Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  The elevator opened as we were passing it, and a man stepped off. On impulse, I grabbed Brooke’s arm and stepped into the open cab, pulling her with me. I heard my name shouted and caught a glimpse of Jordan as the doors closed. The elevator started moving.

  Brooke looked at me wide-eyed. I shrugged and made a face. “It would be nice to say I know what I’m doing,” I said.

  “But you don’t.”

  “I’m trying to stay one step ahead of everybody else. I can’t do that in jail.”

  The elevator door opened. I grabbed Brooke’s arm and hustled out. “Jordan’s going to be coming down the stairs,” I said. I let go of her, and we walked swiftly across the lobby, our heels clacking on the tile.

  “When are we going to hear something from that guy at Odyssey Funds?” I asked conversationally.

  Brooke glanced at me as we pushed through the outer doors into the heat. “Jared Thompson? I don’t know that we’re going to hear anything,” she said.

  “I don’t mean directly,” I said. “But he got the information on Monday. Eventually, he’ll be making a statement or selling shares or something.”

  “Selling shares based on nonpublic information would be insider trading,” Brooke said. “It’s illegal.” A couple of steps brought us to the sidewalk, and we turned to skirt the building. “And he might just delete the message without opening the attachments, you know. A lot of people do that.”

  “Now that’s encouraging.” We were moving down the sidewalk as quickly as two women in heels and tailored dresses can move — which wasn’t very. Once again the hot wind whipped at our skirts and our hair. Brooke had one hand on her head and the other gripping her skirt. With my ponytail, I didn’t have to worry about my hair, which left me two hands to try to control my dress.

  I heard a shout from behind us.

  “Come on,” I yelled to Brooke. I pulled up my dress to the top of my legs and started to run.

  Brooke hesitated, but caught up with me almost immediately. Because of our heels, we had to run on our toes, but our speed improved considerably. We crossed the street to the parking lot just as the light changed and released a flow of traffic. As I beeped my car and grabbed the door handle, I saw Jordan start into the traffic and jerk back onto the curb as a horn blared.

  I swung down into the car and keyed the ignition.

  “What now?” Brooke asked me as she swung into her own seat.

  “Heck if I know.”

  “I mean, where are we going?”

  “Heck if I know that either.” I glanced at her as I backed out of the space. Jordan was crossing the street toward us. “You worried?”

  “Heck yes.”

  I wiggled my fingers at Jordan as we drove past him, and he shook his head in evident exasperation. For some reason, that gave both Brooke and me the giggles.

  Chapter 38

  We were on I-64 when my cell phone rang. The best plan I had come up with was to find a motel up in Ashland or somewhere that would rent a room to us by the week. I didn’t know how long it would keep us out of jail. It might give us the time for one critical play, if I could figure out what that play should be.

  “We’re going to be living out of a suitcase for longer than we thought,” I said. “We’re going to need more stuff.”

  “Drop by your place, then mine?” Brooke said.

  “And go by the ATM to get a wad of cash. Four hundred for me, four hundred for you, and that’s it for the duration. They’ll be able to track where we are when we make the withdrawals.”

  My cell phone kept chirping, and Brooke said, “Aren’t you going to pick it up?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I didn’t recognize the number, but it had to be either John or Jordan.

  “Robin Starling,” I said.

  It was John, calling from the courthouse phone.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  I sighed. “Where I always am. On the run. What happened?”

  “I’ve been released from bail.”

  “What?”

  “The judge said it was a close question, but that he’d heard two people implicated in the courtroom and frankly thought Maxwell had a stronger case against the defendant’s attorney. It probably helped that you resorted to flight.’”

  “Ah, good. Glad I’ve accomplished something.”

  “It’s not like Judge Cochran’s is the last word. The grand jury can always indict me, and the prosecution can continue almost without a blip.”

  “Too true.”

  “From listening to Maxwell and Jordan, I think they may be getting a warrant out for you.”

