Justice Redeemed

by Scott Pratt

  “And finally, if you live up to your ethical obligation yet your client doesn’t like something about the way you’re handling the problem with the two overly enthusiastic police officers, your own child could be kidnapped and killed. Is that a fairly accurate summation of your problem?”

  I took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to control myself. I’d been struggling internally with the situation, but having someone actually spell it out like that caused a near panic.

  “What the hell am I going to do, Richie?” I said.

  Richie laid his right arm across his substantial belly and began tugging at his left earlobe with the fingers of his left hand. I’d seen him do it many times before. It meant he was perplexed.

  “I have to tell you, Darren, in my nearly forty years of lawyering I’ve never run across anything like this. I don’t really know how to advise you.”

  “Between you and me and the wall over there,” I said, “I’ve given some thought to killing him.”

  When I’d mentioned killing Jordan to Rachel earlier, it had been an off-the-cuff remark. But the more I’d thought about what Jordan had said, the more I thought about the eerie way he looked and spoke, the more frightened I’d become for Sean. During the drive to Richie’s office, I’d even thought about what I would do if Jalen Jordan somehow managed to break into my house in an attempt to kidnap Sean. I’d fantasized about surprising him and shooting him. I had a pistol near my bed at home, for the same reason I kept one at the office. If Jalen really came after Sean, I had no doubt I’d kill him.

  “Really?” Richie said. “And how would you kill him? Gun? Knife? Run over him with a car?”

  “I suppose I’d use a gun. Just shoot him in the head and be done with it.”

  “In front of witnesses? During the day or at night? Your place or his?”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Richie,” I said as I realized that was exactly what he was doing. “This is serious. You didn’t see the guy or talk to him. He threatened my son and I have every reason to believe he’s capable of acting on the threat.”

  “I didn’t mean to make light of the situation,” Richie said. “My point is that I’ve never taken you for a killer. A bit intense and unpredictable at times, perhaps emotionally unstable occasionally, but I don’t think you’re the type of person who could simply walk up to another human being, put a gun to his head, and pull the trigger. Have you considered removing your son from harm’s way until you can affect some type of resolution to this extremely unusual situation?”

  I hated it when Richie went into his lawyer-speak mode. I much preferred plain, simple English.

  “Affect some type of resolution?” I said. “What the hell does that even mean, Richie?”

  “I might not have phrased that exactly the way I intended,” he said. “What I meant was that perhaps the authorities will soon get a line on Mr. Jordan, especially now that you’ve gone to the patrol officer and expressed your concerns about the stop. I would expect the officer you spoke with to get a hold of the FBI agent immediately and tell him that there’s a good possibility they might lose whatever evidence was in the van. I would expect the officer to tell the FBI agent they need to find a different way to get to Mr. Jordan, and they need to do it quickly. I would think they would set up surveillance on him and wait until he makes a mistake.”

  “They’ll also start talking to his family and friends if he has any,” I said, “and as soon as they do, Jordan will find out about it and Sean will be dead.”

  “And that’s precisely why you move the boy out of harm’s way.”

  “Where?” I said. “Where do I take him? Do I give up my practice and run away with Sean until Jalen Jordan is arrested for killing another child? And by the way, how do I live with the guilt of knowing I allowed a little boy to be killed without doing anything about it? Do I put my entire life on hold because this sicko threatened to hurt Sean? You know I’m not wired like that, Richie.”

  “Let me give it some more thought and call me this evening,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t kill anybody.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  As I drove west along I-40 toward the Farragut exit, I wondered about something Richie Fels had said: “I’ve never taken you for a killer. A bit intense and unpredictable at times, perhaps emotionally unstable occasionally, but I don’t think you’re the type of person who could simply walk up to another human being, put a gun to his head, and pull the trigger.”

  What he’d said about me being intense and unpredictable at times, perhaps emotionally unstable, was true. He just didn’t know how true, because he’d never seen me fight anywhere outside of a courtroom. Richie hadn’t seen me on the football field, he hadn’t seen me wrestle, and he hadn’t seen me in a mixed martial arts competition.

  He also didn’t see what I did to my father.

  It was nineteen years earlier—a cold, bleak night in November, the day before Thanksgiving. I was thirteen and going through the early stages of puberty. I’d put on some muscle weight, had grown a few inches, and my voice was changing. I’d also joined the wrestling team at school and had excelled at the sport.

  I’d grown up fighting, mostly because of my size. I was smaller than a lot of guys, which meant they thought they could pick on me. They found out very quickly that I would fight back. My maternal grandfather, Delmar Royston, was a small, lithe man. He was a machinist during the week and an outdoorsman on the weekends until an aneurysm dropped him in his tracks when I was six years old. I remember him vividly, though, and I remember him telling me during a camping trip right before I started school, “Darren, buddy, it’s just human nature that boys bigger than you are gonna try to dominate you. They’re gonna try to make you do things they want you to do; they’ll try to push you around. You can’t let them, son. If you do, you’ll spend your whole life mad at the world. First one that picks on you, punch him square in the nose. That’ll discourage about ninety percent of the rest of them right there.”

