The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  “Melda?”

  Her cast-iron skillet lay on the counter.

  “Melda?”

  She was not in the kitchen or the main room. He hurried into the bedroom, stumbling over debris, and turned on the light. The shoe lay on its side, outside the closed bathroom door. White, soft-soled. Melda’s shoe.

  “Melda?”

  Sloane never closed the bathroom door. His immediate neighbor was the ocean. With his pulse beating in his ears, he reached for the handle of the door. If there was a God, let the room be empty. He turned the handle, pushed open the door. The wedge of light swept over the linoleum, widening like the sun passing over a sundial, and came to a stop on the figure slumped against the porcelain tub. It was an almost serene image. Then Sloane flipped the switch, and the light brought unspeakable horror. Melda lay in a pool of blood, her head pitched backward, her throat a gaping hole.

  Sloane’s feet felt anchored to the floor; his hands twisted with anger, despair, and uncertainty.

  “No,” he cried softly. Then the agony burst from his throat in a torrent of rage. “Noooooooo!”

  He stumbled forward to his knees, crawling to her, clutching her to his chest.

  No. No. No.

  “Breathe,” he pleaded. “Please breathe.”

  Please. Breathe. Please breathe.

  He lowered her to the floor, tilted her head back, and cupped her mouth with his own, blowing, pressing on her chest, all reason now lost and buried.

  “One, two, three, four, five.”

  One breath, five thrusts.

  His breath escaped through her neck like air from a hole in a tire.

  “Three, four, five.”

  No. God, no . . .

  Again. Blow. “Three, four, five.”

  Again. Again. The room blurred in white flickering lights.

  “Two, three, four . . .”

  The voice grew faint.

  Darkness enveloped him, pulling on him like a weight tied to his ankles. He sank. The light faded. Pain exploded across his forehead and temples, plunging him further into darkness, alone, the only sound the fading of his own voice, a tape running low on batteries. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  Then it, too, faded. And he was gone.

  26

  HIS DESIRE TO punish those who had killed his dogs urged him to steer the horse down the narrow path, guns blazing like Rooster Cogburn—John Wayne—riding across the open field in the climax to True Grit. But this was not a movie, and in real life the good guys died. Jenkins turned the horse away from the barn and kicked it hard up the path, using one arm to protect his face from low-hanging branches. Behind him he felt Alex Hart’s head against his back. She kept a tight grip around his waist. The brush cleared at the asphalt road. He stopped in the trees, considering the road for a moment, hoping that their attackers had not anticipated this path of retreat. Then he urged the horse across it, deeper into the darkness on the other side.

  After ten minutes of hard riding, with the Arabian snorting white puffs in the cool night air, Jenkins slowed the animal to cross a small creek bed that emptied into the sound a mile downstream. He pushed the horse up a steep hillside, letting it find its footing, and looked down on the cottage, a tepee of fire. Dismounting, he tethered the animal to a tree and eased Alex to the ground, putting her back against a tree. She grimaced when he ripped the sleeve off her blouse to examine her arm.

  She’d been lucky. The bullet had ricocheted off the tree and grazed her biceps. She’d have a scar, but she’d live. The wound was already clotting.

  He used his teeth to tear strips of cloth. “We need to get you to a doctor,” he said between clenched teeth.

  “You going to ride the horse in?”

  He ripped another strip and wrapped her arm. “This doesn’t involve you, Alex.”

  “It does now.”

  He made a knot and applied another strip. “This is a surface wound. These wounds cut a lot deeper and have been bleeding since you were riding your bike in the front yard of your parents’ home.”

  She pushed him away and struggled to her feet. “Well, I’m not riding my bike anymore. And I’m not a little girl, Charlie. So why don’t you just let me take care of me.”

  She was stubborn, like her father. He stood from his crouch. “You make it personal, Alex, and you’ll end up getting killed.”

  “What are you going to make it?”

  He turned, looking down at the farm. From the distance it looked as peaceful as a campfire. “They killed my dogs,” he said, the realization sinking in. “I was willing to let it all go. They took my career, my life, but I was willing to let it go.” He turned his head to look at her, his voice taut with emotion, anger. “They made it personal.”

