Due Process

by Scott Pratt

  I went back into the jury room. Jack and Charlie and the rest of the people I’d left ten minutes earlier were still there.

  “The bailiff said you went running right into the middle of it,” Jack said. “He said you could have gotten yourself killed.”

  “Leon was hit,” I said. “I just went to make sure he was okay, and he is. I think it’s over, but let’s get out of here.”

  The four of us—Charlie, Jack, Kevin and I—gathered our things and walked out of the jury room, down the hall, through the door, into the lobby, where we were met by Kevin’s parents and three other members of his family. Mr. Davidson shook my hand and thanked me.

  “You don’t need to thank me,” I said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “That’s just it. He didn’t do anything wrong, but if it hadn’t been for you, he could have wound up in prison for the rest of his life.”

  “Well, instead he’s going to finish up the school year and head off to law school. The best thing you can do, all of you, is put this behind you. I’m not saying forget it because you won’t, but put it behind you, hold your heads up, and move on with your lives. Are you going to be in town for a couple of days?”

  “We’ll probably leave tomorrow.”

  “Stop by the office early and we’ll rehash some things. I’ll tell you what went on in the judge’s chambers.”

  “We’ll be there,” he said, and we all turned and walked toward the door.

  It happened before I could get out the front door.

  It happened so quickly there was nothing I could do.

  I was in the back of the group. Kevin’s family went out, followed by Kevin, then Charlie. Jack was a few feet behind her, and I was behind him. As soon as Kevin cleared the doorway, I saw a woman move out quickly from behind a pillar to my right and run straight toward him. A flash of steel caught the sunlight as she raised a large knife over her head. I opened my mouth to yell a warning, but it was too late. Kevin had already turned to his left, following his family to their car. Charlie spotted her, and she threw herself between the attacker and Kevin. The knife came down, and Charlie reached up and tried to block it. I saw the knife bury itself deeply into Charlie’s left forearm, and she yelled out in pain. Sheila withdrew the knife and raised it again just as Jack realized what was happening. Before I could get through the door, and before Sheila could make another strike, Jack had bull-rushed Sheila, lifted her onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and slammed her onto the concrete sidewalk so hard I could hear her skull crack. She lay motionless on the walk, her eyes open, seemingly staring at the sky above. The move Jack used on her was one I’d taught him many years earlier. I’d seen him use it before, but never on a woman, and never with such devastating effect. He was so strong, and apparently had experienced such a rush of adrenaline, that Sheila looked like a rag doll.

  I rushed through the door to Charlie, who was standing with a gaping wound in her arm. I walked her over to a concrete column and sat her on the ground. A bailiff came rushing over, his pistol drawn.

  “Get us some medics,” I said. “Hurry!”

  Jack stood over Sheila for a few seconds, seemingly in a daze. He finally came out of it and moved quickly to Charlie and me.

  “Charlie, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t get to her.”

  I took my tie off and began wrapping it tightly around Charlie’s arm. I was terrified. The wound was oozing dark blood. It was right in the middle of the underside of her forearm, about four inches up from the base of her hand, and I was afraid the knife may have struck either or both of the radial or ulnar arteries. If it had severed them or opened them up, she could bleed to death.

  The medics showed up in less than a minute. I stood back and got out of their way. Two of them immediately went to work on Charlie, while two more went to work on Sheila Self.

  “I killed her,” Jack said. “I think I killed her.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “You did what you had to do.”

  The medics slowed the bleeding from Charlie’s arm fairly quickly. I didn’t notice any blood spraying; it wasn’t gushing, which, to me, meant no artery had been sliced or severed. She did have a nasty gash, though, and they immediately set about cleaning and dressing the wound. A few minutes later, they loaded her into an ambulance. Jack climbed in with her, and they drove off to the Johnson City Medical Center.

  I stayed and watched while they worked on Sheila. They tried to stop the ever-widening pool of blood oozing from her skull. She went into cardiac arrest shortly after I began watching, and they were unsuccessful in reviving her. They finally stopped working on her fifteen minutes after they started and covered her body with a sheet.

  Sheila Self, the woman who had set all of the wheels in motion at the direction of Erlene Barlowe, was dead, and my son had killed her. I knew there wouldn’t be legal repercussions—he had killed her in defense of another—but I also knew Jack. Psychologically, he would be in for a long, rough road ahead.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17

  We gathered at our house that evening. Lilly had been following the case on the news and I spoke to her on the phone for an hour. Charlie spent a couple of hours in the Emergency Room at the hospital before they let her go. I went by briefly. It was like a scene from a war movie in there with bullet-riddled bodies being carted in and wheeled off to surgery.