  I was silent for a few seconds. “Well,” I said. “I expected it.”

  “Why did you do it, Robin? It doesn’t make any sense for you to implicate yourself.”

  “I didn’t intend to, starting out. It just kind of came to me as I went along, and I went with the flow.” I thought of my prayer that morning. Whatever it takes. There was no real reason to assume a connection, but from now on I was going to be much more careful what I prayed for.

  “You were amazing,” John said. “I don’t think one lawyer in fifty could have pulled that off.”

  I felt a rush of gratitude, but I said, “Why quibble? Why not one in a million?” I heard an unexpected tremor in my voice and hung up abruptly, afraid I was about to start blubbering.

  Brooke said, “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, my eyes streaming tears.

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  I shook my head and wiped at my eyes with the heel of my hand. I think I’d have felt better if I had any idea of what to do next.

  Chapter 39

  From the alley behind my house, I turned into the driveway. The garage door rumbled up, I drove in, and the garage door rumbled down behind us. “Keep a low profile,” I said. “In and out. Nobody will know we were here.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Somehow most of my lamebrain ideas do. We were in the bedroom, a half-filled suitcase open on the bed, when we heard a sound from the living room.

  “Uh oh,” Brooke said.

  “No.” I reached across the bed to pick up the phone, but there was no dial tone, and my cell phone was in the car. “No, no, no.”

  Marty Nolen appeared in the doorway, holding some kind of revolver. It was the gun that caught and held our attention. “I think you ladies might want to come into the living room,” he said. He raised the gun and thumbed back the hammer. I cringed, flinging up a hand and turning my head away, but he didn’t fire.

  “No fuss now, or I’ll shoot you and drag you.”

  We went, and he backed out ahead of us. Armando Gutierrez was in the living room, as was a man I’d never seen before who was standing with his hands in his pockets. Armando was on the couch, sitting forward with his forearms on his thighs, a pistol dangling carelessly from his hand.

  “There’s the girl took my pants,” Armando said, looking up.

  The man with his hands in his pockets said, “Hell with your pants. She killed Tony.”

  I thought of the man I’d stabbed with the corkscrew, and dread settled like a brick deep in my guts. “What do you want?” I asked, and my voice quavered.

  “Oh, I think you know what we want,” Marty said from behind us. “Keep moving.”

  We took another couple of steps forward.

  Armando got up. “How we gonna do this?”

  I felt the barrel of Marty’s revolver just under my ear, and my mouth went dry.

  “I want this one to sit on the end of the coffee table,” Marty said.

  He pushed. I recovered my balance, turned, and sat. It was a sturdy coffee table, solid wood with stout, round legs.

  “Lie back on the table,” Marty said. I looked around at him, and he smiled. The barrel of the gun was pointed at the middle of my forehead.

  I lay back on the altar, wishing I wasn’t wearing a dress.

  “Hands touching the floor.”

  I let them touch the
floor on either side of me.

  “You, sit,” the nameless man said to Brooke, and he pushed her into my club chair.

  “Tie her up,” Marty said to Armando, jerking his head at me.

  Armando knelt beside me. My options, I felt, were fast disappearing, but with a gun trained on me from half-a-dozen feet away, it was hard to see what options I had in the first place. Moving with practiced speed, Armando looped something around one of my wrists and then the other, and drew the cord tight enough that I felt the strain in my shoulders. It hurt enough that I stopped worrying about people looking up my dress.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Brooke said, sounding as if she were close to tears.

  Armando moved to the end of the coffee table to lash a cord around my feet. He threw the end of the cord under the table and, going around to my head, picked it up and pulled my feet toward him. He looped the other end of the cord around my neck and tied it.

  I started to choke almost immediately and could relieve the pressure on my throat only by curling my feet under me as far as the frame of the table would allow.

  “You’re killing her.” It was Brooke’s voice, followed by a slap that must have turned her head on her shoulders.

