Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(2)

Her smile revealed pointed, yellowed teeth.

“Have it your way,” she said, and the sword dove toward me at the speed of . . .



I felt the hand on my shoulder, and my eyes immediately popped open. I looked around the den, heard the television, and couldn’t believe I’d dozed off.

“Is it time?” I said.

“Are you all right, Darren? You sounded like you were having a nightmare.”

“I’m fine. I was dreaming about this teacher I had in high school named Mrs. Judge. It was strange. What about you? How are the contractions?”

“I think we should go,” Grace said. “They’re about sixty seconds, and they’re coming every three or four minutes.”

“Do they hurt?”

“Ever had somebody push on your lower abdomen with an anvil?” she said.

“Can’t say that I have.”

“That’s what they feel like. The longer they get, the heavier the anvil.”

Grace’s contractions had begun the day before, but they’d been intermittent. Over the past several hours, however, they’d become more intense and had come at much shorter intervals. I looked at the clock next to the couch. It was 7:45 p.m. on Friday night. We were both dressed and had everything packed in my car. Grace called her mother and father—both of whom lived in San Diego, California—and told them we were heading to the hospital.

The thought struck me that it was rather pitiful that I didn’t have anyone to call. My son, Sean, who was nine years old, had just returned to Hawaii after having spent the summer with Grace and me. He knew Grace was going to have a baby and seemed excited by the fact that he was going to have a sister. But I knew if I tried to call him, his mother, Katie, would ignore the call, so I just let it go.

Grace took my arm, and we walked out of the building into the mid-August heat and humidity. Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the birthing center just south of Knoxville, Tennessee. Everything was prearranged. Grace had been the perfect mother-to-be. She’d taken good care of herself, gotten plenty of exercise and rest, and eaten well with the exception of an unusually large intake of french fries that she chalked up to cravings. She’d worked her job at the federal defender’s office until the previous week and was planning to take a month off after our baby girl—her name was to be Jasmine Cathleen Alexander—was born. Grace had chosen the name, and I liked it. Since she and I weren’t married and had no immediate plans in that vein, we’d agreed the child would take Grace’s last name. If we decided to take the vows at some point, we’d talk about names then. What we called the child didn’t really mean that much to me. All I wanted was a healthy, happy baby girl, and I planned to love her with everything I could muster.

A nurse told me to take a seat in a small waiting room and she’d come to get me when Grace was settled into her birthing suite. I sat down and began to reflect.

Grace and I were getting along well. She’d kicked me out of her apartment when she suspected I’d been involved in killing the two men who’d murdered my mother, but her stance had eventually softened. I’d finally opened up and been honest with her about what had happened to Ben Clancy and Big Pappy, and she had allowed me back into her life with the stipulation that I see a psychiatrist on a weekly basis, both to overcome Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from my time in prison and to try to make sense of the violence that had been visited upon me and my reactions to that violence. Eventually, Grace became akin to a wife whose husband had volunteered for a combat tour overseas and had taken lives and seen terrible things in the line of duty. She didn’t really understand the things I’d done, but on some level she accepted that in my way of thinking, I’d really had no choice. I had to avenge my mother by killing the men who had killed her. I had to force justice upon Ben Clancy because the system that was in place wasn’t going to do a thing to him, and I had to protect myself from Big Pappy Donovan because he was a dangerous killer.

I’d been a criminal defense lawyer for more than a decade and knew the judicial system inside and out. It had failed me again and again, so I’d taken matters into my own hands and used my knowledge of the laws of evidence and the individual protections afforded by the Constitution not only to dole out my own brand of justice but also to do so in such a manner that the police and the lawyers and the judges never got a chance to hold me accountable. Grace still looked at me strangely sometimes, but I believed she had forgiven me.

I’d visited a shrink for months—never mentioning any of the murders I’d committed—before Grace allowed me to stop. It was good she let me stop when she did, because the doctor was beginning to annoy me so much that I’d begun to fantasize about strangling her and hauling her up to Granny Tipton’s pigpen.

Grace hadn’t renewed the lease on her apartment when it came time two months earlier and had moved in with me. I had an extra bedroom, and she slept in there. There was no sex, but we’d become closer than ever during those two months. I found myself doting on her, which she enjoyed. I was a perfect gentleman, holding doors and holding hands and saying please and thank you. I felt the baby moving in Grace’s womb, listened to her heartbeat. I also listened intently to everything Grace said, and if she asked me a question, I gave her a thoughtful and honest answer.

I hadn’t said “I love you” to her since before she kicked me out of her apartment, but it was the first thing I planned to say as soon as the baby was born. I thought it would be a good start to our lives together as parents. I didn’t know how she’d react, but I was going to say it, anyway. Like I said, I still sensed just a bit of distrust from her. I knew she wanted me in Jasmine’s life, but I wasn’t sure at this point whether she’d totally committed to our relationship as husband and wife. Grace cared for me and she let me know it, but I sensed that she also regarded me warily sometimes, the way a trainer of dangerous lions regards the animals. I wondered occasionally whether she stayed with me out of an old-fashioned sense of duty. She’d made the choice to sleep with me, she’d become pregnant, and now it was her duty to stay with me and to attempt to successfully hold the family together. Maybe she didn’t want to disappoint her parents. I barely knew them, but from what Grace had told me, they were conservative and old-school. Her father was a career marine corps officer, and her mother was a journalism professor. Maybe Grace didn’t want them to have the stigma of a bastard grandchild, so she stuck with me in the hope that I would be able to resist some of my behavioral and emotional urges and we’d eventually marry.