Courthouse (46 page)

“I have to get to a phone,” said the Captain. “I have to call for a car.”

“Do it, then. I don't care if you call for help. If the car that takes us out of here isn't here in two minutes, and I mean two—I'm going to time you with the Judge's own watch—in two minutes, I either start moving out that door, or the Judge's head starts moving out that door.”

The Captain crawled across the floor to the door leading to the judge's robing room. Al-Kobar watched him. The Captain opened the door and scooted inside.

“Now the rest of you pigs, start moving over to the far side of the courtroom, away from the doors. Start moving,” Al-Kobar commanded sharply.

There was a general movement of guards and officers along the floor on hands and knees, away from the side of the courtroom where the doors were.

“That's it, you officers up here, start moving out into the audience,” said Al-Kobar. “I don't want anyone this side of the barrier.”

The court officers near Santiago started to comply. So did O'Connor.

“Where's that turncoat bastard?” said Al-Kobar, chancing a quick look toward Santiago. He realized how dangerous it was to emerge from cover and decided not to chance another look. “I'll get you later, you pig. Where's that pig Captain?” shouted Al-Kobar. “Captain, Captain.”

The courtroom was silent as Al-Kobar waited for a reply. There was none. He fired a pistol shot into the wall above the door leading to the robing room. The shot echoed thunderously throughout the court.

The door opened slightly.

“Is that you, Captain?” Al-Kobar demanded.

“Yes. I just made the call, it took time to get through.”

“There's only a minute fifteen seconds left,” said AlKobar. “We're starting through the door right where you are in seventy seconds. If there's no car, there ain't going to be no Judge or stenographer either.”

“It'll be waiting,” said the Captain. “It better be. Now get someone to get that judges' private elevator up here and hold it up here,” directed Al-Kobar.

There was some movement in the courtroom as one of the policemen tried to crawl out the back door. Al-Kobar winged a shot in the direction of that movement.

“I didn't tell anybody to move,” Al-Kobar spit out. “And unless I say move, don't move.”
\

“We have the courtroom surrounded, Johnson,” announced the sergeant on his bull horn from the outside corridor. “You can't get out of there.”

Al-Kobar pegged another shot, this one shattering and hurtling through the glass panel of one of the doors leading to the outside corridor.

“I'm going out with the Judge, and if anybody tries to stop us, this here Judge and this here stenographer are dead,” shouted Al-Kobar. “You, cop in the back. You wanted to get out. Go ahead out and tell that to the other pigs out there. Tell them I mean it.”

The cop crawled near the entrance, then bolted out, the door swinging behind him.

“Now just in case you other pigs figure that you're going to get out of here one by one, all of you get up and sit in the seats there, them benches.”

There was a general shuffling as people, court officers, and the remaining reppoter sat up in the spectators' benches.

“Forty-five seconds, Captain,” Al-Kobar announced. “You still there, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“Did you send someone to get that elevator?”

“Yes.”

“Well, send someone else to tell them police pigs in the hall that when I come through, if there's any movement, any trouble, these two people are dead. You got that?”

“Yes.”

“Then move it, move it,” said Al-Kobar, firing another shot into the wall above the door. “I got all you bastards where I want you now. You have to listen to whatever I tell you now, you miserable bastards,” he shouted to the court officers in the spectators' section. “Drop all your guns on the floor in the aisle. Come on,” he shouted. “You, brother Phelan. Go out there and get all the bullets out of those guns. Hurry.”

“What about the girl?”

“Take her with you,” said Al-Kobar. “She looks like she could use a little walk.”

Phelan moved down toward the aisle, dragging the girl with him, the gun at her throat. She moved just ahead of him, his body staying directly behind hers.

“Thirty seconds. You hear, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“You do what I told you?”

“Yes, it's all done. The car's down there already.”

“Remember, no tricks, or I'll kill these two.”

“I told them that, Johnson,” said the Captain.

