white, but you sound black.” Cal started to raise the gun.

  Janis stepped on a piece of glass. The crunch was like thunder to Danny’s ears. Cal jerked his head around to look at her. He took his eyes off Danny, who raised the Glock and fired it into Cal’s left arm, which held the gun. Cal flew back and his gun hand lowered, but somehow he was able to hold on fast to the butt of the weapon.

  Cal and Virginia smashed into the railing. The weak metal buckled. Virginia managed to grab the railing using her two bound-up hands for support.

  Danny seized Cal as the latter swung his gun toward Danny and fired. Danny was leaning into him and the shot missed.

  Danny heard Janis yell then her body hit the ground. A second later, Danny saw Erik kick the gun out of Cal’s hand.

  Erik was reaching for Virginia when Cal pushed Danny, off and holding on to his mother, sent them into the railing and over the side.

  Danny caught Virginia, but Cal kept falling. Virginia grabbed her son by the arm with her two hands and held on.

  Danny was almost pulled over by their weight, but he hung on, pushing himself back. His arm strained and he felt as if it would dislodge from its socket.

  “Let go!” Cal screamed. “Let me die!”

  Erik caught Danny and held him fast. Together they pulled Virginia up, but the extra weight of her son made it difficult.

  From behind them Janis yelled something.

  Then Cal brought his mother’s hand—the hand that held him—to his face and bit into it. Virginia screamed, but did not let go.

  Erik and Danny dragged them both up just a little more. Danny could almost reach Cal.

  Cal bit deeper into Virginia’s hand and drew blood. Her index finger began to separate. Virginia screamed again, but held fast to her son, her body bleeding and tears streaming down her tortured face.

  Erik grabbed Cal by his shirt and Virginia let go of him. Cal stopped biting Virginia’s hand and looked up at Erik, who hit him as hard as he could in the face. Danny pulled Virginia to safety.

  With Cal in a daze, Erik lifted him up and over the railing and handcuffed him. Cal struggled, cursing and muttering, but Erik had him subdued.

  Janis walked over, holding her neck. Cal had hit her there. She was bleeding pretty badly. Blood poured through her fingers and she fell to one knee on the filthy floor.

  While Erik cuffed Cal’s feet together so that he could not move, Danny went to Janis and applied pressure to the wound on her neck. Erik radioed for the rest of the team to come in.

  Danny didn’t have time to attend to Virginia. Janis was bleeding too badly and Virginia wasn’t as bad.

  Then Virginia started to move on the floor. She dragged her body toward the collapsed railing. Danny was alarmed for a second, then she changed her path. Bloody and crying, Virginia crawled over to Cal, lifted an arm over her son, and hugged him.

  The streetlights had been turned back on outside the station as Cal, Virginia, and Janis were put into ambulances. Medics, FBI, and cops swarmed all over the place. Not far away, reporters were held back by uniformed cops. Overhead, news helicopters circled.

  Danny’s boss was happy as he and Chip exchanged congratulations. Exhausted, Danny and Erik sat on the hood of a car. Around them were SCU team members, celebrating their good work.

  Chip walked over to a TV news crew. The FBI would probably take all the credit, Danny thought, but it didn’t matter. Danny felt a tremendous sense of closure. Cal would live and Virginia would not be taken from her other children. No matter what he thought of her, she was still someone’s mother.

  Jim Cole walked over to them and started talking to Danny and Erik about the press conference he and Chip would attend and how he wanted the information on the case to be given out. Erik said that he would rather not talk to any press. Danny echoed this sentiment.

  Suddenly Danny saw something in the crowd of cops, paramedics, and FBI. He smiled then got up and walked away from the group that had assembled.

  Walking through the crowd, escorted by a policeman, was Vinny. She’d been crying. They looked at each other for just a second and it didn’t take more than that to know that they’d both made a mistake. Danny remembered that Vinny used to be a cop and had obviously called in some favors to be let into the crime scene.

  He wondered what could have made her come here at this critical time. Maybe it was fate, he thought, some Great Hand that moved her to think of him at this crucial moment. Then Danny looked behind Vinny and saw his father, Robert, in the background, talking with several officers. Robert caught his son’s eyes and smiled a little. He’d lost his wife because his connection to her wasn’t strong enough for Lucy to tell him what was in her troubled heart. Robert didn’t want his son to suffer from the awful legacy that seemed to run in the veins of the Cavanaugh men. Robert nodded a little, then disappeared into the crowd.