  We stayed glued to the news. They were reporting that thirteen of the sixteen men who opened fire on each other and the police had been shot and killed. The police were identifying bodies and notifying next of kin. Only two police officers, besides Leon, were wounded. One received a superficial wound when his neck was barely grazed by a bullet. Another inch toward his neck and he would have likely been dead. The other was struck in the knee when a bullet somehow found its way through a tiny gap in his body armor. He was in stable condition at the hospital.

  Around 11:00 p.m., a face flashed across the television screen that gave me pause. It was the black man who had come to our office and threatened me with the Clint Eastwood hand cannon. They reported that his name was originally Jamie Lynn Greenlee, from Atlanta. He’d done a lengthy prison term for selling crack cocaine and shooting another dealer. At some point along the way, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul Mohammed. He was a member of the New Black Panther Party, they said.

  No more radical rantings and ravings for you, my friend, I thought as they moved on to the next dead radical. Now you’re just another dead hate monger.

  One thing the television news station did well was gauge the reaction of the community. To say the people of Northeast Tennessee were shocked by what had happened in our own back yard was an understatement. There was genuine disbelief that the racial animus in our community ran so deeply. It appeared that people were willing to take a serious look in the mirror and take some steps to try and bridge the gaps of ignorance and intolerance that allowed such things to happen. For my part, I was ashamed of what had happened. I was ashamed that I couldn’t put a stop to it. I was ashamed that so much hatred was so close to the surface in our community.

  Around eleven thirty I asked Jack to take a walk outside with me. He’d been quiet and sullen all evening, and I knew he was thinking about Sheila Self.

  We put on jackets and walked out into a breezy, chilly night. A new moon was almost directly overhead, the sky dappled with fast-moving cumulus clouds.

  “You want to talk about it?” I said as we walked slowly toward the trail where I jogged.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much to talk about. What’s done is done.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Guilty. Sad. Stupid. I could have handled it a dozen different ways. I didn’t have to body slam her like that.”

  “She’d just stabbed the woman you love and was about to take another crack at her,” I said. “You reacted. You didn’t think because you didn’t have time to think. You just reacted. I’m sorry you took a lif
e, Jack. It isn’t a club I would ever want you to join. But you did. You killed her. There was no wrong in it.”

  “I could have taken that knife away from her,” he said. “I could have arm-barred her. I could have choked her until she was unconscious.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe she throws the damned knife into your eye. Maybe she slices you with it before you can take it and you wind up bleeding to death. Maybe she gets it into Charlie’s chest the second time she tries. None of those things happened because you reacted the way you did. You were decisive. You saw the danger and you eliminated it.”

  “I didn’t intend to eliminate it permanently. Or at least I don’t think I did. That’s what is bothering me the most right now. Maybe I did intend to kill her. When I saw that knife go into Charlie’s arm, I think I may have formed the intent right there on the spot.”

  “It happens,” I said. “How much am I going to have to worry about you?”

  “You have enough to worry about with Mom.”

  “I’m serious. Do you think you need to see a shrink? We’ll do whatever we need to do to get you past this.”

  “How did you handle it, Dad?”

  I thought about it before responding. I’d always been one to bottle up feelings, to channel emotions, especially those that were highly stressful. There’d been times in my life when that approach wasn’t healthy. I wanted to help him avoid the mistakes I’d made.

  “The men I killed in Grenada were soldiers. I was a soldier.”

  “How many did you kill?” he said.

  “Three. I shot two and took one out with a grenade. I looked at them up close after I shot them. It wasn’t like it was impersonal, but I was duty-bound. They were trying to kill me, too. It bothered me for a while, I’ve had nightmares about it, but I don’t dwell on it and I never have. I just decided to accept what happened, not feel guilty, and move on. Then John Lipscomb sent the sicarios, and I killed five of them protecting my home and family. I’ve never really given that a second thought. I did what I had to do under the circumstances. I survived, barely, and I protected the people I loved. Once it was over, it was over. I let it go. And that’s what you have to do. You have to let it go. You can’t let it eat at you. If you do, you’ll find yourself having some serious problems.”

  “So I just let it go? Sounds easier said than done.”

  “Talk about it if you need to. Talk to Charlie, talk to me, talk to your mom. But try not to dwell on it. Eventually, the guilt will fade, the memory will fade. It will always be with you. It’ll always be on the fringes of your mind, but it doesn’t have to have a serious negative impact on your life.”

  “I keep hearing the sound her head made when it hit the concrete,” he said.

  I knew what he meant. That same sound had stayed with me, too.

  “The sound will fade with the memory. Think about where you’re going, Jack, not about where you’ve been. Learning from the past is one thing. Wallowing in it is another. I know you. You’re too strong mentally to let this paralyze you. Think about how much Charlie needs you. Think about how much Mom needs you. Think about how much I need you. And then remind yourself how much we all love you. We’ll get through this, son. You’re not alone. We’ll get through it together.”

  He turned his head toward me as we continued down the path.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said.

  “Yes, yes you will.”

