Steve Martini - Double Tap

“Why? So you could put me on the stand and ask me questions I couldn’t answer? I took an oath, a vow,” he says, “never to reveal what we did in the unit. I don’t care how it comes out, you mention Delta and Templeton’s gonna squat all over it. Besides, my time in Delta had nothing to do with Chapman’s murder.”

“How do we know you’re out?” Harry is reading my mind.

“What do you mean?”

“How do we know you weren’t working for Delta when you were out at Isotenics? According to everything we’re hearing, they were having a lot of problems with the Pentagon,” says Harry. “The brass might like somebody on the inside providing information as to what Chapman was doing.”

“This is bullshit,” says Ruiz. “You saw my discharge papers. You think they would let me sit here and rot if I was part of Delta, working for them?” He shakes his head. “They would have had somebody else arrested by now. The government may have killed her, but I didn’t do it. That’s why I’m the patsy.

“This was a setup from day one,” he tells us. “It wouldn’t matter how it came in. The minute anybody used the word in that courtroom, Templeton would have pointed at me and said, ‘The murderer from Delta.’ Hell, they’re already saying it.”

He looks at Harry. “You read the newspapers. You see what they’re saying. How we’re all highly tuned killers. How they train us to murder and then don’t give us therapy,” says Ruiz. “How we’re all trigger-happy, wired-on-the-edge macho men trained to slap everybody around the minute we don’t get want we want.

“But they don’t talk about that when some asshole sets off a bomb on a bus or flies an airplane into a building. No. Then they just want it taken care of, and they want it done so it’s clean, sanitary,” he says. “They want their own professional killers. They want us to be the best in the world. They want us ready to go when things happen, but they want us to be nice when we’re sitting on the shelf. To shoot the enemy in a humane way, which means they don’t have to watch it,” he says. “They want to be told that all the bad guys are dead, and if not, why not. And when you slow down to reload, they want to draw a line in the dirt and say, ‘That’s it, you can stop now,’ while the fuckers who shot us are sitting over there, just the other side of the line.”

He stands there looking at Harry, fire in his eyes. “You want to know why I didn’t tell you? That’s why. Because the lawyers who do their cases in court, and the reporters who report it, don’t live in the same world I do. They live in a fantasy world where you can eat hot food, and drink clean water, sit on a clean toilet seat, and turn everything on and off whenever you want, like a light switch. So you can forget about Delta. The only question now is, where do we go from here?”

“You finished?” says Harry.

“Yeah, I’m finished.”

“I’d love to forget about Delta,” says Harry. “Now, if you can just tell us how to get the jury to do it. .”

“It had nothing to do with Chapman’s murder. I told you, I didn’t kill her. Everything else I said was true. I don’t know who shot her or why. She was afraid. She called me and asked me to keep an eye. That’s what happened, and that’s what I told you.”

Without putting Ruiz on the stand, we have no way of even asserting any of this, much less proving it. Confronted with the videotape and photos of Emiliano “stalking” the victim, his story that she asked him to provide security without telling anyone else, and that she was afraid of some mystery assailant, appear both self-serving and highly convenient to the point of being contrived. To put Ruiz on the stand to testify to this would be judicial suicide. Templeton would shred him on cross.

“Son, let me tell you,” says Harry, “so that you know exactly where you stand at this moment. And I’m not telling you this to make you feel any worse than you already do. Larry Templeton is going to ride that photograph, the shot with the gun in your hand. He’s gonna whip it like a stallion right through his closing argument. I can tell you right now, with absolute certainty, that picture will be the last thing lingering up on the visualizer when the lights come up and the show is over. When that happens, if I were a betting man, and I am, I’d be placing all my money on the prosecutor.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” says Emiliano. He looks at me. “How ‘bout you, Counselor?”

“I don’t like to gamble. If I had my choice, I’d start over.”

“That would be a neat trick,” Ruiz says.

There’s a rap on the door. It’s Gilcrest’s bailiff. He has one of the guards open it from the outside with his key.

“Judge wants to see all the lawyers in chambers,” he says.

The guards take Emiliano. Harry and I head out into the empty courtroom. We round the bench and down the side hall toward the back. Gilcrest’s office door is open when we get there. Templeton is waiting for us in the outer area.

“What’s this about?” I ask.

Larry shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.” He follows Harry and me through the door.

The judge looks up from his desk. “Gentlemen, I hope you don’t have any plans for the weekend, seeing as mine were just trashed. I’ve received a phone call from the clerk at the Court of Appeals,” he says.

“They made a decision on the evidence,” says Harry.

“No,” says the judge. “It seems Mr. Sims has decided to withdraw his appeal.”

Harry and I look at each other.

“Well. Looks like you’re finally going to get your evidence,” says Templeton.

On the way out of the courthouse Harry is hitting numbers on his cell phone, calling the office, telling the staff to cancel their weekend plans. We separate near the bank of elevators. I tell Harry I’ll see him at the office in the morning, and I take the stairs. One floor down, I step out of the stairwell and head for one of the pay phones.

I don’t use my cell phone; I don’t want to call from the office or the house. It may not even be a technical violation of the judge’s gag order, but I don’t want to find out. The phone rings twice. I’m hoping that he’s there. On the third ring he picks up.

“AP, Saentz here.”

“Hello, Tim.”

“Who is this?”

“Deep Throat,” I say.

He recognizes my voice.

“I just want to give you a heads-up, nothing about the trial,” I tell him. “But you might want to call the Court of Appeals to find out if anything happened today.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Then I hang up.

I head for the stairs. On the way, I walk right in front of the door with the sign on it. The one that reads: Courthouse Press Room.

Saturday morning and Gilcrest’s irritation is surpassed only by his wife’s. The judge has had to tell her that their weekend anniversary trip to Santa Barbara is off. Today he is camped at his office in the courthouse as we use Herman to act as courier, shuttling boxes of documents across the bridge, reams of paper from Isotenics, as quickly as Gilcrest can review them.

The judge promised us a three-day continuance if the evidence was released. True to his word, he has given the jury Monday off as we pore through piles of paper.

We have researched the presidential decision directive. PDD-25 is classified. All that exists is a summary online. It deals with joint military operations between the United States, the UN, and NATO. Ruiz is right: the summary says nothing about Delta Force or the Joint Special Operations Command. Harry and I made a desperate pitch for more time from the judge, but Gilcrest said no.

Under the circumstances he doesn’t have much choice. With the jury sequestered, locked up in a hotel downtown with bailiffs and sheriff’s deputies to act as chaperones, the court is caught between a rock and a hard place. Gilcrest can’t allow them to go home, not with the state’s evidence now rooted firmly in their brains. There is no telling who they would talk to, what news programs they might watch, or what newspapers they could read.