16 Souls

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Present Day — September 7 — Day Two of the trial

Sleep had come rapidly, and escaped just as suddenly, leaving Marty in the plush hotel bed with his mind racing. The repetitious dream sequence of the headlights popping on in front of him in the blizzard just before touchdown was actually becoming a bore. It never changed, and there was never an answer.

Marty checked his watch, dismayed to see it was only two-fifteen. He knew his wakeful profile all too well: there would be no way of returning to REM sleep before daybreak.

Show time in the lobby is 6:30 am he reminded himself. With two very long and very tedious days of jury selection already behind him, the real trial would get underway at 8 am, and the first agony would be listening to that scumbag Richardson as he oiled his way around the subject of why Marty Mitchell was a mad dog killer who needed to be locked away from society.

I must have wronged him in another life, Marty had joked. What other possible motive did Richardson have?

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.