Steve Martini: The Judge

“Don’t tempt me,” he tells her. “I’m gonna relax my grip. Try anything and I’ll cut you,” he says. “I mean it.”

“I don’t doubt you,” she says.

He releases his grip just a little, his eyes constantly on me. He withdraws the knife a few inches.

Lenore stoops. She snatches the shiny gold object from the carpet.

“Give it to me,” he says.

With her right arm fully extended, grasping the cuff link in her closed fist, she makes a single explosive move.

“Sure.” Her sharp elbow thrusts back like the push-rod on a locomotive. It catches Kline full force under the ribs. His cough of pain echoes through the room. In the instant that he doubles over, she is clear of him.

I push her toward the door. She falls on her hands and knees, and I get between them.

“Go! Go! Get out!”

As I turn Kline slashes with the knife, catching the sleeve of my coat. Frayed threads and blood mingle but I have no sense of pain. Then an instant later, a burning sensation races through my forearm, finally reaching my brain.

He draws his arm back for another swipe. I step away, grab a lamp off the desk, and use it to fend off the blow, metal on metal; a third thrust slashes through the lamp shade.

Lenore is still standing there, seemingly in shock, unwilling to leave me here alone.

I swing at him with the lamp, catch him on the arm, ripping the lamp’s cord from the outlet.

“Get out!” I tell her. By now I am swinging the lamp wildly in a giant arc, windmill fashion, standing between Lenore and Kline, keeping him at bay.

Realizing that with the object in her hand he will lose interest in me, Lenore finally turns and runs. Kline looks away for an instant, distraction. I send the lamp flying on an arc that catches him high on the cheek. This sends him reeling backward against a chair and the wall.

Lenore is through the door. A second later I hear the clatter of her heels on the vinyl floor in the corridor outside as she runs toward the other end of the building, then nothing, as if perhaps she has somehow run onto carpet.

Suddenly I realize that I have the keys. She cannot get into any of the courtrooms along the hallway.

Kline makes a move toward the door, and I cut him off. I am now casting objects from the clerk’s desk in his direction, like a kid pitching balls at cans in an amusement park. A heavy stapler catches him in the chest dead center, and he groans. This is followed by a cellophane tape holder that must weigh two pounds.

Now he’s angry. He starts returning in kind. He grabs a floor lamp and throws it at me full force. I duck, but a portion of it nails me on the shoulder.

I am just recovering from this, coming out of a crouch, when I see it out of the corner of one eye, a small potted plant sailing through the air like a satellite in orbit. This catches me above the right eye, the last thing I see before I find myself on the carpeted floor. Kline steps on the back of my knee going over me, and then the sound of the door as it opens and closes.

I am dazed, wobbling on hands and knees, with drops of warm blood trickling onto the back of one hand. I reach up and feel slick, smooth wetness on my head above the eye.

Then I think: Lenore.

It takes me a moment to steady myself on my feet, grasping the edge of the desk. I turn and stumble toward the door, into the hallway beyond, and out into the long white corridor. Twenty feet down this hall I discover the reason for Lenore’s soundless footfalls, what I thought was carpet. Her heeled shoes discarded, one here, the other ten feet farther down, as if they were flung from her feet as she ran.

Then I hear it, the clatter of the emergency exit at the far end, the door slamming closed. I run, my legs like water, at one point careening off the wall. I make my way down the corridor, around a corner. There, ahead of me, is the double metal door. I push the fire bar and find myself inside a concrete stairwell, the clatter of feet on the metal stairs descending below me. I follow the sound.

By the time I reach the third floor I hear a cavernous slam somewhere in the bowels below me, the door to the street closing, hard leather pounding pavement. I can only assume Kline’s made an exit, chasing Lenore.

It takes me another thirty seconds to make my way to the ground level. I open the door to the cold, dark night, look one way, then the other.

A block and a half away, running diagonally across the street, under the halo of a vapor lamp, I see a feline-like form, shoeless, running, then turning to look. She stops. Lenore. I scan the sidewalk ahead for Kline but cannot see him; the path is obscured by the shadows of thick-rooted trees, giant elms lining the walkway.

Suddenly Lenore starts to run; something has set her to flight like a frightened doe.

I pick up my feet. Heart pounding, I make it to the corner. There, under a streetlight a block ahead, I see a figure: a masculine form running, a solid stride. He cuts across the sidewalk into the street.

By the time she reaches the mall, Kline has cut the distance to Lenore by half. I am still more than a block away, running at open throttle.

The mall is a wide boulevard, pedestrians only, with light rail tracks running down the middle for five blocks. Tonight it has its own facade, aglitter with Yuletide color, flickering minilights; white, red, and green adorn the trees. But under them are an assorted legion of winos, homeless, and other vagrants. The downtown at night is abandoned by the working middle class.

A block from the plaza, there’s a throng of kids, mostly teenagers vying for space on the portable ice rink that the city erects each year. Lenore suddenly sees this and makes a beeline. Safety in numbers.

I am hoofing it, my breath forming clouds before me.

Suddenly I realize that I’ve lost sight of Kline, up ahead. He seems to have dodged somewhere off the street as I was watching Lenore. The hair on my neck rises and I begin to wonder if somehow I have run by him, that he is now behind me. I turn and look: nothing but cold, still darkness.

I scan the mall for a cop, anything in uniform, not that this would do much good with Kline. He is silver-tongued and no doubt would have Lenore and me jailed in an instant, searched and stripped of the one piece of evidence that does not lie. Cops on a beat don’t question an elected D.A., and private security would genuflect in his presence.

I am walking at a good clip by the time I make it under the treed lights of the mall. Lenore has disappeared into the crowd by the rink, the jubilant kids skidding on ice. They are lined three deep along the outside fence waiting their turn, “Jingle Bell Rock” blasting forth from a sound system to wake the dead.

I draw up to a phone booth near one of the light rail stops. For a moment I think I could call for help. But who? I’m a hundred feet from the rink, winos circling for change. Anything at night in a suit is fair game. One of them touches my arm and I shake him off, move away, scanning for Lenore. I see shimmering dark hair and a dark top, her back to me twenty feet away. I look for Kline in the crowd. Nothing.

I close on Lenore and grab her shoulder. She turns, a pimple-faced teen, chomping on gum.

“Hey! Whadda ya doin’?”

Some guy standing next to her, matching her pimple for pimple.

“Hey, Jeannie’s got some new squeeze,” he says.

“Hey, dude wants to cop a feel.” One of his friends.

“Hey, can we have one?” Some kid behind me, six-five, with chin whiskers like Fu Manchu.

“Sorry. Thought you were somebody else,” I tell her.

“Yeah. Sure. Get lost,” she says.

“Get lost, asshole.” Two of her girlfriends turn on me, and I melt into the crowd, thankful for the loud music.