Steve Martini - Double Tap

She set it in the center of the table, shimmering glass over the gloss of ebony. She looked at it, then stepped back a few feet to gain perspective. As she moved backward her heel caught on something. She nearly tripped. Recovering just enough to catch herself, she turned and looked down.

Who the hell would leave a pair of running shoes lying on the floor in her entry hall? They weren’t hers. They were too big. The maid, she thought. What was she going to have to do to find good help?

Before she could utter a word in anger, her attention was drawn back to the glass sphere on the table by a beam of reflected light. The Orb was now emitting a streak of red from the cobalt blue. The color was so intense as it left the glass and entered her eyes that the pain was severe. She closed her eyes, turned her head, and brought one hand up toward her face.

Before the neural path into her brain could be traversed, the kinetic force translated into the violent snap of her neck. Her raised arm dropped, propelled downward by forces greater than gravity as the discharge of energy exploded through her head to her hand. Instantly the pain in the optic nerve vanished, replaced by a brief burning sensation in one finger, and then nothing. Her head dropped onto one shoulder, a quizzical expression on her face. The second impact buckled her knees and Madelyn’s body flooded to the floor like a boneless sack of flesh.

Ihad an uncle named Evo. he was a big man, nearly six-foot-four, and though he carried a paunch above his belt and a spare tire over each hip, I never thought of him as fat. From my recollection he filled the frame of every doorway he passed through, from top to bottom and both sides, shoulders like a stevedore and an angular head like a bronze bust, bald and shiny as polished stone. The only hair you would have noticed were the unkempt bushes over his brows and several days’ layer of stubble on his face. For most of my life, as a child and later, my uncle in physical appearance was the spitting image of Luca Brasi, the notorious assassin of Godfather fame.

Evo’s enduring expression was a kind of passive, simpering smile, what you might take for the face of a wiseass until he opened his mouth to talk, which he seldom did. Then you would have noticed the missing teeth up front like broken pickets in a fence and the childish thoughts and worries that spilled from his mind.

Caught up in events, just a few years out of high school, I was told that Evo had always been a happy kid, full of life, smiles, and laughter. But as Christmas 1950 approached he found himself perched behind the sights of an M1 Garand on a snow-covered slope, peering out at what must have looked like the edge of the earth. His Army unit had pushed out into the mountains north of the Marine battalion encamped along the western side of a reservoir, an ominous place of ice-covered rivers and barren mountains.

The North Korean forces had evaporated under the massive air assault and pounding from UN artillery. U.S. forces, Army units, and Marines, along with their allies, had driven the North Koreans up the peninsula to within a few miles of the Chinese border. MacArthur had broken their backs at Inchon. Victory was at hand. By Christmas the troops would be home. It was late November and temperatures at night dipped to sixty below, driven by icy winds off the steppes of Manchuria, temperatures so cold that at times it froze the actions on machine guns so that they would often fire only a single shot and had to be cycled by hand. Having outflanked the North Koreans by landing far behind enemy lines, the UN forces had moved north so fast that most units had been issued little or no winter weather gear.

Though he didn’t know it at the time, from all accounts Evo’s unit and those on the line with him had gone as far north as any UN forces would ever get. As Thanksgiving approached, these troops were just a few ridgelines south of the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

Much of what I know of these events I have garnered over the years from books and articles and from conversations with my father, who was Evo’s older brother. My uncle seldom talked of his experiences in the war. In fact, in the decades after his return to civilian life, I can recall him having only a few conversations, and most of those with my father.

Even with all of this, what drew my attention to him as a child were the gravitational black holes where my uncle’s eyes should have been. I often wondered what was going on beyond the vacant depths of those twin dark pits. According to the shrinks at the VA hospital, it was most likely visions of hell.

It is possible that these childhood memories of my uncle have softened my brain and impaired my judgment sufficiently that last week I returned a phone call from a complete stranger, one Colonel James Safford, U.S. Army retired. Colonel Safford, who in civilian life is a lawyer in Idaho specializing in estate planning, wills, trusts, and the like, in his spare time volunteers his services as part of a small veterans’ advocacy group known as the GI Defense Fund. The organization was formed in the 1970s in the waning days of the Vietnam War when a growing number of returning veterans found themselves in trouble with the law, oftentimes the result of seemingly senseless and unprovoked acts of horrific violence; this from men who had no prior criminal history or problems with the law before their military service.

Safford had been given my name, along with the names of several other local lawyers, from the office of the base commander at North Island Naval Air Station on Coronado Island in San Diego. It seems the Navy keeps in touch with a handful of local lawyer-veterans who from time to time have drawn attention to themselves by defending members of the armed services who have gotten sideways with civilian legal authorities. These attorneys have on more than one occasion given up on collecting their fees. Some might call this pro bono work. But as a practical matter it is difficult to collect from soldiers and sailors whose spouses and children sometimes have to line up at the county welfare office for food stamps just so that they can eat through the end of the month.

What Safford was looking for was some help with a case. It seemed that a retired Army sergeant had gone a little beyond the usual military brush with the law, your typical bar brawl or flashing incident involving a general mooning of society brought on by unbridled hostility, a domestic dispute, or a few too many beers.

It’s the reason we are here today, my partner Harry Hinds and I, heading for the elevator at the county jail to interview a prospective client. His name is Emiliano Ruiz. We have never met.

He is thirty-eight years old and until two and a half years ago was an Army staff sergeant, what some would call a lifer. He spent twenty years in uniform. And according to what little I know of him, he saw action in Panama and the first Gulf War. He retired and took a job with a security firm in San Diego about two years ago, one of those companies that offer high-end protective services for corporate executives here and abroad. For the last four months Sergeant Ruiz has been behind bars on a charge of first-degree murder with special circumstances. If he is convicted, considering the profile of the case-involving a victim of prominence in this community-and the cold and calculating nature of the crime, Ruiz is a likely candidate for San Quentin’s death row.

As Harry and I turn the corner for our two o’clock conference somebody over by one of the satellite trucks hollers, “There they are,” and within a few seconds they are on us like locusts.

We are engulfed in a sea of bodies hoisting microphones and pushing camera lenses in our faces. Bright lights and a million questions, most of them unintelligible, are drowned out by more shouted questions from behind.