Brambleman (48 page)

“Mr. Sherman,” said Ms. Janus, “I was
reluctant to review a misdemeanor charge, but we’re definitely
opening a case file now.”

“You need medical treatment,” said Ms.
Biello.

“And a press conference,” said Ms.
Wollcroft.

“You’re a
cause célèbre
,” Sandra said.
“Savor the moment.”

Charlie gave her a look of disbelief.
“
Savor the moment
? Press conference? I want the hell out of
here!”

The ACLU attorney said, “Didn’t you know
everyone wants to hear from you?”

Charlie stared at her, dumbfounded. “Hell, I
had trouble coming up with a number for my free phone call. I
thought I was going to disappear in there.”

“You didn’t know everybody knew you got
shot?” Her tone was incredulous.

Charlie shook his head sadly. “I didn’t know
what I didn’t know.”

Sandra held up the latest front page:
“Wounded Writer Held Without Bond.” She patted his arm. “You
shouldn’t even be in jail on these trumped-up charges. Isaac
Cutchins is crazy. He threatened to kill two reporters if they
didn’t get off his property.”

“
Offen
his property,” Charlie
corrected. “And he’s not crazy. He’s got something to hide.”

A side door opened. Charlie’s mouth shut. A
slight, balding man with a shaggy fringe of hair and wearing a
threadbare blue suit entered the room. A few people stood. The man
motioned for them to sit down. “I’m just a magistrate,” he said in
a nasal twang, then did a comical double-take at the civil rights
lawyers as they scrambled to find chairs. “It’s just a bond
hearing, ladies,” he said. “An informal proceeding. I don’t even
need a plea today, let alone a full-blown defense.”

He took a seat behind the desk by the window
and put on a pair of spectacles. The sergeant stepped forward to
hand him a file. He looked over it briefly and grimaced. “So you’re
Charles Sherman.” The man glanced at the defense table, lowered his
gaze, and squinted. “Is that
blood
? Stand up, Mr.
Sherman.”

Charlie stood. The magistrate’s face wrinkled
in distaste. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Your honor, Sandra Hughes, lead counsel for
the defendant.”

“And I’m Hugh Toomer, Ms. Hughes. Sit down,
Mr. Sherman. I must say, the defendant has brought an awful lot of
legal talent for a bond hearing on—”

He looked over his glasses at the files.

“—criminal trespass and theft by taking. Why
was this postponed so long? This note says ‘Hold until four p.m.
Thursday.’ What does that mean?” He gave the sergeant a piercing
look.

Sandra, still standing, spoke: “Your honor,
that statement may be a key to the problem. My client’s treatment
has been an outrage. He has been held incognito nearly to the law’s
limit and denied medical treatment. These offenses follow an
assassination attempt on him by two Forsyth County men and his
arrest on flimsy charges contained in questionable warrants. This
doesn’t seem like America to me. More like Guantanamo or Abu
Ghraib.”

Two Forsyth men
. Charlie wore a blank
expression as he mulled over this fact.

“Save the histrionics for the trial,” Toomer
said.

A flash of anger crossed Sandra’s face as the
magistrate glanced down at paperwork. “You go, woman!” Charlie
whispered. “I love pre-trial histrionics!”

“I’d say what we have is a misdemeanor
defendant who’s bleeding,” Toomer observed. “Is the sheriff already
out of money for treating prisoners? We’re not even through
January.”

The sergeant and Strayer offered conflicting
explanations—“Your honor, they were self-inflicted” and “He fell on
the way over”—delivered simultaneously. Audience members hooted
derisively.

Wearing a sour expression, Toomer shook his
head. A second later, a man in a suit burst through the same door
Toomer had entered and blurted, “My apologies.” He turned and
looked in horror at the crowd, then at Charlie.

“Our late solicitor general, Paul Armitage,”
Toomer said, drawing titters from the crowd. “All right, we need to
set bond. And frankly, I don’t understand why you’re here.”

“The sheriff considers him a flight risk,”
Armitage said. “He was hiding out. If we could just hold him until
four—”

Sandra was up like a shot. “This is
outrageous! Obviously, Mr. Sherman was hiding out because people
wanted to kill him. Your honor, we seek immediate removal of the
defendant from Forsyth County for his personal safety. We ask that
he be released on his own recognizance, though I must admit I’m
curious about the state’s interest in holding Mr. Sherman.”

