Welcome to the Greenhouse (17 page)

The crowd roared even more graphic crudities back at the pirate.

Hebert allowed that to peter out. Then he announced, “The survivors will be tried this very afternoon, and their sentences…” Here he paused, to whet their interest. “… will most likely be carried out first thing in the morning.”

“Are you gonna hang ‘em?” somebody shouted.

Judge Hebert smiled. “I cannot say, since they have been neither convicted nor sentenced as yet. But if I were a betting man…”

That got a rise out of everyone present. It wasn’t a happy noise, she thought. It reminded her of the old Westerns she used to watch with her Gramps on a Sunday afternoon. A herd of cattle about to stampede sounded like that—a low, uneven, grumbling that kicked at her heart with a cowboy’s spurs. She wondered which way they were leaning. Pro or con on executions?

Maybe both. There was a clear divide, she noticed, between the folks actually standing around on the dock and those lurking on the periphery. The former were much better dressed, and cleaner too. Most of them even had shoes, while the latter wore rags and perched in trees or atop wooden fences and crates and such—all positions with both a good view and a handy escape route.

Townies and refugees, Taiesha told herself. The heart of her personal problem.

Waistcoat chuckled. “Well, judge, somebody here might be willing to lay odds for you, but of course, by California law…
that
would be illegal too!”

Laughter gusted among the townies, and was met with unease on the part of the refugees. Three guesses who thought the laws now being revived would be mostly applied to them, she thought. She was close enough now to touch M-16, and did, tracing out the flowing form of a lion tattooed on his arm.

“We look forward to seeing justice done,” said the mayor.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Judge Hebert replied, donning his grim reaper’s grin.

The mayor eyed him, hesitating.

“Oh,” said the judge. “Please forgive me. We haven’t actually been introduced as yet, have we? I am John Alton Hebert, Judge of the First Circuit Court of the Central Valley. And you, sir?”

Waistcoat seemed reassured by this, by a formal brand of courtesy not often seen in the Valley even before the sea reclaimed so much of it. “I’m Eric Moreland,” he replied, “and pleased to meet ya!”

He thrust a hand out, intending to shake the judge’s mitt.

“Well met, indeed,” Hebert replied, and struck like a snake.

Snick!

Moreland blinked, staring down at the steel around his wrist in utter astonishment.

To his left, on the ground, M-16 got it instantly. By the time he made his move, though, Taiesha was pressing the muzzle of her injection gun into his arm, right into the lion’s mouth. When she fired, the gun spat scores of nano-needles into him. He jumped like a cat and swung the M-16 at her head, but MacClure was there and grabbed the rifle. Two seconds later, its owner went cross-eyed and slid to the ground in a boneless heap. He wasn’t the only one. Between her team and Bobby’s, they’d knocked out half a dozen men, all of them heavily armed and strategically located.

“Jesse, where are you?!” Moreland cried, panicking, trying to yank his hand free of the judge. Then Bobby’s men pressed inward, ringing the man as he was pulled down off the planks and spun about and the other handcuff applied. He kicked at them but it was already too late, especially if M-16 was the ‘Jesse’ he wanted to come to his aid.

“Eric Alvin Moreland,” the judge intoned, “you are under arrest for the murder of Ramon Izquierdo, following your indictment on the same charge pursuant to testimony heard by the Modesto Grand Jury on April 14th of this year.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Moreland shrieked at him. “No one in
this
town would
ever
take
me
on! They all damn well
know
better!”

Some of them, maybe. As people caught on, pandemonium broke out here and there. Most appeared to be taking Moreland’s side, but more than a few were cheering his arrest. Some of the townies suddenly surged toward the platform. The rescue attempt, if that’s what it was, petered out just as quickly, however, when the bailiffs turned and took aim at them. Meanwhile, aboard the
Queen,
somebody fired a burst from the 50-mm machine gun mounted on the Texas deck.

While the crowd took that in, Rishwain ordered, “Go!”

Moving as one, the bailiffs hustled Moreland across the dock and onto the gangplank before anybody could quite figure out what to do.