  “Now we’re going to talk,” Marty said. “You and me.”

  He was outside my field of vision, and I wasn’t sure to whom he was talking. I was concentrating on breathing, in any case. My world had gotten suddenly very small.

  Marty said, “I want to know where the disk is. I want to know what copies you’ve made and where to find them. And I want to know who’s seen them.”

  “Okay,” Brooke said. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Anything. Just don’t hurt her.”

  My left hamstring cramped, and my leg started to straighten automatically. I gagged, curled my cramping leg under me again, and gritted my teeth against the pain that spread upward from the back of my thigh into my left buttock. I breathed one gasping breath at a time, and Brooke’s voice flowed over me. Her purse in the car, she said. Her computer; that was in the car, too. Jared Thompson at Odyssey Funds. She didn’t know Thompson, and she hadn’t spoken to him. She’d just sent him an email and had no idea whether he had gotten it or had deleted it without opening it.

  I closed my eyes, not able to wonder whether Brooke was putting Jared Thompson in jeopardy, but concentrating only on keeping my knees bent and my air passage open.

  The front door banged open. There was a cry of exclamation and a voice like the voice of God, except that it was cracked with age — a timbre that might not disqualify it, since God himself is reputed to be no spring chicken. There were gunshots. I opened my eyes and saw old Dr. McDermott standing backlit in the front doorway just as someone fell across me, his weight landing on my chest and stomach. The air gusted out of my lungs with a grunt, and my arms and legs surged against the cords that held them, which tightened the garrote about my throat and closed off my airway.

  There were two more gunshots, and a woman’s cry.

  My mouth gaped uselessly. With the man on top of me, I couldn’t recover. Black patches sprang into the air above me, and it occurred to me that I was dying. I felt hands on my ankles, pushing at them.

  And, just before I passed out, I heard sirens.

  Chapter 40

  Dr. McDermott and I went to St. Mary’s Hospital in the same ambulance. I was in the emergency room when I regained consciousness, but they told me that in the ambulance Dr. McDermott had tried to doctor me, even while strapped to a gurney in the supine position. He demanded information the paramedics wouldn’t give him and gave orders they didn’t obey. Their placatory assurances irritated him beyond endurance, and he kept raising his head to look at me, though my oxygen mask obscured my face.

  “I’m a physician, blast it,” he said, “the only one in this vehicle.” He paid no attention at all to the bullet in his right leg and showed no interest in its treatment.

  When I opened my eyes, Brooke was sitting in a plastic chair inside the curtained cubicle with me. She popped out of the chair immediately and laid a hand on my arm. “How do you feel?”

  I tried to speak, but my voice sounded like a frog’s would if a frog could talk.

  “It’s all right,” Brooke said.

  “Tell. Me,” I croaked.

  “That old man from across the street saved us.”

  “Dr. Mmm…” I gave up. McDermott was too much for my tortured throat.

  “The door slammed open, and there he was,” Brooke said. “He took in everything at a glance, and he started shooting.”

  I smiled weakly, remembering the glimpse I’d had of him with the light around him. An avenging angel.

  “If he’d hesitated, they’d have got him — probably would have killed all of us — but he got all three of them. Actually, I think one of them’s still alive — Armando, the guy whose pants you took. At least, they were loading him into another ambulance when I left to follow yours. All three of our attackers were down before Marty Nolen got the shot off that hit your doctor friend in the leg. He staggered, shot Marty in the head, then fell down.” She shivered suddenly. “It was pretty awful, really. Marty’s head…”

  “Doctor...”

  “He’s in surgery now,” Brooke said.

  I closed my eyes.

  The skin on my neck was raw and bleeding a little, and my throat was badly bruised. A uniformed policeman came and went, but my contribution to his report consisted of little more than the occasional nod in support of Brooke’s statements. Though I was sitting up and sipping ice water, I was unable to speak above a whisper.