“Perhaps at a more pertinent time, Ms.
Hughes.” Toomer glanced at the warrants on his desk. “All right, I
signed these two months ago for a couple of misdemeanors. Not
felonies.” He squinted at Armitage. “These charges don’t even make
it to trial most of the time. Why is he being held for nearly the
full seventy-two hours?”

“It wasn’t my doing, but I would point out
the victim is a prominent—”

“Ixnay on the ominentpray,” Toomer said.
“Let’s send Mr. Sherman home. Mr. Sherman, I’m releasing you
without requiring you to post bond, providing that you give us a
proper address. And we should have a doctor look at you right now.
Any objections?”

Charlie stood. “Your honor,” he said, feeling
a steel grip on his left arm. “Why is there no property listed on
the theft warrant?”

“Shhh,” Sandra hissed.

The magistrate looked down and said, “The
warrant says ‘certain personal items.’”

“I suggest you ask them what I stole,”
Charlie said. Sandra wrapped both hands around his forearm and
pulled with all her might, forcing him down.

“Discovery is not the purpose of this
proceeding, Mr. Sherman. The defendant is released on his own
recognizance.” Toomer looked around. “All right. Mr. Sherman,
please obey any court summons or subpoenas you receive. Everybody
knows who you are now, that’s for sure. Deputy, would you please
uncuff Mr. Sherman? Next case.”

“That’s all we got,” the sergeant said.

“What a waste of time,” the magistrate
muttered.

Armitage, looking like he wanted to be
elsewhere, was immediately surrounded by reporters, who interrupted
his attempt to make a cellphone call. “No comment! I’m not trying
this case in the media,” he said, waving his hands in the air as he
retreated, punching buttons.

The reporters then pressed in on the defense
table, but before Charlie could speak, deputies laid hands on him.
“We’ll take you back to the detention center and get you looked at
by a doctor and processed out,” the sergeant told him, then turned
to a fellow deputy. “Call the EMTs.”

As journalists shouted questions, Charlie
told Sandra, “You handle the media. I’m too tired to talk.”

The sergeant said, “Ma’am, if you’re going to
hold a press conference, please do it outside.”

“I suggest you do your job, not try to keep
me from doing mine, deputy,” Sandra snapped.

The prisoner stood and presented himself for
uncuffing, but the deputies hurried him away in shackles. “I need a
ride back to Atlanta,” he said over his shoulder, then shouted for
all to hear, “Ask them what I stole!”

As the door closed behind him, a young woman
yelled, “Speak truth to power, Charles!”

Unfortunately for Charlie, it was still
power’s turn to talk. Waiting at the jail were two navy
blue-suited, middle-aged white guys with dark hair: Finch and Drew.
They claimed to be GBI agents armed with a material witness warrant
that allowed them to detain Charlie for questioning. Although his
jailers had called paramedics to treat Charlie, Finch and Drew
pulled rank, claiming Charlie was involved in a terrorist
drug-smuggling conspiracy. The locals ceded authority, washing
their hands of Forsyth’s most famous jailbird. They called off the
paramedics. By this time, Charlie was merely oozing blood,
anyway.

As soon as one set of cuffs was removed,
another was slapped on. This time, Charlie’s hands were placed
behind his back. Agents Finch and Drew were in such a hurry to move
their prisoner that he had to literally dig in his heels before
they would allow the desk sergeant to retrieve his keys from the
property lockup. They pushed him out the side door into the
transfer bay. Charlie saw their car and stopped cold. The Crown
Victoria looked like the vehicle that had followed him briefly when
he left Kathleen’s house back in November. And the one that staked
out Danny Patterson’s place. The damned car was everywhere—maybe it
had even blended into Kathleen’s funeral procession. So that’s
how—

“Oh, hell no!” Charlie yelled. “I’m not
letting you take me into the woods and shoot me! Help!”

The agents pulled harder. Charlie shook them
off and staggered backward, then started kicking at them, which
was, in retrospect, a mistake. The agents called for help. Two
deputies came running and tackled Charlie, pinning him to the
concrete floor. While Charlie was down, Finch kicked him in the
ribs.
Oof
. The four men brought him to his feet and shoved
him into the back of the car. “They’re going to kill me!” he
shouted. “Third time’s a charm.” He thought for a second. “Fourth
time, overall. But who’s counting?”

