Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  It was dark in there. I raked my forearm along the wall by the door, but if there was a light switch, I failed to find it. My groping hand closed on a pole leaning against the wall, something heavy on the end. A shovel maybe. Holding onto it, I took another step, my free hand running along the wall, and encountered metal shelving. At chest height there was something about a yard long and moderately heavy. I picked up the thing, whatever it was, and it swung apart as I retreated through the doorway, moving quickly because I didn’t want to be trapped in the shed.

  Outside there was enough light for me to see what I carried: a shovel and a set of pruning shears that had fallen open. Clutching them awkwardly against me, too pressed for time to find a better grip, I ran back toward the house, tightening my hold on the sheers as the shovel slipped away from me and fell on the ground. I didn’t see any movement by the fence, but it was too dark to tell whether I was still alone in the yard.

  On the back of the house was a small porch, the concrete steps leading up to it flanked by large, leafy bushes. Closing the pruning shears, one hand gripping each handle, I crouched on the steps between the bushes.

  I waited, trying to keep my breathing under control, my eyes darting from shadow to shadow. Cicadas trilled, masking the silence. My eyes strained at the darkness. The pain in my side was like a lance.

  I can’t describe the sound that alerted me to the presence of someone else in the yard. I’m not sure it was a sound. I was alone, and then I wasn’t, and someone was moving across the yard, coming around from the other side of the house.

  The shadow moved toward the open door of the tool shed with its right arm extended. The creep was planning to shoot me, I thought with a surge of indignation. Feeling as if I were caught in a nightmare, I rose silently and took a step out onto the grass.

  The shadow continued softly toward the tool shed, moving crablike behind the extended arm. I took another step, bringing the pruning shears up to my shoulder so that I was holding them like a baseball bat.

  The man spun toward me, his left arm rising so that his elbow partially protected his face, but I wasn’t aiming for his face. I swung, and the shears thudded across his lower back, the closed jaws hitting over his right kidney, one of the hardwood handles crossing his spine. His back arched, and his arms came up, the pistol flying from his hand. I hit him again. The man’s knees hit the ground, and he fell sideways.

  Satisfaction surged through me like a stimulant. I let the pruning shears drop to the ground, my face twisting in a savage, grit-teethed grin as I kicked him in the head with the ball of my sneakered foot.

  Arms circled me from behind, pinning my arms against my sides, and I gasped in surprise.

  “All right, ma’am. Easy does it now,” said the voice in my ear.

  Warm, oniony breath was on the nape of my neck, and I felt black despair. For an instant, a fraction of a second, my body relaxed as I submitted to my fate, to the man, bigger than I was and stronger, who had me in his grip.

  A memory surfaced, almost at the level of reflex. I swung my arms against my sides, driving my left arm forward, right arm back, then my right arm forward and left arm back, loosening the man’s grip. As my right arm came back again, I was able to twist my hips to the left enough to allow my right hand to smack palm-out into the man’s groin. My hand closed on him, gripping and twisting as I turned against him. His arms went wide, releasing me, his knees buckling, the cords in his plump neck standing out in what might have been ecstasy — but wasn’t.

  I pushed at his round, sweaty face with my left hand as I let him go, and he sprawled backwards, catching his head on a concrete step as he fell. I didn’t wince at the sound of the impact; I was scarcely aware of it. Time and space had ceased to exist for me. I was in the zone.

  The other man, the man I had felled with the pruning shears, was still on the ground, legs beginning to thrash as he struggled to get up. I stepped on his head on my way to his gun, which lay glinting in the wet grass beyond him. I picked it up, peripherally aware of its clumsiness in my hand, the weight of the slotted cylinder that was screwed onto the end of the barrel.

  The gate to the driveway rattled, and a shadow appeared at the top of the fence. Someone was on the woodpile I myself had climbed. A third man. Without even considering the consequences, I pointed the gun at the middle of the fence below the shadow, and I pulled the trigger.

  The pistol emitted a hard cough, jerking in my hand as one of the fence’s vertical pickets snapped and splintered. There was a curse, inarticulate and disbelieving, but the shadow disappeared.

  I ran limping to the back fence, to the gate just past the little tool shed, but I’d forgotten the padlock.

  I turned, eyes darting to the windows of the house, still dark, then scanning the circling fence, looking for a way of escape. I could feel my pulse in my neck and in the palms of my hands.

  The shovel in the middle of the yard. I ran for it, bent to pick it up.

  The two men were still down, one twitching, the other lying face-up, the back of his head on the concrete step, his smile beatific.

  I closed my mind against the implications of that glassy-eyed expression as I propped the shovel against one wall of the tool shed. The edge of the sloping roof was at roughly the height of my chin. Sweat ran down into my eyes, stinging them. I wiped it away as I placed the sole of my sneaker on the shovel’s handle at about the middle and, using the shovel as a step, propelled myself up onto the roof.

  The asphalt shingles tore at my elbows and knees as I clung to it, scrambling upward the half-dozen feet toward the crest, still clutching the pistol, using my free hand for balance. I stood for a moment, gasping, my heaving lungs no longer able to cope with my body’s oxygen needs, and something whined by me.

