Steve Martini - Double Tap

“You better keep those two lines straight.”

“That goes without saying.”

“What about the judge?” I ask.

“What judge?”

“You’re going to need a judge, otherwise you’re going to have to walk all the way to the courthouse at some point.”

“Okay, fine,” he says. “We’ll put the judge in a window upstairs so he can look down on us. Make him feel good.”

“What do you mean, ‘him’?”

“Him, her, whatever. The thing wearing black robes, we put it in a window upstairs, give it a hammer so it can pound on a piece of wood to work out its aggression and a bullhorn so it can be heard. In the meantime we’re outside in the car with the air running, checking our calendar, making sure we’re not getting behind for our ten o’clock back at the office. I mean, look at the advantages: Don’t have to hoof it into the building. Do your business, slip into drive, and you’re outta here. Save us a lotta time and money,” says Harry.

“I guess I’m out of touch, but I don’t remember the county standing with any particular zeal on that scale, the one that measures savings in our time and money.”

“It’s still a good idea,” he says.

“Oh, I think it’s a hell of an idea. Just think of the retired set. They can come over every morning, set up their folding lawn chairs out in the parking lot, and take up lessons lip-reading with binoculars while you get the story fresh from your client in the little window-or is it the other way around?” I start to laugh.

Harry gives me a dim look.

“Either way,” I say, “the audience gets it right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. They can see the whole system at work, right out there in the parking lot. Civics on asphalt.”

“So it has a few problems. Nothing that can’t be fixed,” he counters.

“You could just blind everybody over sixty-five,” I say.

“There’s a thought.” Harry thinks a moment. “Maybe I’ll write it up. The idea, I mean.”

“Good. Just do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t do it on the firm’s stationery.”

“There you go,” he gripes, “running a good idea into the ground again.” Within a few seconds Harry’s back to tapping a cadence with his fingers on the table.

Harry and I have been together for nearly fifteen years, through a marriage-mine-that ended with cancer for my wife, Nikki. He is uncle and godfather to my daughter, Sarah, who is now seventeen going on thirty. A straight-A student, she won’t give me a glimmer as to which college or university she wants to attend until she waxes her snowboard and checks out the slopes in each area. This could take a while, as she seems in no hurry. Nor am I anxious to push her out the door. There are times when Sarah seems to be the last contact I have with life as I knew it in happier days.

Harry takes his foot off the bench and glances out through the louvered blinds in the window. “Here they come.”

Outside, I can hear the jangle of chains and the shuffle of feet coming this way. Two guards, one of them I recognize, a brute who once tried out at summer camp with the 49ers. Between them is a smaller guy, seemingly dwarfed by the two giants on either side.

“What’s this about?” Harry is talking about the security.

“I don’t know.” I begin to wonder if Ruiz has been trouble in the jail. The jangling metal procession stops outside the door.

By now most clients under indictment for murder, after having been handed off from one lawyer to another, would be a jittery bag of nerves, on edge and itching for answers. But as I watch him standing outside the door, one of the guards working on the waist chain, disconnecting it from the manacles that bind the prisoner’s hands behind his back, Ruiz appears to be none of these.

He appears calm, collected, his skin dusky, his face angular and thin, framed by short closely cropped dark hair. In a crowd he would not stand out: the anonymous man. He is of average height-I would say five-ten-well proportioned, with a wiry physique that seems more sinew than muscle. Good-looking, but not enough to be noticeable in a lineup. He appears fit, his arms showing well-veined and — toned biceps and broad shoulders. He is dressed in a jail-issue tank-top T-shirt, baggy cotton sweatpants, and pair of low-top canvas slip-on shoes with rubber soles.

The only visible blemishes are a couple of tiny pockmarks on his forehead and chin, and a small scar over the bridge of his nose at a point where it deviates just slightly to the left, leading me to suspect that his nose might have been broken at one time. There is a tattoo on the bicep of his left arm, what looks like the head of an eagle in profile, its beak sharp and open as if ready to take a bite.

Behind bars for more than four months now, even with the restraint of the chains, Ruiz still bears himself with a certain confidence. It’s not the slick, false bravado, the cock-of-the-walk pimp roll of the jailhouse crowd, but something different. I’m just about to turn and say something to Harry when Ruiz does something so fast that, had I blinked, I would have missed it. With one of the guards still holding his left arm at the elbow, Ruiz lifts both feet off the ground, knees to his chest, his upper body stationary as if it’s suspended in air, and in a single fluid motion he jumps the manacles so that his hands are now in front of him, feet on the floor again.

“Did you see that?” Harry cranes his neck as he stares through the window in the door. “You ever see anybody do that before?”

“No.”

“I’ve never seen anybody do that.”

Neither have the guards, from the look on their faces.

“Guy must be double-jointed,” says Harry. “I tried that, I’d end up with both shoulders out of the sockets and a hernia from the handcuffs wedged in my crotch.”

Ruiz is not your usual inmate.

“Maybe that explains the security,” Harry muses.

“Could be.”

“Let’s hope he’s not one of those guys needs to be rolled into court strapped to a furniture dolly, wearing a hockey mask to keep ‘im from sinking his fangs into you.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” I tell him.

“Fine. You get to roll the dolly in and outta court,” says Harry. “They’re not doing all this shit out there”-he gestures loosely toward the window, turning away just before he finishes his thought in case Ruiz can read lips-“for their health. I take that back. They probably are doing it for their health. So what do we know about this guy?”

“What are you looking for, references? The man’s charged with murder.”

“I’m just looking to make sure he’s not gonna eat us both before the guards come back.”

“He looks normal to me.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” Harry is a good lawyer. A bit of a worrier at times, but that goes with the trade. He is also very practical. He’s been jumped twice by clients in the courtroom and once during a jail conference when Harry refused to put a psychotic client’s cooked-up alibi witness on the stand.

Call it an occupational hazard. Get a bad result in a criminal case and an uncollected fee may be the least of your problems. One of Harry’s old law school profs once told him “When you practice on the criminal side, you want to represent your clients vigorously, but you don’t bring them home to meet Mom.” Harry calls it keeping a proper social distance Like he says, “Most of these people have been arrested for a reason.”

“Actually, he’s clean. No prior criminal record, at least not in civilian life. Military record is a little more clouded.”

“What, as in My Lai massacre?” Harry’s looking at me.

“Nothing like that; just a few blank spots we need to fill in. Some of his unit assignments are a little sketchy. According to Kendal, we just need to get copies of the records.”