OLIVER
Monday
Oliver stared at the oak-paneled wall in his office, pivoting his leather-upholstered desk chair slowly back and forth while wondering if Bill Decker of the Dallas office was as punchable in person as he sounded on the phone. Oliver was pretty sure the guy was from Ohio, but he had a studied, Texan drawl, like a bad character actor.
“If we file a motion to dismiss on the procedural issue,” Bill Decker said in that smug voice of his, “after the judge rules on the substance, it will be six months before the plaintiffs see the inside of a courtroom. They never like paying all those fees without a single Law and Order moment.”
Oliver glanced impatiently at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Their meeting had already gone on for nearly the entire allotted hour, but Bill showed no signs of shutting up any time soon.
“They’ll lose steam and put pressure on their attorneys to settle. And since we won’t have reached the discovery phase, they won’t even know about the Dubai location and what happened out there.”
Finally, Bill Decker had paused for air, so Oliver told the group, flatly, “That won’t fly here.”
Along with Bill and Oliver, the group on the call included a partnered attorney in the building where Oliver sat and three junior associates in a conference room in Denver. Chuck, the elderly partnered attorney, was on the call as a courtesy and probably hadn’t been paying any attention. The junior associates, glorified notetakers, were probably staring at each other with wide eyes… but were absolutely not going to say anything.
That left it to Oliver, not that he minded in the least. Bill Decker breathed into the phone for a second, like he could intimidate Oliver from a thousand miles away with just a foreboding, lengthy pause. Oliver rolled his eyes. “You don’t say?” Bill asked at last, tone scathing. “I suppose they do things drastically different there in Canton, do they?” His inflection on “Canton” made it clear that he thought Oliver worked out of a backwater. He wasn’t completely wrong. Well, not about Canton’s lack of sophistication. Oliver had grown up in Denver, gone to school on the East coast, and then gone back home to Denver to begin his career with the firm’s large, metropolitan office in that city. Canton had taken him some getting used to also.
But Bill was completely wrong about the relevance of how things were or weren’t done in Canton. The case was set on the west side of the river in Kansas City, Missouri. Bill Decker just wasn’t a man of finesse or, from what Oliver could see, much common sense, either. How he’d wound up in one of the nation’s major corporate defense firms was anyone’s guess. Someone’s son-in-law, most likely.
“Well,” Oliver said, in the most patient voice he could muster, “I don’t know about other courts, but in Missouri, they do generally frown upon blatant violations of professional ethics, yes.”
A long silence descended. Oliver wished the call had video, too. He would have liked Bill Decker to see Oliver make a careful examination of his fingernails with careless nonchalance. Instead, he kept perfectly silent and waited, grinning, for what he and Bill Decker each now knew to be inevitable.
Oliver had used the magic words to activate Chuck Lawson, the partnered attorney who may or may not have been dozing through the call thus far.
“We can’t be playing fast and loose with ethics, boys!” said Chuck, so loudly that the speaker caught a little buzz of static. Chuck was one of the aging figureheads of the firm, and he’d had a bad experience a couple of years back with the office of attorney discipline. As part of his penance, he’d volunteered a hundred hours lecturing other lawyers on the importance of keeping their profession honorable. At some point, he had, against all odds, internalized some of his own script.
Also, he had a few decades of seniority over Bill Decker, which meant that Bill now had to hastily backpedal. It was very gratifying; Oliver hated to deny himself a moment of it.
“Chuck, I don’t think that—” Bill began.
“Unfortunately,” Oliver interjected cheerfully, “I have to get to court.”
“Court!” Chuck shouted into the phone. “There’s no civil docket on Mondays!” He paused. “It’s Monday, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Chuck,” Oliver assured him. “It is Monday. And no, there’s no civil docket. I’m not appearing as counsel. I have the interim appointment as magistrate judge, remember?”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” Chuck said doubtfully, though he very obviously did not remember, which was to be expected. A stint on the magistrate court bench was far from noteworthy in a firm that generated seven figures of billable earnings per day.
“I’ll follow up on my action items before we reconvene next week,” Oliver said by way of farewell, and got off the call.
Timber, Malloy, & Lawson’s Canton offices took up the broad hallways of the Case Building’s third floor. The historic downtown building had been painstakingly restored in art deco style. Canton was an unlikely location for a six-hundred-lawyer, nationwide firm to set up shop, but several of the partnered attorneys were Walland College alumni, and had established the location as part of their semi-retirement, interested in the slower pace of Canton and full of nostalgia for their university days.