  “We’re both in this now; neither of us has a choice. We need to be smart.”

  For a long moment they sat in silence, hearing the stream in the distance and the occasional gust of wind through the trees.

  “Where did you go, Charlie? Where did you go back there? You looked up at me like you were a million miles away.”

  He didn’t answer her.

  “You called me ‘Joe.’”

  For the first few years the image of the woman had haunted him every night. Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort helped pass the days. If he got drunk enough he could make it through a night, sometimes a week, but the memories of what had happened, of what he had been a participant in, were always there, as permanent as Mount Rainier on the southern horizon—dormant, but capable of erupting any moment. When the booze no longer helped him to forget, he quit cold turkey. He didn’t need intervention or crisis counseling. He didn’t need AA. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He was just a man trying to forget a nightmare. He didn’t even pour the whiskey down the drain to avoid temptation. It had sat in his cabinet, untouched—until tonight.

  “What’s in that file, Charlie?”

  He looked at her, then back to the fires burning in the valley below. “A lot of bad memories,” he said. “Too many.”

  27

  UCSF Hospital,

  San Francisco

  THE BURST OF LIGHT blinded him, the door exploding in a shower of needled splinters, shaking the room. The percussive blast propelled him from the bed like a man being tossed from a boat in a storm. Slipping over the side, he clutched at the covers, pulling them over him as he fell into the gap, his body wedged between the wall and the heavy wood frame. He couldn’t move. Smoke tormented his lungs, burned his eyes, blurred his vision. The blast had deadened all sounds but for the ringing in his ears.

  The floor beneath him shook again, people running into the room.

  She fell to the ground, her face parallel with his own. A spray of blood spattered the dirt floor. He watched, helpless, as she flailed at the arms striking her, as if warding off a swarm of bees, until pain and instinct forced her to a fetal position. When the blows slowed the woman pushed to her knees, gasping, her body convulsing. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and one nostril. She raised her head, contemplating those who stood over her, then spat at their boots.

  The beating began again. They ripped the clothes from her body, leaving her naked and exposed, and forced her onto her back. One after the next they climbed on top of her until she no longer fought them, no longer resisted. A gloved hand pulled her from the floor by a tuft of hair, her body dangling limp as a rag doll, her right eye swollen shut, her lip split. Her left eye shifted, finding him for one brief moment beneath the bed.

  The blade arced, catching the flickering light of the moon before it sliced the darkness like a sickle through wheat.

  NO!”

  This time no echo rang in his ears. No ghostly wail haunted him. Sloane struggled to sit up, felt pressure across his chest, and realized he could not move his arms or legs. A bright light blinded him, an orb of white. He started to panic, then heard someone calling to him by name.

  “Mr. Sloane. Mr. Sloane, can you hear me?”

  The light receded,
leaving an aura of black and white spots that gave way to blurred images. He sensed someone standing over him, calling to him.

  “Mr. Sloane?”

  The images came into focus. A woman leaned over him, her face unfamiliar, round and flat, like a puffer fish when provoked, her eyes set behind thick plastic-framed glasses—a strange octagon shape and too large for her face.

  “Mr. Sloane?”

  The room was foreign, stark white but for a mauve drape that muted light from a window. A chair the color of the drape sat unused in the corner. He looked down at a red nylon strap across his chest. Similar straps bound his wrists. Though he could not see his ankles beneath the thin white sheet, the pressure told him they, too, were bound. A clear plastic tube ran from an IV bag suspended on a metal stand, to a needle in the crook of his right arm.

  This was not his apartment . . . not his room.

  “You all right?”

  Now a different voice, a man’s voice. Sloane turned his head. The images blurred and slid like time-lapse photography, coming to a stop on a black man standing in the room, one hand holding open the door. Fluorescent lights glistened off his shaved pate. He wore a plain tie and a gray suit.

  “I thought I heard a scream.”

  The woman walked toward him. “I’m fine, Detective. Please wait outside.”

  “Is he awake?”

  “I’m evaluating him. I’ll advise you when I feel he’s capable of talking.”

