Jessie Black Legal Thrillers Box Set 1

by Larry A Winters

  “Even the sheriffs’ elevators?” Jessie expected that the six public elevators would be taken off-line in an emergency, but the courthouse had two special elevators reserved for the deputy sheriffs and the inmates they were tasked with transporting. “They lock those down, too?”

  Rais shrugged. “Standard lockdown protocol. At least we’re walking down the stairs, so it won’t be that hard.”

  Says the person not wearing heels. But she nodded. “Okay.”

  She’d spent a lot of time inside the Criminal Justice Center during the last several years—more time than she wanted to think about—but she had only used the stairwells a handful of times. Unlike those in City Hall, the stairwells in the CJC were kept locked except during emergencies. Now, following Rais into a bare-walled, badly lit space, she realized how sharply it contrasted with the dark mahogany and stately decorations of the public areas of the building. The stairwell was cold, too. When the door clanged shut behind her, she felt a chill.

  Rais started down the stairs, his shoes clomping. Jessie took a breath and followed him. “You can hang out in the Security Center until we round these guys up,” he said, all youthful exuberance now that the horror of the attempted killing was behind him. “I’m sure it won’t take long. We probably have their faces on the camera feed.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said. But she had her doubts. She was still worried about Reggie, stuck in a holding cell on the seventh floor, trapped.

  Rais reached the landing between the seventh and sixth floors, then paused and turned back to watch her over his shoulder as she caught up. Her phone buzzed, and the sudden, insect-like noise seemed unnaturally loud in the stairwell. “Hold on a second, Mo.” She leaned against the wall and retrieved the phone from her bag. Mark Leary’s name lit the screen. In all of the turmoil, she had almost forgotten about him.

  She brought the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Jess. You okay?”

  She leaned her head against the cool cement wall. “This is not exactly the plan I had for this morning’s court appearance,” she said.

  “I know. And I’m really sorry. I got tied up with a case.” She heard traffic sounds on his end of the line, and realized with a jolt that he wasn’t in the building. Her head came away from the wall as she stood straighter. Rais watched her with an anxious expression, one foot on the next stair below him. “Give me ten minutes,” Leary said. “Fifteen tops. There’s an unusual amount of traffic. Just stall the judge, tell her I’ll get on the stand as soon as I arrive.”

  Stall the judge? She bit back her anger. Would he be so flippant with his responsibilities if they were simply colleagues rather than ... whatever the hell they were? She bit her lip. There were more pressing concerns right now. For one, he didn’t seem to know that she’d come within a few inches of having her head blown off. “Leary, there is no trial today. The courthouse is in lockdown. They’re not going to let you in anyway.”

  “Lockdown? What are you—” His voice cut off, and now she heard the sound of sirens racing past on his end of the line. “What’s going on?”

  “Someone tried to kill Reggie Tuck. While I was with him, actually, in a conference room.”

  “What? Are you okay?” The concern in his voice diminished her anger, but not entirely.

  “A little shaken up. But physically, other than a few bruises, I’m fine.”

  “A few bruises? What happened?”

  “I got in the way of one of the bad guys. He pushed me.”

  “One of the bad guys?”

  She glanced down the stairs at Rais, who was shifting his weight impatiently from one leg to the other. “Leary, I’m fine.” She sighed. “There was a security breach. There are five armed intruders in the building. One of them is already in custody and I’m sure the deputies are closing in on the others. I’m on my way to the Security Center now, with one of the deputies. I’m safe.”

  She heard him exhale a breath. “I’m coming.”

  “They won’t let you in. Besides, I’m more worried about Reggie. The deputy sheriffs put him back in a holding cell outside the courtroom. He’s a sitting duck there.”

  “Reggie Tuck’s the jailhouse snitch, right? The one who claims Nash confessed to him?”

  “The informant, yes.”

  “What did the gunman look like? A gang member?”

  “No. He was white, clean cut, professional. If anything, he struck me as military.”

  “And you’re sure he was targeting your informant?”

  “He asked for him by name, and he was carrying his photo.” An idea struck her. “Is there someone you can talk to on the outside? Someone with some pull who can get Reggie better protection?”