  Turning my head, I saw the shape of a man at the far side of the house. I pointed the pistol and fired, the pistol jerking in my hand as the man dove for cover.

  From the roof at the back of the shed, I could look down into the alley beyond the privacy fence. An open trash container was directly below me, its open lid balanced against the fence. It was one of the large plastic containers supplied by the city and appeared to be about half-full of weeds and hedge trimmings.

  Another whine, and something stung my cheek as I stepped off the roof, bringing my legs together so that I dropped cleanly into the trash container, my legs buckling and my back and knees jamming against opposite walls. The container rocked with the force of my fall, nearly going over, and the lid closed with a bang above my head.

  Chapter 6

  I could run no further. I was light-headed, my side hurt, I couldn’t catch my breath — but for the moment at least, I was hidden. And I still had the gun. If the lid of the trash container opened, I was prepared to shoot whatever face appeared above me.

  I expected to hear someone at the locked gate almost immediately, but time passed and I heard nothing. The end of a branch was jabbed into one leg, and the air in the container was hot and stale. The close quarters and the sudden cessation of movement opened up my pores, and sweat poured out of me.

  Breathing through my mouth, I shifted my position, keeping the gun up, the cooling barrel against my cheek. Then I froze. Voices, coming closer.

  “We’ve lost her. They won’t be happy about that.”

  “We can go back to her house. She has to return there sometime.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe she is in there.”

  My hand tightened on the grip of the gun so hard that it began to cramp.

  “If there was someone else in the house, the police would be here by now. And he’s in no position to help her. She saw to that herself.”

  No response. Saw to what herself? My eyes cut to the gun in my numb fingers. The guy I’d hit with the pruning shears had been carrying this. The other one? The guy I’d grabbed by the nuts and pushed back onto the steps? The sound of the impact of his head on the concrete step came back to me, and in memory it was like the sound of a pu
mpkin breaking open on the street pavement.

  All right, ma’am, easy does it, he’d said as he grabbed me. Had he been the man who lived here? Had he grabbed me only because he’d just seen me whack a man with his pruning shears?

  I strained my ears to hear more, but my tormentors had fallen silent. There were a lot more things I would like them to stand there and discuss, but they didn’t oblige me. Time passed, and I continued breathing short, shallow breaths in the stifling air of the garbage container.

  When I heard the crunch of tires on gravel, I’d endured all I could take, and something in me snapped. Grasping the pistol with both hands, I lurched from my crouch, driving up the cupped lid of the trash container with the top of my head. I thrust the gun at the windshield of the Ford sedan that was rolling toward me, and it jerked to a stop. The light of the security lamps overhead revealed an old man with a seamed face and rimless glasses, both hands on the wheel, and beside him a stocky woman clutching a purse against her chest. Her eyes were wide, her mouth a tiny “o.” I tried a smile and a wave to reassure them, as if a girl with a gun popping out of a trash container could ever be reassuring, but the movement only upset the container, and it went over with a thump that threw me onto the gravel in the path of their headlights.

  There was a jolt of gears, and the engine whined as the headlights receded, the light bouncing from fence to fence as the Ford reversed down the alley. They were gone; they would be calling the police, but I didn’t care. The breeze, faint as it was, felt so fresh and cool that it might have been blowing out of a window-unit.

  Whatever the relief and the freshness of the air, I could hardly lie there in the alley forever. I picked up the pistol I’d dropped and climbed awkwardly to my feet, feeling almost unbearably stiff after my cramped immobility.

  When I got to the end of the alley, limping less as my muscles warmed, I lowered the pistol and held it discreetly against my leg. I wanted nothing so much as to get home, but at the moment I was afraid of my little house on Beechnut. I turned toward John Parker’s apartment complex, a little less than two miles away. He had company, but Wendy Walters was just going to have to pardon the interruption. By my calculations I owed Wendy a face full of spit.

  A bit more than half-an-hour later, I climbed painfully up the steps to John’s apartment, stood on the bare concrete, and rang the doorbell. A two-note chime sounded inside the apartment, but there were no answering footsteps. I waited a moment, then rang the bell again. After another moment I raised my fist to pound on the door.

  “Robin?”

  I spun, falling back against the door at the sound of the voice coming up from behind me. It was John. His hair was tousled, and he was wearing an orange T-shirt, drawstring pajama bottoms, and sandals.

  “What are you doing here?” He was already on the steps, taking them two at a time. “Are you all right?”

  He looked so good to me right then that it was hard to focus on his small failings, like his being a low-down cheat and a miserable excuse for a human being.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. My voice grated unnaturally, and he stopped three steps short of the top.

  “Is that a gun?”

  I raised my left hand to look at it. “I guess it is.”

  “Did something happen?”

  I shook my head at him as he climbed the remaining steps to reach me. He didn’t touch me.

  “You smell funny,” he said.

  “I’ve been hiding in a garbage bin, and I need to use your phone.”

  “What happened?”

  “Are you going to unlock your door, or are we just going to stand here?”

  He moved past me, keys in hand. As he pushed the door open, I brushed past him into the apartment. “So are you going to tell me or not?” he asked.

