Part 2 of two parts.
I'm indebted to GeorgeAnderson and Blackrandl1958 for edits, discussion, suggestions, and criticisms of a previous draft of this story. If you like it -- thank them. If you don't like it, I'm the author.
There's almost no sex in this story, and if you blink, you'll miss it. There is some cheating, violence, drug use and other bad behavior, so there's that, but it's not a BTB story. Depending on what you're looking for, you've been warned.
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Copyright, 2024, by H. Jekyll. I reserve all rights.
Battery, Part 2: The Shooting
Life crept on in its petty pace from day to day, until the light turned red.
I was in Indy, driving to the disciplinary hearing that my licensing board had finally decided to hold, and it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't stopped at a brisket place on MLK and eaten lunch in the car. I was a few minutes late, second in line at a light on Washington Street when this black kid walked up and put a gun to my window. He pointed it right at my head. "Give me your wallet or I'll fucking kill you!" You can't be prepared for something like that. The gun looked enormous, and he was shouting so I could hear him clearly through the closed window. He had one of those keffiyehs like Yasser Arafat used to wear, but he'd pulled it down so it was a mask, not a head scarf. I remember that it was loose, and he had to keep pulling it up. That's one of the things I remember distinctly.
I put my hands up. "Sure. Okay. Okay. My wallet's in here. Here it is!" There were several cars at the light and people crossing the street, and none of that seemed to bother him. I tried to unzip my messenger bag. I thought he was going to kill me, and I was suddenly afraid to die. I pushed the button to roll my window down.
"Now, motherfucker! Right fucking now!"
I felt in my messenger bag for my pistol. I kept saying "Here it is. Here it is," in a quavering voice. I thought I might have unzipped the wrong compartment, but there it was. When I pulled it out, he reached in the car window with his left hand like he thought I was giving him my wallet, but I pushed the barrel to his chest and shot him. I shot him again. I shot him six times and kept pulling the trigger when the gun was empty. I'd have shot however many bullets were in the magazine.
With the first shot the mask fell down and both his eyes and mouth opened wide, like he couldn't believe it, but he didn't say anything. He just went limp and fell, almost like Mary Ann had. I got out of the car, still holding the gun. People were yelling "Call 9-1-1," and they were keeping away from me.
He wasn't dead yet. I thought he should have been, but his eyes moved all around, and his lips moved. One of his hands rose from the pavement and opened and closed. Was it his left hand? I can't remember, though it seemed somehow important that it did, and then it dropped and his eyes and mouth half-closed, all at the same time. I think that was when he died, but blood kept coming out of his chest. I never knew what happened to his gun.
The police were yelling at me, and I realized time had passed and I was still holding the pistol, so I shook it out of my hand, onto the street, and put my hands on top of my head. I couldn't make out what they were yelling, so I squeezed my eyes shut and stood there with my hands on my head, and then I could hear people again. They were telling the police what had happened, but the police shoved me to my knees and then to my face, right onto some blood. That scraped my cheek, which half brought me around, and I smelled the blood, but I hardly noticed when they cuffed me and hustled me to a van and drove me away.
*****
The Marion County prosecutor wanted to charge me with murder. There was a store's surveillance video, and two people had caught parts of it on their phones, so it was clear how it had gone down, but it was a racial issue, and I was a white guy, and it was Indy. The prosecutor insisted that even if the first shot or two were self-defense, all the rest were excessive and showed 'malice aforethought,' as he put it. Then they found my assault conviction from right next door in Carmel, the whole record, and they knew just how to frame it.
It didn't matter to me. Innocent or not, I'd killed him, a kid. Just a kid. The newspeople said he was seventeen and already had a record. Lafayette Johnson. His name was from where he was born, near the Purdue University campus, and his friends called him 'Laffy.' He'd moved to Indianapolis with his mom and had gotten involved in some bad stuff that didn't fit his nickname, and he got shot. I shot him.
My case didn't matter to me at all. I saw the kid's face in front of me when the keffiyeh dropped, that surprise, the bewilderment. He had a baby face that I saw each time I closed my eyes. It replaced the image of Mary Ann and her stupid fuck. And now the shakes wouldn't go away.
They wanted to remand me. The assistant prosecutor argued that I had a history of violence, and they couldn't let me out on the streets before my trial. I'd have accepted that if I'd had a say, but the judge at my arraignment was skeptical. He was chubby and balding, and his face looked like that of a guy who would be great reading Little Golden Books to the grandkids. Judge McGregor. His name fit, and I found he did have a grandfatherly voice, when he asked the assistant prosecutor, "Do you actually think you can get a jury of twelve good people and true to convict this man of
anything
?" It was a good problem and true for the city of Indianapolis, as the videos played on social media 24/7 and half of Indy was calling me a hero, including a large part of the black population, but the prosecutor insisted.
My jailors were kind and soft-spoken with me. I knew why, but I didn't understand how political my case was. There was a demonstration in favor of my release, down at the courthouse, and another one opposed to it, at city hall, and the city was afraid it could get messy. Lafayette and I even made cable news, where anyone could predict the positions of the talking heads at MSNBC and Fox News. Ultimately, the judge set my bail at one-hundred thousand dollars, and a couple of days later I was out.
