Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Self merely snorted. “Yeah, right.” Then the door slammed open, propelled by a shoulder. Eric Moreland’s. He was still wearing his cuffs, and the cuffs were chained to his waist. His feet were chained to each other.

  “Hey, get these damn things off me!” he snapped at her, flapping his hands around.

  Taiesha frowned at the man. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, get ‘em off me!”

  “I’m not a bailiff, Mr. Moreland. I don’t have the keys.”

  “Then get someone in here that does!”

  Clearly, he was used to giving orders. Could he take one?

  “Sit down,” she told him, using what Tremaine used to call her none-of-your-nonsense voice.

  It didn’t go over well. He leaned forward, planted his knuckles on the table and glared at her with an intensity that sent a little spike of adrenaline through her veins. It brought Jerome a step nearer too, but she shook her head and that stopped his advance on the suspect.

  Apparently, Moreland thought that was due to his importance. He developed a nasty grin. “I don’t know who you think you are…” he began.

  “Taiesha Daniels. I’m your attorney.”

  That stopped him. In silence, he gave her the hairy eyeball. She returned the favor.

  Pretty well fed for a farmer. Most of them hereabouts had lost all their water rights early on. When the snowpack up in the mountains subsided to one-fifth of “normal” the cities and big corporations got first dibs. Now most of the rivers were dry by July. Worse yet, when the Inland Sea swallowed the valley, it took out the Aqueduct too, and the wells soon after, thanks to saltwater intrusion. No water to drink from above or below, let alone irrigate anything, for at least half the year. So just how had this redneck hung on to his land, and how was he maintaining that minor league beer belly?

  “You? A lawyer?” said Moreland. He straightened, then pointedly ran his gaze over her corn rows. “Where’d you go to school, huh?

  Ghetto Tech?”

  “UCLA,” she replied.

  That got a dry sneer of a laugh. “Another south state water-sucker, and a shining example of the equal-opportunity program, I bet. State scholarship, right? Or a grant. Anything but your own dime.”

  “G.I. Bill.”

  The correction derailed him for a moment, but didn’t convince him. That, she thought, came from his spotting the long twisted scars on her left hand and wrist. They had nothing to do with her tours of duty, but he didn’t know that. Moreland brought his head back an inch or so. Something darkened in his eyes. Then, with a skeptical grunt, he finally settled into the chair on his side of the table. After a moment, he inquired, “My lawyer?”

  “Yes. I’m the public defender for the First Circuit Court of the Central Valley,” Taiesha told him. “I’ve been assigned to your case, and now…”

  “Don’t need one.”

  Taiesha frowned. “Mr. Moreland, you’ve been charged with murder.”

  “Yeah, right.” Moreland shrugged that off as if it were dandruff. “I killed me a thief. A sea rat. That ain’t murder. That’s me, exercising my right to defend me and mine.”

  “Really? Why don’t you tell me about it.”

  Suspicion glittered in those eyes. On more than one front, she thought, but he’d either get over the skin color thing or he wouldn’t. She didn’t much care about that. She could only address the more patent problem.

  Taiesha nodded to Jerome et al. “Gentlemen?”

  When they’d stepped out, she assured Moreland, “Whatever you say to me is protected by attorney-client privilege. It can’t be used against you. It can’t even be shared with anyone else, not unless you agree to it.”

  Moreland was, what? Forty-one? Old enough to remember what life was like, back before Second Rise. Back when sea level had only gone up by a couple dozen feet, back when we all thought we could simply adjust, when everyone in the country had power and cable and working wall screens, and every other TV series was a cop show. Back when everybody knew their Miranda rights by heart and could tell you the best way to use Luminol at a crime scene. Did he remember the rules about privilege? She could only hope so.

  Once more, she gently urged him on. “Tell me what happened.”

