Ransom River (2 page)

The figure stood silhouetted in the headlights. He moved like a lump, splitting the beams. He turned in a slow circle and paused, facing the tree.

“Oh,” Rory said.

“We didn’t do anything,” Seth said.

“Like Freddy Krueger cares?”

They held still, hands curled over the edge of the open tree-house window. And Rory saw more lights, in the farther distance.

At first she thought a shooting star had blazed to the ground. Far, far along the county road that pushed into the foothills, near the freeway to Los Angeles, hot white lights burned the night. But it wasn’t a flaming meteor crater. It was big road spotlights, like construction crews used when they fixed highways in the dark.

And those lights were surrounded by flashing red and blue.

“Seth,” she said.

He looked. After a moment, he shrugged. “Don’t know.”

But she did. Police and fire trucks. Maybe ambulances. They were parked under big spotlights out near the highway. Like there’d been a huge wreck.

“This is freaky,” she said.

Seth turned back to the Freddy guy on the dirt road. “He’s looking for something. Or someplace.”

She leaned close to him. His Ninja Turtles T-shirt hung loose on his skinny shoulders. The figure in the road seemed to be backing up, toward the van.

Then, from beneath the tree, came a bad, bad sound.
Yap.

She spun and leaned down through the trapdoor. “Pepper, shh.”

Below her the little dog put his paws on the trunk of the tree. His tail wagged in the moonlight. He barked again.

“Pepper, no,” Rory said.

Seth yanked on her sweatshirt. “Be quiet.”

She pulled back into the tree house. The man in the headlights stopped. And walked toward them again. They ducked.

The man’s breathing was hard, like a mummy wheezing through its wrappings. His footsteps were slow and uneven. They heard him stumble and grunt.

“Fuck,” he said.

Rory’s ears went hot. Seth had stopped moving.

The man groaned. He was right there, just beyond the wall. “Fuck it all.”

With a click, the beam of a flashlight veered and shone through the tree-house window.

“He knows we’re here,” Rory said.

Pepper kept barking. The flashlight paused. They heard Freddy hawk and spit on the dirt, something wet and nasty.

And they heard a siren float on the air. Far away, maybe out by the hot white lights and red police alarms near the freeway.

“Is he after us?” she said. “Why would he be after us?”

“You’re the genius. You tell me.”

She hit him in the arm. “Don’t be stupid.”

He looked at her. “Don’t worry. I got ya.”

“What does that mean?”

He looked hurt. “You know. I’ll protect you.”

She was bigger than him. Right. She wanted to hit him again, just to stop being afraid. She wanted him not to move away from her even an inch.

Freddy’s footsteps faded. They heard grunts and a groan and a thud.

“What’s he doing?” Seth said.

Rory peeked and saw the flashlight next door, swinging like a light saber. “He climbed into the neighbors’ backyard.”

The van sat on the dirt path, idling. Rory said, “This is too weird.”

Below the tree, Pepper began a low, sad moan. It was his sound when he was frightened. Through the leaves of the tree, Rory saw the flashlight
dim. Freddy was sneaking between houses to the street out front.
Hunting,
she couldn’t help thinking.

“What does he want?” she said. “To rob houses? Kill people?”

“How should I know?”

“Don’t get mad.”

But she knew why he sounded angry. ’Cause his dad was a cop, and he got it all the time. In the far distance, the siren wailed.

“What if he comes back?” she said.

“Lay low.”

She thought of Pepper running loose. Did Freddy Krueger murder dogs? She stood up. “No. The house. Let’s get in my room.”

She swung through the trapdoor and slid down the tree trunk. A moment later Seth hit the ground beside her. She whistled for Pepper.

Freddy’s swinging flashlight wavered across the wall of her house.

“He’s coming back. Hurry,” she said.

She thought she heard the door to the garage creak open. She called Pepper again but he bolted for the kitchen door. She heard his dog door swing as he pushed through it. She sprinted to her bedroom window with Seth beside her. She jumped and squirmed a knee onto the sill.

She stopped. Her room was dark, but a bright yellow stripe leaked under the door. The lights were on in the hall.

Footsteps hurried past the door. Her mom’s voice. “What the hell?”

Farther away, maybe in the kitchen, came a crash, like a table had fallen over. Her dad called out, “Samantha, stay there.”

Rory hung on the windowsill. A voice deep inside her head whispered,
Leave.

She jumped back down onto the grass. “Let’s get out of here.”

She slid the window and screen closed. She and Seth ran across the lawn and herked themselves onto the top of the concrete wall. The old van idled on the dirt path, lights blazing. Seth leaped into their glare and landed and ran.

In the house, more lights turned on. Behind closed blinds, a shadow
hurried across the living room. Rory jumped, awkwardly. She crash-landed in front of the van.

From the field, from the dark, Seth hissed, “Come on.”

Her breath clapped out of her. She put a hand against the van and wobbled to her feet. Back at the house, a man’s voice rose sharply. A meteor streaked overhead, pointing the way into the field and the wide night.

They ran for five minutes. They ran until Seth grabbed her sleeve and said, “You trying to get past the city limits sign?”

She stuttered to a stop. She could barely breathe.

She knew they were in trouble. She knew it while they huddled beneath an oak tree, eyeing the night. She knew it an hour later when they went back to her house and she crept in her window. The neighborhood was dark and still. The van was gone. Her house was quiet. But things weren’t right.

She knew it. She just didn’t know what was wrong.

Not then.