“It's Ali Al-Kobar. I ain't no slave,” he hurled angrily. He pegged another shot into the wall above the door. “And don't none of you worry about me running out of bullets,” said Al-Kobar. “I got plenty. I'm reloading right now. Come on, brother Phelan, come on, get the bullets. Just empty those other guns and put all the bullets in your pocket.”

“I'm going as fast as I can,” said Phelan.

“Twenty seconds,” said Al-Kobar. “I'm coming through that door in eighteen seconds now, Captain. Come on, brother Phelan, you got that done, man?”

“There are too many guns to empty in ten seconds,” he said. He let go of the girl as he bent to pick up the pistols. She stood as if in a trance, looking at all the court officers she had known so well, with whom she had joked and drunk coffee. One of them signaled to her with his eyes. He signaled her to move away from Phelan as he was bending.

The stenotypist stared in disbelief. She was too frightened. Her eyes grew wide with terror. She couldn't do it. She couldn't move.

“Ten seconds. You got those bullets, man?”

“Some of them, some of them, for Christ's sake.”

“Hurry.”

Suddenly, the stenotypist bolted, diving into one of the audience benches.

Phelan rose from his bent position, now exposed in the open. His pistol whirled in the girl's direction. The court officer who had signaled the girl suddenly leveled a hidden revolver and fired point-blank at Phelan. The explosion was violent, rocking the room. It was a .38 magnum shot. There was an intense howl from Phelan as he spun in a circle, landing on his back in the benches on the other side of the courtroom.

“You motherfuckers!” shouted Al-Kobar wildly. “You motherfuckers! You think that's going to stop me?” He sprayed two more shots into the benches where the officers had been sitting. They were all on the floor again.

“Come on, you pigs, sit up, come on you pigs, sit up,” Al-Kobar goaded. “I said sit up,” he demanded impatiently.

“It's time,” the Captain shouted from behind the door, to distract Al-Kobar.

Al-Kobar looked at the door, then out to the audience once again. He decided he was more interested in getting out. “Open the door, you pig bastard,” he shouted as he shoved the Judge sideways, staying behind him, the barrel of the shotgun ever in the Judge's throat. He moved sideways down the steps.

“You lead the way, Captain, and no funny business, or I'll blow your head off too,” said Al-Kobar.

“No, no funny business,” said the Captain.

Al-Kobar moved through the robing room to the other door which led to the interior corridor. The Captain was walking ahead, Al-Kobar following, keeping the Judge in front of him. He shifted the Judge a bit to his side so that he could twist him either front or back, depending on from where the attack might come. The three men moved slowly through the corridor. The door to the main corridor was about twenty feet ahead. The elevator was at the end of the corridor just before the door.

Suddenly, there was a noise ahead, as the door to the main corridor was banged or punched or slammed. Al-Kobar's head twirled, and he shifted the Judge in front of him quickly. From behind him, at that very moment, the policeman who had been posted in the interior hallway stepped from the robing room. He had hidden in the judges' washroom just before Al-Kobar walked through. On this prearranged noise from outside, the policeman emerged and fired a shot at the exposed back of Al-Kobar, to the side away from the Judge's head. Al-Kobar howled. There was a shotgun blast now, and blood flew and splattered the wall. The Captain leaped on Al-Kobar. So did the cop from behind. There were more cops coming in the front way. More from behind. There was screaming and cursing, and people slipping in blood on the terrazzo floor.

30

Thursday, September 14, 2:15
P.M.

Marc sat next to Nick Stuart's work bench as Stuart peered through the eyepiece of a microscope with two separate magnifying lenses. This was a comparison microscope which caused two images to appear side by side, thus permitting the study of two bullets, one under each lens, at the same time. By rotating each bullet 360 degrees, every line or mark on one bullet, could simultaneously be compared to every line or mark on the other.

Stuart was studying two bullets he had fired from two separate pistols into a recovery box stuffed with cotton.

“And you want to know if bullets can be studied and positively identified using a microscope like this?” asked Stuart, still peering into the microscope.

“That's right,” replied Marc.