  “He looks alert to me.”

  “Detective Gordon, I’ll be the judge of that.”

  The man shrugged, resigned. “I’ll get another cup of coffee,” he said, and let the door shut behind him.

  The woman returned to the foot of the bed. “Mr. Sloane? Can you hear me?”

  Sloane nodded. Her face shifted up and down until he squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them.

  “Are you having trouble with your vision?”

  “Blurry.”

  “I’m Dr. Brenda Knight. Do you know where you are?”

  He shook his head, and her image bounced like a television picture that had lost its vertical hold.

  “You’re in the hospital,” she said.

  His mind connected the room’s sparse furnishings, but things remained disproportionate, off-kilter, like a bad Alice in Wonderland movie. “How . . .” His throat felt as if it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. Dr. Knight picked up a plastic cup from a side table and lifted the straw to his mouth. Tepid water burned the back of his throat. He winced, and she pulled the straw from his lips. His head fell back against the pillows.

  “What happened to me? How did I get here?” he asked. The words pulsed in his forehead.

  “An ambulance brought you in last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “It’s morning, Mr. Sloane.”

  He looked again to the mauve drape and realized that the muted light was daylight. Morning. The last thing he remembered was standing on the sidewalk with Tina, waiting for a cab to take her home.

  “Was I in some sort of accident? What happened to me? Why am I strapped down?”

  The doctor pulled an ophthalmoscope from her coat, clicked it on, and pulled back one of his eyelids, talking to him as she did. The light shot daggers of pain across the top of his skull. He grimaced and shook free.

  She clicked off the light, snapped it to the front pocket of her coat, and folded her arms, studying him.

  “Do you remember anything about last night, Mr. Sloane?”

  “Not really.”

  “Try. Tell me what you can remember.”

  He focused on the wall across the room, his mind blank. He started to say, “Nothing,” when the images began to flip like cards in a deck, slowly at first, then more quickly. He saw the mug shot in the newspaper. Joe Branick. Tina handed him the pink message slip, the name scrawled in ink. Joe Branick. His mailbox, the metal door swinging open. The mess in his apartment. The man walking on the landing, turning to him. The gun in his hand. Running. Stumbling across the ice plants, slipping at the edge of the cliff. Dirt cascading over him.

  Melda. He remembered, something had happened to Melda. His apartment. Melda’s skillet. Her shoe on the floor near . . . the bathroom door.

  Melda.

  “Oh, no.” He closed his eyes.

  “Mr. Sloane?”

  The man held the woman upright by a tuft of hair, blood oozing from her nose and mouth.

  “Mr. Sloane?”

  The light flickered. The blade arced.

  “Mr. Sloane . . . Mr. Sloane!”

  A heavy weight dropped onto his chest, driving the breath from his lungs. He sank into the darkness. The voice above him grew distant. The light faded. “Mr. Sloane . . . Mr. . . .”

  He descended into darkness, to the woman now lying in a pool of blood. She was young. Her hair, a rich dark brown, covered a portion of her face. He knelt down and pushed the strands from her cheeks. It was not Melda. It was not Emily Scott. A sharp pain pierced his chest, a wound that radiated throughout his being.

  Breathe. Please breathe.

  Her legs were bent at the knees and tucked beneath her. Her head, twisted awkwardly over her shoulder, revealed a gaping wound. He pulled her to him. Tears flooded his eyes and flowed down his cheeks. His fault. It was his fault.

  He sensed that he was no longer alone, and looked up to find two men towering over him: a black man, as tall and big as anyone he’d ever seen, stood beside a white man, hair dripping water down his face, breathing heavily, though not like one might after running a long distance. It was labored, choking back emotion, anger. Sloane looked into the man’s face, and though it was a contorted mask of grief, it was somehow familiar.

  He felt himself slipping away again, looking down at the two men and at himself as he floated above them, rising to the surface like a diver who has slipped from his weight belt, struggling against the buoyancy, unable to stay down. The dark depths gave way to flickering light. The voice returned.

  “Mr. Sloane?”

  He breached the surface, gasping for air, unable to catch his breath, heart thumping.