Oliver, on the other hand, had no ties here. He’d come from the Denver office because he’d been told to do so, and had assumed once he’d paid his dues for a few years that he’d be invited back to civilization. But he hadn’t been, and to his own surprise, he hadn’t minded. With technology as it was, and the Kansas City office so nearby, it hadn’t been difficult to remain a part of the most significant cases in the region.
And, he had to admit, being forced to slow down a little had been good for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had more than a day or two of insomnia, whereas there had been weeks toward the end of his time in Denver where he’d managed no more than an hour of sleep per night.
He was, for all intents and purposes, very nearly happy. It had come as a surprise, considering that, at some point in his early twenties, he’d begun to think brief moments of contentment were the most he could hope for. And those generally only came directly after fucking someone, making them cry, making them come, or, best of all, all three.
Not that he didn’t still enjoy that trifecta at age thirty-seven.
A flash of pleasant memory stole over him. He’d had a very good night on Friday with Wilson, taking turns with a young man wearing nothing but a cock cage. He grinned at the reminiscence.
Not the most virtuous thoughts to be having as he walked down the shady downtown streets of this small college town. But maintaining a facade was Oliver’s central skill, so it didn’t trouble him.
The downtown area of Canton was quaint, and at present, spilling over with reminders of every business district’s favorite holiday season: Christmas. Honestly, Oliver had never understood the appeal. He wasn’t religious, he bought himself all the things it occurred to him to want, and the predominance of red, green, and gold everywhere he turned was an assault on his aesthetic senses.
The courthouse was just a few blocks away from the Case Building. It was nearly two hundred years old, a pretty thing built from limestone with a square clock tower. But it was in dire need of renovation. While the Case Building had been modernized in all of the invisible ways that mattered most, the courthouse was a disaster of primitive heating systems that left most of its interior as cold as—well, stone—all winter long, with even worse air conditioning that created sweltering conditions all summer, obnoxious carpet, and badly-positioned and severe, uneven lighting, which had a tendency to hum and flicker.
Inside the door, Oliver joined the handful of people waiting their turn to go through security, grimacing when he recognized the woman standing ahead of him in the line.
She’d glanced over her shoulder as he’d come in, and once their eyes met, there was no way for them to simply ignore each other.
“Judge,” she said, practically gritting her teeth around the honorific. Mallory Schmidt was an assistant county attorney. She detested Oliver. He wasn’t sure when it had started, or if he’d done anything to deserve it, but it certainly predated his first day on the bench in magistrate court and he’d decided to have some fun with it.
“Counsel,” he replied in his warmest voice. But before he could think of the right kind of harmless but irresistible barb, it was her turn to push her briefcase through the scanner and walk through the metal detector.
Oliver followed her, smiling at the guards as they made their cursory examination of his things, and then he took the open stairs in the foyer two at a time. He exchanged more pleasant greetings with other attorneys he recognized. For the most part, he had a good reputation amongst his colleagues—for being honest and fair, if ruthless. He’d cultivated it carefully. Oliver was good at making the impression he intended. But there were always a few nuts whom even Oliver couldn’t crack, and he was resigned to Schmidt being one of them. If he couldn’t win her over, though, he could delight in encouraging her spite instead. Antagonism was his addiction, in every part of his life.
In the stairwell, his phone rang and when he saw the familiar name of his mentor in his firm’s Denver office, he decided to answer.
“I’m on my way into court, so I can’t talk for long,” Oliver told Ted as he strode up the stairs. “Is this call for business, or pleasure?”
Ted laughed on his end of the line. “Pleasure, thank God. I wanted to see if you were still interested in spending a weekend at the cabin. It’s been ages since we caught up properly, and I’m free in February.”
Oliver did want to see Ted, and he enjoyed Ted’s cabin, tucked against a mountainside, but… “February?”
Ted laughed. “It’s peak season! People make reservations a year in advance to experience the Rockies in February.”
“Presumably, those people do distasteful things, like ski or, God forbid, snowshoe.”
“I won’t make you do those things,” Ted promised.
“No, you won’t make me,” Oliver agreed, “but you’ll mope when you suggest it, and I say no.”
“The problem with negotiating with another lawyer is that they always spot the loopholes,” Ted sighed, but Oliver could tell he was amused. “I’ll let you get to court. Call me back when you can, and we’ll figure it out.”
“Will do,” Oliver agreed, then ended the call.