  He licked his lips, and she pushed a ration bladder his way, but Moreland didn’t take it. “I, uh, I have a warehouse,” he told her. “Not far from here. Me and my brother, we built it. The roads wasn’t comin’ back, right? So there wasn’t no good way to get things to market. At first, it was no big deal ‘cause we weren’t even growing enough to feed our own selves. But once we got the de-sal plant started up, well, then we come up with a surplus. The town got together and put in a dock, and boats started coming… and we were a port town, just like that.

  “Nothing big, see? But we did a lot better’n some.”

  Taiesha nodded. She’d seen the towns he was talking about— the ones that did not come together and pull themselves back from the brink. Towns that made Hilmar-whatever look damn good and pirates were really the least of it, where people wound up eating each other. But that thought brought up other things she would rather not remember clearly—the sound of their screams and the smell of their blood…

  Not now.

  She rubbed at the scars on her wrist, and shifted her hips in a vain attempt to ease the pain still enfolding her spine, thanks to her early morning encounter with Hilmar’s unlucky buccaneers.

  Hey! Come on, focus!

  Her client, thank God, didn’t notice the lapse. He said, “Next thing you know, the whole damn town was overrun with sea rats.”

  A term Taiesha found distasteful, to say the least.

  “All over the place, we got squatters,” said Moreland. “They tear the hell out of whatever place they get into. They steal everything, and there’s more of ‘em every damn day! When they start taking the food out of our kids’ mouths, well, a man has to do something.”

  Taiesha nodded.

  “That deputy they sent out here from Merced is the first one we’ve seen in ten years, so the rule is the same as in L.A. You see a looter, you shoot him. And that’s what I did.”

  Taiesha peered at the case file. “It says here the victim, Ramon Izquierdo, was nine years old.”

  Moreland nodded.

  “I don’t see any property listed, except for his clothes and a homemade slingshot. That and a pair of real rats, both dead. Did you see him steal something?”

  “That little bastard was inside the fence, and about to get into the warehouse. He would’ve stole something, sure as shit.”

  “Did he attack you in any way? With the slingshot, perhaps?”

  “Hell, no.” Moreland scoffed at the very idea. “Didn’t give him the chance.”

  Taiesha frowned. “It says here he was shot in the back.”

  “That’s right. That’s how we do it around here. Ain’t no such thing as a warning shot. Not with a sea rat. You take your shot when you see ‘em. You don’t, they’ll either get away or they’ll get you first.”

  A rational attitude, five or six years ago. Now?

  Taiesha swallowed a bad taste and pressed on. “Did you get a look at him first? Were you aware that he was a child?”

  A movement of the man’s shoulders might’ve been either a twitch or a shrug. “Ain’t about size,” he said. “My Daddy taught me that much. All guns are loaded. All dogs bite. And a rat is a rat.”

  Great, she thought. Just great. That little tidbit was likely to be the centerpiece of her closing argument, come the trial, when she’d have to act as this man’s mouthpiece and do her best to justify his killing this kid.

  Why me? she asked the Universe At Large.

  Nobody answered, not even Self.

  Her next stop was the galley, where she could look at her witnesses through the service window without being spied upon herself. The three of them were seated in the Mess, at the captain’s table. All three were stuffing their faces, surrounded by ration pack wrappers and soup bowls
.

  “Been eating their heads off,” the cook told her. “Them kids’ll finish a pack and get up and go run laps around the boiler deck. They’re trying to make room for more, I guess. ‘Specially when they found out they was gettin’ dessert.”

  Taiesha nodded. “How long do you think it’s been since any of them got to eat their fill?”

  “No tellin’, honey. I reckon that boy been hungry his whole life. The little one ain’t quite so fixated on it, but she sure ain’t picky! And Momma’s already got three or four picnics’ worth tucked into her underwear.”

  Taiesha could see a certain lumpiness in regions that ought to have curved a bit more, but some of that was the sheer lack of meat on her bones. The woman looked to be in her late twenties—a skinny brownette with long tapering fingers and ragged nails. She might have been pretty once, when she was still a kid. Now, mostly, she looked worn out.

  Small wonder. The boy seemed to be in perpetual motion. Keeping up with him would wipe out a Marine. And the girl… Oh my God.