  “Do you know how much I love you, Dad?”

  I nodded.

  “I do, Jack.”

  “I still think you’re crazy, but I love you.”

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22

  A light snow, the first of the year, began to fall as Caroline and I headed into the mountains west of Knoxville on our latest trip to Nashville for her immunotherapy. She was doing relatively well, all things considered, and I was feeling relieved after being able to climb out of the pressure cooker that had been the ETSU rape case that wasn’t a rape at all.

  “I don’t think I ever told you how proud I was of you,” Caroline said as her car climbed steadily along Interstate 40.

  “Proud of me for what?”

  “For taking on that case in the first place. For believing in those boys. For having the courage to take on racists from both sides. And for making sure it turned out right.”

  “It didn’t turn out right for everybody,” I said.

  “It shouldn’t have turned out right for some of them. Karma’s tough on some people.”

  Judge Neese had been true to her word. The Tennessee Supreme Court had suspended Mike Armstrong’s law license pending disbarment proceedings in front of the Board of Professional Responsibility. An assistant district attorney named Tony Brooks had been appointed to serve in the interim, pending the primary election the following April. No one had seen or heard from Armstrong since he received notice of his suspension, but the newspaper had reported that the feds had opened an official misconduct investigation. Since Erlene didn’t actually pay him any money, he might beat the charge, but he’d certainly be sweating—or crying—for several months to come. I didn’t really give a damn what happened to him. He’d done a great deal of damage, and he deserved every bit of what was coming.

  The most shocking thing that came of the hearing—outside the bloodbath that occurred afterward—was that Bo Riddle hanged himself in his jail cell three days after Judge Neese held him in contempt. I suppose he knew the real hammer would come down on him sooner or later. Leon Bates had discovered videotape of the truck that was at my house the night the cross was burned. The feds had moved in and turned up the heat on his buddies that were captured at the power station, among them Garrett Brown. All of them were facing a variety of federal firearms charges along with attempted civil rights intimidation charges. One or two of them apparently had made deals and agreed to testify against Riddle. He must have known he was on his way to a federal penitentiary when he slipped the sheet around his neck. I worried about Greg Murray, Sarah’s boyfriend, a little. Even if Garrett Brown and his white supremacist buddies went off to the penitentiary for a while, they’d most likely be back in five years and Greg might have to deal with them. They had to know it was him who gave them up.

  [[?page_288?]]All three of the players: Kevin Davidson, Devonte Wright and Evan Belle, were allowed to return to school and the football team. They had classroom work to catch up on and they had to get back into shape, but the last time I talked to Kevin, he seemed genuinely satisfied with the way things were going. He and the other boys had retained civil attorneys to deal with the university. ETSU wouldn’t be paying Erlene Barlowe, but they’d being putting out some money for the three young men they condemned before they were given their day in court.

  As for Erlene Barlowe, Leon had decided to leave her alone. He didn’t want erotic videotapes of himself and Erlene being distributed throughout the state, and he figured Erlene had been punished enough because everything had gone so terribly wrong. Sheila was dead, along with several men. There had been a lot of property damaged or destroyed at the courthouse and at my house. The university was paying—they just weren’t paying her. So Erlene was still free to ply her trade and prey on lonely perverts and druggies.

  “Thank you,” I said to Caroline. “What you think of me means more than anything else.”

  She reached over and took my hand as the snow began to fall harder. It was beautiful against the backdrop of the mountains.

  “You’re a good guy, Joe Dillard,” Caroline said. “I’m glad we found each other all those years ago.”

  “Me, too,” I said as I turned to her, smiled and winked. “And we still have a long way to go.”

  Thank you for reading, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed Due Process. As an independently published author, I rely on you, the reader, to spread the word. So if you enjoyed the book, please tell your friends and family, and if it isn’t too much trouble, I would appreciate a brief review on Amazon. Thanks again. My best to you and yours.

  -Scot
t

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Scott Pratt was born in South Haven, Michigan, and moved to Tennessee when he was thirteen years old. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee College of Law. He lives in Northeast Tennessee with his wife, their dogs, and a parrot named JoJo.

  www.scottprattfiction.com

  ALSO BY SCOTT PRATT

  An Innocent Client (Joe Dillard #1)

  In Good Faith (Joe Dillard #2)

  Injustice for All (Joe Dillard #3)

  Reasonable Fear (Joe Dillard #4)

  Conflict of Interest (Joe Dillard #5)

  Blood Money (Joe Dillard #6)

  A Crime of Passion (Joe Dillard #7)

  Judgment Cometh (And That Right Soon) (Joe Dillard #8)

  Justice Redeemed (Darren Street #1)

  Justice Burning (Darren Street #2)

  Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)

  River on Fire

  Children’s Stories

  An Elephant’s Standing in There

  A Ride on a Cloud