The Trial, page 13
part #91 of The Executioner Series
"We know your people, Ethan. Some of us have noticed that they haven't been much help so far."
"They put him in the bag now, didn't they? They got him where you wanted him."
"We want him gone."
"He's on his way."
There was a ringing silence on the other end, more sinister than anything the caller might have said. Peck felt the dark intelligence that radiated from the telephone receiver, sensed the power that would crush him like an insect if he failed.
The rancher cleared his throat. "A few more days. You can relax."
"Some of us are concerned about what might be happening tomorrow, or the next day. Let's imagine your canary starts to sing."
"What could he say?"
"Too much. He's been around."
"I'd say his ass is in a sling."
"That makes him more inclined to deal."
The VCR hummed into life, its freeze-frame time running down, the camera zooming in to focus on a pair of mammoth, heaving breasts. A long, unearthly moan erupted from the speakers as he fumbled the remote, recovered it and killed the picture with an angry snarl.
"You with us, Ethan? Am I keeping you from anything?"
"Right here. I understand your problem."
"Excellent. So good of you to take it off our hands."
He flinched as if he had received the kiss of death, which in a way he had.
"You can relax," he said, projecting confidence he didn't feel. "I wouldn't let you down."
The line went dead, the irritating dial tone buzzing in his ear. Ethan Peck replaced the receiver and slumped back in his soft reclining chair, angry and frightened, all at the same time.
There had been nothing left to say of course. He had a job to do, and if he blew it he was dead. There wouldn't be a rat hole in the Western Hemisphere where he could hide himself away from hungry guns if Bolan made it through the weekend. They were itching now — he had been able to detect the nervousness beneath his caller's cultured tone — and when they started scratching they would start with Ethan Peck.
Unless he brought the contract in on schedule.
The rancher thought about his life, the climb from ragged poverty to filthy affluence, and knew that he could not afford to fumble now. He had achieved the dream of generations past, the wasted generations who had scrabbled at the hard, unyielding soil, attempting to preserve a tattered legacy whose time had come and gone.
If his father and the rest could see him now, they would have been bewildered at the empire he controlled. They might have shunned his motives, sure, but the proof was in the pudding. And these days he was washing down his pudding with champagne instead of chasing fatback with a stale, warm beer.
The thought of his success gave him momentary strength.
Aware that he could lose it all — tonight, tomorrow — Peck was livid. Seething. At the Dallas crowd for making him accept their burden as his own. And at himself for falling into line so readily, contributing the final touches to a plan that just might boomerang and cut him off below the knees.
Mack Bolan wasn't Ethan's problem — hadn't been until the man from Dallas had asked him for a favor and he had hungrily agreed. The rancher had seen dollar signs, and he had known the Dallas crowd was lavish in expressing righteous gratitude. A favor of this magnitude, if executed properly, would set him up for life.
For life.
Except that life would be a rare commodity if Ethan muffed it one more time. The men in Dallas were known for holding grudges, and for burying mistakes. Their fabled generosity was rivaled by the energy with which they punished failure in the ranks, and Peck did not intend to finish out his days as a statistic on some Texas Ranger's missing persons list.
He would succeed — and not because some overrated son of immigrants had threatened him long distance.
Ethan would deal with the goddamned Executioner as he had with every other obstacle along the rags-to-riches road. He would obliterate the stumbling block and grind the shattered pieces underfoot before he went about his business, confident that he was still the best. And if the Dallas crowd took issue with the obvious, well, there were ways of dealing with that kind of problem, too. It would require some thought, but Peck was good at that. They would be sorry if they tried to throw their weight around McLary County.
But first he had to deal with Bolan.
Swiftly and efficiently.
If Bolan went to trial...
The rancher smiled as a plan took shape in his mind. It just might save his ass and everything that he had worked for, fought for, all these years.
A little subtlety might do the trick where plain brute force had failed, a change of pace to throw the enemy off guard.
And if the rapier in his right hand didn't turn the trick, he would rely on the meat-ax in his left. Whichever way it played, the frigging Executioner would never leave McLary County's jail alive.
The rancher's smile had spread from ear to ear, and now he could not pen the laughter up inside. It overflowed to fill the paneled study, echoing along the corridor outside and drawing puzzled glances from the Hispanic kitchen help.
He felt like dancing, but he would have to wait until the necessary groundwork for his plan had been completed. Later, when the time was right, there would be time enough to dance.
On Bolan the Bastard's grave.
17
The slender black man sipped his bourbon, found it satisfactory and set the glass aside. He liked nursing the single drink allowed to him by overcautious doctors, making it last throughout the morning. The amber liquid warmed him, radiating welcome heat through organs and extremities, anesthetizing all the little aches and pains that came with age.
At sixty-three he had already reached the pinnacle of his career, expecting no promotions, no surprises. But the Bolan case had managed to surprise him all the same.
In younger days the black man had believed that he had been born to wear a judge's robe. His very name was borrowed from the wisest jurist in Supreme Court history, and loving parents had prepared him for the bar before he had been old enough to understand the words that they had repeated and impressed upon him. Justice. Liberty. Equality before the law.