“Well, let me tell you this,” said Stuart, looking up now. He was thickly built with a bald head and a wide, smiling face. He was employed as a laboratory research technician at Winchester Firearms Company, and part of His duties involved microscopic examination of bullets and shell casings for the purposes of finding better manufacturing methods of eliminating manufacturing defects. “When I was on the police force, in Ballistics, I thought you could. But after working in the lab where I am now, I say there's no way in the world to compare bullets precisely or accurately with a microscope like this.”

“Are you kidding?” asked Marc.

“Not at all,” said Stuart.

“How come?” asked Franco. “What about the lansing grooves and all?”

“There's no such thing. That's the trouble with all this stuff on TV. It's really fiction.”

“Can you explain that a little?” asked Marc.

“Here's a quick lesson,” said Stuart. “A bullet is smooth, made of soft metal. And it fits almost exactly into the barrel of the weapon it was made for. But inside the barrel of every weapon—except shotguns—sticks down what's called rifling—grooves. Now when the bullet is fired, it's forced over these grooves that are protruding down into the barrel. And the grooves cut into the soft metal of the bullet as it moves forward. It can't go through otherwise. The bullet then gets caught on these grooves like a trolley on tracks. And since the grooves are spiraled inside the barrel, the bullet gets a spiral spin. It gets to be like a football being thrown with a spiral pass. That lets the bullet go straighter, faster. You got that so far?”

“If the metal wasn't soft, the bullet wouldn't get past the grooves, is that it?” asked Marc.

“Right,” said Stuart.

“How about the lansing grooves you always hear about?” said Franco.

“That's land and grooves,” said Stuart. “After the bullet is fired, the flat part of the side of the bullet is called lands, and the lines or marks cut into the bullet by the rifling in the barrel are called grooves. So a fired bullet has lands and grooves. I guess that came to sound like lansing grooves. With me so far?”

Franco nodded.

“You say, even with these lands and grooves, you can't compare bullets from the same pistol with this microscope?” asked Marc.

“Right,” replied Stuart. “For example. Every Smith and Wesson Chief Special revolver made—that's the pistol detectives use—is made on the same dies or machine and has the same size barrel and the same size and number of grooves as every other similar-model Smith and Wesson Chief Special. The same goes for every other weapon manufactured. Every weapon of a certain model made on the same machines will be practically the same as every other model of the same weapon. That figures, doesn't it?”

“Yes,” Marc replied.

“Okay. Now the only way to tell if a bullet you know was fired from one revolver compared with some other bullet found some place else, is to study each bullet fired to see if the particular pistol has left any identifying characteristics in the lands or the grooves on the bullets. Right?”

“So far, so good,” said Marc.

“The problem is, you can't look through a microscope like this and make the precise findings or readings necessary to compare bullets. It's just not powerful enough,” said Stuart. “I mean maybe it was okay fifty years ago, when there wasn't anything more powerful. But what we do now is actually measure the width and the depth of the grooves, the width and the height of the lands. And we do this with electronic microscopes that enlarge to the millionth of an inch. We have them at the lab.” Stuart lit a stubby cigar.

“Go on,” Marc said. He was listening carefully.

“The only way to tell if one bullet matches another, is to measure them exactly—and I mean exactly—to match them. No one can tell if the grooves on this bullet,” he said, holding up one bullet, “are the same as the grooves on this other bullet, except by measuring them to the millionth or at least ten thousandth of an inch. Of course they look alike. They were fired from the same kind of revolvers, manufactured on the same machines. They were designed to come off the machine exactly the same. Let me ask another thing before I go on. Do you know what the humidity factor is in the laboratory where the police test these bullets?”

“Humidity factor? I don't know,” said Marc.

“I do. I worked there fifteen years. It's the same as outdoors. Maybe they got air conditioning now. But that won't help. You see, these bullets are lead. If I just breathe hard from my mouth on them, and you're looking at them with the big microscopes at the lab, you'll see the needle measuring them fluctuate. These bullets react very much to atmosphere. If you don't control a constant humidity at their lab, which the cops don't, you can't compare a damn thing. From second to second, a wind could change a measurement reading.”