Justice Hunter
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations,
and events portrayed in this novel are either products
of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
JUSTICE HUNTER Copyright © 2012 by Harper J. Dimmerman
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN: 146626988X
ISBN-13: 9781466269880
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62110-260-1
Registration Number TXu 1-748-333
For Adam, mom and dad for teaching me what love is & for Chloe and Sienna, whom I will always love more than infinity
“There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.”
—Clarence Darrow
CONTENTS
H
unter Gray was screwed—and not in a good way, like the night before when he had once again found himself in borderline illegal positions with the sexiest judge on the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court bench. Hunter was unjustifiably late, even by slick lawyer standards. In other words, he couldn’t bullshit his way out of this one. It was the most important oral argument of his career—a career that could only be described as a painfully bland, seven-year, slave-like existence. He had finally made it to the big show. And unlucky for him, that show had started twenty minutes ago.
Ominous gunmetal gray clouds converged overhead, following Hunter like a spotlight. As the sweat oozed from his pores on this tropically humid first day of spring, all he could do was smile at the irony of the situation. A virtually spotless win record and thousands of billable hours were about to be destroyed—nuked. And he would have two judges to thank for his career crashing and burning. In one corner loomed the insatiable and persuasive judge, and in the other, a mediocre judge with a Napoleon complex and the patience of a firecracker wick on Independence Day. Any way he looked at it, he was fucked.
A hand-me-down brown leather bag bounced off his shoulder as he darted in front of a yellow cab. The horn sounded, and Hunter flipped the cabbie the bird. Heads turned as the drones of the business world gave him the crazy treatment. He swigged a bitter last sip of vendor coffee and swooshed the cup into the nearest garbage can, barely stopping as he sprinted the last two blocks to city hall. It was there that his fate awaited him, not to mention a butch lawyer who had been gunning for him since he clocked her in moot court back in law school. She was out for blood and no doubt bucking like a rabid bull at the gate.
By the time he hit the bulky wooden doors of city hall, he felt as if he were out of his body.
I knew I should’ve never smoked that joint last night. It doesn’t tend to mix too well with the Zoloft.
For an instant, he considered the possibility of skipping the hearing altogether, giving himself time to fabricate the lie of all lies.
“Fuck it,” he said under his breath as he entered the dreary and dank interior of the building, rolling the dice. He rummaged through the satchel, searching for his electronic access card. He couldn’t get to the stairwells or elevators without it.
“Shit! Shit!” He must’ve left it in the clothes he had worn earlier in the week for a run-of-the-mill settlement conference. It was some case involving one of the firm’s tier-three clients. Translation: small businesses barely able to afford their rates but who enjoyed the bragging rights and sense of power that came with having a big-swinging-dick firm like Whitman Packer in their corner, which cynical associates rather affectionately referred to as Whitman “Fudge” Packer. The client from the other day was a moderately successful car dealer who had lost a sizeable security deposit after a commercial real estate deal went south. Just for shits and giggles, Hunter fumbled for the access card through the pockets of his wrinkled khakis and blazer, which was still draped over his arm, fearing the inevitable—another ten-minute delay in the twilight zone on the other side of the building, also known as the visitor registration area.
A few years ago, the city finally took the technology plunge. Probably the last metropolis in the country to do so, Philly realized there were far too many nut jobs passing through the building each day. At least half of them were
pro se
litigants; those crazy enough to represent themselves without the benefit of legal counsel. The fancy Latin expression had become virtually synonymous with insanity. And they seemed to get off on clogging up the court system with a never-ending array of useless and incomprehensible motions, pretending they had something more important to do than get a day job like the rest of the world. All of their defective papers were filed
in forma pauperis
, no less. Translation: on the taxpayer’s dime.
With all the crackpots flowing in and out, the last thing the city needed was another shooting like the recent one at the criminal justice center, the wastefully sleek and modern criminal court facility just blocks away. Apparently a criminal defendant—some hulk of a scumbag who stopped just short of crushing his shitty court-appointed attorney—whipped out a pistol during his arraignment, called the judge a cocksucker, and popped a couple caps in his ass. By the time a cop took him down, it was too late. A few hours later, Judge Schleiffer was removed from Courtroom 601 in a body bag. Not a good day for justice in Philly, which was inaptly named the City of Brotherly Love.
By the time Hunter reached the visitor’s entrance, a line had snaked its way through the dingy hall and out the metal door onto the sidewalk. Hunter, who felt the pissed-off stares of the visitors burning a hole through the back of his neck, caught a break when he flashed his state bar card. The female cop behind the counter waved him to the front. As he waited for a pass, he couldn’t help but overhear the lively sports debate between two cops supposedly guarding the elevators right behind the row of turnstiles.
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell they’ll get the pennant this year,” said the younger of the pair.
“Don’t give up on Philly, man,” joked the other, a black cop whose cadence and pointy chin resembled Samuel L. Jackson’s. “We’ve got mad skills.”
“Skills my ass,” the first mumbled before casually eyeballing Hunter as he approached. The cop was a tough-looking Irish kid. Couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-one.
“My money’s on Chicago,” Hunter lobbed as he passed.