  “Maybe. I’ll see what I can do. I just reached the courthouse. I’ll call you back soon.”

  She ended the call, then stared at her phone for a moment, thinking about the questions Reggie had asked about her relationship with Leary. I’m coming, Leary had said, even though she’d explained that the building was locked down. Was whatever they had between them clouding his judgment? Could she count on him?

  “Ready to keep moving?” Rais said. He had already descended three steps while waiting for her, and his left foot was lowering toward a fourth.

  “That was the lead homicide detective on the Nash case. He was scheduled to testify today, but he was running late.”

  “Lucky him.”

  “Yeah.” She followed Rais down. The stairwell seemed eerily quiet. Their footfalls echoed from the shaft’s close walls, and the sporadic light sources cast bouncing shadows of their movement.

  “Your friend upstairs is safe,” Rais said to her without turning around. “You don’t need to worry about him. Kenny knows what he’s doing.”

  “Reggie’s not my friend,” she said, maybe a little too harshly. “He’s a witness.”

  “Witness. Sorry.” He jogged ahead. Jessie turned a corner at the landing and almost bumped into him. His progress had been stopped by a massive object that filled the stairwell between two floors. “What the hell?” he said.

  She reached past him and touched the obstruction. The surface felt like hard, smooth plastic. “A JusticeGuard,” she said, remembering the huge bulletproof judge’s benches she’d seen delivery men hauling across the lobby this morning. Someone had managed to pull or push one into the stairwell, where it had jammed in the narrow space, effectively stopping their descent before they could reach the sixth floor.

  Rais placed both hands against the thing and pushed. His mouth straightened to a tight line and cords stood out on his neck. Jessie joined him, placing her own hands near his and leaning all of her weight.

  “It won’t budge,” she said.

  Rais dropped away, gasping. “Shit.” He tried to maneuver around the thing, first squatting and peering under it, then attempting to squeeze around it. Jessie knew it was hopeless before he tried. The gaps between the JusticeGuard and the walls, ceiling, and floor were too narrow for either of them to fit. Rais dipped his chin and keyed his shoulder mic.

  “Control, this is 19.”

  A voice crackled from his shoulder unit, sounding loud in the enclosed space of the stairwell. “Go ahead, 19.”

  “We need some help in stairwell 2. There’s an ... obstruction.”

  The speaker crackled. “What kind of obstruction?”

  Rais’s face creased with impatience. “One of those ... JusticeGuard things. Someone blocked the stairwell. Bring—I don’t know—an axe or something. A chainsaw.”

  “Stay put,” the other voice said. “Dispatching someone to check it out now.”

  Rais looked at Jessie and shook his head. “Why would someone shove a judge’s bench into the stairs?”

  The answer seemed obvious. The Criminal Justice Center had sixteen floors, sixty-five courtrooms, sixty-two judge’s chambers, and numerous restrooms, conference rooms, and holding cells. “Someone’s trying to limit our options. Give us fewer places to hide. Trap u
s.”

  “Us?” Rais said.

  “Reggie Tuck and anyone trying to protect him.”

  Rais’s eyes narrowed with a skepticism that looked out of place on his boyish features. “Who would go to all this trouble to kill a snitch?”

  “I don’t know, but my guess would be a man who’s looking at the death penalty if that snitch is given a chance to testify.”

  “So you think this is about your murder case? Against that low-life gangbanger Nash?”

  She shrugged. “You have a better explanation?”

  They heard the slam of metal as a door opened on the floor below them, then footsteps. Then a voice, from the other side of the JusticeGuard. “Holy shit.”

  Rais pressed himself against the rounded surface of the obstruction. “Did you bring a chainsaw like I said?”

  “We don’t keep chainsaws in the CJC, you dumb ass. I’ve got a fire axe.” They heard a clunk. The JusticeGuard did not even rattle. “This is not the right tool for the job,” the man said.

  The radio crackled again. “Control, this is 10. I’m on the eighth floor. There’s an obstruction here, too. Seventh floor is blocked on both ends.”

