“So you killed her,” Martin said in a whisper. Almost imperceptibly he moved a couple of steps forward.
The Russian nodded. “You did a real good job in there,” he said. “Especially with that fucking slut, that Bunny woman. For a few seconds I almost shit my pants. Who’s this bitch? I thought. My guys tell me they already took care of the witnesses. All of them. But that fucking nigger prosecutor was holding out. He found one stupid little slut to tell the truth.”
Martin watched Smerdnakov’s face. An expression of unconscious ferocity flickered across it like a shadow. He realized now that this man was irredeemably bad, that everything he had held as true about him — and about many other things as well — was a lie.
“They think they can protect her,” Smerdnakov was saying now. “The fucking idiots. When I get out of here, I’ll find that little slut and personally cut her throat. Then I’ll fuck her while she’s bleeding to death. I swear it.”
Martin didn’t think about what he did next. He lunged at Smerdnakov and hit him with both hands in the center of the chest and shoved with all his might. For a terrible moment the Russian teetered on the brink, his eyes rolling wildly. He fought, but cuffed and shackled, cigarette still smoking between his lips, he couldn’t maintain his balance. With a loud ripping sound, the thin plastic sheeting gave way under his bulk, and he fell over backward and plummeted headfirst to the hard concrete five stories below. Only in the last few feet of his descent did he let out a short, terrified cry. Martin heard the sound of his head splitting on the pavement and turned away. At that moment the door flung open, and Caesar sprang into the room.
“What’s going on here? Where’s the—” He stopped short when he saw Martin’s ashen face.
Martin’s lips felt cold. “He jumped. My client jumped.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.
Caesar let out an exclamation and ran to the window and looked down. A puddle of blood was spreading over the sidewalk. Two police officers were already sprinting across the park toward the body from the direction of Indiana Avenue.
“What do you mean, the motherfucker jumped?” Caesar shouted. “Why the fuck did he do that?”
For a second Martin couldn’t think. Then his mind began to work, creaking like a machine that hadn’t been used in years. “He confessed,” he said. “He confessed that he strangled that woman, and he said he couldn’t take the guilt anymore. He was out the window before I could stop him.”
Caesar stepped back, bewildered, rubbing his hands together. “Shit, man. Shit...” He didn’t know what to believe.
Downstairs, in the deliberation room, the church ladies knelt on the floor, joined hands, bowed their heads, and loudly called on Jesus. Denise Wheeler knelt beside them and folded her arms over her bosom to address the odd deity of the Mormon Church. The Pakistani garage manager spread his jacket across the new linoleum, lowered himself onto his hands and knees, consulted a pocket compass for the direction of Mecca, and whispered in Urdu a prayer to Allah, the Just and the Merciful. The other jurors bowed their heads out of respect or offered silent prayers of their own devising. One of the old men took out a rosary, rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands, and began murmuring the paternoster.
Twenty minutes passed this way. Then everyone was done praying, and Denise stood and smiled at the others. She had been selected foreman.
“We’ve done God’s work here today,” she said in a sweet voice. “We can all be proud of ourselves.”
“Amen,” the church ladies said in unison. The Pakistani frowned and said nothing.
Then Denise went out into the hallway to inform the court clerk that the jury had reached its verdict.
Chad Holley
The Island in the River
They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes.
— Joseph Conrad
From Creensboro Review
We slept in the car that night somewhere in Louisiana, and it got bad cold on us. My buddy Louis kept squirming and cussing up in the front seat, and in the back I curled tight and hunted heat down in my coat. I dozed enough to dream I was freezing all the way to death, and it wasn’t like they say it is. It was the hardest way I’ve ever gone in my dreams.
We were back on the interstate hours before daylight. Louis’s heater wouldn’t come on, and in the glow of the dash lights we rode hunched forward, gritting our teeth, and not a word between us. At one point I did reach over and bang the heater knobs with the heel of my hand. When nothing happened, I slid my hand back under my thigh and hunkered down again.
“I keep hoping that heater’ll decide to come on,” I said. Talking made the road noise seem louder inside the car.
“Well, you know what they say, Raymond,” Louis said. “Hope in one hand and shit in the other, you’ll see which hand gets warm.”
I didn’t answer him.
We finally went over the river into Vicksburg, and with it now getting morning enough that we could see our breath inside the car, we started up into the Delta. We had been gone almost six months. All we planned to do was drive up through the Delta and go through Silas, just to see if things would look different to us now, I guess, and keep going. I was the one said we ought to do it. I don’t know. Neither of us could really think straight anymore.
A small, weak sun came up, and I rode looking out my window. There was the Delta, a vast sheet of mud under the white sky, still as a picture all the way to the horizon. Black trees standing out there in the mud and sometimes a solitary metal farm building far out in the distance made the Delta seem even bigger and emptier. I don’t know why I expected any different. I have never seen that emptiness blink. I let my forehead fall against the cold glass.
“I’ve seen enough,” I said. “This can all just go to hell.”
Louis didn’t answer. We were about an hour out of Vicksburg and another one yet from Silas.
“You can drop me off or I don’t care what we do,” I said, “but I ain’t going through Silas.”
I looked over at Louis. He was squinting his eyes like he was thinking. He was cold and haggard as I was, and he looked especially skinny with his leather streetcoat buttoned up and his Dodgers cap pulled down hard on his head. Finally he gave me that ever-game little shrug of his and that nonchalant tone.
“You want to see if they still got that branch bank up here in Shardale?”
We didn’t have all that much cash on us, but we weren’t broke enough to need to stop in Shardale either.
I turned my face to the window again. Alongside us, row ends bent past at the speed of thought.
“I don’t care what we do,” I said.
Outside of Shardale we stopped at an old store to top off our gas. There was frost on the pumps. In the trunk of the car I dug through my bag until I found the .45 automatic I had picked up in L.A. It hurt to hold that chunk of ice.
Along the highway as we came into Shardale there was a John Deere place that had apparently gone out of business and next to it a little run-down feed store. Louis watched them go by. “Damn,” he said, and he kind of winced and smiled at the same time. “We drove two thousand miles to hit a bank in Shardale.” He shook his head, apparently as amused with us as ever. It had been weeks since I myself had been all that amused. But it used to be we both laughed at us all the time. And I think we both knew that’s all we were ever really about. It wasn’t like we had some solemn friendship or something. We were just running buddies from high school who hadn’t yet figured out what to do next and both thought that was real funny. When we left Silas I know I laughed my head off. I couldn’t believe us. It was on a weekday afternoon near the end of August, and Louis and I were standing around in the gravel lot of Mitch’s store out near the elevator. One of those days I just didn’t have what it took for working all day at a grain elevator in Silas, Mississippi. So I had left the elevator at lunch, told them I had the stomachache. Louis was supposed to be helping some guy out that way with his catfish ponds, even though Louis had just gotten out of county lockup under suspicion of stealing some of that same guy’s equipment, which come to find out he had in fact done. So that afternoon we were talking about that and drinking beer out of a cooler I kept on my back seat. Eventually, we stood against my car without talking, and alter a while we started humming rocks at Mitch’s sign out by the road. Not thinking much about it, I sung out this one line my daddy used to sing over and over from some song I never heard.