John Nance - 16 Souls

That same dark and deep panic that had propelled him to the top of the mountain weeks back returned without warning. There was a coherent point to it, and it was a scream that no way could he survive the ultimate shame of being a convict, or the uselessness and endless agony of vegetating in a sterile cell while the world quickly forgot about him. Yes, he would stay until the verdict as he promised, but if the verdict was guilty, he’d impose his own death sentence to be carried out immediately. He didn’t have the stomach or the endurance for an appeal, and this time he wouldn’t need a mountain. There were at least a dozen ways to leave the planet he’d considered, and the most bizarre and demeaning involved the courthouse steps in front of cameras.

Marty rolled out of bed in one fluid motion, landing on his feet before heading for the shower with intent to use the hotel’s hot water supply as a watery escape pod of white noise. But the shower was a massive fail at masking the pain and the panic, and after a half hour he dried off, liberated a tiny bottle of bourbon from the mini-bar, and plopped back on the bed, working hard to talk away from the ledge the panicked little boy inside him.

There had to have been, he thought, a reason for surviving his suicide attempt. There had to be a bigger purpose, right? Judith had essentially preached that to him at dinner the night before, but she could barely convince herself.

He called up a mental image of her and the thought returned a smile — not because she was beautiful or alluring, which she was, but because she had done something very simple that now brought tears to his eyes. She’d decided he was worth saving.

Judith had promised him an expensive pretrial steak dinner, and she had delivered, both of them feeling comfortable and calm enough to spend those hours joking about last suppers and other snippets of twisted gallows humor. He’d found himself enjoying the tones of her voice — the polished and professional words spoken with near-perfect diction that betrayed none of her Oklahoma roots — although she’d cracked him up by lapsing in to what she called her original Okie accent. Aided by too much of an obscure brand of smoky bourbon which had loosened his tongue, he’d taken her verbally back to the top of Long’s Peak to show her how much, at that moment, he had longed to leap to the next reality. He fumbled the description of those moments and the fear of nothingness, but she understood. On a far deeper level than just nodding, she got it.

Judith, it turned out, was as much a cynic as he, especially when it came to religion and faith and what she characterized as the “Sit down, shut up, and believe what we tell you!” terrorism of rigid dogma. He’d caught a glimpse in that discussion of the smart little girl who had taken a huge risk in rejecting the hypocrisy that had consumed her family. She had survived, but the cost had been high, and even now, she told him, her siblings — two sisters — communicated reluctantly and only on holidays, as if sending carefully worded messages to the enemy.

A few moments of silence passed between them as Judith decided she was being too frank and Marty felt himself thinking protectively, as if he could scoot back in time and protect that little girl.

He shook himself off the subject.

“How did you get from there to the law?” he asked.

A warm smile had spread across her face in response, broad, profound, and slightly embarrassed, all of it coming through with clarity.

“I desperately wanted a structure I could trust, Marty. Some… human institution built on honesty, or at least a continuous struggle to find honesty and, that elusive concept, justice. I fled home, enrolled in college, and threw myself at a much older guy who was a lawyer. I loved the way he looked at the world! I loved what he taught me about the law… and, a few other more intimate subjects. Yes, he was using me shamelessly as a willing girlfriend, but what I got from him was a fast track to law school, and it turned out I was really good at it — good enough to get admitted to Yale. See, in the practice of law, it’s not what you believe. It’s how you can prove something or convince someone based on facts and the structure of the law. Yes, we have horrid hypocrites running around with law licenses, the DA being one of the worst. But we also have a profession that retains a sense of propriety, and, I think, a real sense of honor. At least when we screw it up and act unethically, we know we’re over the line.”

Marty recalled with painful clarity averting his gaze at her words and nodding.

“I did admit that I screwed up, Judith, and climbed to the wrong altitude.”

She had come forward, alarm showing in her eyes.

“No, no, no, Marty! I didn’t mean that in reference to you. I meant… we have a disciplinary structure to go after ethics violations.”

But it was too late. The shame of making such an epic mistake overwhelmed him again, and there was simply no more to say. The dinner ended quickly, and sitting in his bed now, Marty realized they had come very close to a moment of shared insight, or maybe even intimacy. But that intimacy had receded like a rifle shot — ripped from the artificial reality of an absorbing movie by a filmbreak in the projection booth.

It was now 3 am, and the only recourse was the TV remote.

Present Day — September 10 — Day 5 of the trial

Courtroom 5D Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse, Denver

The small procession of lawyers surrounding the defendant moved quickly down the corridor outside Courtroom 5D to a small conference room. TV and print media marked their progress with rolling cameras as Judith Winston leaned toward the uniformed airline captain to whisper something out of range of the reporters.

“ Say absolutely nothing and keep an even expression and don’t engage anyone’s eyes!”

When the door had closed behind them, Marty Mitchell whirled and pointed to the courtroom.

“What… what the hell was that? When did my goddamned copilot decide to turn on me?”

“Marty,” Judith began.

“No! Seriously. Whiskey tango fox! I thought he was on my side, not out to help the fucking DA!”

“He IS on our side” she snapped, fitting the retort in between his angry sputterings.

“What do you mean, ‘he is’? He just sold me down the river!”

“Marty, please sit down. This is not a problem. This is not what it seems. The prosecution has presented their case-in-chief, and they called Borkowsky as a prosecution witness and only got the raw truth out of him. This is just the opening round of our defense, which is why I asked to preserve our right to reexamine him on cross, and why I re-called him now.”

The other three lawyers in the room were keeping their distance, their mouths shut, two of them wide-eyed as they, too, tried to see as a good thing any aspect of the previous ten minutes in which First Officer Ryan Borkowsky had testified that his captain knew people would die if Flight 12 wasn’t slowed before landing.

Marty slowly slid down in one of the chairs, his eyes on his lawyer in disbelief.

“Am I not getting this correctly, Judith? Isn’t that F’ing bastard of a DA trying to convince the jury that I knew people would die if I didn’t slow down, and isn’t that the basic criteria for conviction, and correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t that sniveling little scone-chomping weasel just say precisely what Richardson wanted to hear? Basically, I’m screwed!”

She bit her lip and fixed him with a steady gaze and the hint of a smile.

“No, you’re not. Marty, do you trust me?”