The system was rigged, Donnie knew that much. And it wasn’t some localized Emmanuel County problem that he could just solve by moving out and getting a bar license somewhere else. The entire damned ‘justice’ — and using that word was an insult to everyone that’s been in contact with it, guilty or not — system was designed to benefit those with money and further trample on those without. That’s why he decided to work inside it.
That’s what had gotten him the characterization as some sort of bleeding heart liberal who believed a system designed to selectively administer justice could be reformed by putting a few good guys in the right positions. “Maybe if Superman and Wonder Woman became Supreme Court Justices…” no, they’d still get outvoted. The best even they could do was write a dissenting opinion. Although, he must admit, he’d love to hear Wonder Woman’s thoughts on certain rulings currently in effect in this country.
“IDs, please,” asked the police officer standing guard at the entry checkpoint. He had his metal detector ready, with a grip that looked more like someone holding a tool they were about to use to bludgeon rather than to examine. “Anything in your person that would hurt me if I reach into your pockets?”
Donnie raised both arms, saying, “Nope,” before using one hand to drop his briefcase on the conveyor belt and the other to slowly reach inside his breast pocket. A West Virginia driver’s license with the face of a man that clearly wasn’t ready to have his picture taken was handed to the police officer; which gave it not
hing more than a cursory glance. “Heston, Donnie Charles. Attorney. I’m here to see my client.”
“Fuck is this?” The police officer asked, dangling a pair of tinted aviators from his fingers. “You LARP-ing Tom Cruise out there, Heston?”
“That is a disability aid,” motherfucker, Donnie would’ve added. Thankfully, the voice of Alma Heston scolded him from the afterlife before he could say something that would end in an unnecessary commotion. “And even if it wasn't, I don't see why a Tom Cruise LARPer couldn’t enter a police station in Kanawha County.”
A grunt and several profanities directed at attorneys later, the police officer cleared him for entry. As he walked through the full-body scanner, he heard the buzzing of magical sigils on its inner side. It seemed that some of the old families had started taking police contracts. Guess nobody escaped inflation, after all.
After a couple of minutes, another police officer greeted him. This one was a rookie, he could tell from the simple fact that her voice carried considerably less bile than the one at the entrance. “Mr. Heston, this way, please.”
Nodding, Donnie followed her into an all too familiar interrogation room. The humming of the cheap fluorescent lights. The poorly insulated walls. The scraping of the metal chairs and table that, if he convinced himself enough, could pass as something resembling a B flat. He had sat with many people in that room. Rich, poor, man, woman, good people, scared people, genuinely evil people, people who society would prefer to believe were evil. And he had begun every meeting with the same greeting. “I’m your court-appointed counsel.”
But not today. He hated himself for it, but as soon as the police officer left the room, his hands gripped the edge of the table, knuckles whitening due to the amount of pressure exerted on it. His eyes, hurting though they met from the fluorescent light’s incessant penetration of his nervous system, remained focused on the woman before him. There was not an ounce of guilt on her face. He did not expect there to be any. Hell, if anything, there was a twisted feeling of happiness inside him concerning the fact that she wasn’t.
“Hello, Lydia,” Donnie said, giving the woman in front of him a nod. He didn’t know what the nod was for. Was he acknowledging her presence? Her humanity? Her status as a fellow Damascene? Or maybe he simply could not stand the light anymore and needed a couple milliseconds where his eyes were pointed elsewhere, he couldn’t tell. “How have you been doing?”
She spat at him. Her saliva reached his face before his hands could block it. Maybe it reached his face because he didn’t want his hands to even attempt a block. Somewhere in Donnie’s mind, as Lydia’s eyes, engulfed with anger, bore into his soul, was an argument that he deserved it, and way worse. “All I wanted was a place for people like us.”
“I’m not here to argue.”
“What are you here for, then?” She asked, leaning forward as far as her restraints would allow her. The indicator screens on the power dampeners put on each of her fingers began turning orange. “To gloat? To suffer me with yet another speech about how we must be eternally kind to the people that would never show us an ounce of kindness? The people that called us an anomaly, a burden, and a threat?”
Lydia chuckled, shaking her head. “They were right about that last one.”