  On that day before Thanksgiving, it was just me and my mom and my father. I was nervous. I was always nervous during the holidays, because I knew, just as my mother knew, what the holidays could bring. There would be angst, if not outright terror, along with drunkenness and, perhaps, violence.

  My father, Billy Street, was a drunk. He started drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon at noon every day and he drank until he passed out sometime between nine o’clock and midnight. He’d been doing it for as long as I could remember. Billy tried to act like he owned a mechanic’s business—he worked on cars in a run-down shop out back of our house—but all he really cared about was making enough money to drink. I remember one night when I was very young, maybe three or four, when my uncle Tommy walked into the house while my father was hitting my mother. Uncle Tommy beat him unconscious, and for several years, the violence stopped. The threats remained, but the violence stopped. Then Tommy went to prison, and it didn’t take long for Billy to start up again.

  Most nights, Billy would sit in the den in front of the television in an alcohol-induced haze and mumble to himself about whatever was troubling him at the moment. Some nights he would cry. But other nights, especially if he managed to get his hands on some liquor or some drugs, he became violent. He enjoyed removing his belt and lashing us with it. He struck me dozens of times with that belt—sometimes with the buckle—for offenses so miniscule that I rarely knew why I was being beaten. He beat my mother viciously. The beatings always came with threats of death should anyone dare to tell the police or anyone at school—or anyone at all, for that matter—and were always followed by remorseful wailing and pleas to God for forgiveness. It was a sickening way to live. I remember asking my mother repeatedly why she allowed him to get away with the things he did. Her answer was always some variant of “He doesn’t mean it, Darren,” or “It’s really my fault, honey,” followed by a vague reference to Jesus and how divine it is to forgive.
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br />   On that cold evening in November, my mother had closed her salon early to make a run to the grocery store so everything would be perfect for Billy on Thanksgiving. I’d spent a couple of hours with two of my friends that afternoon, but I’d asked them for a ride home early so I’d be around for the evening meal. I knew we would be the only people at our house over the holiday weekend. Billy had long ago worn out his welcome with the few remaining family members, and none of them would dare set foot in our house because they knew he would be deep in the bottle. Thanksgiving meant a Wild Turkey weekend for Billy, and he’d started taking shots of Wild Turkey chased by his beer as soon as the sun had gone down around five o’clock that Wednesday afternoon. By seven o’clock, when the three of us sat down for supper, he was spoiling for a fight, and so was I. I’d noticed the telltale signs over the past week—the escalation in the insults directed toward both my mother and me, the constant threats of violence, the suggestions that the world would be a better place if both of us were dead—and I’d readied myself mentally for the inevitable as best I could. My father wasn’t a big man, nor was he especially strong. He’d spent fifteen years poisoning himself with alcohol, and at that moment, he was full-on drunk. I didn’t know whether I could take him in a physical confrontation, but I was determined to try if I had to.

  “What’s this shit?” he slurred at my mother as she bowed her head and thanked the Lord for her family and the meal.

  I stiffened when he said it. The tone in his voice was familiar; it told me something bad was about to happen. The muscles in my thighs began to twitch.

  “What’s what?” my mother said. A fake smile crossed her face, and I could see fear in her eyes.

  “This shit right here,” Billy said, pointing to his plate.

  “You know what it is,” Mom said, trying to maintain the smile.

  “Don’t get smart with me, bitch,” Billy said. “I asked you a question!”

  “It’s spaghetti,” Mom said. “We have spaghetti the night before Thanksgiving every year because that’s what you always want. The sauce is your mother’s recipe. You love it.”

  “Bullshit,” Billy said. “I ain’t no fuckin’ guinea.”

  “I don’t think anyone here is suggesting you’re Italian, Billy,” Mom said. “It’s just that for as long as I can remember, you’ve always wanted—”

  My fists clenched as I watched Billy pick up a fistful of spaghetti from his plate and throw it into my mother’s face.

  “Tryin’ a feed me wop food day before a holy day,” Billy said. “Fuck’s the matter with you, anyway?”

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said as she reached for a paper towel and began wiping spaghetti sauce from her cheek. “I thought you’d—”

  “Thought wrong, didn’t ya, bitch? Matter of fact, you ain’t ever thought right in your whole life. Trappin’ me into this marriage the way you did. Havin’ this damn kid.”

  I saw his hand reach below the table and knew he was undoing his belt buckle. He was drunk, so it took him a few seconds, long enough for me to get up from the table, grab the metal baseball bat I’d stashed behind the refrigerator a couple of days earlier, and stand between him and Mom.

  “No,” I said. “You’re not going to hit her. You’re never going to hit her—or me—again.”

  He stood shakily and freed the belt from the loops around his waist.

  “Well, lookie here,” he mumbled. “Got us a hero in the house.”