Those concepts had been incomprehensible to Southern blacks at the time of his birth and unknown throughout the years of segregated schooling. He had worked and fought to squeeze a decent education from facilities that were, inherently, both separate and unequal. He had missed the revolution of the sixties, born too early for the sit-ins, marches, voter registration drives and brutal violence that had torn the South apart. Conservative by nature, busy with his practice and a growing family, he had been there to pick up the pieces with others and to reassemble something that approached the working definition of a free society.
And Oliver Wendell Price no longer believed in destiny. He could not make himself believe that any man was born to a specific role in life, that an unseen guiding hand controlled the fate of humankind. He could believe in work and perseverance, even plain dumb luck, but Price had lost his childhood faith in anything beyond the present. He still believed in justice, though the definition sometimes blurred before his aging eyes, and he believed emphatically in every man's equality before the law.
And, yes, Price had also witnessed injustice and inequality before the law. He had seen the "brothers" — poor, uneducated black men in their prime — sign up or accept being drafted for military service in Vietnam, perhaps for no other reason than to allay perpetual hunger pangs. At the same time more privileged white boys had been safely sequestered in colleges — in academe — across the nation.
When the "bloods" had unwittingly found themselves entangled in a conflict that they were neither trained for nor understood, Price had heard their anguished cries reach across eight thousand miles as they had died, impaled upon punji stakes and shredded by Vietcong artillery.
The judge reflected wryly on the condition of his people, who had been shanghaied into slavery from their safe jungle homes so many generations before, then sent back in the here and now to a different kind of jungle.
But it didn't matter, Price told himself, because the eyes of the world were focused on America as she paid lip service to a different kind of oppression that was running rampant in South Africa. Did America really care? Had the "massa" mentality really disappeared? Price didn't think so...
His own rise from private practice to the Texas bar had been achieved through politics, the seedy give-and-take of government where principles were sacrificed too often on the altar of expediency. It had been possible for Price to be a judge in 1970 as it had been impossible for Price's father or for any other black to rise so high a decade earlier.
Beyond the possible, it was desirable, conferring a belated halo of compliance on McLary County's hidebound, arch-conservative establishment. A token black, he had survived the seventies with reputation unscathed, and he had seen the civic dinosaurs begin to totter off in the direction of a well-deserved extinction. Price had managed to outlive them all, his scruples more or less intact, and he was justly proud of his achievements on the bench.
But he was troubled, too.
There was a malady alive and growing in America, malignant tendrils worming through the body politic, subverting law and order, festering within the shadow of the flag. A modern vigilante spirit had been spreading through the nation like a Texas bushfire, sparking hatred and fanning random violence into angry, paramilitary flame.
The Klan, the Posse Comitatus and a host of pseudo-Christian, neo-Nazi splinter groups were crawling out of burrows and from underneath their stones to batten on the fears of middleclass Americans.
The judge had dealt with psychopaths and super-patriots before. Throughout his life there had been confrontations with the sort of racist bullies who required an underdog to make them feel superior. He had observed the Klansmen of the thirties as they had marched in torchlit columns down McLary's main street, chanting words of hatred, breaking ranks to harass blacks or Mexican-Americans along the route.
In later years, as an attorney serving those whose race or income kept them from obtaining uptown legal talent, he had grown accustomed to the sneers of redneck deputies who had falsified arrest reports to justify the beatings they had inflicted on a whim. He had encountered bigotry in military service, and before the bar, but he had never grown accustomed to its sting.
The new-wave vigilantes worried Price. They frightened him, and now the case of one Mack Bolan had arrived to focus all his apprehensions, all his doubts and fears. The former Green Beret epitomized a rough-and-ready justice that defied established law and jeopardized the system that, with minor hiccups, had been running smoothly for two hundred years and more.
Except the system wasn't running smoothly now. The aging jurist sometimes wondered how — or why — it ran at all. The trend toward bartering with criminals, to minimize their penalties on everything from misdemeanors to major felonies, had never gone down well with Price. He understood about the crowded calendars, the overcrowded prisons... and he understood about the victims, too.
He recognized the need for safeguards on the rights of the accused, but during forty years of studying the Constitution and the law, he had discovered nothing that proclaimed the predators more worthy of protection than the citizens on whom they preyed.
And he could understand the gut appeal of vigilante justice, certainly. Despite his heritage, his race, Judge Price was not immune to outrage at the news of an atrocious crime. His background merely tempered the instinctive fury with a knowledge of what vigilante justice could become if it should be allowed to run amok.
He wondered where Mack Bolan fitted, precisely, in the scheme of things. The soldier was an outlaw certainly; he had killed, prolifically and with premeditation, since his one-man war had begun. He had been wanted by the state of Texas long before he was arrested in McLary County, and there would be countless other jurisdictions waiting for him when the current case ran its course. But none of that concerned Price at the moment. He would sit in judgment on a single case, the death of Alma Jennings, and that crime had bothered him increasingly since Bolan had let his true identity be known.