Outside the door to the stairwell, he turned down the second-floor hallway that led to all of the judges’ chambers and gave the clerks a wink and a wave as he passed their counter. They laughed and guffawed back at him even while they blushed; they were a trio of stern, middle-aged women who Oliver had come to genuinely like. Allison had excellent baking skills and Sarah had knitted him socks.
The hallway beyond the clerk’s counter was narrow and sported the worst of all of the bad carpet, a threadbare atrocity that had originally been maroon but was now worn to pale pink in the middle. The door to Oliver’s borrowed chambers stuck; he had to pull up on the ancient handle as he turned it to pry the oak slab from the frame. The chambers themselves were cramped and the old desk could give someone splinters if they were careless. Nothing could have struck a more stark contrast to his offices at the firm.
Still, Oliver couldn’t help smiling to himself as he took his pressed robes from their hanger on the backside of the door and shrugged them on. There was just something about being a judge that he couldn’t deny he liked. In the most transparent sense, he wasn’t surprised he felt this way. Of course, his penchant for dominance was indulged by the act of sitting head and shoulders above a room full of people and meting out all decisions. But he also felt the significance more deeply—to a degree he hadn’t anticipated—understanding that he’d been entrusted with something larger than himself.
He liked the feeling, and it resonated in a manner that left him humbled rather than aggrandized.
He could admit to himself that he would be disappointed when Mary Nair, the regular judge on this post, returned from her maternity leave. But he was beginning to think that things were happening in the Denver office that might allow for his return—Ted had been dropping hints for years; Oliver could hardly believe that he’d kept himself from mentioning it during their brief call just now. When that window opened, surely Oliver wouldn’t miss this sleepy town and occasional stints in a judge’s robes.
He checked his watch—a Cartier piece, one of his best—and upon seeing that it was about thirty seconds before he’d be expected on the bench, he pushed open the door that led from the stuffy chambers into the courtroom. As the door opened, a flood of noise washed over Oliver—the casual conversations of a few dozen attorneys, police officers, and courtroom staff. Oliver hid his pleasure when the sound of voices was abruptly replaced with the din of a roomful of people getting hastily to their feet. Oliver swept a glance over the gallery, noticing a row of people in the cold-weather county jail uniform of drab grey, their long sleeves bunched up past their cuffed wrists. He had a vague aversion to the sight of the people towed in from the jail, though over the past few months, he’d had ample time to get used to it. He didn’t let his attention linger on the morning’s line-up, focusing instead on getting settled in at the bench before he gestured for the people before him to return to their seats.
One of the clerks, probably Sarah, had left him a neat stack of files, each one with a bright label denoting its case number. On top of the stack was a docket sheet listing the morning’s cases in the same order that had been posted in the hallway. But Oliver preferred to keep everyone on their toes, so he never called them in the printed order. He chose one at random from the middle of the list, slipped the corresponding file from the stack, and spoke in the direction of the microphone mounted to the bench.
“I am Municipal Court Judge Oliver Grayson. The first case I’ll call is CR-20-411, State versus Carson B. VanPelt.” As he spoke, he heard the low murmur of a familiar voice and glanced up briefly to see one of the public defenders speaking to his handcuffed client, whose head of messy dark hair was bowed.
Mallory Schmidt already stood at the prosecution’s table with a stack of files very much like Oliver’s.
Oliver requested, “Parties, state your appearances, please?”
“Your Honor, the State appears through Deputy County Attorney, Mallory Schmidt.”
The public defender, having just reached the counsel table, slid into a chair and said hastily, “Defendant appears in person, and through counsel, Colin Peters.”
Colin was often in Oliver’s court. He was a young lawyer, maybe a year out of law school, so the public defenders’ office assigned him the more minor cases. Inexperienced attorneys were common in the public defenders’ ranks; their turn-over was atrocious. No one wondered why that was. It was a miserable, undercompensated job, as far as Oliver could tell.
“It seems we’re here for arraignment on charges of marijuana possession,” Oliver said. Then, he happened to glance from his file toward the defendant. And he forgot what he’d been saying. Because the young man sitting handcuffed next to the public defender was Blake.
Cujo’s Blake.
His Blake.
He looked terrible, was Oliver’s next thought. Maybe that was why Oliver hadn’t noticed him instantly. Because, ordinarily, Oliver was very aware of him. His broad shoulders were hunched to accommodate his chained wrists, and his dark eyes were red-rimmed. His hair was always attractively messy, but right now it was lank and dull, scraped back into a ponytail instead of in his usual half-bun.