I got out because the Peter-the-Hero crowd began a Go-Fund-Me campaign that brought in far more than was needed, I imagine most of it from right-wingers. I was being represented by a criminal-defense law office that someone else was paying for, and the Go-Fund-Me money kept pouring in. I still didn't care. There was an interview with Laffy's mother--they always kept it formal and called him 'Lafayette'--who said she'd tried to raise her son right and didn't know how this could have happened. I liked her and wanted to apologize. That night I sat in my cell with a blanket over my shoulders, shivering and saying, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Johnson," over and over. It got worse when my meds started to wear off.
But suddenly I was out, with my wallet and cell phone and car, everything but my pistol. There were dozens of voice mails and texts on my phone, a dozen of each from Mary Ann alone, about how worried she was for me, and how proud she was of me for defending myself, and how big a burden I was carrying, and how much she loved me, and how they wouldn't let her see me, and how I shouldn't be alone now, and to please call her when I got my phone back. She went on and on. For a slut wife, she was being as good as she could be. Yes, I knew she hoped to get me back. I'd hit her and she
still
wanted me back. I hadn't even apologized, and she wanted me back. I didn't call her. I'd thought I'd be a little better once I knew exactly what she'd done, but I wasn't. Her confession left me a lot to obsess about, and all I had room for were Laffy Johnson's uncomprehending eyes and his baby face. I blocked her number before I left the station.
There were a lot of rules about how far I could travel and how often I had to report, and I had to turn in my passport and such, but I could drive my own car. Someone had even washed and polished it for me. My attorneys wanted someone else to drive me because I was so wasted, but they'd had a psychiatrist evaluate me and he'd shrugged and said I was probably okay. I wanted to feel normal again, so I drove, but my hands shook on the steering wheel the entire way.
That didn't end the day. There were the news crews waiting for me at my apartment, which I imagine I should have expected. I said I wouldn't answer any questions without my attorney, and after hanging about a while, they left. Other people came by throughout the day. I yelled at some to leave and played possum until others gave up and left on their own. Everyone seemed to want to interview me, but finally
everyone
left, and that was my first time in days feeling truly alone.
I had a dream that night. Laffy Johnson was pointing his gun at me, and I shot him, but he turned into Mary Ann, who fell to the floor in the living room. That's when I awoke, sweating and shaking again. Maybe I'd killed her in my sleep! I had to make sure she was okay, so I started to call her. It was idiotic but I almost did it, to the point of clicking on her most recent call, but after thinking about it long enough I exited my phone app, took some extra meds, dressed, and went for a long walk through the night.
I needed to do something, anything, so I started trying to counsel people again the very next day. I couldn't just sit around. There was still about half my community service to do, and the licensing board had delayed my disciplinary hearing indefinitely, so I was available. Probation and Parole got me a client in the Hamilton County jail for that afternoon. The officer didn't want me there, but they had a backlog, and I was available, so she apparently decided 'what the hell?'
*****
"You look like crap." That was my prisoner-client, Robert Ostrowski. Bobby. We sat across from each other at a table in a little, windowless room, not as nice as my Hamilton County jail cell. He wasn't chained or anything, and he leaned forward on his elbows. He looked like a punk, his arms and neck covered in tattoos, dirty-blonde hair long and unwashed. He had a mustache and about a week's worth of whiskers. And frankly he
was
a punk, He was in for ignoring a domestic violence protective order while out on charges of battery and drug possession 'with intent.' They'd revoked his bail, and I was the perfect damned counselor for him. He was also the boyfriend of the woman who had come on to me at the Women's Center, who'd taken out the protective order on him in the first place, so they were more or less getting couples' counseling on the cheap. He'd seen me on the news and had taken a liking to me because I'd killed Laffy Johnson.
"You put six into him? All in the chest and belly?"
"You're the client. We talk about you, not me." I looked down at my hands, which were quivering again.
"Six shots. Sweet!"
He'd decided I wasn't The Man and that I was on his side and trustworthy. He pointed at my hands, which I was trying to control by clenching my fists and holding them in my lap. I told him, "I've had a bad week."
"They have you tranked?" I told him. He wasn't impressed. "Fuck. That shit's no good. I could tell you where you could get some stuff that would really help."
"I wouldn't even know what to ask for or what to do with it."
"There's this place right down on 106th Street. My friend Franklin stays there. Tell him I sent you and there won't be any problems." We went on with the counseling session, me playing it like a game and working like mad to hold myself together. I kept confusing Laffy's and Bobby's names, though they were like black and white. Exactly, in fact.
I turned my phone back on when I left the jail and unblocked Mary Ann's number. I'm not sure why, but it seemed wrong to leave her hanging. Anyway, there were three new voice mails from her, which I didn't listen to. 'Go away,' I thought. 'You're not my biggest problem.' Also, a text message: "Please let's talk." I replied to that one: "Leave me alone. I don't want to talk."
Then I drove down to 106th Street.
*****
