Before the Month's Out, Mystery Writer Wants to Tell You About KC's Street

How's this for late entries? Mystery Writer's back with a 2,500 word opus called KC Street. The hours left in April number few, so I'll let you get right to it.

KC's Street
by Mystery Writer

Jeanie stood in front of the jury; she clasped a new yellow pencil in her hand behind her back. Her knuckles turned white as the blood drained from her small hand. The tighter she held the pencil the more she felt it slipping from her grasp. She had stopped mid-sentence, completely losing her train of thought. She stepped back toward her desk, the seat behind it a sanctuary of sorts, safer than the unprotected spot she now occupied. She would have liked to sit down, but it was not yet time to rest. She saw Henry, looking at her with an unquestioned confidence, a feeling she could not, in all truth, convince herself she deserved. The continuation of her thought was not on the desk and Henry, his dark brown eyes, not quite understanding the complex issues surrounding him, was not going to offer the needed words either.

Time had not slowed down like you see might see in the movies. However, when you have such a gap or void in thought and words and when people are waiting for you to fill it, the time you are allotted to make the next noise, hopefully an intelligent utterance, is remarkably short. She looked down, at her notes, carefully arranged on her open portfolio. They might as well have been written in a different language, as all she could see were the words “Guilty as Charged”, over and over again. Jeanie was all Henry had. She stood before this jury and knew once again, it would be her words that had failed her, and that they were also going to fail him.

Just pick a friendly face and talk directly to that one person.

It was advice that her boss, Jackson, had given her several weeks before. Jackson was not his real name, but one that had been assigned to him during his days playing football at Mississippi State and it had stuck. He was a large black man, who had taken the opportunity to get his law degree at the same time he was tearing up the cartilage in his right knee. He walked with a slight limp but always had a smile and words of encouragement, especially for his newly minted lawyers, given the near impossible task of protecting the rights of an ever increasing guilty clientele. He had sat her down in his office, provided a large white handkerchief from his pocket, and listened to her near coherent words in-between the tears. He closed the door preventing the others in the office from hearing her distress. Her most recent client was on his way to January State Prison and he was innocent. She had not been able to convince the jury that it was a mistaken identification and that even if he had been to prison twice before. He was not guilty. He hadn't raped the girl. She knew it was her summation that lost it: she'd sounded like she didn't believe her client, she hadn't been passionate, and the jury mistakenly took her abject fear for lack of confidence in her own client, and now he was going to spend the next 15 years in hell because of it.

Jeanie quickly scanned the twelve seats and found a face that wasn't friendly so much as questioning and, perhaps, a little sympathetic. It was far better than the other eleven, whose expressions seemed to say, "How in hell did I get trapped here and when do I get to go home?" Jeaniedirected her gaze at the woman and smiled. The woman smiled back.

“Excuse me,” she turned to the judge, “I would just like to review that last point." She did not know the name of the woman, so in her mind she named her Beverly and every time she needed to, she would add a silent Beverly to the conversation, that she had now started with the unsuspecting juror.

Just talk to her like you would a friend.

The words echoed inside but got louder on each subsequent reverberation until she had to move out of their path, their truth powerful but potentially overwhelming.

“(Beverly). When Henry stepped out of his house that morning he had only one thing on his mind and that was how he was going to get high. We admit he has a drug habit. He has a very bad drug habit. It's debilitating. His only objective each day, from the time he wakes up until he goes to bed is when, not if, he is going to get that next fix. It is a sad life. There is no love in his life, there is no passion, there is no future. He is going to die with a needle in his arm.

Janie walked over to one of the prosecutions’ large well-lettered boards outlining Henry’s drug habit in excruciating detail. She waved an arm absently as if this held little importance, even though the jury had heard from three witness with over 4 hours of testimony on the well-labored subject.

“ We heard from many experts,” she began again, turning toward the jury and dismissing the boards importance completely. "The prosecution spent an inordinate amount of time telling and proving to you that Henry is a herion addict. (Beverly) not once did we ever dispute that. We did not even cross-examine any of these people. The fact that Henry used drugs that very day is not in question, because he used drugs, he got high, he stuck that dirty needle, now in evidence as prosecution exhibit 23, between his toes, in his arm pit, and god knows where else, everyday.”

Janie watched several of the jurors squirm with that comment. She was not sure if this was a good thing but it did show they were listening.

Don’t talk down and don’t talk over there head, she is a friend and your just sharing your thoughts with her, trying to help her see your point of view.

“(Beverly) How many people live with you?,” Janie changed the topic, she was taking these people, her friends, on a ride, to where Henry lived, a place foreign to them, but it was vital that they joined her. (Beverly) I live with a cat. I am not sure that even counts. But she and I take care of each other, so even counting the cat, that’s just two of us in that apartment. Henry lives with 8 people in a two bedroom apartment. Across from him, in 809A there are 7, and down the hall 812B is a 2 rooms apartment that have has two whole families, for a total of 12, and an occasional father, with children ranging from 2- 19, all in one apartment. (Beverly) it’s the same for every apartment in that building and on that block, this is a very dense population, people are basically living on top of each other. And everyone in that close quarters knows ever body else’s business. And everybody knows everybody else. So of course Henry knew Kiicha, KC to her friends. In fact she was KC to everybody on that block.”