  “Not, I think.”

  In the living room I put the gun on the table at the end of the sofa and picked up the phone. I punched 9-1-1, and, as I put the phone to my ear, my eyes went to the sofa itself, so recently occupied by John and Wendy.

  “You’re a pig, John Parker,” I said, listening to the ring of the handset.

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “9-1-1,” the voice on the phone said.

  I took a breath as I thought how to reduce my recent experience to a sentence or two.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m here. I’m calling because I was assaulted tonight on the street outside my home.”

  “That’s at the Cedar Creek Apartments? Who is this?”

  “Cedar Creek is where I’m calling from. My name is Robin Starling.” I gave them my address and a brief sketch of what had happened. John’s face, I noticed, had gone still. I turned away from it.

  “You didn’t see the men when you left the house at the beginning of your run?” the dispatcher asked.

  “No. I didn’t. When I got back, they seemed to be waiting for me. I’m afraid they may be there now.” I wet my dry lips.

  “We’ll send a car by to check it out.”

  “I was hoping you could send someone here to take me home. Maybe they could go in with me so I could get my wallet and some I.D. and go to a motel.”

  “I think we can do that.”

  When I had hung up, John was still looking at me. “I’ll take you home, if you want to go,” he said.

  “You don’t want to mess with these guys.”

  John’s eyes went to the gun on the end table.

  “This is terrible,” he said.

  “Isn’t it, though.” I dropped onto his sofa, for the moment heedless of the grass clippings and whatever else might be clinging to my clothes and skin.

  “Were they trying to …” He trailed off, and I shook my head, my eyes resting reflectively on his face.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “You never answered my question.”

  “What question?”

  “The one about where you’ve been.”

  There was a silence.

  “Let me help you out,” I said. “You’re in your pajamas, and that limits the possibilities. Your car wasn’t here earlier. Have you got it back?”

  I paused, but the silence just settled deeper.

  “You could have been visiting your girlfriend,” I said, “except that I’m your girlfriend and I wasn’t home.”

  “I could have been for a walk,” he said.

  I smiled. “Yes, you could have. You couldn’t sleep, slipped on your sandals to take a walk around the block. It doesn’t explain why your car’s gone, but maybe I could buy that — unless it turns out your car’s back in its parking space? Is it?”

  “What, are you going to go and look at my car? Feel the hood?”

  “I might.”

  “What’s that going to prove?”

  I raised my shoulders and dropped them. “You tell me.”

  There was a pause. “After what’s happened to you, I guess you’re entitled to be upset,” he said.

  I exhaled, loudly. “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. I stood abruptly. “They’re sending a cruiser. I’ll wait outside.”

  He raised his arms, hands open toward me, and I suddenly found myself badly in need of a hug. I stepped toward him, and, as his arms went around me, put my head on his shoulder and hugged him back, fiercely. My eyes, though they were squeezed shut, began to leak.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” I said, thickly.

  “What isn’t a good idea?”

  Crap. I’d said it out loud. I pulled back. “Two women in one night are bound to overtax you,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I kissed his cheek, then skipped backward and slipped out the door.

  I didn’t look back until I got to the bottom of the stairs. He was there in the doorway, his shadowed face expressionless. I had no idea what he was thinking, or whether he was thinking anything at all.

  Chapter 7

  Women provide some of the more egregious examples of sexism. I had called for a cop, and they sent me a cop. But, when the cruise
r pulled up against the curb, the cop who got out was a short dumpy woman. She was in a uniform, but both it and her gun belt, which was weighed down with a revolver, a nightstick, and assorted paraphernalia, looked designed for a taller, leaner, more powerfully built person — for a man in fact. She introduced herself as Officer Riley, a name that fit her as poorly as the uniform.

  “I’m Robin Starling,” I said, extending my hand. Some people have two first names (Jesse James, for example). Some have two last names (Jefferson Davis). Me, I have two bird names; I don’t know why. Both my parents seemed genuinely startled when, as a teenager, I pointed it out to them. That was the year before Dad left.

  “I understand you’d like me to follow you home,” Officer Riley said. Her nasal intonation was the one thing that fit her perfectly.

  “I don’t have a car here. I guess I was hoping I could ride with you.”

  “Okey dokey.”

  I tried not to cringe as I followed her to her patrol car. Okey dokey? Clint Eastwood wouldn’t have said okey dokey. Daniel Craig wouldn’t say okey dokey. She opened the passenger door for me, and, as I bent to get in, I tugged the revolver from the waistband at the small of my back so it wouldn’t stick into me when I sat down. Officer Riley’s hand closed on my wrist. Her grip-strength was surprising, but, in any case, I didn’t try to pull away.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  I figured she knew it was a gun. “I took it from one of the guys who was chasing me.”

  With her free hand, she flapped open a handkerchief. She used it to take the pistol from me, then went around to the back of the car to pop the trunk.

  When she got back in the cruiser, she didn’t have the gun with her. “It’s been fired,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Yes.”

  “You do the firing?”

  “Some of it. I think it’s been fired more than once.”

  “Unh huh.” She put the car in gear. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “I already told the dispatcher.”