  “Mr. Sloane? Can you hear me?”

  He closed his eyes, wanting to go back down, to see the two men again, unable to descend.

  “Mr. Sloane?”

  Then, just as suddenly as Sloane had sunk to a place he did not know, the man who had been at the bottom, the one somehow familiar to him, breached the surface of Sloane’s reality, bringing a startling revelation.

  28

  Highway 5,

  Brownsville, Oregon

  A SHARP PAIN radiated a trail of fire down his spine from his neck to a searing point between his shoulder blades. After six hours of driving, Jenkins felt like a pretzel. His lower back ached. His left knee cracked when he bent it—arthritis from an injury he couldn’t even recall. With his mother’s youthful looks and a body that showed no outward sign of deserting him, Jenkins sometimes forgot that he was fifty-two years old. When he looked in the mirror the face surprised him; he still felt thirty—except at moments like this.

  For the first two hours he had watched the rear and side mirrors, but there were few cars on the highway; he would have detected anyone following them. No one was. Alex remained asleep, her leather jacket serving as a pillow against the passenger seat window, her body twitching from an over-the-counter painkiller—two Motrin washed down with two beers, picked up at a convenience store. Her arm would be sore.

  Jenkins drove through Oregon on a barren desert stretch of Highway 5. The horizon burned in the distance with the approach of dawn like a windswept fire. It colored the brick-red dirt a rust orange and caused the glacier-carved mountains to glow like huge bonfires. It made him think of his home, and of Lou and Arnold.

  He and Alex had waited until the flames died. Someone on the island had seen the fire and called the fire department. It took them better than three hours to put out the blaze. Alex had urged him not to go back to the farm, but he would not leave the
dogs to rot in the woods, food for the coyotes and other animals. He buried them near the creek. It felt like the right place—they liked to run through the water—but he had not had enough time to pick out all the twigs and rocks cluttering their graves, and that continued to bother him. He’d also had no time to mourn them. He grabbed a handful of dirt, doing his best to remember a prayer he had learned by sheer osmosis sitting for hours in a Baptist church Sunday mornings.

  “From ashes you came. To ashes you shall return,” he said, letting the soil sift through his fingers and scatter in the wind. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

  They deserved that much. They deserved more. Someday, if he ever returned, he’d stack stones there, plant a tree or a rhododendron, something to grow from their memories. The finality of the thought caused the sadness to well inside him. He pictured them bounding to their deaths, tails wagging, never suspecting the inhumanity that men could inflict. Charles Jenkins knew. He’d seen inhumanity firsthand, and thirty years wasn’t going to erase that memory, either.

  HIS BLUE NYLON windbreaker captured the heat steaming off his body. His shirt clung to his skin like cellophane wrap. He wiped the sweat and moisture pouring from his hair into his eyes. Dawn brought broken slits of sunlight filtering through gaps in the thick canopy of trees and vines, along with an almost serene quiet.

  Too quiet.

  He sensed an uneasiness in the jungle, an unnatural silence that comes when a predator has scared away or killed every living thing capable of movement.

  He pushed through the thick foliage into a clearing—and a horror he had witnessed just once before, in Vietnam.

  Smoke and ash hung thick in the stagnant air, rising from the embers, burning his throat and nostrils with the smell of charcoal and a sweet odor he had hoped never to smell again. Small fires smoldered where shacks once stood, an occasional flame bursting from the destruction, crackling and hissing at him like an angry snake disturbed from its rest. It was the only sound beneath the deafening canopy. Even the animals mourned in silence.

  Jenkins dropped to one knee from exhaustion and grief, sick with anger. Behind him he heard the rustle of the plants, the fall of footsteps, and the heavy breathing of a man struggling to catch up. Joe Branick came through the foliage and stopped as if approaching the edge of a cliff. Whatever words formed in his mind stopped just as suddenly. Mouth agape, Branick stared at the carnage of bodies—in the doorways where the structures no longer existed, and along the roads and hillsides to which the villagers had fled in a desperate and futile attempt to escape. They had been hunted and shot like animals. Slaughtered. Men and women.