Blake didn’t seem to have had the revelation Oliver was experiencing right now. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, as though his thoughts had taken him far away.
Oliver, on the other hand, was so rattled that he couldn’t even remember the charge that he’d just read. He looked at the file again, struggling to compose himself. Possession of marijuana.
What the hell?
In Oliver’s opinion, marijuana was a practically harmless, popular intoxicant, especially in a college town. The charges weren’t that big of a deal on their face.
But Oliver found himself furious with Blake for being in this courtroom.
He was so blindsided by the circumstances, and his own emotional reaction, that he didn’t call Mallory over and inform her he had a conflict. Nor did he announce said conflict in open court, and let the prosecutor and defense counsel sort it out. Either of those actions would have been perfectly acceptable.
Instead, he stared at his file for several long moments before he realized that Colin, the public defender, was speaking.
“…Counsel has asked whether the defendant may apply for a diversion.”
Of course, Oliver thought with relief. A diversion. The quiet road to dismissal for virtually every young, generally upstanding person charged with possession of marijuana. The case was hardly a case at all; it would go away on its own. And so there was no need for him to say anything, because—
“Yes,” Mallory said flatly, “and the prosecution has determined that Mr. VanPelt is ineligible for diversion.” Colin didn’t look happy, but he obviously wasn’t surprised, either. He and Mallory must have discussed the case in advance.
“Ineligible?” Oliver echoed, raising a brow at Mallory. That’s what he’d asked, instead of announcing that he knew the defendant—saw him four days a week, in fact, and had once sat on a toilet seat while the defendant had knelt between his knees to carefully disinfect and bandage a tiny, painful bite in the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger.
Mallory looked at Oliver coolly. “Yes, your honor. That’s correct.”
They stared at each other. Oliver merely bewildered, Mallory radiating her usual dislike.
Tell her. Tell her now. If she finds out later, on her own, then she, of all people, will show you no mercy. But Oliver still didn’t announce his conflict. Because if he did, some other substitute judge would come along and hold Blake’s fate in their hands.
And for reasons that he couldn’t quite articulate even to himself, that was not a state of affairs Oliver could accept. So, he cleared his throat, his gaze skating over Blake’s bowed head, and said, “Well then, shall we set the matter for arraignment?”
At last, Blake’s head jerked up like he’d just woken from a daze. A bruise distorted the line of his right cheek, swollen and discolored.
Their eyes met across the courtroom. Blake’s lips parted, almost like he was going to say something. He was so handsome, Oliver thought—out of nowhere really, but he couldn’t help the sentiment. He was strong and broad, but not in the manner of someone who obsessed over his reflection at the gym. Oliver could imagine that his stomach, arms, and back would all have a hint of softness that would yield beautifully to rope.
Shock. That was the only explanation for the way his orderly mind was in chaos, like someone had taken all of his thoughts from their files and shaken them loose into a maelstrom.
Blinking, Oliver looked at his desk, but his eyes took in no information from the open calendar.
“Or the tenth, your honor?” Mallory was asking. Oliver blinked again. The box for the tenth came into focus. “I’m free in the afternoon. One p.m. docket?”
“It’s a date,” Colin said cheerfully.
Blake tucked his chin back against his chest.
A dozen questions were moving rapidly through Oliver’s mind. Why had Blake been arrested for a relatively minor offense? When had he been arrested? At the possibility that he’d spent an entire weekend in jail, Oliver’s heart wrenched.
Colin stood up, and so did Blake, though without looking up. The jail staff was waiting behind him.
“Next case,” Oliver said, his voice as clear and resonant as always, outwardly unaffected although inwardly he was still reeling. “CR-20-401. Counsel, state your appearances, please?”
He couldn’t help glancing at Blake as he trailed behind Peters toward the door and back out into the hallway. Had he made bail? The scheduled amount for the offense was low; surely, he’d managed the bond?
Oliver went through the rest of the docket on autopilot, and as soon as he could escape back to chambers, he did so with his stack of files tucked tightly under his arm. When he got to his rickety computer monitor, he pulled up the electronic file for Blake’s case. It had already been updated with the information relating to the bond, which had been paid.
Somewhat less uneasy knowing that Blake was at least out of cuffs, Oliver opened the paper file in front of him and flipped it to the back page, where the original citation was stapled. That, and the accompanying report handwritten by the arresting officer, answered at least a few of his questions.
“You reckless idiot,” he murmured, not sure whether he was speaking to Blake, in absentia, or to himself.