As deputies retreated into the building, one
cast an uncertain backward glance at Charlie. “You know what it
is!” Charlie shouted. “They’re not real GBI agents!”

“Shut up,” said Finch, slamming the door.
Drew took the wheel and started the car.

Charlie’s right side was killing him. He was
sure the bastard had cracked a rib. Well, maybe not, but he’d claim
so, anyway. He coughed up phlegm and spit on the back of the front
seat to check it for blood. None yet, but the day was young. “Where
are you taking me?” he demanded.

“Where your lawyer can’t find you.” Finch
turned to give him an oddly pleasant smile. It was evil, that face,
bought and paid for by Uncle Stanley and the Cutchins’s ill-gotten
gains, no doubt. Who else had the clout to keep this
habeas
corpus
nightmare going? As if to taunt his prisoner, Drew drove
by the courthouse. Charlie saw Sandra surrounded by reporters, too
busy discussing his plight to notice him. Here he was, drowning,
slipping under the water’s calm surface while lifeguards held a
training session on the beach just a few yards away. This was
not
a fitting end to his contract, to be shot while in
custody, especially not after he’d regained his will to live.

He recalled Redeemer Wilson’s chilling
account of such times: “
If there were reporters in the town
where they arrested you, they moved you to a place where no one
knew you. A small town, back in the woods. That’s where they did
their dirty work, things that couldn’t be proven. They’d say they
gonna beat the nigger outta you, but what they meant was they gonna
beat the man out of you or kill you, one
.”

Charlie thought his ordeal wasn’t going to
end well, either.

The agents took him into Cherokee County and
on to Canton, passing over I-575, a spur off I-75 that ran north to
merge with the Appalachian Highway near Nelson. Drew took a right
turn into an industrial park. At the bottom of a hill, he pulled
off the street and stopped before an electric gate. The agent
produced a plastic card. The gate opened, and he stopped beside a
nondescript building hidden from the street at the back of a
heavily wooded lot. A few cars were parked near the front door.
This was heartening to Charlie, since he had feared he would get
the abandoned warehouse treatment.

So maybe they wouldn’t kill him. Surely their
prisoner-grab had been too public for that. That was a theory,
anyway. And they probably were GBI agents—rogues or moonlighters,
based in Forsyth County and beholden to Uncle Stanley or someone
even higher up. And they were playing a game, keeping him out of
public view.

“So you want to tell me what this is about?”
Charlie asked.

“You’re being detained as a material witness
to a crime—the drug-related bombing at the North Atlanta Store-All
on Christmas Eve,” Finch said, pausing like he expected a
confession.

“Whatever do you mean?” Charlie’s tone was a
mixture of innocence and insolence. After an awkward silence, he
said, “If you really wanted to question me, you shouldn’t have
taken me away from my attorney. Now you’re screwed as far as
information is concerned. And furthermore, I don’t know what you’re
talking about.”

The agents pulled him from the car and led
him into the building’s side entrance. As they tugged him down the
hall, Charlie looked around for other people but saw none. Finch
and Drew pushed him inside a small, windowless room near the back
of the building and closed the door. When Charlie refused Drew’s
command to sit on a cushioned metal chair beside a folding table,
the lawman kneed him in the groin and pushed him down onto the
seat. They uncuffed him, then recuffed his hands behind him so that
he was fastened to the chair.

“We need a statement,” Finch said, pressing a
button on a digital recorder and placing it on the table. Charlie
stared at it balefully. He knew that anything he said could be
edited and then held against him. It was simply outrageous that
anyone would do such a thing. He was shocked,
shocked
, at
the very thought of doctoring information to achieve an end.

When he was ready and able to speak, Charlie
said, “Hey, don’t you need a good cop to make this dynamic work?”
Finch scowled. Charlie leaned forward and spoke into the
microphone: “Fuck yourselves. Thank you, I’ll be here all week.
Wait! I already have been.”

“We know you’re involved. That was your van
that blew up. We can hold you till you talk.”

Technically, the van was Susan’s, but he saw
no need to point that out. Now he realized she had another reason
to be pissed at him, as if she needed one.