John Miller: Upside Down

“You're trying to pull one over on me,” she chastised.

“Hell, honey,” Cecil said, “I never was too good with times and days and all. I'm better with arithmetic like adding up you and this corpse and getting a hundred thousand in cash money.” Cecil and the other two men had her boxed in, the open trunk at her back. That was fine, she wasn't going anywhere.

Marta remained on her haunches, tightened her leg muscles, and bounced up and down gently so maybe they believed that she was nervous. She would have preferred to be barefoot, because she had gone without shoes for most of her life and felt more secure that way. The sharp clutter in the junkyard made that impractical. “You think you are getting a dime for this fraud, you're even a bigger moron than people say you are.”

“How about I dump you and the maggoty little whore in the trunk and take the cash?”

“What will you tell my boss's men when they come to find me?”

Cecil slipped a revolver from behind his back and held it by his side, barrel down. He cocked the hammer, probably imagining the sound intimidated her. “That you never showed up. Must a run off with his cash. Or I'll say, ‘Just kiss my ass.' Boys, I think it's gonna be plan two.”

“What is plan two?” she asked. She was aware that the man on her left had pulled a pistol from his coat pocket. The man called Boomer had something in his right hand. She didn't care what it was, because unless they all had grenades with the pins already pulled, they might as well be holding tulips. She turned Cecil's Puma knife in her hand so the blade was aimed up.

“Plan two is the old ‘snuff-the-Beaner-cunt' plan.”

“You aren't man enough to snuff this Beaner, Cecilia Baloney.” Her next words were hard as Arkansas stone, certain as taxes. “And as a woman I resent the C-word coming from the rotten-tooth stink-hole mouth of a stupid, syphilitic, dog-fucking redneck puke.” Keeping her left fist in shadow, she twisted the flat blade she had taken from her cap into position.

The other two men sniggered at her insult, which infuriated Cecil. “Watch it happen… you stinking wetback blow job.” As he raised the gun up, she launched her light body into the air, slicing, the Puma up through Cecil's right bicep like an oar's edge through still water. Before his handgun hit the ground, Cecil had spun and fled for the front gate, howling and holding his useless arm.

Marta spun a full revolution, a whirling dervish with her arms extended so that one blade was much higher than the other. After the spin, she squatted between the confused men. Balanced on her haunches, she looked like a jockey on the home stretch-her elbows out like wings, her hands in front of her face level with her chin like she was pulling back hard on reins. Instead of leather leads, the wetly lacquered blades radiated out from her fists. Knowing the men were no longer a threat, she focused straight ahead, her eyes following Cecil as he ran through the valley of wrecks.

The nameless third man pulled his hands up to his neck, perhaps to see what the sudden blast of cold against his throat meant. His scream gargled out from a new mouth below his jawline. He stamped his boots a couple of times like he was marching in place to music and collapsed. His feet quivered as though he was being electrocuted.

Boomer dropped to his knees and stared at the bloody pile growing on the ground below him. When he turned his eyes to her in disbelief, she smiled at him.

She said, “That was the Beaner cunt's plan number one.” She stood and, laughing melodiously, loped out into the dark after Cecil.

By the eerie lantern light, the kneeling man worked to gather up the steaming mess that had slid out of him and put it all back.

New Orleans, Louisiana

Faith Ann Porter yawned and looked over at the venetian blinds for any sign that the sun was rising. Her watch's display read 6:13.

The small reception area always smelled like a place where somebody really old lived. The space was strictly a prop, because there was no receptionist. Usually Faith Ann's mother could hardly afford to pay the office rent, much less hire someone to sit there at the desk to greet the few people who ever came there. Not a single one of her clients had ever been to visit her, and the fact was that the vast majority of her mother's calls were outgoing. Even so, it was absolutely necessary to maintain a professional office.

The upper part of the front door to the five-room suite, which was at the end of the hallway, had a frosted glass panel in it where each tenant's name had been hand-painted backward on the inside since 1927, the year the building had been constructed. At that moment, Faith Ann was lying prone, peering through the brass mail slot, watching the fifty feet of hallway between herself and the elevator lobby. Not that she believed the mysterious woman was going to show up this time either. Most likely she'd been awakened and dragged all the way down here before dawn for nothing.

“Watching won't make her get here one second sooner. If she sees your eyes looking out at her from down there, she'll think we have rats. You shouldn't snoop,” Kimberly Porter said from the door.

“You just told Mrs. Washington that you liked my inquisitive nature. You said my curiosity shows intelligence.”

“You were listening in on the extension while I was talking to your teacher!”

Time to change the subject. “I bet you got me up early for nothing. I'll be sleep-deprived when I get to school… for nothing. I'll bet you a dollar she won't even show up. I'll bet you another dollar if she does she's just some lunatic trying to get money for some old letters she probably scribbled up herself, knowing you'd do anything to save Harry Pond.”

“Horace,” Kimberly corrected automatically. “If she's right, he's really not guilty.”

“You think everybody you represent is innocent.”

“I don't think any such thing. There are lots of other lawyers with investigators who try to prove innocence. When that fails, they call me.”

“To do legal mumbo jumbo. Hocus-pocus high jinks. Pick a card, Your Honor.” Faith Ann plopped onto her back and clapped her hand to her chest. “No sir, that isn't really an ace of hearts, I say it's a two of clubs, your honor. So, since it isn't the ace at all, like you thought, my client is not guilty.”

“You little monkey!” Kimberly said. She leaned down and tickled her daughter's ribs.

“Child abuse!” Faith Ann said, laughing, squirming, and trying to push her mother's hands away.

Kimberly straightened. “What I do is not trickery. Horace Pond might be one in a hundred. This is exactly why there shouldn't be a death penalty. It is preferable to-”

“‘Free a hundred guilty people than punish one innocent one,'” Faith Ann interrupted. “Like freeing a hundred criminals to go out running around doing crimes is going to happen. You know most people don't agree with whatever old jerk it was said that. Uncle Hank, for one.”

“For your information, Miss Know-It-All-that ‘whatever old jerk' was Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren of Brown v. the Board of Education. And I know Hank Trammel does too agree.”

“Then why does Uncle Hank have a sign on his office wall that says LET NO GUILTY MAN ESCAPE? You know who said that?”

“I somehow doubt it was Earl Warren.”

“Old Hanging Judge Parker. He hanged men as quick as his marshals could round them up.”

“I believe that sort of behavior is precisely why Earl Warren said what he did.” Kimberly walked from the reception area.

Just as Faith Ann was about to get up and follow her mother, she heard the elevator door open, so she looked out through the mail slot. Sure enough a woman stepped out. It had to be her because her mother's office was the only one on the fourth floor except for an eyeglass repair shop run by a frowning man who just came to work when he felt like it. People didn't bring their eyeglasses, either. The glasses came by UPS and the mail, from optometrists all over the city. Lots of times, boxes and mailing envelopes containing broken glasses sat in the hall outside his door, waiting for him to show up. Faith Ann made it her business to know what was going on around her at all times.