Her biggest worry though, on the home front at least, was the cats. “We think they’re still around,” Vincent said when she asked. “Something’s been coming in to eat their food anyhow, but if it’s them they won’t show hide or hair for us.”
Elena’s head began to sink with a look of despair. “What is it?” Rosemary asked.
“I’m all alone here. I can’t live alone.” Vincent and Rosemary got the sense that she really might not be able to do this herself.
“We’ll take you to visit Randy tomorrow, ‘kay?” Vincent said. “And I’ll spend the night in the motorhome. You’re not gonna be alone.”
* * *
After Rosemary went home, and Vincent retired to the motorhome, Elena spent some time calling the cats before giving up and going to bed. Sleep wasn’t going to come easily, because she couldn’t feel safe anymore. She looked at the wall panels that had been pried open and then nailed back shut, and the photos of her and Randy that they had torn off the wall. There were people who could come here in the night and there was nothing she could do to stop them. Not only that, Randy wasn’t here to stop them anymore either. They’d taken him away from her, over a fight they had started themselves.
She thought about whether she could handle the responsibilities of life without him. She had never carried such a weight before in her life. But Randy had been right about this too. The property was paid off, and the bills weren’t more than she could afford. Other than coping with her fear of being alone, there wasn’t really that much to it, once she got the hang of it. She decided she’d have to knuckle down and do it, because for her to lose everything Randy had given her would break his heart.
Her heart jumped as she heard a sound out in the hallway. Was that Vincent? The sound moved closer, and then it began to sound familiar as it slithered through the hole Randy had cut in the bottom of the bedroom door. Then she felt something land on the foot of the bed and she turned on the lamp.
Kemo was sitting there, and she didn’t look good. There was a gash on the side of her neck that had begun to heal, and some other bite marks. A second later, Ninja jumped up and sat beside the other cat. Ninja had some claw marks too, but Kemo had gotten the worst of it by far. That was odd because Ninja was the one who wanted to play with everything in sight, including the dangerous critters. Kemo knew better, and she wasn’t interested in socializing with other critters anyhow, which meant she could only have gotten hurt like that while protecting Ninja. This was undoubtedly the age of looking out for one another.
She put her arms out to them. “Come here babies,” she said, and they came to her. She’d have to get them to the vet first thing in the morning, but at least she could sleep now. Finally, something had gone right.
* * *
Vincent drove Elena to the jail in the afternoon to see Randy, but he stayed in the waiting area while she went ahead. He’d been there himself already, and this was to be their visit. Elena checked in at the desk, emptied her pockets, and then they gave her a key to take down the hall to a row of doors. She opened one, and went inside the booth. There, she had to wait a few minutes because of the assistance Randy needed. But then, though she was horrified to see him in a wheelchair, she saw his face on the other side. He smiled with joy at seeing her, and everything felt almost okay again. He was wheeled into the booth and the door closed behind him. They picked up their phone receivers.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Randy began.
“Hey baby. How they treating you?”
“Like shit. But they paid for the privilege, didn’t they?”
Elena smiled. “I just got home yesterday.”
“I don’t want to know what it’s like…”
“It’s not that bad. Vincent and Rosemary fixed most of the damage, so it looks okay, other than the safe being cut in half.”
“What about the kids?”
”They came home last night. They’re a little messed up but they’ll be okay.” Randy breathed a huge sigh of relief. “How about you?” she asked.
“Well, chances are decent that I’ll walk again to some degree anyhow,” he replied.
“How about…”
“Still works.” Elena breathed her own big sigh of relief. “But if we ever get the chance again, odds are that you’ll be doing most of the work,” he said. Elena was perfectly fine with that.
“So what’s your lawyer saying?” she asked.
“Well, he’s got some ideas on how to fight this. He wants me to see a couple of shrinks, so we can try to play the angle that the police drove my paranoia level too high by their own actions.”
“What do you think of that?”
“I have a little different idea,” he said as Elena listened closely. “Even if he is able to get me out of the death penalty, my life is over. I can’t ever come home to you again. So I’m thinking, plead guilty, get the death penalty, skip all the drama and be done with this as fast as possible.”
Elena threw the receiver against the shatterproof glass. Then she stood up and turned away with tears of rage on her cheeks. Randy shouted from the other side of the glass, but she couldn’t hear. Finally she sat back down and picked the receiver back up. Thankfully it wasn’t broken.
“Elena, there’s nothing left to fight for!” Randy tried to tell her.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you the man I married? Are you the man who told me that I have a place in this world, and that I have to justify it?” Randy was taken aback. He hadn’t seen this side of her since the roadblock incident. “If what you did wasn’t wrong, then why would you say that it was? This is your life now. This is the job you bought into, and you have to see it through or this has all happened for nothing.” Elena fought to steady her voice. “You’re going on trial Randy, and you have to tell people why it is that what you did was the right thing.”