  The little girl had Kayla’s snub nose. She turned her head toward the window, presenting a backlit profile, and just at that moment, the woman reached out and tapped the tip of that upturned nose. The move transferred a dollop of cream from the pie she’d been eating.

  “Tia Trina!” the child protested. She promptly went cross-eyed, trying to look at her new decoration. Then she tried to lick it off, only her tongue wouldn’t reach. The two of them burst into giggles, and Taiesha’s heart did a belly flop as she remembered the barbecue, that final Fourth of July before her own daughter was killed.

  Something crashed to the floor—a stack of pie tins. She’d knocked them off as she staggered back.

  “Hey! You all right, honey?” Large warm floury hands took hold of her. They held her up when Taiesha’s legs didn’t want to. She clung to the counter and closed her eyes and turned away, from the view and the memory.

  “Here,” said another deeper voice, and she felt herself pressed into a chair. At the sound of that second voice, though, her eyes flew wide open again, and she found that while two of the helping hands were the cook’s, the other two were MacClure’s. Where in hell had he come from?

  She pulled free of both sets, and growled out a low, “No, don’t!”

  To the Scotsman, she said, “You get the fuck away from me.”

  To her relief, and without a word, he did. But the trio pigging out in the Mess must have heard all the noise, and been spooked by it. When she looked back through the service window, all three were gone. There was nothing left but wrappers and crumbs, and damn few of those.

  Taiesha sighed. She hauled herself upright again. “It’s… I’m okay,” she told the cook when the latter moved in again, ready to grab her. “It’s just the heat.” And since the kitchen was indeed overly warm, that gave her a semi-graceful exit.

  She made it by way of the Mess, where she pulled on gloves and carefully gathered up lunch’s remains. There just might be a little bit more she could do for these people.

  Moreland’s hearing took all of ten minutes. The bailiffs allowed thirty townsmen aboard, but also insisted on disarming everyone. Taiesha had Jerome make sure at least five were refugees, too. Some townies weren’t happy about that, but justice, as Jerome loudly informed them all, either applied to everyone or nobody. That, plus the big guns the bailiffs all carried around on their belts, served as a convincing argument and the protest subsided, at least until the judge ordered remand for the mayor.

  What do they expect on a charge like this? Taiesha wondered. There weren’t any bail bondsmen left, for God’s sake, not around here.

  Then, after her client was hauled back to lock-up, the judge’s clerk called out the traditional Oyez announcement, and they proceeded directly to trial for the two surviving pirates. She was saved from having to mount the witness stand herself by MacClure’s testimony about what took place on the boiler deck that morning when they were boarded, but realized now why she’d won that round so easily. The “man” she’d kicked and cold-cocked was nowhere near full grown. He was a teenager, half starved to death, and so striped with scars as well as tattoos, there was hardly a square inch of him unmarked by one or the other. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe? Scared, for sure.

  His compadre was older by a decade or so, but missing an eye and still more of his teeth. The second man wasn’t frightened at all. He was grinning at one of the local women and smacking his lips as he grabbed his crotch. One of the bailiffs cracked a baton across his elbow, hoping to improve his manners, but mostly it just made him noisier.

  To her surprise, the Scot’s account of the morning’s encounter was both concise and accurate. Unemotional, too. His brevity let her concentrate on her clients’ defense, which mainly amounted to a plea for mercy on account of the younger buc’s age.

  In the end, however, the judge’s ruling surprised no one. Rishwain made his closing argument, she made hers, and the clerk handed up a neat sheaf of the paperwork involved to His Honor. Judge Hebert nodded his thanks, and glanced at the forms, but what he saw there deepened the lines engraved in his long face. He turned toward the pirates again with a grave air better suited to funeral parlors.

  “Michael Dysart, and James Alan Wilson,” he intoned. “You have both been found guilty of attempted piracy on a public waterway. The penalty for attempted piracy is the same as for actual piracy—it is not the policy of this state, after all, to reward you for failing.”