Now

T
wenty-four hours would have changed everything. If Rory had been slower, if she had taken a breath and waited, she wouldn’t be here. If she’d torn up the place, gotten drunk, mooned the moneymen, seduced a border guard, she would have missed the flight home. She would have arrived twenty-four hours later and skipped this grief.

“All rise.”

But no.

Rory hadn’t paused, not even to give a middle finger to the bean counters. Others had pleaded or even cried. Rory had cleared her desk. She said, “This will kill people.” And she walked.

The bailiff stood before the bench. “Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, is now in session. The matter of
People versus Elmendorf and Smith.
Judge Wieland presiding.”

In the jury box, Rory stood with her peers. Back row, chair number seven. She’d finally been chosen for a team.

Morning sunlight prismed through the windows. The courthouse was surrounded by an acre of lawn, and the third-floor courtroom looked out on palm trees and the civic center and the River Mall. A blue sky glazed the view. The rocky hills of the inland ranges sawtoothed the horizon, charcoal and brown.

The door to chambers opened and Arthur Wieland entered, black robe rustling. Sunlight shone on his white hair and rimless glasses. He ascended the bench.

Noisily, everybody sat. The courtroom was full. It was day three of the trial but the air still had a buzz. Outside on the street, news vans lined up nose-to-tail. Eager reporters stood on the sidewalk talking to the camera.

Rory took out her notebook and pen. To her left, Helen Ellis smoothed her brown wool skirt. To her right, Frankie Ortega plunged his hands into the pocket of his hoodie. In front of her, Daisy Fallon gazed yearningly at the prosecutor. Daisy had confided the first day, “He’s
hot.
” Daisy had texted her friends about his hotness. Daisy had, Rory figured, already decided to vote guilty.

The bailiff tucked his thumbs into his utility belt. He was a totem pole with a Tom Selleck mustache. Though he wore an L.A. County Sheriff’s uniform and his belt bristled with weaponry, his job consisted of standing still, for hour upon hour, staring at the courtroom. How he bore the tedium Rory couldn’t imagine. Create a TV cop show about the guy, it would be called
Stultified.

Welcome to Ransom River.

In Ransom River, nothing happened. That was the line. Everybody was quietly hardworking, and all the tattoos said
Mom,
even the gangbangers’. The unofficial city motto was “Look away—nothing to see here.”

Except the Ransom River Superior Courthouse had become center stage for a spectacle of murder. And Aurora Faith Mackenzie had been plucked from the voter registration pool and thrown into it. Juror number seven on the teen burglar execution trial.

Twenty-four hours. If she had waited, even long enough to spit on the corporate hacks who slashed the funding for Asylum Action, she would have had an out.
Please excuse me from jury duty. I’m overseas, assaulting heartless pricks.
But cast adrift in Geneva and nearly broke, she’d grabbed the only escape route she had: her return airline ticket. She’d tried to outdistance
her anger and dejection. So she ran straight ahead and in the wrong direction. Home. Where a jury summons waited.

Juror number seven. Caucasian female, age twenty-nine. Slight, angular, with what her parents called Black Irish looks. Today she’d dressed conservatively, at least compared to her Peace Corps days. V-neck sweater with a tank beneath, hipster khaki jeans, boots. The press was getting an eyeful. The jurors’ names had not been made public, but a courtroom artist had sketched each of them, and one journalist had described her as having “night-sky hair and blue eyes with a challenging gleam.”

She’d rolled those eyes at that.

Beside her, Helen Ellis adjusted her bifocals. “They look so excited.”

She was eyeing the public gallery. The crowd was Southern California exurban: women in mom jeans or in mom-jean shorts. Men in
Tijera Sand and Gravel
shirts. Ranch workers in denim. At least today nobody wore T-shirts with an agenda. No
Justice!
shirts, no
Self-defense is our right.
The first day of the trial several people had shown up in pro-defendant attire. Judge Wieland had put a stop to it. No shirts with messages, he decreed. No disruption from the gallery. Violators would be ejected.

He’d clamped the lid down. Still, the atmosphere hovered between edgy and
We’re going to Disneyland.

“Bring on the popcorn vendors,” Rory said. And maybe the Reaper, dancing up the aisle playing his scythe like an electric guitar.

Because the heart of this show was death. And its emissaries were the defendants. Behind the defense table, they took their time sitting down.

Charged with murder, they were standing tall. Wearing civvies, they looked every inch the cops they were.

Jared Smith shifted his shoulders inside the jacket of his suit as though it was too snug and his tie was choking him. He sat forward, like a plow. Like he expected other people to move aside for him.

Lucy Elmendorf didn’t look at him. Sober and drawn, she sat with her hands laced together on the table.

Helen Ellis leaned heavily toward Rory. “Check out Lucy’s husband.”

Neil Elmendorf sat in the second row. Though his expression was stoic, he hunched, as though flinching. He seemed sandblasted with humiliation.

“Telling, don’t you think?” Helen said.

Rory didn’t respond. Elmendorf had put distance between himself and his wife. Maybe that lessened the anguish. After all, the man had to watch Lucy stand trial for murder. More than that, he had to endure her sitting beside the lover she’d been romping with when the gunfire began.

And Rory wondered again why the defendants hadn’t had the sense to screw around in a motel across the county line. If Officer Lucy Elmendorf had handcuffed Jared Smith to a vibrating bed in Bakersfield instead of playing Bad Cop, Really Bad Cop at Smith’s house in Ransom River, the victim might still be breathing.

And Rory wondered again how Smith and Elmendorf thought they could prove self-defense when they’d shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old kid in the back from point-blank range.