  Jessie looked at Rais, both of them silent as the news sunk in. Someone had used the JusticeGuards to cut the seventh floor off from the rest of the courthouse. They were trapped.

  “Listen,” Rais said to the men on the other side of the obstruction. “I have a piece of paper with the shooter’s fingerprints. I’m going to try to slide it between the JusticeGuard and the wall. Can you grab it from the other side?”

  “I’ll try,” one of the voices said.

  What happened next would have been comical in different circumstances. Rais tried various entry points and angles, but the JusticeGuard was too large, and the deputies on the other side could not grasp the sheet of paper. Finally, Rais crushed the sheet of paper into a ball and lobbed it through a gap between the obstruction and the ceiling. He cast a sheepish look at Jessie. “Hopefully I didn’t just destroy the prints.”

  Jessie could hear the men straightening the sheet of paper on the other side of the obstruction. “Looks okay to me,” a voice said. “We’ll take it back to the Security Center.”

  Rais looked at Jessie. There was fear and uncertainty in his gaze now. “We’re going to have to go back,” he said.

  “I know.” She craned her neck to look up the stairwell they’d just descended.

  Rais switched the speaker on his shoulder mic to mute. When she looked at him, he shrugged. “I feel like we should be quiet. Like we’re being hunted.”

  Jessie nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. “Take out your gun.”

  6

  What should have been an orderly evacuation of the sixth floor devolved into chaos. People surged toward the stairwell in a mob, ignoring the shouts and arm-waving of the deputies. Kurt Garrett spotted an old woman about to be run down by two men in suits. He grabbed her just in time, lifting her off her feet and setting her down next to the wall. She gazed up at him with thankful, watery eyes, then hobbled back into the fray and promptly got shoved between rushing people like a pinball between bumpers. Garrett doubted she’d make it out of the building without one or two fractures.

  Garrett’s father used to be fond of saying that most people were sheep. Garrett had always resisted the comparison, choosing to believe that each person was an individual with his or her own mind and, if not unlimited potential, at least more potential than a barnyard animal. But the years had ground away most of his optimism about the human race. He still didn’t agree with his father, who’d remained a bitter, close-minded failure to the end of his life, but he had come to accept that just because he recognized a quality in himself did not mean that he could assume it existed in others. He might possess creativity, ambition, and introspection, but not everyone did. Events like the crisis today proved that. Most people were—if not sheep—idiots.

  With the discovery of an impassible barrier blocking off all floors above six, Security had decided to evacuate all civilians from the lower levels of the courthouse. Garrett had to laugh at their logic—just because the threat appeared to be limited to the seventh floor at the moment didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any bad guys on the lower floors—but he wasn’t senior enough to factor into the decision-making process, and he knew it. So he followed orders, helping to herd—despite his feelings, there really wasn’t any better word for it—the lawyers, witnesses, staff, and other hapless people to the stairwell.

  Garrett shouldered his way to one of the other deputies. “This isn’t working. Someone’s going to get badly injured—or worse.”

  The deputy, Bart Oliver, only stared at him with a blank expression. “They’ll sort themselves out in the stairwell.”

  “They’ll kill each other in the stairwell,” Garrett said.

  Oliver shrugged. He had a doughy face, with a deep crease up the center of his chin that looked distractingly like a butt-crack, but Garrett didn’t judge people by their looks. Unfortunately, Oliver also came up short in the brains department, a failing Garrett did judge. “Our job is to direct people downstairs,” Oliver said. “If they won’t listen when we say to move in an orderly manner, what can we do? There are hundreds of them. Only a few of us.”

  Garrett could feel his frustration churning inside him. This job—and especially incompetent co-workers like Oliver—were going to give him ulcers worse than his father’s. “We need to halt the evacuation until we establish order and safety.”

  Oliver scoffed. “Yeah, good luck with that, kid.”

  Garrett shook his head, not bothering to conceal his disgust. Oliver wasn’t going to do the right thing. He didn’t care about keeping the courthouse safe—he had no higher priorities than showing up and collecting his paycheck. “I’m going downstairs. We’ll see what Security says.”

