The Simple Truth (5 page)

Derek had a good-paying job, Fiske knew, albeit an illegal one. He was a first lieutenant for the number two drug distribution ring in Richmond, hence his street name of DB1. Turbo was the boss, all of twenty-four years old. His empire was well organized, discipline enforced, and included the facade of legality with dry-cleaning operations, a café, a pawnshop, and a stable of accountants and lawyers to deal with the drug funds after they had been laundered. Turbo was a very smart young man, good head for numbers and business. Fiske had always wanted to ask him why he didn’t try running a Fortune 500 company. The pay was almost as good, and the mortality rate was considerably lower.

Normally, Turbo would have one of his three-hundred-dollar-an-hour Main or Franklin Street lawyers take care of Derek. But Derek’s offense was unrelated to Turbo’s business, so that accommodation had not been made. Sloughing him off to someone like Fiske was a form of punishment for Derek doing something as stupid as losing his head over a female. Turbo had no reason to fear Derek’s turning snitch. The prosecutor hadn’t even made any noises along those lines, knowing it was futile. You talk, you die — in or out of prison, it made no difference.

Derek had grown up in a nice middle-class neighborhood, with nice middle-class parents, before he decided to drop out of high school and take the easy route of drug dealing over actually working for a living. He had every advantage, could have done anything with his life. There were just enough Derek Browns around to make the world largely apathetic to the horrific lives of the kids who turned to the sugar-elixir provided by people like Turbo. Which made Fiske want to take Derek out to an alley late at night with a baseball bat in hand and teach the young man some good old-fashioned values.

“The ACA doesn’t give a damn about what he was doing to your girlfriend that night.”

“I can’t believe this shit. Buddy of mine cut up somebody last year and he got two years, half that suspended. Out in three months with time served. And I’m looking at five damn years? What kinda shitty lawyer are you?”

“Did your buddy have a prior felony conviction?”
Was your good old buddy one of the top men for one of Richmond’s worst diseases? Fiske wanted to ask, and he would have but it would be wasted breath.
“I tell you what — I’ll go back with three and time served.”

Now Derek looked interested.
“You think you can get that?”

Fiske stood up.
“Don’t know. I’m just a shitty lawyer.”

On the way out, Fiske looked out the barred window and watched as a new shipment of inmates climbed from the prison van, grouped close, shackles beating a chant on the asphalt. Most were young blacks or Latinos, already sizing each other up. Slave to master. Who gets cut or scored first. The few whites looked as though they might drop and die from sheer panic before they even got to their cells. Some of these young men were probably the sons of men Patrolman John Fiske had arrested ten years ago. They would have been just kids then, maybe dreaming of something other than the public dole, no daddy at home, mother struggling through a horror of a life with no end in sight. Then again, maybe not. Reality had a way of punishing one’s subconscious. Dreams weren’t a reprieve, merely a continuation of the real-life nightmare.

As a cop, the dialogue he had had with many arrestees tended to repeat itself.

“Kill you, man. Kill your whole damn family,”
some would scream at him, drug-faced, as he put the cuffs on.

“Uh-huh. You have the right to remain silent. Think about using it.”

“Come on, man, ain’t my fault. My buddy done it. Screwed me.”

“Where would that buddy be? And the blood on your hands? The gun in your pants? The coke still in your nostrils? Buddy do all that? Some buddy.”

Then they might eye the dead body and lose it, blubbering.
“Holy shit! Sweet Jesus! My momma, where’s my momma? You call her. Do that for me, oh shit, do that, will you? Momma! Oh shit!”

“You have the right to an attorney,”
he would calmly tell them.

And that now was John Fiske.

After a couple more court appearances downtown, Fiske left the glass and brick John Marshall Courts Building, named after the third chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall’s ancestral home was still right next door, now a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the great Virginian and American. The man would have turned over in his grave if he had known of the vile acts being debated and defended in the building that bore his name.