  He paused, and got a nervous laugh from the townies. Was that intentional? Hebert had an improv actor’s sense of timing, Taiesha thought, but she hoped he wasn’t going to play up this crowd, not when one of their own was about to be tried here.

  “In addition,” the judge announced, “the two of you were tested while in custody. Your, ah, bodily by-products, that is.” Again he paused, letting that one sink into a growing silence. Taiesha, who’d run the tests, knew where he was going with this, but the locals didn’t. “James Alan Wilson, you tested positive. Human myoglobin from muscle tissue was found in your feces. You, sir, are a cannibal.”

  The courtroom erupted and the bailiffs were hard pressed to keep the townsmen away from the two defendants. A clamor arose and became a chant, and the chant was soon loud enough to be heard ashore, where still more voices joined in. Moments later, the whole town of Atwater seemed to saying the same thing: “Hang ‘em! Hang ‘em!”

  It didn’t subside until Judge Hebert used all of the Queen’s many loudspeakers. Over and over again, His Honor shouted, “Order in the Court!” and banged his gavel with such a will that it sounded like gunshots. That was what finally shut them all up—the fear that it might be.

  Hebert waited until everyone had sat down again, too, before he banged the gavel once more and announced his decision. “Michael Dysart and James Alan Wilson, you have both been convicted of a capital crime. In accordance with the laws of the sovereign State of California, I do hereby sentence the pair of you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

  Again, the crowd in the courtroom roared, and drowned out the rest of it. This time, though, Hebert let them go at it until they were tired of shouting. Then he told them, “Said sentence will be carried out immediately.”

  That’s when Dysart, the younger one, shot to his feet and cried, “No fair! He ate the meat, not me! That bastard wouldn’t even give me a taste! Hang him, not me!”

  Half an hour later, Taiesha found herself back on the Texas deck. Alongside Judge Hebert, she watched while the bailiffs erected the collapsible gallows behind the pilot house. “Why hang them today?” she asked the judge.

  “Why not?” said Hebert.

  “Well…”

  “We’d have to feed them again, for one thing,” His Honor went on, not waiting for her reply. “And they’d both have to suffer through a long sleepless night, knowing there was no hope. I think that would be cruel.”

  “But…”

  “What?”

  Taiesha shook her head.
“I’m just wondering how long it’ll be before we can afford not to kill everyone we convict.”

  The judge sighed as he turned to face her. “You know we don’t have the resources to keep anybody in prison. We don’t have the space, or the guards, or the money for that, much less the food.”

  “But a kid that young…” Here she pointed at Dysart. “… if he ever had even half a chance…”

  “He’s a cannibal.” Hebert put his hand on her forearm. “You heard him. The boy was mad at his compadre. Why? Because he didn’t get his fair share of their last victim. Besides, you know there must have been others.”

  “I realize that,” she retorted. “It just doesn’t feel right, that’s all.”

  “Tell me, then. Why are we here?” the judge asked her.

  Taiesha shrugged.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  When she still didn’t answer, he moved closer and took hold of both shoulders, so that she had to look up at him. “We are the law,” Hebert reminded her. “This circuit court, these robes?” he said, waving a hand at his wind-fluttered expanse of black muslin. “This whole damn ridiculous floating courthouse? This is the heart of the law, and we must bring it back to life. Because if we don’t, there’s no hope for any of us.”

  The urge to argue that point must have shown in her face.

  “You know it’s true,” Hebert told her. “We made it through First Rise, but Second has damn near done in the entire world. How many people have died already, of flooding and droughts and famine and war? Of murder, disease, and cannibalism? Three billion? Four? Hell, we don’t even know. But we do know this. We’ve only got one more chance at it. We’ve got to get things back under control. Because if we don’t, then sure as hell, Third Rise is coming. If that happens, civilization is over with. Probably, so is what’s left of humanity.”

  She knew he was right, knew it down in her bones, but that didn’t do much for the queasiness rumbling through her gut, or the aching pain in her lower back, where things had healed up, but would never be totally right again.