Judge Price had been aware of Bolan's war from the beginning. Like countless others, he had once believed the soldier dead, and part of Price had been relieved that it was finished. But the one-man army hadn't died, and he was sitting down in Sheriff Kendricks's jailhouse now, awaiting trial for butchering a woman.
It was the nature of the crime that nagged at Price, the savagery and choice of target. Bolan was a killer, certainly, and other women might be included in the body count, for all Price knew. But with Alma Jennings it had been... different. He had already seen a sheriffs photograph, depicting the carnage at the Blue Oasis, and he had recognized the grim, irrefutable evidence of sadistic madness in the killer's handiwork. If Bolan was responsible, the man had lost his mind. It was as simple — and as damnably complex — as that.
The strain of waging a relentless private war would be enough to break the average man. It would have been enough to break a superman, but had it broken Bolan? If the soldier's mind had slowly snapped, there should have been some warning signs amid the orchestrated chaos of his violent "normal" life. If, instead, he had somehow suddenly collapsed, then Alma Jennings's murder might be the first sign of madness.
The jurist stopped himself, one hand poised, reaching for the bourbon glass. He was assuming Bolan's guilt before he heard a single shred of evidence, and Price could not afford that error in a case so fraught with perils as the one before him now. His first responsibility was to the law, to justice, and he would reserve his judgment until he had the evidence in hand.
No matter what the soldier represented, he deserved the same impartial trial as any other suspect in McLary County. And he would receive no less while Price was on the bench.
As for the future... the jurist closed his mind to what would follow, and the implications of the several verdicts Bolan might receive. Whichever way it went, the one-time Green Beret had nothing waiting for him but a string of lonely cells and fortresslike courtrooms.
But here and now were all that mattered, and the wall clock told him that he had a special hearing on the soldier's case in slightly less than ninety minutes. It was the proximity of that encounter that had led him to the bourbon and had set his nerves on edge.
He wasn't looking forward to pronouncing judgment on a man who had, by all accounts, done valiant service for his country in her time of need. What had followed was something else again, and Price would gladly have agreed to a change of venue if it had been sought by either side. But he would not get off so easily this time. The case was his, and he would have to see it through.
The liquor scorched his throat, its heat immediately fading, mellowing, diffusing through his body as he sat back in his padded swivel chair. If he had been a praying man, he would have asked for guidance, but the jurist had no shortage of self-confidence. He would be called upon to make some tough decisions, but he was equal to the task.
And in a most peculiar way Price grudgingly admitted that he was looking forward to it.
He was about to peer inside a lonely, violent mind, rummage through its darkest corners, searching for the key to what made it tick. He was about to look into Mack Bolan's heart and soul, to travel through the labyrinthine corridors of one man's sojourn in hell.
It was a trip that Price had made before, with other cases, but always on a smaller scale. The case before him now could be the pinnacle of his career — or it could end that same career abruptly. Price did not delude himself that he was operating in a vacuum, that his court was somehow sacrosanct, untouchable. He meant to run the trial according to the inbred principles that he had used as guidelines all his life... but if he swam too far, he might be swept away. There were a hundred different means of toppling judges from the bench and damned few ways to minimize the damage such a fall would have on his career.
Price recognized the risks inherent in the Bolan case, but he would forge ahead in spite of them. No, that was wrong. The jurist would proceed because of all the dangers. It was his duty to the law, to justice, and he meant to guarantee that every man was equal in McLary County's courts. His robe, his very life, was dedicated to equality before the law. Whatever the soldier had done, whatever had compelled him on his violent run, the prisoner locked away in Sheriff Kendricks's jail deserved no less.
And once again the nagging thought came back to Price that Bolan might deserve a good deal more.
He pushed the renegade idea out of conscious thought. Price would consider all the evidence, instruct his jurors with impartiality, and in the case of a conviction, he would do his best to make the final sentence fit the crime.
And if the jurors found Bolan innocent? What then?
He shrugged the thought away, secure in the knowledge that a verdict wouldn't be a problem. If the panel found defendant Bolan innocent of killing Alma Jennings, he would remand the prisoner to the custody of Texas Rangers, FBI or whoever the hell might be waiting to claim him next. Whichever way it played, the odds against Mack Bolan ever being free again were astronomical. And then some.
That wouldn't be the judge's problem — or his burden — either way.
Except that he would be responsible for everything that happened in the courtroom, for admitting or denying each item of evidence that would decide a jury's verdict in the end. It would be his decision, no less than a jury's, and there would be no way for him to escape that burden now.
The life of yet another individual was riding in his hands, and Price could feel the sheer weight of responsibility descending on him like a shroud.
A frown was etched across his burnished ebony face as Price debated, reconsidered and finally reached across his desk to fill the bourbon glass a second time. The simple gesture broke a lifelong habit, but he recognized that this would be a day of firsts in a life that had become predictable and commonplace.