Fiske headed down Ninth Street toward the James River. Hot and humid the last few days, the weather patterns had angled cooler with the coming rain, and he pulled his trench coat tighter around him. As the rain started, he began to jog along the pavement, his shoes cleaving through puddles of filthy water collected in dips of asphalt and concrete.

By the time he reached his office in Shockoe Slip, his hair and coat were soaked, the water running in miniature rivulets down his back. Eschewing the elevator, he took the steps two at a time and unlocked the door to his office. It was located in a cavernous building that had once been a tobacco warehouse, its oak and pine guts having been given the new ribs of multiple office drywall. The reek of the tobacco leaves forever lingered, however. And this wasn’t the only place it could be found. Cruising on Interstate 95 south past the Philip Morris cigarette-manufacturing facility Bobby Graham had referred to, one could almost get a nicotine high without even lighting up. Fiske had often been tempted to fling a lighted match out the window as he drove by, to see if the air would simply explode.

Fiske’s office was one room with a small attached bathroom, which was important, since he slept here more often than he did at his apartment. He hung up his coat to dry, and wiped his face and hair down with a towel he grabbed off the rack in the bath. He put on a pot of coffee and watched it brew while he thought about Jerome Hicks.

If Fiske did a superb job, Jerome Hicks would spend the rest of his life behind bars instead of receiving the prick of lethal injection at the Virginia death house. Killing an eighteen-year-old black kid would not win Graham the attorney general’s job he coveted. A black-on-black, loser-on-loser murder wouldn’t even warrant a back-page story in the newspaper.

As a Richmond cop, Fiske had survived, barely, the violence of combat. It swept through neighborhood and town, swelling large, like an aneurysm, the size of a county, leaving behind the shattered ghettos, and the soaring, dollar-consumed spires of downtown, flowing over, around and through the ill-conceived barricades of suburbia. And it wasn’t just the commonwealth. Glaciers of criminal activity flowed from all the states. When they eventually met, then where would we go? Fiske wondered.

He abruptly sat down. The burn had started slowly at first; it usually did. He sensed its march from his belly up to his chest, then spreading. Finally, like lava in a trench, the sensation of impossible heat started down his arms and poured into his fingers. Fiske staggered up, locked his office door and stripped off his shirt and tie. He had a T-shirt on underneath; always wore the damn T-shirt. Through the cotton, his fingers touched the starting point of the thickened scar, after all these years still rough-edged. It began just below his navel and followed the meandering path of the surgeon’s saw in an unbroken line, until it ended at the base of his neck.

Fiske dropped to the floor and did fifty push-ups without ceasing, the heat in his chest and extremities surging and then diminishing with each repetition. A drop of sweat fell from his brow and hit the wooden floor. He thought he could see his reflection in it. At least it wasn’t blood. He followed the push-ups with an equal number of stomach crunches. The scar rippled and flexed with each bend of his body, like a serpent unwillingly grafted to his torso. He attached a quick-release bar to the doorway leading to the bathroom and struggled through a dozen pull-ups. He used to be able to do twice that many, but his strength was slowly ebbing. What lurked beneath the fused skin would eventually overtake him, kill him, but, for now, the heat faded; the physical exertion seemed to frighten it off, letting the trespasser know that somebody was still home.

He cleaned up in the bathroom and put his shirt back on. As he sipped his coffee he looked out the window. From this vantage point he could barely make out the line of the James River. The water would grow rough as the rain picked up. He and his brother had often boated down the river, or leisurely floated down it in truck-tire inner tubes on hot summer days. That had been years ago. This was as close as Fiske got to the water these days. Leisure time was over. He had no space left for it in his shortened frame of life. He enjoyed what he did, though, at least most of the time. It wasn’t the life of a Supreme Court superlawyer like his brother, but he took a certain pride in his job and how he did it. He would have no money or grand reputation when he died, but he believed he would die reasonably satisfied, reasonably fulfilled. He turned back to his work.

