Turner Justice Read online

  Turner Justice

  Dan Decker

  Published by Grim Archer Media, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  TURNER JUSTICE

  First edition. April 10, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Dan Decker.

  Written by Dan Decker.

  Contents

  The Mugger

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  The Hostage Negotiator

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  The Prosecution’s Witness

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  The Ghost Suspect

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  The Good Client

  Author’s Note

  Books by Dan Decker

  About the Author

  For my family.

  The Mugger

  1

  It was already dark when I came out of the courthouse, stuffing a file into my briefcase as I walked down the street. I had been at the court all afternoon and then got stuck in an impromptu meeting with Frank Ward, a prosecuting attorney. We had tried to hammer out a plea deal for a client who had got caught trying to sell his personal stash of meth after he decided to go clean.

  Or so he claims.

  I didn’t believe it and neither did Frank, so perhaps that was why my client was telling it to anybody who would listen. He’d told the story to me three times today but that hardly mattered now as we haggled over how many years he was going to spend in prison.

  I growled under my breath, frustrated that my client had wanted to sleep on the offer. I’d badgered Frank down to below what he should have offered because this was a small matter to him and he just wanted it off of his desk.

  It was a good deal. My client was a fool for not taking it right away.

  I had a feeling my client had delayed his decision because he wanted to continue bargaining in the morning.

  Frank wasn’t going to budge another inch. I knew. He knew it.

  My client didn’t believe it.

  My office was within walking distance. I liked to walk on the days when I had court because it gave me a chance to make sure I went into battle with a clear head, nevermind the constant exhaust of the busy downtown city street that threatened to choke me and make me regret my decision.

  As I approached an alley I heard a man yell. I crept forward and peeked around the wall to see a man at the end of a dead-end alley with his back to me. He had a weapon of some sort pointed at a middle-aged woman who had her back up against the wall.

  There was approximately seventy-five feet between them and me.

  I had no way of knowing if the man had a gun or a knife, but I knew he had something to make the woman stand with her back to the wall.

  I headed into the alley, inching forward a step at a time while keeping a close eye on both the scene and the ground, hoping to get close enough to take the mugger unaware.

  I just don’t want this to get in the paper. Criminal Defense Attorney Foils Mugger?

  No thanks.

  Notoriety was always good, but somehow I felt that wouldn’t be good for my image.

  “Give me your purse!” The mugger’s voice was rough.

  “Over my dead body,” said the woman in a calm but terse tone, which was surprising given the situation.

  I was halfway through a step when I saw that the light reflected off the ground in front of me.

  I was about to step into a puddle.

  While I skirted around the water the mugger grabbed the woman’s purse and tried to tear it from her hands.

  She held onto it with a death grip.

  I feared he might indeed take it over her dead body.

  “Give it here now!”

  The mugger’s voice was slurred as if inebriated, which could easily explain his poor decision to pull a fool stunt like this.

  “No!”

  The mugger yanked the purse away, shoving it underneath his arm.

  “The jewelry too!”

  “You can have my necklace, but I am not going to give you my wedding ring. Isn’t it enough that you’ve already taken my dignity and my purse?”

  “Jewelry too. Everything. I want your necklace. I want your ring.”

  “I will only give you my necklace if you agree to not take my ring.”

  “Wedding ring too.” He waggled something at her that I now identified as a knife.

  I took another step forward with mixed feelings, a knife was better than a firearm, but he could still kill me if he had a mind to.

  “I’m a widow. My ring is the last thing I have from him because I had to part with all the rest. If you take it from me, I don’t know what I’ll do. Do you want that on your conscience?”

  “This is easy, just give me what I want and you walk away without a problem. Got it?”

  The woman’s eyes alighted on me when I was less than ten feet away, still creeping up on the man.

  “Help me, sir!”

  2

  I cringed inside as the mugger spun, whipping his knife around while stepping away from the woman. He immediately pointed his knife back towards the woman and shook a fist at me.

  “Stay where you are!” the mugger said. “This doesn’t involve you.”

  I could get to him before he attacked the woman but his words also did not sound nearly as slurred as they had a moment ago.

  Maybe he wasn’t high after all.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” I said with my hands out in front of me and to either side. “I just came to help a woman in distress. I’ve heard what you’ve been talking about and I think you’ve got a pretty good deal. She’s willing to give you everything except some old ring that reminds her of a dead husband. I suggest you take what has already been given.”

  “I need the ring.”

  I shifted, catching a glance of the ring, and saw that it had a rather large diamond.

