Another voice came onto the intercom circuit: “You keep talking like that, sir, and we might get a little scared.”
“Sergeant Zimmer, how are things in the back?” Johns asked. Zimmer’s regular spot was just aft of the two pilots, hovering over an impressive array of instruments.
“Coffee, tea, or milk, sir? The meals for this flight are Chicken Kiev with rice, Roast Beef au Jus with baked potato, and for the weight-watchers among us, Orange Ruffy and stir-fried veggies – and if you believe that, sir, you’ve been staring at the instrument panel too long. Why the hell don’t we have a stewardess along with us?”
” ‘Cause you and I are both too old for that shit, Zimmer!” PJ laughed.
“It ain’t bad in a chopper, sir. What with all the vibration and all…”
“I’ve been trying to reform him since Korat,” Johns explained to Captain Willis. “How old are the kids now, Buck?”
“Seventeen, fifteen, twelve, nine, six, five, and three, sir.”
“Christ,” Willis noted. “Your wife must be some gal, Sarge.”
“She’s afraid I’ll run around, so she robs me of my energy,” Zimmer explained. “I fly to get away from her. It’s the only thing that keeps me alive.”
“Her cooking must be all right, judging by your uniform.”
“Is the colonel picking on his sergeant again?” Zimmer asked.
“Not exactly. I just want you to look as good as Carol does.”
“No chance, sir.”
“Roger that. Some coffee would be nice.”
“On the way, Colonel, sir.” Zimmer was on the flight deck in less than a minute. The instrument console for the Pave Low helicopter was large and complex, but Zimmer had long since installed gimbaled cup holders suitable for the spillproof cups that Colonel Johns liked. PJ took a quick sip.
“She makes good coffee, too, Buck.”
“Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” Carol Zimmer knew that her husband would share it with his colonel. Carol wasn’t her original given name. Born in Laos thirty-six years earlier, she was the daughter of a Hmong warlord who’d fought long and hard for a country that was no longer his. She was the only survivor of a family of ten. PJ and Buck had lifted her and a handful of others off a hilltop at the final stages of a North Vietnamese assault in 1972. America had failed that man’s family, but at least it hadn’t failed his daughter. Zimmer had fallen in love with her from the first moment, and it was generally agreed that they had the seven cutest kids in Florida.
“Yep.”
It was late in Mobile, somewhere between the two southbound aircraft, and jails – especially Southern jails – are places where the rules are strictly applied. For lawyers, however, the rules are often rather lenient, and paradoxically they were very lenient indeed in the case of these two. These two had an as – yet – undetermined date with “Old Sparky,” the electric chair at Admore Prison. The jailors at Mobile therefore didn’t want to do anything to interfere with the prisoners’ constitutional rights, access to counsel, or general comfort. The attorney, whose name was Edward Stuart, had been fully briefed going in, and was fully fluent in Spanish.
“How did they do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You screamed and kicked, Ramón,” Jesús said.
“I know. And you sang like a canary.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the attorney told them. “They’re not charging you with anything but drug-related murder and piracy. The information Jesús gave them is not being used at all in this case.”
“So do your lawyer shit and get us off!”
The look on Stuart’s face was all the response either man needed.
“You tell our friends that if we don’t get off on this one, we start talking.”
The jail guards had already told both men in loving detail what fate had in store for them. One had even shown Ramón a poster of the chair itself with the caption REGULAR OR EXTRA CRISPY. Though a hard man and a brutal one, the idea of being strapped into a hard-backed wooden chair, then having a copper band affixed to his left leg, and a small metal cap set on a bald spot that the prison barber would shave on his head the day before, and the small sponge soaked in a saline solution to facilitate electrical conductivity, the leather mask to keep his eyes from flying out of his head… Ramón was a brave man when he had the upper hand, and that hand held a gun or a knife directed at an unarmed or bound person. Then he was quite brave. It had never occurred to him that one day he might be the helpless one. Ramón had lost five pounds in the preceding week. His appetite was virtually nil and he took an inordinate interest in light bulbs and wall sockets. He was afraid, but more than that he was angry, at himself for his fear, at the guards and police for giving him that fear, and at his former associates for not getting him free of this mess.
“I know many things, many useful things.”
“It does not matter. I have spoken with the federales, and they do not care what you know. The U.S. Attorney claims to have no interest in what you might tell him.”
“That is ridiculous. They always trade for information, they always -”
“Not here. The rules have changed.”
“What do you tell us?”
“I will do my best for you.” I’m supposed to tell you to die like men, Stuart could not say. “There are many things that can happen in the next few weeks.”
The attorney was rewarded with skeptical expressions not entirely devoid of hope. He himself had no hope at all. The U.S. Attorney was going to handle this one himself, the better to get his face on the 5:30 and 11:00 Eyewitness News broadcasts. This would be a very speedy trial, and a U.S. Senate seat would be available in just over two years. So much the better that the prosecutor could point to his law-and-order record. Frying some druggie-pirate-rapist-murderers would surely appeal to the citizens of the sovereign state of Alabama, Stuart knew. The defense attorney objected to capital punishment on principle, and had spent much of his time and money working against it. He’d successfully taken one case to the Supreme Court and on a five-to-four decision managed to get his client a new trial, where the death sentence had been bargained down to life plus ninety-nine years. Stuart regarded that as a victory even though his client had survived precisely four months in the prison’s general population until someone who disliked child-murderers had put a shank into his lumbar spine. He didn’t have to like his clients – and most often he didn’t. He was occasionally afraid of them, especially the drug runners. They quite simply expected that in return for however much cash – it was generally cash – they paid for his services they would get their freedom in return. They did not understand that in law there are no guarantees, especially for the guilty. And these two were guilty as hell. But they did not deserve death. Stuart was convinced that society could not afford to debase itself to the level of… his clients. It was not a popular opinion in the South, but Stuart had no ambition to run for public office.
In any case, he was their lawyer, and his job was to provide them with the best possible defense. He’d already explored the chances of a plea-bargain; life imprisonment in exchange for information. He’d already examined the government’s case. It was all circumstantial – there were no witnesses except his own clients, of course – but the physical evidence was formidable, and that Coast Guard crew had scrupulously left the crime scene intact except for removing some evidence, all of which had been carefully locked up for a proper chain-of-evidence. Whoever had briefed and trained those people had done it right. Not much hope there. His only real hope, therefore, was to impeach their credibility. It was a slim hope, but it was the best he had.
Supervisory Special Agent Mark Bright was also working late. The crew had been busy. For starters there had been an office and a home to search, a lengthy procedure that was just the opening move in a process to last months, probably, since all the documents found, all the phone numbers scribbled in any of eleven places, all the photographs on desks and walls, and everything else found would have to be investigated. Every business acquaintance of the deceased would be interviewed, along with neighbors, people whose offices adjoined his, members of his country club, and even parishioners at his church. For all that, the major break in the case had come in the second hour of the fourth home search, fully a month after the case had begun. Something had told them all that there had to be something else. In his den, the deceased had a floor safe – with no record of its purchase or installation – neatly hidden by an untacked segment of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Discovering it had required thirty-two days. Tickling it open took nearly ninety minutes, but an experienced agent had done it by first experimenting with the birthdays of the deceased’s whole family, then playing variations on the theme. It turned out that the three-element combination came from taking the month of the man’s birth and adding one, taking the day of his birth and adding two, then taking the year of his birth and adding three. The door of the expensive Mosler came open with a whisper as it rubbed against the rug flap.