Like a brooding hawk, Fort Jackson perched on the desolate topography of southwest Virginia, fairly equidistant from the Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia borders and in the middle of a remote scrap of coal country. There were few if any stand-alone military prisons in the United States; they were typically attached to a military facility, due both to tradition and to the constraints of defense dollars. Fort Jackson did have a military base component; however, the dominant feature of the place would always be the prison, where the most dangerous offenders in the United States Army silently counted down their lives.

There had never been an escape from Fort Jackson, and even if an inmate could manage to achieve his freedom without benefit of a court ruling, such liberty would be empty and short-lived. The surrounding countryside represented a prison of even greater menace, with jagged-faced, strip-mined mountains, treacherous roads with widowmaker drops, dense, unyielding forest laced with copperheads and rattlers. And along the polluted waterways awaited their more aggressive cousin, the water moccasin, anxious for panicked feet crashing its border. And the self-reliant local folk in the forgotten
“toe”
of Virginia — the human equivalent of razor wire — were well schooled with the gun and the knife, and unafraid to use either. And yet in the slope of the land, the breadth of forest, shrub and flower, the scent of unhurried wildlife and the quiet of ocean depths, there was much beauty here.

Attorney Samuel Rider passed through the fort’s main gate, received his visitor’s badge and parked his car in the visitors’ lot. He nervously walked up to the flat, stonewalled entrance of the prison, his briefcase lightly tapping against his blue-clothed leg. It took him twenty minutes to go through the screening procedure, which included producing personal identification, verifying that he was on the visitors’list, a pat-down of his person, walking through a metal detector and ending with a search of his briefcase. The guards suspiciously eyed the small transistor radio, but allowed him to keep it after confirming that it contained no contraband. He was read the standard rules of visitation and to each he gave an affirmative, audible reply that he understood. Rider knew that were he to run afoul of any of these rules, the guard’s polite facade would quickly disappear.

He looked around, unable to shake the oppression of fear, of extreme nervousness, as though the prison’s architect had managed to craft these elements into the bones of the place. Rider’s bowels clenched, and his palms were sweaty, like he was about to climb on a twenty-seat turboprop in the face of a hurricane. As a member of the military during Vietnam, Rider had never left the country, never come close to combat, to mortal danger. Damn ironic if he were to drop dead from a coronary while standing in a military prison on United States soil. He took a deep breath, mentally signaled his heart to calm down, and wondered again why he had come. Rufus Harms was in no position to make him, or anyone else, do anything. But here he was. Rider took another deep breath, clipped on his visitor’s badge and gripped the comforting handle of his briefcase, his leather amulet, as a guard escorted him to the visitors’room.

Alone for a few minutes, Rider eyed the dull brown of the walls that seemed designed to depress further those who probably already lived in the throes of near-suicidal intent. He wondered how many men called this place home, entombed by their fellow man and with excellent reason. And yet they all had mothers, even the vilest among them; some, Rider assumed, even had fathers, beyond the stain of semen on egg. And still, they ended up here. Born evil? Maybe so. Probably have a genetic test soon that’ll tell you if your preschooler is the second coming of Ted Bundy, Rider thought. But when they drop the bad news on you, then what the hell do you do?

Rider stopped his musings as Rufus Harms, towering over the two guards trailing him, entered the visitors’room. The quick image was that of the lord to his serfs, reality the reverse of that. Harms was the largest man Rider had ever personally encountered, a giant possessed of truly abnormal strength. Even now he seemed to fill up the room with his bulk. His chest was two slabs of rebarred concrete hung side by side, arms thicker than some trees. Harms wore shackles on both his hands and feet that forced him to do the
“prison shuffle.”
He was accomplished at it, though; the shortened strides were graceful.

He must be close to fifty, Rider thought, but actually looked a good ten years older; he noted the facial scars, the awkward twist of bone beneath Harms’s right eye. The young man Rider had represented was the owner of fine, even handsome features. Rider wondered how often Rufus had been beaten in here, what other telling evidence of abuse he carried under his clothing.

Harms sat down across from Rider at a wooden table heavily scored by thousands of nervous, desperate fingernails. He didn’t look at Rider just yet, but instead eyed the guard, who remained in the room.