  I reexamined the woman, expecting to see that her clothes were more elegant than I had first thought, but they were worn around the edges. Her fashion sense seemed to be off by about a decade, my girlfriend Brittany would probably have told me that I was off by a decade or two.

  “I think you might be arguing over nothing here,” I said, “that’s a fake.”

  The mugger growled and the woman looked affronted by my assessment.

  “It looks real enough and I will have it one way or another.”

  “I have several hundred dollars in cash that I will give you if you let her go. Just let the woman walk away with her wedding ring, nobody has to get hurt. You can leave with plenty of money. Easy peasy.”

  Easy peasy?

  I haven’t said anything like that since I was a kid.

  “Give me your money now!”

  I had to keep from laughing at the hooded mugger, he sounded more desperate by the moment.

  “You’re not gonna get the money unless you let the woman go. Once she is safely away, I will hand you my wallet. I even have some credit cards in there. Knock yourself out.”

  The mugger made no move other than a small flick of his wrist with his knife hand which made the woman’s eyes grow large.

  “Wallet now!”

  I shrugged. I didn’t like how agitated he was becoming and decided
I better give into a demand so he felt like he was in control of the situation.

  “I’m gonna give it to you as a sign of good faith. If you let her go, I will sweeten the deal.” I reached into my pocket, fished out my wallet and tossed it towards him, intentionally undershooting so it landed halfway in between us. I tried not to flinch when it landed in a puddle.

  The man was about to take a step forward when he turned back to the woman, wagging the knife at her. “Ring! Now!”

  “No.” She thrust her ring hand behind her and made a fist with the other.

  3

  “Hey Mister Mugger,” I said, “how about this, you can follow me to my office and I’ll write you a check for several thousand dollars. That’ll easily cover the cost of what that ring would be worth if it were real, which it is not.”

  “We can do that too.”

  I shook my head, something was wrong with the guy. No thief in his right mind would accept a personal check. My attempt to calm him down by giving in to a demand had not worked, if anything it had sent him the other way.

  “That only happens if you let the woman go with her ring. I will give you several thousand dollars, you can have my wallet, you can max out my credit cards, let’s just make sure everybody leaves here in one piece and goes home tonight, sound like a good plan?”

  “After I get the ring.”

  I suppressed a sigh as I studied the man and reached for my pocket but got only halfway there before he noticed what I was doing.

  “You stop right there! Stop moving your hand right now!”

  I kept my hand where it was. “I am only trying to sweeten the deal.” Before he could say anything more I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I held it up for him to see.

  “Mister Mugger, I have a brand-new top of the line iPhone. This is worth at least a thousand dollars. I paid cash, I waited in line for like three hours. These things are hard to find. It is definitely worth as much as that ring if not more. You can take this too if you just let her go. If you don’t want it, you can flip it, easily getting at least half that much without trying. You can easily get more if you are patient in how you sell it.”

  The mugger studied me as I looked at the woman, silently wishing she would just run, he was so focused on me that she could make it away before he knew what she was doing.

  The mugger swung his knife around to point it at me.

  I looked at the woman.

  Now’s your chance!

  She didn’t move.

  “How old are you?” I asked. “Eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “Stop asking questions!”

  “I hate to break it to you but the path you’re taking is going nowhere good.”

  I stared at the woman, hoping she would make a break for it.

  “What are you, a priest?”

  “No, even better. I’m an attorney, a defense attorney.” I studied the man for a long moment to accentuate my next sentence. “I represent people like you, people who step over the line, get caught, and sent to jail.”

  “An attorney?”

  He sneered at me. “I ought to just kill you anyway, the last thing the world needs is another attorney.”

  I pointed at him. “That is what you don’t want to do. Murder gets you sent away for a long time. This mugging, assuming you get caught, will set you back a few years because you’re armed.”

  “I don’t need advice from you.”

  “You’re either gonna be dead or in jail for life before you’re thirty. I think we can do better than that. How about I help you?”

  The mugger almost seemed to forget the woman. I made a small motion with my hand, but she did not see it because she was just focused on my face.

  Probably still insulted that I called her ring a fake.

  While I had never been involved in a mugging before, I had represented many muggers in my time. I also knew a little bit about how to talk to desperate people.

  I took a step. “You still haven’t picked up my wallet and that’s worth real money, how about I give it to you?”

  I shuffled forward.

  “You stay right where you are!”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself. What are you into? Meth? Cocaine?” I nodded down at my wallet. “There’s enough for you to get a good hit. You should just pick that up and run, you need to max out those credit cards as quick as you can. If you do it fast enough you could easily load yourself up with several thousand dollars of merchandise. Assuming you have a good place to unload it, you could get a load of drug money.”