  He raised the belt above his head, but before he could swing it, I hit him in the ribcage with the bat as hard as I could. I heard a bone break, heard the breath rush out of his body, and the next thing I knew he was on the floor by the table. He sat upright for a couple of seconds until I kicked him square in the chin and sent him straight over onto his back. His head thumped against the floor and he was still. I jerked the belt out of his right hand, tossed the bat aside, and for the next minute or two, I beat him with the belt while my mother watched me in silence from across the room. I beat his head and face with the strap for a good while, and then I took the strap in my hand and beat his torso and arms and legs with the buckle. After he finally managed to roll into a ball to try to protect himself, I straddled him and pounded him in the head with my fists. Years of anger, hatred, frustration, and vengeance came pouring out of me. When I finally stood up, breathing heavily, I looked over at my mother. She was standing against the refrigerator door with her arms folded and a look of resignation on her face.

  “Just get him out of here, Darren,” she said.

  I dragged him by the ankles through the house, out the front door, and down the porch steps into the yard. It was cold and dark, the only light coming from the front porch. He was lying on his back, looking up at me through swollen eyes as puffs of mist rose from his bloody lips.

  “You don’t live here anymore,” I said as I knelt beside him. “Do you hear me? Do you understand me, Billy? You don’t live here anymore. Go to your druggie girlfriend’s house. Go to your sister’s. Go to hell for all I care. But if you come back here, I’m going to kill you. I mean it. You set foot on this property again, and I’ll kill you.”

  My cell phone rang and jolted me back to the present. I looked at the screen, saw it was my mother, and answered it.

  “This man who threatened Sean—what was he driving?” she said.

  “I don’t know. He was driving a van a couple of days ago, but the police impounded it. Why?”

  “I think somebody might be watching us.”

  “Watching? What do you mean? Is somebody parked close?”

  “I’ve had this feeling ever since I picked Sean up,” she said. “I don’t know how to describe it, just eerie, you know? Like someone was following me. I kept looking in the rearview and didn’t notice anybody, but there’s so much traffic coming out this way I probably wouldn’t be able to pick anybody out even if they were following me. But I’ve been sitting in the living room looking out the window at the road and this car keeps going by. It just went past again.”

  “Are you sure? What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know, Darren. I don’t know cars, and maybe I’m wrong, but I’m scared. Are you close?”

  “Yeah. Just two or three minutes.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Which way was the car going?”

  “Toward the interstate.”

  “Then it’s coming toward me. Can you tell me anything about it?”

  “A small car. Light blue, I think.”

  “Is that it?”

  “I don’t know cars, Darren!”

  There was still plenty of light left, so I started watching the cars in the oncoming lane. About a minute after Mom and I talked, I saw a light-blue coupe coming toward me. It passed quickly but I got a clear look at the driver, a male with dark, long hair and wearing glasses.

  It was Jalen Jordan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My mother’s first name was Shirley. She’d changed her last name back to Royston when she divorced Billy Street. She lived in a neat, fastidiously clean white house that sat on seven acres about five miles from Farragut High School in Knoxville. I was going so fast when I pulled into her driveway that I dug up some of her immaculately manicured lawn and slid off into the yard. I parked outside the garage and dialed my paralegal’s cell number.

  “Rachel,” I said, “did Jalen Jordan list a cell number and an address on the intake form?” Every potential client who came into the office filled out an intake form that listed basic contact information.

  “Just a sec,” Rachel said. She came back on the line shortly thereafter and said, “He did.”

  “Give them to me.”

  As soon as I had Jordan’s cell number, I dialed it. To my surprise, a male voice answered.

  “Is this Jalen Jordan?” I said.

  “You sound like Darren Street,” he said.

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nbsp; “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Whatever do you mean, Counselor?”

  “I just passed you on the road,” I said. “You followed my mom and now you’re driving back and forth, just like you did the other night.”

  “So your mom lives in that white house? I thought so.”

  “Stay away from my family.”

  “I haven’t bothered anyone in your family. I just wanted to show you I was serious about what I said this afternoon, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it so far. I figured you’d call your wife and have her get Sean out of school, but I guess she was busy or you couldn’t get a hold of her. Am I right? I was at the school before your mom was. I watched her lead little Sean out the front door, and then I followed her out here.”

  “I’m not going to represent you. Just leave us alone.”

  “Yes, you are. And like I said at your office, you need to do right by me.”

  “I’m not going to help you kill children.”

  “I don’t know where you got the idea that I want you to help me kill anyone. I’m not asking you to help me do anything. All I’m asking is that you do what lawyers get paid to do. I want my constitutional rights upheld. Those police officers violated my rights, and your job is to hold them accountable for it.”

  “You’re delusional,” I said. “The underwear the cops found in the van is going to be tested, and when the tests come back and show that the underwear belonged to the two boys who were murdered, you’re going to be arrested and held without bail. And under those circumstances, there isn’t a judge on the planet who will rule that your van was illegally stopped and searched and suppress whatever evidence they found in it, including the underwear. The cops will come into court and lie, and the judge will accept everything they say as gospel. You can’t win this. You’re going to prison for the rest of your life, if they don’t give you the death penalty.”