Joseph Teller - Overkill

“Forty.”

He raised both eyebrows in mock surprise. “You’re kidding,” he said.

“Thanks. Anyway, as soon as it happened, I developed this sudden urge to look younger.”

It couldn’t be easy, being a woman.

“And you,” she said, looking him over. “How come you’re not tan?”

He shrugged. “It’s the price one pays for hitting the beach just before sunset.”

“So aren’t you even a little bit curious as to how I knew you were there?”

“No,” he lied, knowing that she was itching to tell him and would get around to it sooner or later.

She located a folder of papers on her desk and extended it toward him. “A lot of this stuff you may already have,” she said, “but some of it’s new.”

He took the folder. From the lack of heft, he decided there couldn’t be too much inside, old or new. “What about this gun you mentioned?” he asked.

She got up, walked over to a metal filing cabinet, unlocked it, pulled the top drawer open and reached in. When her hand emerged, it was holding a good-sized silver semiautomatic. He knew from the ballistics report that the weapon had been a 9 mm or a.380. Either one was capable of firing the ammunition and discharging the spent shell casings that had been recovered.

“Ballistics?” he asked.

“Inconclusive.”

That was a nonanswer if ever he’d heard one. Test-firing either established that this was the gun that had fired the recovered rounds or that it wasn’t. Without coming right out and saying it, Darcy was conceding that there was no match.

“Prints?” he asked.

“Not by the time we got it,” she said. “Some kid found it in an alley off 113th Street, took it home, played with it for a day and a half. Lucky for him, it was empty. His mother saw it finally, phoned the precinct. Patrol picked it up, didn’t know it might be a murder weapon.”

“May I?”

She extended the gun to him delicately, the way one might offer up a dead bird or mouse. He took it and held it by the grips. It felt good, pleasantly heavy but nicely balanced. Even without looking for the maker’s name, he recognized it as a Browning. He’d owned one back in his DEA days. Bought it for undercover work. You couldn’t very well show up to buy drugs packing a six-shot.38 Smith amp; Wesson Detective Special.

Katherine Darcy had said they’d found the thing empty, and presumably it still was. But rule number one was that you always assumed the opposite. He jacked the slide back to clear the chamber. Nothing ejected. Applying gentle pressure to the trigger, he eased the hammer back in place. Then he depressed the magazine release, and the clip dropped easily into his palm. It, too, was empty. He visually checked the chamber, the safety and the firing pin, then jacked the slide back again to cock the gun. Taking aim at the on button of the air conditioner unit in the window, he dry-fired.

“Bang!” he shouted, and smiled as Darcy lifted a full inch off the floor.

Gripping the gun by the barrel, he handed it back to her. “It’s not the murder weapon,” he told her.

“How do you know?”

He said nothing.

“I’ll tell you how I know you were in Puerto Rico,” she said. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

He shrugged.

“I’ll be your best friend.”

“Getting warmer now,” he told her.

“I’ll let you buy me that drink.”

“You’re on,” he told her.

“One of my girlfriends from appeals happened to spot you at the airport. She knows I have a case with you, and she thought I ought to know. Also…”

“Yes?”

“She said you were awfully early for your flight.”

“That would be me,” Jaywalker conceded.

“So why isn’t this the murder weapon?”

“Because,” said Jaywalker, “there was no murder. If it was anything, it was manslaughter.”

Which was arguably true, if you wanted to factor in extreme emotional disturbance, but was sneaky at best. What Jaywalker hadn’t told Katherine Darcy was that the Browning’s firing pin was just slightly off-center, a hair toward eight o’clock. From the ballistics photos of the recovered spent shell casings, he already knew that the gun that had killed Victor Quinones had a dead-center firing pin, and therefore almost certainly had to have been a Glock or a Tech Nine.

That drink turned out to be nothing more exciting than a hot chocolate at a small coffee shop down by the federal courthouse. True to her word, Katherine Darcy actually let Jaywalker pick up the tab this time. And she waited until they were finishing and he was paying to bring up the case again.

“So,” she said, “if you’re so confident this is nothing but a manslaughter case at worst, what’s your guy looking for?”

“Five years,” said Jaywalker. He had absolutely no idea what, if anything, Jeremy might be willing to take. But five years was rock bottom for first-degree manslaughter and would be an absolute steal, especially for an execution . So it seemed to Jaywalker like a pretty good place to start.

“Get serious,” she said.

“What would be serious? Ten?”

“Twenty,” she said. “ Maybe eighteen or nineteen. But don’t count on it.”

“Tell me ten,” said Jaywalker, “and I’ll ask him.”

“Never. Absolutely never.”

And that was how the discussion ended.

But the thing was, not only had Katherine Darcy earlier backed off from her insistence that it was a murder case with no lesser plea, now she’d indicated a willingness to consider something less than the twenty-five-year maximum on a manslaughter plea. In other words, for the second time, the prosecution had blinked.

Why?

He met with Jeremy two days later.

“Suppose I could get you twelve years,” he said. He figured if Darcy had already blinked and offered eighteen or twenty to his five, sooner or later he might be able to talk her into splitting the difference. “Would you be interested?”

“How much of that would I have to do?”

“On twelve? A dime.” He figured Jeremy had been in long enough by now to have picked up the language of state time. A dime was ten, of course, just like a deuce was two, a trey three, and a nickel or a pound five.

Slowly Jeremy shook his head from side to side. There was nothing arrogant to the gesture, nothing the least bit defiant. Had Jaywalker been forced to come up with a word to describe it, the best he would have managed was sad.

“I feel like, you know, like I put up with a lot from those guys,” said Jeremy. As he spoke, his eyes locked onto Jaywalker’s own. They were as blue-gray as ever, even in the poorly lit visiting area of 10 °Centre Street, but there seemed to be some sort of film coating them. Jaywalker had never seen Jeremy cry, and had decided he never would. He wondered if the young man had shed more than his share of tears during the long summer of his torment, and if this slight watery look was all he had left. Or maybe Jeremy just wasn’t a crier.

“You did,” Jaywalker agreed. “You put up with a lot.” He paused for a few seconds before following up with the caveat. “But the law doesn’t always look at it that way.”

“Not even if I was trying to save my life?”

“As long as you were trying to save your life,” explained Jaywalker, “what you did was absolutely justified. No question about that. But once you get the gun away from Victor, and once he’s lying on the ground unarmed and helpless…” He let his voice trail off from soft to silent. This wasn’t an argument they were having, after all, or a lecture he was delivering. It was more like a commiseration. In the short space of four months, Jaywalker had grown surprisingly fond of this young man, had come to care deeply about the impossible predicament in which he now found himself. But personal feelings were one thing, and being a criminal defense lawyer was another. The fact was, he owed Jeremy more than empathy, more than compassion, more than caring. In addition to all those things, he owed Jeremy the benefit of his twenty-some years in the trenches, and whatever wisdom might have come along during them. And leading a client valiantly into a battle they were sure to lose was no way to satisfy those debts.