Overkill

“May I?”

She extended the gun to him delicately, the way one might offer up a dead bird or mouse. He took it and held it by the grips. It felt good, pleasantly heavy but nicely balanced. Even without looking for the maker’s name, he recognized it as a Browning. He’d owned one back in his DEA days. Bought it for undercover work. You couldn’t very well show up to buy drugs packing a six-shot.38 Smith amp; Wesson Detective Special.

Katherine Darcy had said they’d found the thing empty, and presumably it still was. But rule number one was that you always assumed the opposite. He jacked the slide back to clear the chamber. Nothing ejected. Applying gentle pressure to the trigger, he eased the hammer back in place. Then he depressed the magazine release, and the clip dropped easily into his palm. It, too, was empty. He visually checked the chamber, the safety and the firing pin, then jacked the slide back again to cock the gun. Taking aim at the on button of the air conditioner unit in the window, he dry-fired.

“Bang!” he shouted, and smiled as Darcy lifted a full inch off the floor.

Gripping the gun by the barrel, he handed it back to her. “It’s not the murder weapon,” he told her.

“How do you know?”

He said nothing.

“I’ll tell you how I know you were in Puerto Rico,” she said. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

He shrugged.

“I’ll be your best friend.”

“Getting warmer now,” he told her.

“I’ll let you buy me that drink.”

“You’re on,” he told her.

“One of my girlfriends from appeals happened to spot you at the airport. She knows I have a case with you, and she thought I ought to know. Also…”

“Yes?”

“She said you were awfully early for your flight.”

“That would be me,” Jaywalker conceded.

“So why isn’t this the murder weapon?”

“Because,” said Jaywalker, “there was no murder. If it was anything, it was manslaughter.”

Which was arguably true, if you wanted to factor in extreme emotional disturbance, but was sneaky at best. What Jaywalker hadn’t told Katherine Darcy was that the Browning’s firing pin was just slightly off-center, a hair toward eight o’clock. From the ballistics photos of the recovered spent shell casings, he already knew that the gun that had killed Victor Quinones had a dead-center firing pin, and therefore almost certainly had to have been a Glock or a Tech Nine.

That drink turned out to be nothing more exciting than a hot chocolate at a small coffee shop down by the federal courthouse. True to her word, Katherine Darcy actually let Jaywalker pick up the tab this time. And she waited until they were finishing and he was paying to bring up the case again.

“So,” she said, “if you’re so confident this is nothing but a manslaughter case at worst, what’s your guy looking for?”

“Five years,” said Jaywalker. He had absolutely no idea what, if anything, Jeremy might be willing to take. But five years was rock bottom for first-degree manslaughter and would be an absolute steal, especially for an execution. So it seemed to Jaywalker like a pretty good place to start.

“Get serious,” she said.

“What would be serious? Ten?”

“Twenty,” she said. “Maybe eighteen or nineteen. But don’t count on it.”

“Tell me ten,” said Jaywalker, “and I’ll ask him.”

“Never. Absolutely never.”

And that was how the discussion ended.

But the thing was, not only had Katherine Darcy earlier backed off from her insistence that it was a murder case with no lesser plea, now she’d indicated a willingness to consider something less than the twenty-five-year maximum on a manslaughter plea. In other words, for the second time, the prosecution had blinked.

Why?

He met with Jeremy two days later.

“Suppose I could get you twelve years,” he said. He figured if Darcy had already blinked and offered eighteen or twenty to his five, sooner or later he might be able to talk her into splitting the difference. “Would you be interested?”

“How much of that would I have to do?”

“On twelve? A dime.” He figured Jeremy had been in long enough by now to have picked up the language of state time. A dime was ten, of course, just like a deuce was two, a trey three, and a nickel or a pound five.

Slowly Jeremy shook his head from side to side. There was nothing arrogant to the gesture, nothing the least bit defiant. Had Jaywalker been forced to come up with a word to describe it, the best he would have managed was sad.

“I feel like, you know, like I put up with a lot from those guys,” said Jeremy. As he spoke, his eyes locked onto Jaywalker’s own. They were as blue-gray as ever, even in the poorly lit visiting area of 10 °Centre Street, but there seemed to be some sort of film coating them. Jaywalker had never seen Jeremy cry, and had decided he never would. He wondered if the young man had shed more than his share of tears during the long summer of his torment, and if this slight watery look was all he had left. Or maybe Jeremy just wasn’t a crier.

“You did,” Jaywalker agreed. “You put up with a lot.” He paused for a few seconds before following up with the caveat. “But the law doesn’t always look at it that way.”

“Not even if I was trying to save my life?”

“As long as you were trying to save your life,” explained Jaywalker, “what you did was absolutely justified. No question about that. But once you get the gun away from Victor, and once he’s lying on the ground unarmed and helpless…” He let his voice trail off from soft to silent. This wasn’t an argument they were having, after all, or a lecture he was delivering. It was more like a commiseration. In the short space of four months, Jaywalker had grown surprisingly fond of this young man, had come to care deeply about the impossible predicament in which he now found himself. But personal feelings were one thing, and being a criminal defense lawyer was another. The fact was, he owed Jeremy more than empathy, more than compassion, more than caring. In addition to all those things, he owed Jeremy the benefit of his twenty-some years in the trenches, and whatever wisdom might have come along during them. And leading a client valiantly into a battle they were sure to lose was no way to satisfy those debts.

“The law says,” he told Jeremy, “that self-defense ends once the threat ends. From that moment on, no matter what you’ve been through, you can’t pull the trigger. You’re allowed to defend yourself, but you’re not allowed to get even. That’s what the judge is going to tell the jury, in so many words. He has no choice. The law requires him to do that. And it’s very hard for me to imagine twelve ordinary people getting together and agreeing to blow him off and do the opposite of what he’s told them.”

“They weren’t there,” said Jeremy.

“No, they weren’t,” Jaywalker agreed. “And that will make it even harder for them to understand how you felt. It will make it just about impossible, in fact.”

“Can’t you explain it to them?”

The question was so utterly simple, and yet so disarmingly naive, that it completely broke the spell and forced Jaywalker to smile broadly. “Sure,” he said, “I can try. But I’m going to need an awful lot of help from you.”

“You won’t be mad at me?”

“Mad at you? For what?”