He heard the playful hisses as the door to the cramped elevator opened. Hunter smiled, doing his best to stay calm, cool, and collected. He was about to walk into a shitstorm, after all. His only saving grace at this point would be Judge Russo’s untimely demise. And the chances of that were about as good as his of making partner if he lost this case.
H
unter gave his understated, bronze-colored tie one last tug as he entered Judge Russo’s courtroom. Drab colors, abused wood furniture, and portraits of dead judges lined the walls. A callous chill greeted him like a smack in the face. Hunter’s eyes quickly surveyed the courtroom as he tried to get his bearings. He breathed an internal sigh of relief when he didn’t see Judge Russo, who was presumably running late, too.
Russo has yet to ascend to his mighty throne.
Despite the room’s tattered appearance, and even without the judge, a holy aura still permeated the stale air. Slivered rays of light seeped through the lackluster window coverings, caressing the pews. Hunter tried his best to block out the sobering devoutness and calm his already-agitated nerves.
A few anonymous faces speckled the gallery. Reporters chattered impatiently in the back corner. Hunter wasn’t surprised. The client, Mediacast, had garnered tons of publicity since it was one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. The judge’s anal-retentive law clerk and tipstaff were stationed near the bench, looking self-important. Hunter noticed the law clerk turn and march like a good soldier toward the door behind the bench that connected to Russo’s chambers.
With all eyes on him, Hunter casually approached counsel’s table. The defendant—thankfully not Hunter’s client—was your typical sales guy. With his two-thousand-dollar custom suit and perfectly coiffed hair, he sat leisurely at the defense table, looking smug.
Hunter’s stomach somersaulted when he saw defense counsel. Nothing could’ve prepared him for coming face-to-face with his law school arch nemesis in open court. The source of his agitation was an extraordinarily talented attorney named Melissa Zane. They had been in the same graduating class at Temple Law School in 2002. Zane finished number two in their class, and Hunter was a close third. She was exceedingly bright and looked every ounce of it, too. If her appearance had an address, it would have been the intersection of SoHo and Berkley Boulevard. Her all-black, masculine pantsuit had the unfortunate effect of accentuating her poor physique rather than masking it, as she may have intended. To put it simply, she looked butch and didn’t seem to care very much. She sported the standard mod, square eyeglasses and had a head of unkempt, frizzy black hair.
Zane was a newly minted partner at the city’s most prestigious and haughtiest firm—Kruger. The one-word moniker spoke volumes about the place and the arrogance that came with it. It was a bastion of egotism that also happened to be his girlfriend’s former employer. Kruger lawyers were the best and brightest money could buy—five hundred or a thousand bucks per hour, easy. They almost never lost, and their client list was the envy of every other shop in town: Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and the hits just kept coming.
Zane pretended not to notice Hunter. She had her game face on. A fresh legal pad with a Mont Blanc pen atop sat neatly before her at the ready, just waiting to make that perfect first impression upon the judge. She and her client sat in relative silence, the salesman fidgeting, probably daydreaming about picking up chicks after the hearing. Hunter pictured him driving along the trendy South Street in a tricked-out Mercedes sedan, cruising for action. Zane was all business, though, like a prizefighter psyching herself up before the bell. Hunter set his things down on the table, and Zane surreptitiously glanced over. Their eyes met for an instant before she shifted her condescending gaze, childishly giving him the cold shoulder.
“Melissa,” instigated Hunter, as he unbuckled his case.
“Hello, Hunter,” she replied insincerely.
Hunter tried to play off the fact that his client was conspicuously absent. Inside, though, he was panicking. Without an authorized representative from Mediacast, he had no chance of getting the temporary restraining order—nothing short of catastrophic.
Smelling blood, Zane probed, “Maybe Mediacast wised up and realized their case was frivolous after all.”
“Don’t you wish?”
As far as whale clients were concerned, Mediacast was undeniably his firm’s largest. The city of Philadelphia, no slouch by any stretch of the imagination, awarding Whitman Packer literally tens of millions of dollars of business annually, wasn’t even a close second. Mediacast was the Fortune 500 media behemoth started by a local cable visionary less than fifty years ago. Other firms like Zane’s had been courting Mediacast on and off for years, offering the promise of strategic alliances with the likes of Oracle and Microsoft—and that all must’ve seemed tempting. Yet his firm had a distinct advantage. Mediacast’s general counsel, the lawyer charged with the task of managing litigation and choosing outside firms, just so happened to be the managing partner’s college roommate and best friend.
“Or did you just forget to notify your own client about the hearing?”
“They’ll be here,” Hunter said with as much confidence as he could muster in the midst of an anxiety attack. “That partnership thing has already started to go to your head, hasn’t it?”
“Well, they better make it quick,” she replied with a triumphant smirk, attentively cutting her gaze toward the bench.
“All rise!” ordered the tipstaff, his raspy voice a mixture of boredom and deference. “The Court of Common Pleas, First Judicial District, is now in session. The Honorable Harlen Russo presiding.”
Nonchalantly leaning toward Hunter, Zane taunted, “You’re all mine, bitch.”