  When Dr. McDermott was out of surgery and in the recovery room, the uniformed policeman came back by to talk to us. The surgeon had informed the police that he’d gotten the bullet out with no damage to “that big artery down there or the nerve or anything.” Evidently, it had lodged in the soft tissue of McDermott’s upper thigh without doing any major damage. I tried for further details, but the cop had given us what he knew.

  “I hear one of the guys he shot’s likely to make it, too, though he’s still in surgery.”

  “Where did he…” I gave it up.

  “Two in the chest is what I heard. You know, you should rest your voice.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” I whispered hoarsely.

  The cop laughed and squeezed my knee.

  “He was nice,” Brooke said. “No wedding ring.”

  I raised an eyebrow, but Brooke ignored it.

  “I followed the ambulance in your car, so it’s here,” she said. “Your purse, too.” It, as well as her own purse, was sitting on the chair beside her. “Maybe we could go by an ice cream place when we get out of here. Ice cream will feel good on that throat of yours.”

  I didn’t think so, but I nodded.

  By the time the hospital released me, Dr. McDermott had been checked into the hospital and was in his room. I couldn’t talk at all.

  I made writing gestures with my hand, and Brooke got some paper and a pen from one of the clerks at the registration desk. I sat with them at a small table in the waiting room and wrote out a few messages in block letters. Then we went to find Dr. McDermott.

  He was half-sitting in his bed, propped on his pillows. His face was gray, and the wattled skin on his neck hung slackly, but he rallied when he saw us in the doorway.

  Standing by the bed, I held up a sheet of paper. “THANKS. YOU WERE GREAT.” I could feel tears on my face.

  “She can’t talk,” Brooke said. “Her throat’s all bruised up.”

  “I can see that,” McDermott said in a reedy voice.

  I moved the front sheet of paper to the back, uncovering my next message: “YOU SAVED MY LIFE.” It seemed like such a trite thing to say, but it needed saying.

  “You’re very welcome.”

  I shuffled my papers. “FOR AN OLD GUY WHO’S BEEN IN A GUNFIGHT, YOU LOOK PRETTY GOOD.”

  He smiled. I had written the comment before I had seen him, and of course he knew it.

 
; I held up, “YOU SHOULD SEE THE OTHER GUYS.”

  A spasm of pain crossed his face. “I heard they were all dead,” he said.

  Brooke said, “One of them’s going to make it, they think, but nobody’s been able to talk to him yet.”

  “I’ve never…killed…” He had to stop, interrupted by a weak spasm of coughing.

  I hadn’t written any messages to cover that one, so I reached out to put a hand on his arm. Then, on impulse, I bent over and kissed him on his forehead.

  He smiled up at me. “Now that makes it worthwhile,” he said.

  We were standing in the corridor, waiting for the elevator, when the phone in my purse rang. I fished it out and handed it to Brooke.

  “Hello?” she said. She held the phone against her chest, and said to me, “It’s James Jordan. He wants to know where we are.”

  I nodded at her.

  “Okay I should tell him, or okay he wants to know?”

  I made a twirling motion with my index finger.

  “Okay I should tell him?”

  I nodded.

  A moment later, she had the phone pressed to her chest again. “He’s here, too. In the main lobby.”

  Again I nodded.

  “Okay he’s here, or okay we’ll meet him?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Okay.” Into the phone she said, “Stay put. We’ll find you.”

  The elevator doors opened on the lobby, and there he was. He wasn’t leaving much to chance.

  “Don’t you look awful,” he said to me.

  I grimaced at him.

  “Out of the frying pan, and into the fire.”

  I waved my hand to indicate he should say what he had to say, and he looked at Brooke.

  “Can’t she talk?”

  “Not at all.”

  He grinned, and I could have smacked him. “Why don’t we have a seat over here?” he said, motioning to some chairs. “Since the mouthpiece is out of commission, I guess I’ll have to do most of the talking.”