Janie saw some evident interest in a old Hispanic gentleman, and she decided to name him Arturo. She remembered she had a super once with that name, he always had a smile for her and she needed another smiling face right now. So she was going to include both Beverly and Arturo in her discussion. Her friendly chat and ride into Henry and KC’s neighborhood just picked up an extra passenger.

“(Beverly) when you see the police, I expect that you don’t run and hide. And ( Aurtro) You probably wave and offer a smile. I expect that you see a police officer actually in your neighborhood maybe once a year. Do you ever remember one screaming down your street with the siren blaring. I can’t, not even once. In Henry’s neighborhood it’s a everyday occurrence. There's no hidden secret that there's a crime problem on Henry’s and KC’s block. Gangs, drugs, prostitution, and poverty. It’s a near impossible situation to break. For a lawyer like myself I could think of it as job security.”

Beverly smiled and so did Arturo, Janie clearly focused on her friends and confidants, she heard the titter of laughter from the rest of the group. They had crossed the threshold and had begun to take the trip with her.

If you can get them to smile or even laugh they are listening, and getting them to listen to you is why you are there. If they are listening then they hear what you are saying.

“I don’t of course. I think of my job as more of a gate keeper, helping the ones that can escape get out, especially when they are wrongly accused.”

She let that sink in. Janie, could see Beverly and Arturo nodding understanding the concept of escape.

“So when the police came in, sirens screaming, eight boys ran, all in different directions. (Bev) I can’t tell you why all these boys run from the police but they do every time. They had no idea why they were running, other than not to get caught and have to answer questions, any questions from the police. But Henry,” Janie turned to look at her client, hoping all of the jury members would do the same”, did not run, he just sat there and looked at the pretty lights, because Henry was high. Very high.”

“I have a hard time understanding these kids.”

Janie looked at Beverly and then at Arturo before beginning again. Maybe they understood. Maybe they were no so much taking the steps with her to a new place but perhaps they were returning home.

”These kids are a pack, they are untamed and for the most part wild. You might think of them as herd of wild horses. And when the cops came screaming in that morning, 9:35, to be exact, Henry had shot up only 15 minutes before and he stayed.”

“These police were very familiar with Jefferson street,” Janie, put her notes down at her side, this is where she wanted to take them. This is where they had to be with her.

She stepped up close to the rail, the barrier all but disappearing, as she stepped across and sat among them.

“They knew a lot of the boys that took off, their stampede didn’t fool anybody, the cops knew exactly where each of the boys would end up. They had been down this street many times before, they knew exactly how to get there. Remember me asking Sergeant Collins and I think you might have thought it odd (Beverly), when I asked the question, "how did you get there?” You remember his answer? From the station, it was '...mmm'.”

She made a great play of raising the note pad that had been at her side and flipping though several pages until she found the right note, but she had memorized these directions several days before. She did not need notes, this was her case.

“( Bev) let me read from my notes, Down Casey, right on 3^rd, two blocks, and left around the corner. I even asked why go left there, why not just down Casey and make a right on 4th, and Sgt. Collins replied, “we always go left there to avoid the traffic light at 4^th and Williamson. At first it was just Collins, but as Collins rounded the corner on 3^rd he was joined by Harris, and Anderson, now they are three cars, all moving together, down 3^rd, and at Williams, two more squad cars joined the group, all in all as they made the final run down KC’s and Henry’s street they had six cars, screaming down the street, sirens blaring, it was a procession, no, (Bev) that’s not what it was, it was a freight train, it was hurtling down the street, and it might as well have been on railroad tracks, no deviation, no odd turns, no red lights, they knew where they were going, had been there a hundred times before, the gates came down on every cross street, down came the guards, on and on the train sped through the intersections of Jackson, Harrison, and Taft. Picking up speed, and momentum, their sirens cutting through the normal city din. The train never slowed down, not once.”

“As soon as the boys heard the sirens, they ran, they could hear them getting closer every second.” Janie turned and walked back to her client, “but not Henry, he did not run.”

She walked over to the prosecutions exhibits once again, and pointed to the smiling face on one side of the large white placard labeled exhibit 23, of KC and on the side a picture of a young black woman in a pool of her own blood, the right side of her scalp laid back showing white skull. She paused looking at the pictures, knowing that even the smiling face of KC was a rarity. She too was an addict and she and Henry had both shot up that morning.

She spoke this time to the whole jury, as they had all taken that ride to KC’s street, they were sitting on the stoop with her, watching Henry sitting next to KC each rocking back and forth in their own private world. The smiling KC was no longer there.

“The column of police squad cars was rolling down that street, and at the end was Henry, as he was all that was left, all the other boys were gone.. and of course KC.

"It was like a train running over a horse."

“Henry never had a chance, the train just rolled right over, right though him, as if he never existed. For the cops it was easy, it was over in a flash, and there was nothing else to do. In a matter of seconds, Henry was arrested, handcuffed, in the back of the car, and on the way to jail. He didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye to KC. For all intents and purposes Henry disappeared. Like a horse in front of the freight, he never saw it coming, and it was over before it even began.” Janie could now tell the rest of the story, these friends now had joined her on the journey and she could bring them with her to understand, to travel and to live in Henry's and KC's shoes.