  Danny went to Vinny and they embraced. Behind him, he heard the clapping and jeers of his coworkers and chants of “kiss her,” which he did quite gladly.

  Epilogue

  THE SCORE

  Danny sat in silence in the hospital lobby, waiting to see Janis. She’d survived Cal’s gunshot but had needed surgery. He hated hospitals and their clean smells, which covered sickness, pain, and death. Still, he had to be here.

  Danny and Vinny had spent a busy night at home talking and making love. Robert had told her everything about Danny’s mother and the diary. That had brought Vinny back to him. Maybe it was a little pathetic, he thought, but he was not about to ruin it.

  Vinny for her part was sweetly silent about everything. All she really said was that she missed him. Danny had a thousand questions on his mind about their separation but he would get to them. It seemed that they had time now.

  Danny decided to keep seeing Gordon. He’d called and set up a session for next week. There would be much to talk about.

  Bellva had gone into rehab after the incident with the Bady brothers. The close brush with death had scared her back to normal thinking. Danny had escorted her to the facility himself. He watched her go in an
d it hurt him to know that her chances of making it through were not good. Most addicts failed their first attempt to clean themselves up. Danny hoped Bellva would be the exception.

  Cal Stallworth was in custody. Danny didn’t think he’d ever stand trial. He was obviously insane. Cal kept talking to the doctors about being himself as well as his dead brother and being some kind of avenging angel.

  Cal confessed to questioning all of the victims about his mother’s plan, trying to find out what she was up to and how she would make it happen. All he wanted to do was hurt Virginia. Cal didn’t know about John Baker’s money and he didn’t care.

  While he’d been at a mental health facility in Grand Rapids, Cal had had a roommate who’d killed an orderly by stabbing him with a kitchen knife and taping up the wounds. Cal had gotten his method of killing from a proven practitioner. He told the police that he’d learned to spoil the crime scenes from watching a forensics reality show on cable TV.

  Virginia Stallworth was in intensive care. The image of her holding on to her son while he tried to literally chew off her fingers would be with Danny for the rest of his life. Her devotion to saving her son in that moment was only matched by her failure as a mother in the early part of her life.

  The SCU reopened the case of Colson Stallworth’s accidental drowning, but it remained inconclusive. Oscar Stallworth was leaving his wife for the second time in twenty-seven years. No one thought he’d change his mind this time.

  The police found Virginia’s speech for the convention. Danny was allowed to read it and was stunned and saddened by it all. Virginia was not so different from his own mother, he thought. People’s feelings about color ran deep like subterranean rivers. Now he knew it was a force that, if not checked, could destroy.

  The mayor was told about Virginia’s speech and the tapes Danny had found in the dog’s grave. The mayor turned them over to Hamilton Grace. No one in the NOAA would acknowledge being part of Virginia’s scheme. So the speech was burned, and all of Virginia Stallworth’s plans for a new race disappeared. Hamilton Grace was reelected NOAA president unanimously.

  Danny asked Hamilton Grace what his son Jordan had been doing over on Joy Road the day Janis and Danny had spotted him. Grace confessed that he’d dispatched Jordan to find Logan, his errant half-brother, who had shacked up with what he called an “undesirable” girl. Hamilton was unsuccessful in getting Logan to come back to the family, which seemed to suit Jordan just fine.

  When Reverend Bolt regained consciousness, he made a full confession to all of his crimes and confirmed that the Bady brothers were his sons, who had come to Detroit to kill him. Bolt was being extradited to Texas to stand trial for murdering his wife. His church was taken over by one of his deacons, who said his ascension to the mantle of pastor was a sign from God.

  The skin color of the victims was significant on the one hand, and on the other it was not. All of the members of Virginia Stallworth’s secret committee were multi-ethnic and fair in complexion. She thought this would make them more agreeable to her grand scheme. Conversely, Cal didn’t care what color his victims were. He would have killed anyone to hurt his mother and spoil her plan.

  At that moment, a doctor came out of Janis’s room and motioned Danny to go inside. Janis was sitting upright and had a bandage on her neck.

  “You look like shit,” said Danny, sitting down.

  “At least I have an excuse,” said Janis, smiling.

  “You know that was a lucky shot he got off,” said Danny. “One in a million he would have hit you.”

