Before the Month's Out, Mystery Writer Wants to Tell You About 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.
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
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.
“(
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. (
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.
“(
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.
“(
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
”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,
“These police were very familiar with
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 (
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 3rd, 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 4th and Williamson. At first it was just Collins, but as Collins rounded the corner on 3rd he was joined by Harris, and Anderson, now they are three cars, all moving together, down 3rd, 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.
3 Comments:
THE PAIN TRAIN IS COME'N!!!!!
WOOO WOOOOOOOOOOOOO
yep. i read it, well most of it. damn, treva, you sure took your time. should have been time enough to proof read, but oh well. so what if your words are run together and comas are spread like flowers at a wedding, that is to say like two year olds did it and weren't paying much attention.
"have has" but you might have ment had. nice. i'm gonna have to remember that.
well, ya helped me care a little more and what was going on. but if i was on that jury, and the lawyer put that horse comment out there like that...i might have come with her, but i'd bail as soon as it came out.
if i'm on a jury and a lawyer says " I think of my job as more of a gate keeper, helping the ones that can escape get out" the guy is almost certain to fry.
it is just me...or does anyone else think of lewis black when reading these stories. if it weren't for my horse, i wouldn't have spent semester in college.
ya just want to jam a fucking pencil in your eye to make it stop!
is this a story? or the middle of a story? frankly i don't care, but since treva wrote this and called me out on her not thinking mine was a story...i say this is part of a bigger story. like half a chapter in what seems like a 15000 page book. i might use it to set my monitor on, but i sure as hell ain't reading it. but i don't read. just fling shit.
the puctuation mistakes and miscues threw me for a loop at times and stalled my reading efforts, taking me from reading to scanning.
likening the cops to a train and to horses...blah, "hated it!"as the men on film from the tv show 'in living color' use to say. and if i read that wrong, well it's your fault. i probly started scanning again.
i give ya credit. writing this much makes me not want to pick it apart peice by piece, and when i do pull peices out, the volume makes me look petty. i'd give ha points for that, but...na, i'd probly just squeeze your jaw for old time sake.
as for the sentence....you made me realise that the " " is actually messing with the sentence. it takes the responsabilty of the sentence away from the author and puts it into the hands of the character. sure, the author made up the character, but i'm an ass and it's a change.
you loose extra points for being my sister. if it's not business, it goes both ways. and if you're not treva, well, then you shouldn't have been an anonymous coward.
score: 1.8
bitches
Interesting. I think this is the best and most serious usage of the prompt sentence. So, you get points for that.
Overall, I liked it. I like following the lawyer's thought processes as she tries to get the jury onto her side. How she assigns a name to seemingly friendly jurors to help her get through her closing arguments. I liked Jackson's little backstory and I also liked how you tied Jeanie's last client, the innocent man who got convicted, to her current case. Her failure there puts the pressure on in this case. Any time you can put the screws to a character, the better off you are.
There were a few strictly writing issues I had with it: some sentences seemed too long, some sections seemed overdescribed, the punctuation was not particularly clean; and I thought that the closing argument was too long for a short story -- if this were one of the closing chapters of a novel a reader had been involved in for a couple hundred pages already, than yeah, the summation's about right. But for the purposes of an independent short story, a bit too much. It seems like that to totally get what's going on with Jeanie, Henry and KC, we'd have to have read something more, like the rest of a novel, and it seems like all we need to appreciate the story ought to be contained within the entry. But like I said, I liked it overall, it felt like a mix of Michael Connelly and Grisham, and I liked it moreso the second time than the first. So, I give you a...
(6.4)
I give it a...
10
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