“Lydia, you murdered three people.” Donnie replied, taking out from his briefcase the file that the Kanawha County District Attorney’s Office had given him an entire day after he was assigned to her case. It took him three emails and four calls to obtain. “You altered the spatiality of Charleston and damaged public facilities. Those are the facts.”
“They were coming after people like us.”
“You didn’t have to kill them!” Donnie leaned back against his uncomfortably cold metal chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. God damn this fluorescent light to hell. He felt his head burning from the inside. “I’m sorry. That was unprofessional conduct. You’re free to report me to the West Virginia State Bar. I’ll even help you draft the letter.”
“Oh, Donnie Heston,” she cooed. If one were to parse through the venom in her voice, they’d find pity somewhere in there. “Even when it has taken so much from you, you still play by its rules. I’m the villain, though, for wanting better.”
“You’re not a ‘villain’ because you wanted better. You’re in jail because your argument about a safe space involved murdering three people.”
“Three federal agents, counsel.” Lydia said, finally leaning back. “Three federal agents sent to kill me. If they had left me well enough alone, I wouldn’t have done anything to them. They classified people like us as a threat. And then they sent hit squads into our homes to apprehend us. You know how the poem goes, don’t you? How long do you think it will take until they find a way to breach the walls of 4 Augsburg Avenue?”
“You still don’t get to preemptively kill them because of it.”
Lydia remained quiet, her eyes not leaving Donnie for even a second. She was good at this, Donnie thought. Intimidation. Even when they fought, her manipulations were intentionally made to be threatening. A dark mirror, he thought, to how he used his powers to affect the space around him. “Do they still hurt?”
“What?”
“The wounds I inflicted on you, do they still hurt?”
“It’s worse some nights.” Donnie answered. “Why do you care?”
“Because one day,” said Lydia. “I hope you’ll get to join us in Mount Horeb, Nebraska.”
Donnie shook his head. His fingers found the cover of the file and flipped it shut before shoving it back to his briefcase. This wasn’t like the movies. There wouldn’t be a scene where got into a screaming match with his own client about the morality of her actions. As much as he wanted to, and as much as he was sure the oldest interlocutor would love to see it, there were codes and etiquettes one needed to abide by as an attorney. “We’re done here. Thank you, Ms. Saint-Romaine.”
“That fast?”
Donnie stood up, straightened his jacket, and shot her a look. There was anger there, yes, but there was also sadness. In an ideal world, where the two of them were people less bound to their principles, they could’ve been allies. Maybe even friends. “Contrary to what you might believe, there are people who haven’t detached themselves from the world around them and the rules that govern it. I happen to be one of those people. And, seeing as I could not properly tend to you as your court-appointed attorney today, due to the heightened state of distress I’m in, I’ll postpone this meeting until tomorrow.”
“I won’t be more agreeable tomorrow.”
“Hell isn’t freezing tomorrow either.” Donnie replied. “Trust me. I know.”
Donnie’s hand was already on the door handle, feeling the sting of metal in his nervous system that caused him to grimace, when the question he had heard a million times over struck him. “Why?” Lydia asked. “Why do all this? For me, for them. Even if you get me acquitted, Donnie Heston, we would still be enemies.”
If this had been any other person, he would’ve answered it easily. Lutheran theology, American penal code, philosophy, he had those at the ready to deploy whenever he needed an answer. But this wasn’t just any other person, was it? “The question ‘why’ requires an answer that starts with ‘because’. I don’t do ‘because’. ‘Despite’ is where I operate.”
He exhaled the moment he closed Moab’s driver side door. A long, tired, angry, and disappointed exhale followed by his head resting against the steering wheel. It would take him another hour before he turned on the engine of his car. An officer would knock on his window by the half-hour mark, and he would have to explain that his nervous system was assaulting him from all angles without using colorful words that could be misconstrued as an attack on a police officer. He would arrive at 4 Augsburg Avenue when the moon was already high in the sky, way past dinner time, and end his day with a bottle of whiskey to dull the world around him.
And tomorrow, like the prophet Habakkuk did in days of old, as written in that silly, crumpled Sunday School bookmark he carried with him whenever he left for work, he’d stand in his watchpost again.
But those were later things.
For now, Donnie Heston, Attorney at Law, panel attorney for the Northern and Southern Districts of West Virginia, sat in his car and wept.