John Hart - The King Of Lies

“That’s it, then?” she asked. “Think hard.”

“That’s it.”

“Okay.” She started the car and drove me the rest of the way home. “Don’t leave town,” she told me as I stepped out of her car.

“Ha-ha.” I said. “That’s funny.”

“Who’s joking?” she asked, flashing that same troubling smile. Then she backed down the driveway and was gone. I lit a cigarette and watched the empty spot in the road where her car had been. Then it occurred to me-why her smile troubled me. I’d seen it before, in court, right before she pulled the rug out from under whichever defense lawyer had the misfortune of underestimating her.

I had a client early on, my first murder case. I was young, still idealistic, and even though he was guilty, I felt for him. He’d killed his neighbor in a drunken fight over a shared driveway. He didn’t think the gun was loaded. He just wanted to scare the guy, a common enough story, until a bloody hole appeared in the man’s chest.

The trial took eight days. I beat the murder charge, but the jury came back with manslaughter. My client bought seven and a half years, not bad in the big picture. Two hours after the verdict, I got a call to come to the infirmary at the county jail. My client had chugged half a gallon of cleaning fluid in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The guards were laughing about it at central processing. The jail, they explained between smiles, used nontoxic supplies. My client would shit green for a week, then be okay. Happens all the time. Wink, wink, ha-ha.

I found my client in the infirmary. He was fetal and weeping, oblivious to me and to the guard stuck with suicide watch. It took him five minutes to meet my eyes and another five to respond.

“Don’t you get it?” he pleaded.

I was speechless, clueless, I didn’t get it.

“Look at me.”

I shook my head to show I needed something more.

Then he screamed, veins like cords in his neck. “Look at me!”

I turned to my eyes to the impassive guard, who shrugged. “He’s a bitch,” the guard said. “Just look at him.” My client was small and well formed, with fair skin and straight white teeth. He was attractive, maybe even beautiful.

Suddenly, in a sickening, visceral way, I got it.

“I can’t go back to prison,” he finally told me. “I’ll die first. I’ll fucking kill myself.” He swore it to me. “One way or another.”

Eventually, the story came out. He’d done time before, which I knew. Here’s what I didn’t know. There was a group of them. Sometimes only three or four. Sometimes seven. They’d tape a centerfold to his naked back and take turns-a screwdriver in his ear to keep him docile. He showed me the scar from the one time he’d fought back. He was still deaf in that ear.

He described it between choking, gut-wrenching sobs. That’s what he was going back to. Sometimes for hours at a time.

“I can’t do it, man. I just can’t.”

The next day, he was transported to Central Prison in Raleigh. Two weeks later, he finally managed to kill himself. He was twenty-seven years old, same as I was at the time. I’ve never forgotten him, for his was the most horrible display of utter despair that I’ve ever witnessed. Since then, I’ve skirted the prison system with something like morbid fascination, safe behind my briefcase, yet close enough never to forget what I saw in that young man’s eyes.

So, yes. Mills scared me. Terrified me, in fact. I was playing a dangerous game, the stakes brutally real. But Ezra was dead, his shadow as tattered as his flesh, and I was finally learning a few things about myself.

I gave Mills two minutes to disappear, then threw myself into the truck. I had to talk to Jean, to warn her about Mills. Tell her to keep her mouth shut. And if she wouldn’t listen, I’d make her. One way or another.

Powerful words.

I raced up Main Street but was stopped by an approaching train. So I cut right to Ellis Street and shot across the bridge, the train beneath me a black snake of chattering coal. I didn’t know if Mills had talked to Jean or not. She could be en route, even stopped by this very train. So I drove with one eye on the road and dialed Jean’s house on the cell phone. I got a busy signal, waited, and hit redial. Twice more I got a busy signal and then it was ringing. I was halfway there, doing fifty in a thirty-five, and the phone kept ringing. I counted fifteen rings, but no one answered. I slammed the phone down, tried to calm myself, but failed. I was near panic. Suddenly, the tension and fear were upon me, hot on my face, like sweat. I pictured Jean in prison and knew that she couldn’t make it; it would kill her, sure as the bullets in Ezra’s head.

Traffic began to fall away as I moved off the heavily traveled streets and onto the narrow ones where the houses dwindled onto small lots. Children played on the pavement, and I had to slow down for fear of killing one. I passed more and more dirt driveways as the tracks again drew near. Cars littered yards like derelicts and rust streaked the tin roofs of mill houses in their second century. The curbs fell into crumbled ruin and then I was on Jean’s street. A tiny boy dangled from the tire-swing in the yard opposite her house, and he watched blank-eyed, his feet trailing in the dust. A face appeared at the window behind him, two eyes and a hint of mouth, then vanished behind mustard yellow curtains that flicked closed as I turned my head away.

I parked in front of Jean’s house and turned off the truck. Alex Shiften sat on the front porch, tipped back in a rocking chair, feet on the rail. A cigarette hung from her mouth and she watched me from behind her glassless frames. The corners of her mouth dipped as I got out. I heard the train in the distance, and wind moved the tree-tops, but I couldn’t feel it. The kudzu was still on the banks of the track.

I pulled myself taller and walked into the yard, twigs snapping under my feet. Alex never took her eyes off me. When I got closer, I saw that she had a knife in her hand, calmly shaving down a piece of wood. Her hair was uncombed, sticking up in spiky tufts, and the hard muscles of her arms moved as she whittled. She stood before I got to the steps, barefoot and wearing tight faded jeans.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” I shot back.

“Caller ID,” she said, and smiled coldly.

I put one foot on the stairs and stopped. Her smile grew into a smirk as she folded the blade away and put the knife into her pocket, as if to say that she didn’t need it to deal with me. She leaned against the pillar, and I felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. “I need to talk to Jean,” I said.

“You always need to talk to Jean.”

“Is she here? It’s important.”

“Gone,” Alex replied.

“To work?”

Alex shrugged and looked away, smoke exploring the air around her head.

“Damn it, Alex! Is she at work?”

She stared down at me and slowly gave me the finger. An unrecognizable sound escaped my throat and I pushed past her, into the house. She didn’t follow, which surprised me. I’d expected a fight.

The screen slammed behind me and I was in shadow, breathing musty air that smelled of cabbage. Alex’s voice followed me. “Look all you want. It won’t change anything. Jean’s not here and she’s got no use for you. So take one last look and then get the hell out.”

The rooms were small, with low ceilings, the furniture old and shabby. I moved across the sagging floor in light that fingered through dusty windows to play upon my feet and the thin green rug. I passed the television, saw a framed photo of my mother there, and continued into the kitchen, knowing better than to look for one of me or of Ezra. Pots were stacked in the rack to dry, two places set at the narrow table under the window facing the backyard and the tracks that ran straight into the distance. An African violet was on the windowsill, its purple blossom a bright splash of lonely color.