“Elena, the system is rigged. We’re going to lose no matter what.”
“Fuck the system, and fuck winning. You’ll lose the case, but you’ll keep your good name. And I’ll keep mine.”
Randy had already heard a similar message from a wise physician, and he tended to share that view himself, but he was tired of fighting and was beginning to hope for an easy out. The woman he loved wasn’t going to give him one though.
* * *
Elena came back out to the waiting area where Vincent was. He stood up and they started down the long hallway to the exit together. “What’d you talk about?” he asked.
“His trial.”
“How you feeling about that?”
“It’s going to be one fuck of a good show.”
Chapter 18
Trial of the Millennium
For the first time in many months, Randy woke up with a measure of anticipation mixed in with his dread. His name had been dragged through the proverbial mud and raked over the proverbial coals for a very long time, and this was the day he began returning the favor.
* * *
“I think we could do pretty well, if you would follow my approach.” Brett Milner, the court-appointed attorney, had found a dream client in Randy, but he wasn’t enjoying the job nearly as much as he should have been. Randy had his own ideas for conducting his defense, and attorneys don’t like being told how to do their job any more than anyone else does. “We could whittle your sentence down to some time in prison, some time in Western State, and quite possibly we can get you out while you’re still young enough to get your dick hard. You need to consider this,” he said.
Randy was considering it, as he had been doing frequently for months. He could be out while there was still a little bit of life to be lived. He had little doubt that Elena would be waiting. Would that not be the best thing to do for her? Give her something to live for, some thread of hope to hang on for, even if it was a long way down the road?
“It would mean admitting to them that I’m a paranoid nutjob,” Randy said.
“The actual terminology involved is a bit more couth than that.”
“In the court of law, yes, in the court of public opinion, not so much,” Randy replied. “This would also mean admitting that the Forest Hill Police did nothing to bring about what happened.”
“We can color their actions as having fueled your paranoia, but what the court and the jury will want to see before considering leniency is contrition. That only happens when you take the blame, at least for your own part in what happened, and not when you heap it on everyone else.”
Randy had been questioning the court’s choice of lawyers for him ever since the voir dire process of jury selection. He had done jury duty himself once before. During that experience he had been amazed by the malleability of the minds that can be found on a jury. Some people in jury pools come to the courtroom with their minds made up about the case, and they typically get excused. Others, many others, come with their own opinions of varying sorts, but in the end will believe pretty much whatever they’re told. Those are the ones who are selected with the greatest frequency. Real critical thinkers are the rarest breed of juror who actually gets selected.
During jury selection for Randy’s trial, Brett had been just a bit too accommodating to the prosecution’s desire for that second type of juror. Randy wanted people with strong opinions, whatever they might be. Those are the people who are willing to ask the hard questions and demand real answers. They’re the ones who will vote against the crowd and stand by their choice. They were also the people who would have best identified with Randy’s admittedly black-and-white views. But Brett seemed to believe that malleability would work in their favor. Maybe it would have, if Randy considered his approach to be a viable one.
“Brett,” Randy began, “we’ve had this talk many times, so I’ll break it down. There are people, including my wife, who are looking to me to do what needs to be done, because nobody else will. What needs to be done is for the truth to be told, and I will not defend myself with anything else other than the truth.”
“And that truth is?”
“That this needed to happen.”
Brett looked down at his stack of paperwork and sighed. “That truth is what you’ll be standing on when they put the rope around your neck. But I’ll do the best I can with it.”
* * *
As the early phases of the trial progressed, the prosecution had been running amok. They had heavily researched Randy’s past blog postings, online comments, and other writings. They had a stack of photographs of Randy’s weapons, cases of ammunition, and tactical gear. He had brought out all the experts from the Sheriff’s Office and State Patrol who had examined evidence.
There was also the fact that Randy had once killed a man on his property. However justified it may have been at the time, it wasn’t helpful now. And every little thing about him had been misrepresented in ways Bill Clinton couldn’t get away with.
Now it was Randy’s turn to fire back, and he wanted to start it off properly. “The defense calls Randolph Gustin to the stand,” Brett announced to the courtroom. The gasp in the room was collective and huge. Such a move was legal suicide, if not actual suicide. As Elena watched from the front row immediately behind him, Randy stood with the help of his walker and made his way to the stand. He sat down and was sworn in.
“Mister Gustin,” Brett began, “you’ve elected to take the stand early in the trial.”
“I have.”
“And did you do so against my advice?”
“I most certainly did.”
“Would you tell us the reason for that?”
“I see nothing to be gained here by playing games of legal strategy. With my actions I made a statement. Now it is incumbent upon me to explain what I did and why I did it. I intend to do so very candidly, and the only thing I want in exchange for that is the same candor from the people I bring up here to question.” Randy knew what the chances of that happening were, but he also knew it couldn’t hurt for the jury to see the difference between plain speaking and smarminess.
