Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

“Fuck that shit!” This comes from the Norse god who’s in the deputy’s face, in a voice loud enough so that everyone in the corridor has stopped moving, including me.

The deputies are standing in the airlock between the two sets of double doors leading to the courtroom, the outer doors are open. The inner doors look like they’re closed.

“You’re just doin’ this because of who we are. You know it, and I know it.”

His three buddies in biker boots and frayed jeans are bunched up behind him, all nodding, discrimination being a terrible thing.

“You can’t even see it if we’re sittin’ down. Hell, it’ll be up against the back of the chair.”

“Hey, I told you. I’m not gonna tell you again. No exceptions. No signs, no messages,” says the deputy. He and another officer are wedged in the door like a stone wall.

What I saw downstairs now becomes clear. By now the small army of uniforms is probably standing just on the other side of the closed door in the stairwell about ten feet behind Conan and his buddies-no doubt getting ready to play jack-in-the-box with cans of pepper spray and nightsticks if things get pushy.

The bikers move a step or so away to confer, then Odin is back in the deputy’s face. “Fine, we’ll take ’em off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Our jackets. You don’t like ’em, we’ll take ’em off.”

“Fine, take ’em off, take ’em outside, get a shirt, and come back,” says the cop.

“Where the hell are we gonna get shirts? By then all the seats’ll be taken.”

“That’s your problem. But you can’t enter the courtroom without a shirt.”

The blond one says, “Shiiit.” His arms are flexed, he’s leaning in like maybe they can just blow past the two cops, into the room, and grab seats. This has all the dynamics of a budding brawl. The guy’s ego is way out to there; he’s wearing it on his chin. A hundred people in the corridor watching it. You can feel it in the air. He’s not going to back off.

It is at this instant that a small patch of gray sticks her head out from behind and under the flexed elbow of one of the deputies in the door. Before he can move, she slips past him. She must be eighty-five and can’t weigh much more than that in pounds. She’s holding a small water cup in her hand. One of the courthouse regulars, she has picked this moment to go take her meds. Standing in no-man’s-land, she is stopped in her tracks, her eyes just at the level of the blond guy’s belt. She looks up at him and smiles.

His fighting gaze locked, he’s staring at the deputy, snorting bull breath.

She tries to squeeze through between the open door and Armageddon, but he has her blocked.

The deputy leans faintly forward as if he wants to reach out and pull her back. But he knows if he moves, it’s going to trigger a brawl, and the old lady, frail as a bird would be crushed in the middle.

She looks up one more time and says-and you can hear it clear as a bell in the silent corridor-“Excuse me.” This tiny little voice.

Like “open sesame,” something from a Stooges movie. The four bikers, their heavy boots taking baby steps in unison as if they were all connected at the hip, give her just enough room to get by. As she squeezes through, the four of them are left standing there, watching as she trundles past. Just like that, an instant of diversion and the moment passes, the time for action melts.

You can almost hear the cops in the stairwell bouncing cans of pepper spray off the walls and jumping on their hats.

The old woman heads for the water fountain, looking around in wonder at all the people standing in the hallway staring at her like statues.

As she gets up on tiptoe at the fountain with her cup, I’m thinking we need to clone this, package up all the parts, and ship boxes to the Gaza Strip, Beirut, and downtown Baghdad.

Then, like stop motion, people start moving again. The Posse passes me going the other way, toward the elevator. I can hear a few “goddamn”s and “kick his ass”es as they go by. They’d better watch it or the Gray Missile may get into the elevator with them.

Whether they’re here in support or measuring their friend Mr. Gross for a box after he talks, one thing is certain. Unless they have a supply of long-sleeved dress shirts in the saddlebag of one of their choppers-or they can sprint down to Nordstrom at the speed of light-they won’t be getting into Judge Quinn’s theater of thrills this morning.

Inside the courtroom I pass through the gate at the railing. Tuchio is standing at his table talking with his assistant, Harmen. She glances up and sees me.

“Good morning,” I say.

She smiles and returns the greeting.

Tuchio looks at me, a near-death stare. He doesn’t say a word. His head goes back down, and he’s talking to Harmen again. He is still stinging from the meeting in chambers and the loss of his federal agent.

As I slip into my chair at our table, Harry has already caught this.

“Man’s positively furious.” Harry is busy lining up his three pencils and a pen along one side of his legal pad. Then he reverses them and puts them on the other side. “Which looks better to you?” he says.

I smile and ignore him.

“Good news,” he says, “from the East. One of our process servers tagged Scarborough’s editor, Jim Aubrey, with the subpoena just before noon, New York time. One down, two to go,” he says.

There is still no word on Bonguard or Trisha Scott.

“In case you’re feeling bad, he treated me the same way,” says Harry.

“Who?” I’m busy looking at notes, a summary of Charlie Gross’s statement to the cops.

“Tuchio. When I showed up this morning, I said hello. He was like dry ice, frozen solid and still smoking.” Harry abandons his Monopoly game with the writing implements just long enough to bring his closed fist gently up to his chest in the region of his heart. “And I have to tell you, it hurts.”

“So you want to send him a sympathy card?”

“You joke, but I haven’t felt this bad since my dog died of rabies,” says Harry.

“You don’t have a dog.”

“I know, but if I had one and he died of rabies, I can imagine that he might look a lot like Tuchio does right now. I’ve been thinking. The next time we screw him over, maybe we should try to be a little more polite. When a prosecutor starts foaming at the mouth, you have to begin to wonder what he might do if he really got mad.”

When I glance over at Harry, I get the sense that perhaps he’s only half joking.

Tuchio brings on his witness of the day, Charles “Charlie” Gross.

When the jury is in the box and Carl is planted in his chair between Harry and me, Arnsberg gives me a strange look when he sees the witness, as if to say, Who’s that?

Gross, if he is to be believed, is one of the charter members and the chief financial officer for the Aryan Posse.

According to an investigative report, Gross keeps track of the group’s beer and booty fund as well as the accounts receivable from meth and other pharmaceuticals they sell, often jotting down numbers in ink on the palm of his hand. That way he figures if he gets busted, sweat will dissolve all the evidence. I guess if the IRS wants to see the Posse’s books, they’re just going to have to cut off his hand. It’s thinking like this that got Gross right to the top in the organization.

If you saw any of his mug shots, you’d have to admit that Tuchio has done a crackerjack job of cleaning the witness up for today’s appearance. Gross looks like they’ve put him through a car wash and had him detailed.

Gone are the long, sparse, stringy strands of dirty blond hair that hung down below his shoulders from the craggy, bald summit of Half Dome. The state probably spent forty bucks having the hundred or so hairs on the top of his head styled and clipped. The back and sides of his head are as neatly trimmed as if Suki ran his mower over them.