  “Just my luck,” said Janis. “It severed an artery, but I’ll be okay. And when I’m good to go, I’m leaving. I’ve been called to a case in Baltimore.”

  “That’s great,” said Danny. He took a moment to consider his third partner and what they’d been through. He felt a little sorry to know she was going. “Look, I know we didn’t get along too good, but I’ll miss you.”

  “Same here,” said Janis. “Hey, I’m going to write a paper about the killer for the FBI. Cal Stallworth just might be our first verified black serial killer.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t celebrate your discovery,” said Danny. “And how can you be so happy about it? He tried to kill you, remember?”

  “Nothing rare comes without a price. Say, I’m going to call him The Angel because of what was on the picture of the boys and their mother. I’m hoping I can turn it into a book.”

  “That’s cool,” said Danny. “Just make sure you describe me as tall and handsome.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Janis. “Good-bye, Sherlock,” she said sweetly.

  Danny placed a hand on her shoulder, then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. It was a mild surprise to Danny, but certainly welcome.

  Danny left, got into his car, and drove back to his old elementary school. He took just a second to look at the hard playground. Ghosts of friends and tormentors floated in his mind, and he was struck by how much of what we are is memory, and how much is forever unchangeable. He was who his life had made him and it was too late to worry about it.

  Danny saw himself walking along with Marshall, a white face in the ocean of black ones. Then the kid with the red hair stopped and turned. Danny looked into the memory of himself and saw that he was truly happy back then, happy as only a kid can be.

  Danny watched as his memory faded into the red brick of the school itself and was gone.

  He got back into his car, drove back downtown, and walked to the stairs of thirteen hundred. As he got to the top of the steps he stopped and looked out on to the city beyond him. He was acutely aware of people moving around him, rushing in the service of his chosen occupation. A couple of cops passed by, glancing at him strangely.

  He remembered his father’s words: “…the job is life.” Robert was right, as usual. This place was part of him and he could never let it go.

  Danny considered the color of all the people he saw and wondered if Virginia Stallworth wasn’t right in her assessment of our society. Maybe if there was no color, people would have to invent it or find other ways to be biased against one another. Perhaps society needed these petty differences to be human. Virginia had been torn apart by a slavish devotion to these differences, and in the process, she’d created a monster.

  He thought of Fiona and how nature had taken all of her color away. He never thought of Fiona as black or white, just as the person she was. Suddenly, he didn’t think of her as afflicted.

  Vinny and Danny were separated not by race but by class and divergence of aspiration. But what brought them back together was that thing which is colorless and bigger than the petty differences of individuals.

  Danny was a man divided internally by external notions of color and perception. He thought about all that had happened, then what the psychologist had said about him and the two guns of different color. Quietly he accepted it.

  He had Vinny back, but he had lost his mother and a part of his heart had gone into the grave with her. The memories of Lucy would make the days and nights a little harder.

  Sure, he was keeping score, but didn’t we all?

  Danny turned back to police headquarters and left these heavy thoughts behind him. He walked in and went back to the job, the only thing he could never lose.

  About the Author

  GARY HARDWICK is the author of the novels Cold Medina, Double Dead, and Supreme Justice. A former attorney, he is also the screenwriter and director of the hit film The Brothers, as well as a television executive producer. Born and raised in Detroit, Hardwick now lives in California and is currently working on his next motion picture and novel.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Resounding Praise for

  GARY HARDWICK

  “The Elmore Leonard of black mystery writers.”

  Seattle Times

  “Hardwick handles the issues of skin color and prejudice with skill, poignancy, and insigh
t.”

  Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

  “Gary Hardwick plays the race card with an expert touch…. He has always delivered powerful novelsthat leave the reader thinking more about the state of American society than whodunit…. Hardwick uses his perfect pitch to incredible effect, making every word hit home and every character a complex mixture of right and wrong.”

  Orlando Sentinel

  “Hardwick has an ear for dialogue and an unflinching wisdom about anger and skin color.”

  San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “Hardwick was a swell suspense writer from the get-go…. He’s becoming a superb one.”

  Toledo Blade

  Also by Gary Hardwick

  SUPREME JUSTICE

  DOUBLE DEAD

  COLD MEDINA

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  COLOR OF JUSTICE. Copyright © 2002 by Gary Hardwick. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2007 ISBN: 9780061844799

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