Jack Ketchum
The Passenger
2001
It wasn’t the best of days even before her car died.
She’d fallen asleep the night before at her desk in the study and awakened from a dream of Micah Harpe, all three-hundred-plus pounds of him, crashing through the picture window and spraying her with shards of glass, slamming up against her desk and scattering papers and cigarette butts everywhere and then laughing, leering up at her, saying, troubles, counselor? and she rode that sudden wakefulness for a moment like a bucking steer.
Then Alan walks in from his shower wrapped in a towel, carrying a manila file folder, drops the folder on the end table and asks her not to let him forget these briefs tomorrow, please. Sure, Alan, thanks, no problem. It took him a full two minutes to really see her there, pale as chalk, and yet another to ask what was wrong.
“Dream,” she said.
He glanced at the desk littered with paperwork.
“You been down here all night?”
She yawned, nodded.
“So? How’d it go?”
“So I think I’m screwed without Micah Harpe, that’s what it comes down to.”
“I could have told you that.”
“All I can do is argue insufficient evidence.”
She watched him throw the towel over his shoulder and turn and walk toward the kitchen.
“Uh-huh. You want some coffee? I need some coffee.”
“I want some sleep. I want a case I can win, goddammit.”
He said, “Settle for the coffee.”
Then later she and Milton Wendt, the prosecutor, before the bench and Judge Irma Foster- another stunning excuse for a conversation.
“We’re not arguing,” she said, “that my client wasn’t at the Willis home that day, your Honor. They were old friends and he had every reason to be there. The prosecution has placed my client in the house and we allow that he was, in fact, present. But Big was there too and there is nothing…”
“Big?” Judge Foster squinted at her.
“Micah Harpe, your Honor, the defendant’s older brother.”
The judge looked past her to Arthur “Little” Harpe at the defense table. Arthur was looking pretty good today, Janet thought, all told. As good as he could look, anyway. A new suit and tie off the rack at Burton’s and a shoeshine in the courthouse lobby. But Janet still knew what the judge was seeing-a chubby pasty-faced country-ass snake watching them through idiot eyes. She just hoped he wasn’t using the eraser end of the pencil to clean out his earwax again.
“ Big and Little?’’ she said.
“Yes, your Honor.”
“Good God.”
She tried to move on.
“The prosecution has presented no physical evidence whatever to suggest that it was my client and not, as we contend, my client’s brother, who was responsible – without my client’s knowledge or cooperation-for the murders of these two people. I move to dismiss.”
“He confessed, Counselor.” Wendt sighed.
“He’s since recanted and implicated Micah as the shooter. That confession was taken under duress and you know it. The police went at him for over twenty- two hours. All because they couldn’t find his brother.”
“They still can’t.”
“That’s simply not true, your Honor.”
Then the judge sighed too. “Let’s take this into chambers,” she said.
In chambers she fared no better than expected. The trial was set for Monday morning. She had the weekend to prepare. But to prepare what? She certainly wasn’t putting that little weasel on the stand. The best she could hope for was to shake the detectives who’d handled the interrogation, or to pull off a miracle in summation. It wasn’t very promising. Harpe had confessed to the shotgun murders of Joseph and Lilian Willis over a drug deal gone bad and that was probably that. In the hallway she gave it one last try with Wendt, though.
“It should have been postponed,” she said. “It should never have come to trial.”
“Come on, Janet. We don’t know Big’s even in there.”
“And you don’t know he isn’t.”
“Nobody’s placed him there. Not even his brother has definitively placed him there. What do you want the cops to do? Remember probable cause, for god’s sake? We’ve gone onto that estate half a dozen times. The place is an armed camp-safe house for half the psychos in the state. But every gun in the place is registered to its owner. You know what the locals call it.”
“I know. Hole-in-the-Wall.”
“That’s right. We’re talking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid right here in quiet old Adderton County. But it’s still private property. These guys have influence. They’ve got bucks. Big bucks. With a cleanup crew to dispose of their disposables as good as any in the U.S.A. And we don’t have probable cause.”
“He’s in there. And he did the crime.”
She stopped and opened her briefcase and pulled out the folder second from the top. She handed it to Wendt. “Look at this.”
“Big’s rap sheet. I’ve read it.”
“Read it again. Arrests for arson, rape, armed robbery, another rape-this one a man, sodomy-murder, attempted murder, assault…”
She was aware that her voice was rising, echoing through the nearly empty halls, turning a head or two. She didn’t give a damn.
“You can do something, Milton. You can send them in there after him.”
Wendt shook his head. “Wish I could. Look, nobody’s saying Big’s a sweetheart, Janet. I’ll even grant you that they could have done it together. But the point is we’ve already got your boy. So I think I’ll go right ahead and fry him if that’s okay with you.”
The Turtle Brook Inn was all amber lights and dark wood paneling and tables and chairs upholstered in burgundy-a steak joint with romantic aspirations. Seven- thirty on a Friday night and not half the tables full, nor even half the bar, a testament to northern New York State’s fundamental lack of any real trickle-down prosperity. She was halfway through her second glass of wine when Alan finally made his appearance. There was no point scolding him. Alan was late. Fact of life.
“So?” he said.
So again. She took a sip of wine.
“Alan, you can be boring as spit sometimes. You know that?”
“It didn’t go well.”
“No, it didn’t.”
He reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. His own hand was warm and dry and despite herself she always found comfort in his touch.
“I love you, honey,” he said.
“Alan, you damn well cheat on me.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Don’t worry about the case. You’ll think of something. Listen, I’m staying at the apartment in town tonight. I have to take a deposition first thing in the morning. You mind?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Behind him their young pretty blond waitress was approaching.
“I do,” he said. “I mind. I may be boring as spit sometimes but I know one or two sex crimes we haven’t committed yet that I’d rather try tonight.”
The waitress froze.
“It’s all right,” Janet told her. “He’s an officer of the court.”
She was on her way home when the Taurus started shuddering and then died, cresting a hill on the dark slice of two-lane country road that was Route 605 northeast of Meville. She managed to pull over to the shoulder and tried to start it up again but the ignition only screeched at her like an angry cat. She stepped out onto black macadam and a warm still moonlit night. Below and far away across the valley she could see the lights from a single farmhouse. She walked to the front of the car and then the back and looked at emptiness in both directions.
She’d been meaning to get a new cell phone for nearly a week.
This could take a while, she thought.
It did.
Nearly twenty minutes passed with her standing there smoking Winston after Winston and listening to the frogs and crickets and she was seriously considering the trek down to the farmhouse before she at last saw a pair of headlights moving north in her direction. She was relieved but apprehensive too and wondered why in hell she hadn’t had the sense to take the tire iron out of the trunk when she had a chance to. It would be nice to have it on the car seat where she could reach it through the window in case of trouble.