Joseph Teller - Overkill

“What’s this Frankie going to say?” she asked.

“Frankie says he witnessed an encounter between my client and the gang. I’m sorry, the Christian youth group . Only now Frankie’s retired, and all I know is he’s supposed to be somewhere in Puerto Rico. Probably the rain forest.”

“And?”

“And the other witness,” said Jaywalker, “is a young lady who goes by the name Miranda.”

“Might that be Miranda Raven?”

“It might be.” Jaywalker nodded. Actually, he’d intended to fudge on her last name, too, and was surprised to learn that Darcy not only knew it but had it on the tip of her tongue.

“We’re looking for her, too,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” said Darcy. “Have you spoken with her yet?”

“Uh, not exactly.”

“Well, we have,” said Darcy. “And she corroborates our other witnesses’ accounts of the fight and the shooting.”

“Including the shot between the eyes?” Jaywalker asked, his voice audibly catching on the word eyes .

“Including the shot between the eyes,” said Darcy. “The one where the victim’s lying on his back, begging for his life. And your client calmly takes it away from him.”

“ Calmly? Miranda said calmly? ”

“Okay,” said Darcy. “Maybe that wasn’t precisely the word she used. But find her if you can, and talk to her. Then get back to me, and we’ll compare what she tells you with the statement she wrote out and signed for the detectives.”

For a moment Jaywalker was speechless. When he recovered, it was to ask, “How about showing me her statement now, so I can confront her with it?”

“Were you going to tell me her last name?”

“No,” said Jaywalker. “No, I wasn’t. Mea culpa .”

“How about Frankie the Former Barber?”

“His last name I honestly don’t know,” he lied.

“You talk with Miranda,” said Katherine Darcy. “And then we’ll take a look at her statement together.”

God, she was good .

The check came to $5.75, and after protesting that her having had a bagel meant she should pay most of it, she relented and agreed to split it down the middle. Outside on the street, Jaywalker thanked her for having joined him. “Too bad the stakes of this case are so high,” he told her. “Otherwise, it would be fun.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

Afterwards, he played those last four words over in his head fifty times before coming to the conclusion that they’d been nothing but a polite rejoinder, her way of agreeing that trying a shoplifting case, say, or an auto theft, would likely prove a more pleasant experience than going up against each other in a murder trial.

But, being Jaywalker, at the time she’d said it, he hadn’t taken it that way at all. No, he’d heard the words Maybe some other time as a direct response to his comment about having fun together. And immediately invited his imagination to take over from there. Thus emboldened, he proceeded to do exactly what his upper brain, the one located between his ears, had managed to keep him from doing not half an hour earlier.

“Have you ever tried wearing contacts?” he distinctly heard his lower brain say.

“Why would I?” Suspiciously.

“Oh, you know. They don’t break or fog up. Less glare. Much easier on your ears and the bridge of your nose. Then there’s all that pocket space they free up. Lots of reasons.” All, of course, except the real one. But he couldn’t very well come out and say, “Because your glasses hide that pretty face of yours.” People got fired, even went to jail, these days for saying stuff like that, didn’t they?

“It wouldn’t make much sense,” she said.

Now he’d done it. Here comes the part about cancer of the cornea, he decided, or retinitis fatalis .

“They’re nothing but plain glass,” she told him. “My eyes are fine. I wear these to look older, and so people will take me more seriously. Here.” And with that she removed them and simultaneously shook her head so that her hair came free of whatever had been holding it back.

All the usually glib Jaywalker could do was gulp. And not silently, or even softly. No, this was a full-throated gulp, one that would have done a bullfrog in mating season proud.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Jaywalker, pretending to be absorbed in looking through the glasses. She was right; they were definitely nothing but plain glass.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” he assured her. “Just releasing a bit of excess testosterone into the atmosphere. I belong to a cap-and-trade program, actually.”

“You’ll have to excuse me,” said Katherine Darcy, standing up. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

Well, he’d certainly managed to screw that up, hadn’t he? He was reminded of an airline commercial he’d seen on TV not too long ago. This guy’s at a big office meeting, and he nods off. He starts dreaming about his dog, petting him and calling him “good boy” over and over again. He wakes up to realize he’s been saying that out loud and stroking the hair of the woman sitting next to him, while everyone else in the room is staring at him like he’s totally lost it.

“Wanna get away?” the announcer asks.

Jaywalker wasn’t exactly a white-knuckle flyer. The fact was, the prospect of dying didn’t bother him all that much. It was something he knew he’d get around to sooner or later, so he didn’t spend much time worrying about it. That said, traveling by plane didn’t come easily to him. Days before his scheduled departure, he’d begin making exhaustive lists of everything he’d need to bring and do. The night before, he’d lay everything out on the floor and then pack obsessively in the smallest bag that could possibly hold his things. If that bag were to prove insufficient, he would move up a size, and he’d been known to go through three or four in the process. The next morning-he booked only early flights, because the equipment was always there, rather than being expected momentarily from Boston or Philadelphia-he’d set out for the airport neurotically early. He liked to allow enough time to get lost on the way, suffer not one but two blowouts, have trouble finding an empty spot in the long-term parking lot, discover that the shuttle bus wasn’t running, encounter record-breaking lines at the security checkpoint, and be pulled out, grilled and strip-searched as a suspected terrorist.

The result, of course, was that he invariably ended up sitting for long hours at the gate as earlier flights arrived, unloaded, refueled, reloaded and departed. But that, too, Jaywalker had planned for, having brought along the morning’s New York Times, the latest unread issue of the New Yorker, the most recent Sunday Magazine section crossword puzzle, and-should all those diversions prove insufficient-a paperback book or two for good measure.

Today, finally, he settled into his window seat, arranged his reading material and belted himself in. Outside, a thin freezing rain was falling, a mid-December harbinger of the coming winter. He smiled at his good fortune in having picked a good day to be leaving. Just then the loudspeaker system crackled, and he looked up, afraid he might miss some safety equipment demonstration or announcement of great importance. Like he was on the wrong plane, for example, or he’d left his headlights on in the parking lot.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard Southwest Airlines flight 562, nonstop from Newark to sunny San Juan, Puerto Rico.”