States of Grace by Mandy Miller (great novels of all time .TXT) 📗

Beep, beep, beep.

The deputy points at my feet, meaning, do my shoes have a metal shank in them? I shake my head and raise my pant leg to show him Oscar. He hesitates for a second before waving me through. Soon enough, folks here will catch on. It’s just that they still remember me in my old incarnation. Sky high heels. Ego to match. Neither applicable now.

“Hello there, stranger,” the deputy says, a tall man with a gray buzz cut and a warm smile.

“Deputy, deputy…” I say, as he hands me my possessions, racking my brain for his name.

“Tanner’s still the name. And I assume Locke’s still yours?”

I feel a blush blooming on my cheeks. Tanner’s been a fixture at the main entrance for almost as long as I’ve been alive. “Deputy Tanner, of course.”

Despite being on in years, Tanner still has the tight muscled physique that announces mess with me at your own risk. Never once did I see his polite manner fail him, not even when things got heated with people pushing and shoving to get to court on time, but he had no qualms about extracting the nightstick from his gun belt, although he never used it.

As I’m about to step away, Tanner puts an arm in front of me, stopping my forward progress. I brace myself, primed as I am to read trouble into even the most innocent of acts, but he stoops to my height and whispers in my ear. “Don’t let the turkeys get you down. If I had a dollar for every lawyer and judge in this building that’s been popped on a DUI, I’d already be living lavida up in Panama City Beach, if you know what I mean.” He stands back. “Glad you’re back, Counselor.”

A sense of well-being washes over me. I give Tanner a thumbs up, struck as I always am, that so many of the people who work in this place, a cauldron of misery and loss, can be so kind, so civil, as if exaggerated humanity is the antidote to all the evil and hopelessness on display within its walls. I hope one day, I too will be forgiven, able to see the bigger picture again, be part of the collective effort to rise above the grimness. But for now, I feel like a spotlight is trained on me, and only me, even though I’m just one of hundreds trying to get to court on time to do her job.

Chapter 14

The ancient elevator lurches its way up to the third floor, the transit point to the new wing of the courthouse. The old wing has nine floors, the penthouse having been the county jail years ago, back before incarceration became an industry. The old wing has a musty smell due to the fact that there’s mold in every nook and cranny, which has led to a slew of lawsuits. One was brought by a judge who claimed the mold caused her to develop an autoimmune disorder, although those who endured her tirades speculate it was her noxious soul that made her sick. Whatever it was, she died soon after she filed the suit, and the mold continues to grow unabated.

I cross the bridge to the new wing, a modern glass-and-steel structure housing the criminal divisions. The courtrooms in this part of the complex were designed to be large enough to keep the judges at more than striking distance from the defendants, and decorated in neutral tones, a doomed attempt to project a sense of calm, a mood not often on display in an environment where freedom is currency and life is cheap.

I squeeze through the morning crush, staring down a few double takes from former colleagues and adversaries. No way they expected to see me back in this building today, or any other day for that matter.

The thought tickles me a little and I feel, what? A little bold? Perhaps a little badass? Maybe I can come back?

As a child, the admonition, “No you can’t,” always baited my inner devil. Like the time my mother insisted, “No, you can’t play on the boys’ hockey team, dear. Perhaps, you should consider ballet.” Ballet my ass. I strapped on the goalie’s pads for what ended up being three winning seasons and two missing front teeth. Or the time my father said, “No, you can’t enlist in the Army, Grace, dear. Ivy League graduates don’t enlist in the Army. They run the Army.” I signed up anyway. Two tours of duty and one accurate IED later, and I still deny foolhardiness had anything to do with my decision.

On automatic pilot, I find myself in front of Room 5800, Judge Twietmeyer’s courtroom, and barrel through the two sets of doors designed to keep the hallway noise out and the court’s business in. I head into the well, taking in the veritable cornucopia of humanity. Not one empty seat in the gallery. Worried family members, friends, and maybe even enemies, sit side by side. A rabbi in the front row hunches beside a guy in a leather biker vest who, apparently, finds it difficult to say no to tattoo artists. The back row is lined with cops. There are the obligatory girlfriends in stripper heels and tube tops, court being the only place they can see their men without a glass partition in between. An old woman fingers worry beads as the crackhead next to her picks at track marks like a nautical chart on his forearm.

A chain gang of inmates shuffles in from the holding cells, the singular scent of fear wafting off their soiled jumpsuits.

Oh, how I’ve missed the smell of crime in the morning.

I drop my briefcase on the only empty seat behind the defense table around which State and defense lawyers are going at it hammer and tongs, horse-trading the futures of the accused. The clerk, chewing gum in a way that says, Been there, done that, nothing new under the sun, is