Brett continued his questioning. “I realize there was a lot of buildup that led to this episode, but I’d like to begin with the night the first shots were fired. Would you describe in your own words what happened?”
“I was pulled over by Officer Zachary Simmons,” Randy began. Then, moment by moment, he recounted the tale of how the young officer had tried to cajole him into making threatening moves. He described how, after failing at that, the officer had tried to shoot him in his seat, fully intending to dig up his own gun afterward to plant on him. He told of how after he had disarmed the first cop, he was charged by a second one, and threatened with being shot with the first cop’s backup weapon.
He then told about how he had shot them both.
At that point, Brett turned it over to the prosecutor to cross-examine him. That was the way Randy wanted it, because he had a pretty good idea what would be asked, and it was the prosecutor he wanted to drop these answers on.
“Mister Gustin,” the prosecutor began, “You stated that you disarmed Officer Simmons and held his own weapon on him.”
“That’s correct.”
“Why then was it necessary to shoot him?”
“The policy of almost every department is that if a weapon is pointed at another officer, they have no choice, they must shoot.”
“And that meant you were imminently about to be shot by Sergeant Sylvester Frawley?”
“Correct again.”
“Yet you shot Simmons first. Exactly how do you justify that?”
“He had a backup weapon. If I had turned the weapon I was holding away from him, I’d have been pointing it at Frawley, and department policy would then have left Simmons with no choice but to shoot me for that,” Randy replied. “Even though they initiated the attack, or at least Simmons did, the fact that I took protective measures left them with no alternative but to kill me, according to their policies. So I quickly formulated a similar policy of my own.”
“What policy is that?”
“Neither compliance or not being a real threat worked to save Niles Meservey, or Wayne Scott Creach, or John T. Williams, and it wasn’t working to save me either. So my new policy is, that if I believe my death or the death of another innocent person at the hands of a law enforcement officer is likely to be imminent, and without justification, then I have no choice, I must shoot.”
The anger at that statement from the cops who were sitting in the courtroom was quite palpable.
* * *
Randy had gone on to talk further about justifications, and this time he used the most recent high-profile case of Ian Birk as his example. He told of how Birk had walked to within ten feet of John T. Williams, and then claimed his close proximity as a justification. He told of how Birk had claimed to see such “pre-attack indicators” as a set jaw and stern expression. No one else had seen those things, but he had cited them as justifications anyways. Randy also brought up an instance of his own when he had placed his hands on the steering wheel during a stop, and the cop had written in his report later that Randy had “gripped the wheel with an icy, steely glare…” It was sad but true, he noted, that there was simply nothing one could do that they would not somehow construe as a threat. And it was finally coming back to bite them.
Now that court was out again, he sat in the small visiting room where he and his attorney were allowed to meet in private. “You’ve done a pretty good job,” Brett said to Randy, “of justifying the first two.
“Well, at least that’s a start.”
“You’re not going to do so well after this point though, because of a couple of things. First is the number of people, especially jurors, who will give cops the benefit of the doubt no matter what. Second, there’s no real reason you couldn’t have surrendered after that first incident.”
“Is that what you really believe?”
“I’m sorry, but it is. You can’t justify killing people who aren’t actively threatening you, and you shouldn’t try to. The jury will turn on you if you do.”
“This isn?
??t about the jury, remember?”
“From my perspective, it is.” That was the crux of their disagreement. Lawyers are tacticians, and their scorecards are made up of wins and losses. Losing on principle isn’t in their DNA, and there’s a reason for that. People who shell out money for lawyers are typically most interested in winning.
Randy thought hard about what his answer should be. “Brett, I want to thank you for all you’ve done,” he said. “But you’re fired.”
* * *
“I call Officer Robin Frisk to the stand.” Randy made the announcement, and it was Burt who personally wheeled her to the stand and helped her into the chair. He gave Randy a friendly little smirk as he returned to his seat.
Randy stood with the help of his walker and approached the stand, as Robin’s expression of hatred returned. He spoke softly. “Officer Frisk, how’s your recovery coming?”
“How is that any of your business?”
“It’s not, I just wanted to know. But that doesn’t mean you have to tell me.” Randy took a step back from the stand to give her the space she clearly wanted. “I’d like to talk about the shooting of Arnold McCaslin that took place here in Forest Hill several years ago.”
“Objection, your honor,” the prosecutor said. “This bears no relevance to the current case.”
“Your honor, it is very relevant and very important to understand how a police department responds internally to an officer involved shooting.”
“Very well,” the judge said. “Overruled, for now.”
Randy went on with his questioning. “Were you with the department at that time?”
“I was. Had been for a few years.”
“Do you remember how you first found out about the incident?”
“I was working the swingshift, and this happened on days. The first I heard of it was on the radio while I was on the way to work that night.”