Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(56)

The pistol beneath my desk was a semi-automatic. There was a round in the chamber. I reached down, cocked the hammer, and flipped the safety off before I went into the lobby. Once I got there, I saw a large black man towering over Beverly, who was sitting behind her desk.

“Can I help you?” I said.

He turned and looked at me with disdain. He was taller than me, maybe six-feet-four-inches, and muscular. He looked to be in his early, maybe mid-thirties and was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. I looked down and noticed he was wearing combat boots.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“C’mon back,” I said, hoping to get him away from Beverly as quickly as possible. I turned my back to him and walked into my office. He followed and closed the door behind him.

I reached out my hand and said, “I’m Joe Dillard. How can I help you?”

He looked at my hand and snorted. I withdrew the hand and said, “Would you like to sit?”

I motioned to the chair that was right in front of my desk, the one the pistol was aimed at. I was growing more concerned by the second. This guy was obviously hostile, and he had tattoos running all the way up his neck. I recognized them immediately as prison tats. One of them depicted an open, bleeding wound across his throat, as though it had been cut. I also noticed the EWMN tattoo on his fingers, which I knew meant “evil, wicked, mean and nasty.” He had four gold front teeth.

He sat down in front of me, glaring, trying to intimidate me. His eyes were dark and intense, his hairline slightly receding.

“Listen,” I said. “You’re here in my office. You’re all tatted up and you’re trying to intimidate me, but you might as well know on the front end it isn’t working. I’m not afraid of you.”

“You should be,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I want to know what a cracker like you is doing representing my oppressed brother. I want to know what you’re doing to get him out of this trumped up bullshit charge.”

“First off, if you call me cracker again I’m going to come across this desk and knock those gold teeth out of your mouth. We clear on that? Secondly, I was hired to represent him by his parents. There aren’t exactly a bunch of black lawyers around here in case you haven’t noticed. Now I don’t know who you are or who you think you are, but I don’t talk about my clients with strangers. You want to know what I’m doing? Read the paper, watch the news, come to court.”

“I represent an organization,” he said. “Let’s just say we’re tired of seeing the black man being beaten down by the white man and we’re ready to do something about it.”

“Good for you. I agree with you that blacks have been mistreated for centuries, that things haven’t changed nearly as much as they should have, and that something needs to be done about it. So we have some common ground. I also had the displeasure of having a cross burned in my yard not long ago and my house shot to hell. The people who belong to the organization that burned the cross are very similar to you. They’re filled with hate. I can tell by looking at you. You don’t want justice. You just want blood.”

“You and me ain’t got no common ground,” he said, “But you’re right about one thing. We’re ready for war.”

“Are you talking about a shooting war? Then you’re right, we don’t have any common ground. You start shooting and everybody will lose. You start shooting and you’re just plain stupid. And you know what? You can’t fix stupid, mister.”

He shook his head and glared at me. I was baiting him, but I wanted him to either make his move or get the hell out of my office.

“Did you just call me stupid?” he said, the tension growing thicker by the second.

“I think maybe I did. I was pretty clear about it, actually. Now, if there’s nothing productive that is going to come of this, and I don’t see that there is, you can feel free to get up and walk out the door any time.”

He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a revolver. It was a damned hand cannon. A Dirty Harry special, .44 Magnum. He pointed it at my face. It was as though I was looking directly down the barrel of a howitzer.

“You best start showing me some respect, boy, or you ain’t gonna walk out of this room alive. Now I need for you to tell me exactly what you’re doing for my brothers. I need to hear from you that they’re going to walk away from these charges. You’re supposed to be the man around here. You’ve got the reputation. I hear you have influence. Why haven’t you been able to make this go away? Or are you a part of the white man’s conspiracy to further smear the reputations of young black men? They’re all drug dealers and gang bangers and murderers and rapists, right?”

As soon as I saw the gun, I pushed the panic button. Just as he finished his little speech, Jack walked through the door, pistol up, and moved a few steps to the right. Charlie followed with the shotgun and moved to the left. We had him triangulated. He turned around to look at them and I pulled the Sig from under the desk and stood. I pointed it at his head.

“You said you wanted a shooting war,” I said. “Looks like you found one.”

He looked over both shoulders and back at me.

“You don’t have the nerve,” he said.

“I’ve killed Cubans and Colombians,” I said. “Your life won’t be the first I’ve taken. Jack over there is a crack shot with that pistol and he’d kill you in a heartbeat to save his dad. If you notice, his hand isn’t shaking. And Miss Charleston there? She’s been up against mobsters from Philadelphia. They’re dead. She’s standing over there pointing a twelve-gauge at the back of your head. You picked the wrong lawyers to terrorize. Now I think the best thing for you to do right now is to lower that pistol and lay it on the floor at your feet. I could have you arrested, but you’d be out on bail in a few hours, so I’m not going to bother. I could even kill you since you pulled that gun and pointed it at me. But I’m going to let you walk out of here alive. Your gun stays.”