  “What? You can’t just leave me here—”

  Garrett pushed into a gap in the crowd, leaving Oliver gaping stupidly at his back. When he reached the stairwell, though, he realized how silly his grand exit must look. The entrance to the stairwell was jammed with people. There was no way Garrett could cut ahead of them, and even if he did, he could only imagine the gridlock of bodies on the actual stairs. Turning back, he saw Oliver’s smirk.

  Screw him. I don’t need to go down there in person.

  Garrett reached for his shoulder mic, but not with any enthusiasm. It would have been hard enough to get his concerns across in person—most of the higher-ups in Security were just more senior versions of Oliver. By radio, he’d be lost in the noise. Ignored.

  Across the hallway, a man cried out as he was knocked to the ground and stepped on.

  Still worth a try.

  He thumbed the mic, but his voice died in his throat when something caught his eye. No more than three feet from the man who’d cried out, he saw a familiar face. Not a face he should have seen on the sixth floor, or in this building at all, for that matter. Reed Estrada.

  What was the man doing here? After allowing five armed men to pass through the metal detector and breach the courthouse’s security, he should have disappeared into the city before anyone had time to realize anything was wrong. Instead, he’d apparently come up here. Why?

  “Hey!” Garrett called. He pushed through the crowd, leading with his shoulder. His right hand dipped toward his holster. Estrada’s head turned. His face blanched and he pivoted, as if to run, but was as constrained by the crowd as Garrett was. “Stop!”

  His shouts caught even Oliver’s attention, the man’s heavyset body moving more quickly than Garrett would have expected. In seconds, Oliver had his gun drawn and trained on Estrada. No! The sight of the weapon threw the crowd into an even more intense state of panic. Bodies smashed against Garrett in their rush to get out of Oliver’s line of sight. Garrett lost track of Estrada and cursed. He shoved blindly through the mass of people in the direction he’d last seen the man.

  The noise level in the corridor
was deafening—a cacophony of voices, shouts, sobs, and cries. Garrett plunged through the crowd like a swimmer struggling against an overwhelming current. Two large men moved out of his way and he almost collided with the wall behind them. Estrada was nowhere in sight.

  He cast his gaze left and right, trying to scan the moving crowd, getting desperate. Then he found him again, not more than six feet away, separated only by a clump of civilians. Garrett charged through the human barrier and grabbed Estrada’s arm.

  Estrada cringed away from him and tried to wriggle free, but Garrett held him tight. “Nowhere to go, Reed. You should have gotten out of the building while you had the chance.” The stupidity of some people still amazed him.

  Estrada gazed at him with watery eyes. Looking closer, Garrett wondered if the deputy had been crying. “I have to stop this,” Estrada said weakly. “I should.... I should never have gotten involved.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I needed the money. But ... God, I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “You let five armed men into a courthouse,” Garrett said, dumbfounded by his colleague’s idiocy. “What did you think it would be like?” He wasn’t really interested in the answer. He was talking to give himself time to think. His sidearm was still holstered, and now, close up, he could see that Estrada was armed as well.

  Estrada’s gaze dropped to Garrett’s hip, as if he’d read his mind. “Think hard before you reach for that, Kurt,” Estrada said.

  “I’m always thinking hard.” If he went for his gun, would Estrada do the same? Could Garrett clear his holster before Estrada did? And regardless of the outcome of that race, how many innocent bystanders would fall in the crossfire?

  Estrada’s fingers twitched above his holster. Garrett swallowed hard. If he could talk the man into surrendering, restrain him....

  The blast of a gunshot tore through his thoughts. The room erupted into absolute chaos. People stampeded toward the stairwell, crushing anyone in their path. In the midst of the madness, Garrett saw Estrada’s body slump to the floor. Shoes and legs batted him this way and that like a rag doll. Garrett caught glimpses of him through the pandemonium. Blood matted his hair, and the floor beneath him was dark and wet with it. Garrett lunged forward, squatted before him. He found a jagged hole in the back of his head, edged with singed skin. Looking up, he saw Bart Oliver gaping at him, a smoking gun in his outstretched hand.