  “Why do you think I’m doing drugs?”

  “Aren’t you?” I took another step. “I see this all the time. You’re just full of anxiety, desperately seeking for that next hit, willing to do anything for it.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “Let’s start with your name? What is it?”

  “You think I’m stupid?”

  “I’m going to call you Jim, sound good Jim?”

  “I’m not Jim.”

  “Okay, Jim, I can help you.”

  “I don’t need help. And I’m not named Jim.”

  “Think about what you are doing.” I tapped the side of my head. “You are trying to rob a woman by the courthouse. You are yelling. The cops are going to notice. You’re running out of time. You should run. They could be coming.”

  “I don’t hear nothing!”

  “You need to go but before you do I can help you.”

  “How is this helping?”

  “First off, I recommend you lose the knife.” I nodded toward a trashcan that was ten feet in front of him. “Walk forward, throw it in the trashcan and I won’t tell them that you were ever armed. Sound good, Jim?”

  “Shut up!”

  I took another step forward. “I don’t think you understand. I’m going to make you look sensible to a judge. You were trying to rob a woman because of an addiction you could not control but you started to think straight and realized you needed to change.”

  “I am not on drugs!”

  “I talked sense to you, convinced you to let the woman leave, even giving you money to get you through the night. The judge will buy that.”

  “What judge?”

  “The one you’re going to talk to when the cops show up.”

  There was the sound of tires crunching gravel from behind, but I didn’t look back. The car drew the attention of the mugger, his eyes growing big.

  “How did the cops get here so quick?”

  I would be surprised if it was a police officer.

  A suggestion can be a powerful thing.

  “Throw your knife in the trashcan! We won’t ever tell anybody you were armed, right?”

  I looked at the lady. It took a moment but she nodded.

  The kid panicked and had started to look for a way over the wall behind him when the car pulled away. I looked back and saw that my assessment was right, it was just some random person who had made a wrong turn and interrupted a mugging.

  They decided to bail rather than help.

  I didn’t blame them.

  The kid grabbed the woman by the arm and put the knife to her neck. “Give me the ring or you’re gonna regret it.”

  4

  I stepped forward, my wallet was now behind me and the kid was four feet in front of me. The woman’s face showed more resolve than before.

  Jim needed to cut his losses. She wasn’t giving up that ring unless he cut if from her finger. He was agitated, hyperventilating, and looking down the alley as if he expected the cops to come from around the corner at any time.

  “This is not worth it,” I said to the woman. “You may just want to give him the ring, perhaps the cops can track it down.”

  The woman didn’t move. She wasn’t going to give it up, I just needed one glance at her face to know that.

  I took another step, the mugger was now so close that I could reach out and touch him. “You really must get going, Jim. The police are gonna be here soon.”

/>   “I’ll leave as soon as I get that ring.”

  The kid was like a broken record.

  I pulled off my watch and held it out. “Take this instead, nobody’s ever going to come after you for it. I won’t report you to the police. This is a free gift. Just go.”

  The mugger did not recognize that the watch was worth anything so I waved it until it was lit by a street light from outside the alley.

  He reached for it, taking his hand off of the woman. She acted, stamping down on his foot with her heels, kneeing him in the groin, then kicking off her shoes, and fleeing down the alleyway.

  She runs.

  Finally.

  I tackled him when he tried to chase after her, forcing him down by holding his hands to either side, and putting my knee into his stomach. He had lost control of the knife in the process.

  “Wait until she is gone,” I said, “then you can go.”

  5

  This was my first good look into the face of the mugger and I realized he was a kid, even younger than eighteen. I shook my head and muttered under my breath, then spoke up louder.

  “What are you doing?”

  The kid didn’t answer. He tried to break free from my grasp but I held him down.

  I studied his face, looking into his eyes. They seemed clear to me.

  “What’s going on here? You don’t look high.”

  In answer, he brought up a knee and hit me in the back of the head, sending me flying. I was up on my feet, but not before he was too. When he moved to run, I got in his way and pushed him back into the wall.

  “Tell me why you are doing this.”

  “I need the money. Okay?”

  “You starving?”

  “Let me go!”

  “A kid like you should be home studying or playing a pickup game of basketball at the gym, not robbing some lady.

  “I got a problem to solve. Okay?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  The mugger looked at where the knife had fallen on the ground so I stepped in between to keep him from getting any ideas.