As soon as they had him aboard, Judge Hebert addressed the crowd with an uncharacteristic note of good cheer. “You wanted to see justice done! And you will! Mr. Moreland will have a bail hearing this afternoon. Then we’ll proceed to trial, most likely right after sentence is carried out on those two pirates.”

An angry growling arose, but Hebert only shook his head. “Now, now, good people! You haven’t seen the long arm of the law hereabouts for a very long time. I understand that, but I assure you, the wheels of justice are still turning. In the meantime, Mr. Moreland will be our guest, and
you
will all behave yourselves.”

In the resulting silence, the judge climbed down off the platform. Taiesha joined him as he made his way back to the California
Queen,
with her detail now acting as his bodyguards.

As soon as they reboarded, Judge Hebert turned to Taiesha. “Tag. You’re it.”

Atwater. Rhymes with Backwater,
Taiesha told herself, taking a seat in the interview room. She couldn’t help but sigh. There being no facilities in town that could be secured against the town itself, the accused had been locked up below decks and she, perforce, also had to put up with the overheated stuffiness down there.

“All right, Jerome. Bring him in,” she told the bailiff on duty, a beefy black man who looked a little too much like her husband, Tremaine, for her personal comfort, but was also a solid reliable type, just like Tremaine.

Damn it. Why was she thinking of him right now?

Get your mind on the case,
she told herself,
and quit mooning around like an idiot. Tremaine is dead. Jerome is not him, and you’ve got a job to do, like it or not. So get your head wrapped around this thing.

At which point, a niggling voice in the back of her mind spoke up, asking, “Why?”

Why what?

“Why worry about it?”

She frowned, and the voice continued. “Why bother defending this clown? Wave your hands in the air, and let him hang too.”

The man has a right to a decent defense,
she told herself.
And I’m a professional.

Self merely snorted. “Yeah, right.” Then the door slammed open, propelled by a shoulder. Eric Moreland’s. He was still wearing his cuffs, and the cuffs were chained to his waist. His feet were chained to each other.

“Hey, get these damn things off me!” he snapped at her, flapping his hands around.

Taiesha frowned at the man. “Excuse me?”

“I
said,
get ‘em off me!”

“I’m not a bailiff, Mr. Moreland. I don’t have the keys.”

“Then get someone in here that does!”

Clearly, he was used to giving orders. Could he take one?

“Sit down,”
she told him, using what Tremaine used to call her none-of-your-nonsense voice.

It didn’t go over well. He leaned forward, planted his knuckles on the table and glared at her with an intensity that sent a little spike of adrenaline through her veins. It brought Jerome a step nearer too, but she shook her head and that stopped his advance on the suspect.

Apparently, Moreland thought that was due to his importance. He developed a nasty grin. “I don’t know who you think you are…” he began.

“Taiesha Daniels. I’m your attorney.”

That stopped him. In silence, he gave her the hairy eyeball. She returned the favor.

Pretty well fed for a farmer. Most of them hereabouts had lost all their water rights early on. When the snowpack up in the mountains subsided to one-fifth of “normal” the cities and big corporations got first dibs. Now most of the rivers were dry by July. Worse yet, when the Inland Sea swallowed the valley, it took out the Aqueduct too, and the wells soon after, thanks to saltwater intrusion. No water to drink from above or below, let alone irrigate anything, for at least half the year. So just how had this redneck hung on to his land, and how was he maintaining that minor league beer belly?

“You? A lawyer?” said Moreland. He straightened, then pointedly ran his gaze over her corn rows. “Where’d
you
go to school, huh?

Ghetto Tech?”

“UCLA,” she replied.

That got a dry sneer of a laugh. “Another south state water-sucker, and a shining example of the equal-opportunity program, I bet. State scholarship, right? Or a grant. Anything but your own dime.”

“G.I. Bill.”

The correction derailed him for a moment, but didn’t convince him. That, she thought, came from his spotting the long twisted scars on her left hand and wrist. They had nothing to do with her tours of duty, but he didn’t know that. Moreland brought his head back an inch or so. Something darkened in his eyes. Then, with a skeptical grunt, he finally settled into the chair on his side of the table. After a moment, he inquired, “My lawyer?”

“Yes. I’m the public defender for the First Circuit Court of the Central Valley,” Taiesha told him. “I’ve been assigned to your case, and now…”

“Don’t need one.”

