'No!' the old man wailed. He sunk deep into the backseat, his eyes widening behind his glasses. The cab fishtailed to a stop.
'Yo, lady!' the driver shouted, twisting angrily around. On his dashboard was a deodorizer shaped like a king's crown. 'What do you think you're doin'?'
'This is an emergency,' Marta said. 'I need a ride uptown.'
'Get out of my cab! I already got a fare!'
'Let me share the ride. I'll pay you fifty dollars.'
'Are you crazy?' bellowed the cabdriver.
'Make it a hundred! We got a deal?' Marta thrust a foot into the back of the cab, but the old man edged away in terror and the driver fended her off with a hairy hand.
'Stop that! Get out of my cab!'
'
'GET OUT, LADY! You're a fuckin' PSYCHO!'
'No, wait!' Marta yelled, but the cab lurched ahead and the door banged shut, knocking her bag and briefcase to the snowy street. Marta fished them out of the snow and brushed them off. Fuck! She needed to get to the office somehow. Maybe she could call the cab service. Marta tore into her purse for her cell phone and punched its tiny ON button. Nothing. The battery had run out. Marta was about to hurl the phone across Market Street when she saw another cab coming her way. Was it empty?
She tucked her stuff under her arm and ran for it.
* * *
Across the street, a large man in a black leather duster was watching. He was hatless despite the freezing temperatures, leaning against the fake Greek facade of Hecht's department store. Marta didn't notice him. She wouldn't have recognized him even if she had, for Bobby Bogosian wasn't someone Elliot Steere would ever introduce to her.
4
Christopher Graham was tall and brawny, with big-boned features and a gray-flecked beard trimmed just short of the collar of his flannel shirt. He stood at the window of the large, modern jury room in the Criminal Justice Center, resting his callused hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and watching the snowstorm. The jurors in the Steere case had been told a storm was predicted, though they weren't allowed to watch the news because of the sequestration; no TV, newspapers, or radios for two months. The jurors complained about it all the time, except for Christopher. He didn't miss his VCR, he missed the horses whose shoes he reset and the money he'd make. The last thing he missed was his wife, Lainie.
'Okay, settle down, everybody. Settle down,' Ralph Merry called out. He was a bluff, king-sized man who called himself an 'ad exec,' although the jurors sensed correctly that Ralph was never any type of 'exec,' but some sort of advertising salesman, his life fueled by scrambling and Scotch. Ralph waved the others into their order in accustomed chairs around the rectangular table. 'First order of business,' Ralph said, 'is we elect a foreman.'
Christopher tried to ignore Ralph in favor of the snow flying past the window. He'd known it was going to snow even without the TV news. He'd smelled it in the air this morning when they came from the hotel and he'd seen it in the grayness of the sky, or what was left of the sky once the skyscrapers got through with it. Out where Christopher belonged, the horses would've known it was about to snow, too. They didn't need weather radar and whatnot.
'Ain't you gonna be the foreman, Ralph?' asked Nick Tullio. Nick was the last juror empaneled, an aged Italian from South Philly. Nick had a wiggly neck wattle and a chest so spiny he looked more soup chicken than grown man. A tailor all his working life, Nick wore a suit and tie all the time, so he was curiously overdressed for every occasion. His thumb had gotten chewed up in a sewing machine accident, and Nick kept it tucked out of sight, which served only to draw attention to it. 'You should be the foreman. Don't you want to?' Nick asked Ralph.
'Sure, but we gotta vote on it,' Ralph said.
Nick looked sheepish. 'Okay. Sorry. What do I know? I never did this before.' He hated this whole thing. He wished the lawyers had never picked him in the first place. Nick couldn't believe it when they got through all the other people to choose him. Now it was time to decide if Mr. Steere was guilty. What should he do? How should he vote? Nick wished his wife, Antoinetta, was here.
'Not foreman. Foreperson. You have to say foreperson,' corrected Megan Gerrity, a blue-eyed twenty-year-old with coarse red hair, shorn short. Megan was one of three jurors with any college experience. She had spent a year at Drexel University before she quit to design webpages. Her business had been growing until the Steere case, but jury duty could kill it. Megan lived on Internet time, and her clients needed their pages up and running yesterday. She couldn't afford to be sitting here. She hadn't been online in ages. She missed the sky, the sun, and the Microsoft clouds on the start-up of Windows 95.
'You don't want a man foreman?' Ralph asked.
'A woman,' Megan corrected, unsmiling. She was so over Ralph. He always pulled this sexist crap, waging a sitcom gender battle with her. Megan suspected she wasn't the only juror to tire of it. The black jurors— three men and one woman— didn't like Ralph from the outset, Megan could tell. 'I want to be the foreperson,' she said.
'You?' Ralph shot back in mock disbelief. His large hand flew to the chest of his khaki shirt. It was Ralph's favorite shirt because it looked like the one General Schwarzkopf wore in Desert Storm. Ralph thought Norman Schwarzkopf was our greatest leader since Patton. Ralph had taped the general's press conferences from the Gulf War and had even stood in line to get a signed copy of his book. 'Megan for foreman? No way. No women and no redheads. No redheaded Micks! Everybody agree?' Ralph smiled and so did the other jurors, except Kenny Manning.
Kenny's glare was as dark as his skin. He sat at the opposite end of the table, his muscular arms folded over his broad chest. Kenny hated Ralph's jokes. He was sick of him from jump street. Kenny couldn't wait until the fuckin' case was over so he didn't have to look at Ralph's puffy pig face anymore. 'Let's get this thing over with,' Kenny said. 'I been here forever.'
'And the snow's comin' down hard,' said Ray Johnson, Juror 7. Ray called himself 'Lucky Seven' and sat at the end of the conference table next to Kenny Manning and Isaiah Fellers. The group of three black men routinely ate, sat, and rode the bus together, although the quiet Isaiah was something of a third wheel.