Taiesha frowned. “Mr. Moreland, you’ve been charged with murder.”

“Yeah, right.” Moreland shrugged that off as if it were dandruff. “I killed me a thief. A sea rat. That ain’t murder. That’s me, exercising my right to defend me and mine.”

“Really? Why don’t you tell me about it.”

Suspicion glittered in those eyes. On more than one front, she thought, but he’d either get over the skin color thing or he wouldn’t. She didn’t much care about that. She could only address the more patent problem.

Taiesha nodded to Jerome et al. “Gentlemen?”

When they’d stepped out, she assured Moreland, “Whatever you say to me is protected by attorney-client privilege. It can’t be used against you. It can’t even be shared with anyone else, not unless you agree to it.”

Moreland was, what? Forty-one? Old enough to remember what life was like, back before Second Rise. Back when sea level had only gone up by a couple dozen feet, back when we all thought we could simply
adjust,
when everyone in the country had power and cable and working wall screens, and every other TV series was a cop show. Back when everybody knew their Miranda rights by heart and could tell you the best way to use Luminol at a crime scene. Did he remember the rules about privilege? She could only hope so.

Once more, she gently urged him on. “Tell me what happened.”

He licked his lips, and she pushed a ration bladder his way, but Moreland didn’t take it. “I, uh, I have a warehouse,” he told her. “Not far from here. Me and my brother, we built it. The roads wasn’t comin’ back, right? So there wasn’t no good way to get things to market. At first, it was no big deal ‘cause we weren’t even growing enough to feed our own selves. But once we got the de-sal plant started up, well,
then
we come up with a surplus. The town got together and put in a dock, and boats started coming… and we were a port town, just like that.

“Nothing big, see? But we did a lot better’n some.”

Taiesha nodded. She’d seen the towns he was talking about— the ones that did not come together and pull themselves back from the brink. Towns that made Hilmar-whatever look damn good and pirates were really the least of it, where people wound up eating each other. But that thought brought up other things she would rather not remember clearly—the sound of their screams and the smell of their blood…

Not now.

She rubbed at the scars on her wrist, and shifted her hips in a vain attempt to ease the pain still enfolding her spine, thanks to her early morning encounter with Hilmar’s unlucky buccaneers.

Hey! Come on, focus!

Her client, thank God, didn’t notice the lapse. He said, “Next thing you know, the whole damn town was overrun with sea rats.”

A term Taiesha found distasteful, to say the least.

“All over the place, we got squatters,” said Moreland. “They tear the hell out of whatever place they get into. They steal everything, and there’s more of ‘em every damn day! When they start taking the food out of
our
kids’ mouths, well, a man has to
do
something.”

Taiesha nodded.

“That deputy they sent out here from Merced is the first one we’ve seen in ten years, so the rule is the same as in L.A. You see a looter, you shoot him. And that’s what I did.”

Taiesha peered at the case file. “It says here the victim, Ramon Izquierdo, was nine years old.”

Moreland nodded.

“I don’t see any property listed, except for his clothes and a homemade slingshot. That and a pair of real rats, both dead. Did you see him steal something?”

“That little bastard was inside the fence, and about to get into the warehouse. He would’ve stole something, sure as shit.”

“Did he attack you in any way? With the slingshot, perhaps?”

“Hell, no.” Moreland scoffed at the very idea. “Didn’t give him the chance.”

Taiesha frowned. “It says here he was shot in the back.”

“That’s right. That’s how we do it around here. Ain’t no such thing as a warning shot. Not with a sea rat. You take your shot when you see ‘em. You don’t, they’ll either get away or they’ll get you first.”

A rational attitude, five or six years ago. Now?

Taiesha swallowed a bad taste and pressed on. “Did you get a look at him first? Were you aware that he was a child?”

A movement of the man’s shoulders might’ve been either a twitch or a shrug. “Ain’t about size,” he said. “My Daddy taught me that much. All guns are loaded. All dogs bite. And a rat is a rat.”

Great,
she thought.
Just great.
That little tidbit was likely to be the centerpiece of her closing argument, come the trial, when she’d have to act as this man’s mouthpiece and do her best to justify his killing this kid.