Authors: Ben Bequer
Fast forward two years (two good, successful years,) and I would need my attorney’s services in a different way, as Atmosphero came knocking. For a special prize, I got a one way trip to the L.A. County lockup to one of the special holding cells that sported a power dampening field. I didn’t know where they had the device hidden, but I could feel the waves undulating through the room, through my body, ripping at my insides. It was like having your testicles removed with a pair of pliers, like someone boring through your guts with their bare hands without anesthesia. And at the same time it was draining, exhausting, like at the end of a marathon, that almost drowsy euphoria that threatens to wash over like a wave on the ocean.
Then there were my actual injuries. My body was enhanced, genetically or otherwise, and I could take a beating, but Atmosphero had spent his time with my unconscious form, leaving warm, lumpy bruises and dried, flaky blood coating my face, which was a swollen, bulbous mess. My chest ached with every breath and my midsection felt as if on fire, and that was before they threw me under the dampeners. My left arm was near broken, and my right knee felt dislocated but despite all the injuries, they weren’t going to bother with medical attention or due process.
I was a villain, I got what I deserved.
* * *
“Quit glaring at the judge,” my attorney told me for the third time, but I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I must have been doing it inadvertently. I’d been in jail a month. I wanted to hate someone.
My lawyer was called Sandy Hamlin, but he was known as “The Killer” and Serpentis said I was lucky to have him. The world according to Sandy was all wine and roses, and in his professional opinion, there was no chance I was going to jail.
It was easy for him to be so calm, so damned smug. The guy was rolling in money, wearing a $10,000 Fioravanti custom-made suit and Berluti shoes that go for a thousand a pop. I couldn’t see his belt, but I bet it was worth more than every last red cent I had left, after Atmosphero blew up my house, car, and the stash of money I had hidden in the attic.
I didn’t know how I was going to pay for his services, since they ran $1,000 an hour, and even though he kept telling me, “don’t sweat it, kid,” I had plenty to worry about. The money I had went to buying that house, all my furniture, my collection of Disney movies, and the Bentley Mulsanne that Atmosphero rolled down the hill as he was leaving, a goodbye present. It was all gone.
Across the aisle, the prosecution attorney beamed with confidence. And he had a flock of a dozen assistants and helpers preparing all his papers.
Sandy was all by himself.
A month had passed since the Atmo beating, and we were before the judge on a hearing about Sandy’s motion to dismiss, a motion that in theory would send me home this very day. Except Sandy wasn’t talking. Instead of even focusing on the case, he was doodling a picture of me in full Blackjack costume, while at the same time doing something weird with his mouth and lips as if they were part of the drawing process. Sandy wasn’t a half-bad artist, truth be told, but the quality of his drawing didn’t ease my nerves, or settle the burning anger in my belly. The fact that he was drawing Blackjack, right in front of the court, a few yards from the prosecutor’s buzzing hive belied either a lasses-faire attitude about my plight where he was happy to collect as much as he could until my inevitable incarceration, or he was openly mocking the proceedings, which I’m sure would bode well for me when the time would come for the Judge to decide on the motion.
“Dude,” he said, noting my anxious demeanor. “Will you relax?”
The prosecution attorney wasn’t a local, D.A., and neither was the judge a local guy, even though they were borrowing a run of the mill court room in downtown Los Angeles. No, these guys were big time, sent across the country to deal with villains like me.
Aaron Blackwell served the National Supers Agency, a small division of the Department of Homeland Security, specifically designed to handle super-powered beings and their activities. This guy bounced around the country prosecuting idiots like me that got caught breaking the law.
Blackwell, as a strategy, referred to me only as “Blackjack” drawing a smile from the corners of my face every time I heard the word, as did the hard swallowing apprehension of any person in the gallery I was fortunate to have eye contact with. Blackjack was responsible for all my successes; he was the reason for this whole proceeding, for the disapproving eyes, and the frightened glances. He was the only thing I had going.
“I’m hoping Atmosphero shows,” I said, more menace in my voice than I realized.
Sandy laughed, “What, you’re gonna throw down right here? That might go bad for us with you wearing those things,” he motioned to the power dampener collar and bracers that generated a localized pulse wave denying me access to my powers, in my case my amazing strength, at the cost of terrible nausea and disorientation. If Atmo showed, though, not these bracers, or a dozen other supers would stop me from ripping his spinal cord out of his asshole.
“Anyway,” he continued, “the guy’s not coming. They never come. Hell, he’s gonna be your best friend after today is through. You watch.”
“I doubt that.”
Trust Sandy, Serpentis had told me, and I would have if the guy seemed more capable. In the dozen or so talks on the phone we’d had since I had retained him, it always felt like he was having six conversations at once and I was always the least important on the list. I had paid the guy a hundred thousand dollar retainer, and now I was at his mercy.
I hadn’t endured all the bullshit life had thrown my way to end up in jail. Not like this, not with all the plans I had, all the ideas yet to be realized. Besides, I had only been at this a couple of years now, things were just getting started.
Blackwell rose from the prosecution’s table and took a handful of documents to the judge, no doubt arrest reports and the like, while one of his assistants brought over a corresponding copy for Sandy, who barely bothered to glance at it.
“What’s that?” I asked, not really curious, but trying to lose some of the anxiety that was twisting me into knots.
Sandy looked at it again, said; “It’s their proposed witness list,” and tossed it aside, not caring to either divulge the details or go to the trouble of finding out.
I picked up the document and read it, catching Sandy’s attention, as if he thought I couldn’t read. Yeah, the ape villain was trying to comprehend the hard writing stuff, he must have thought, but I had an IQ probably fifty points higher than his, and if not for some…difficulties…I’d be sporting multiple Master’s in Chemistry, Engineering and Physics, from Cal Tech, as if they could have quenched my overwhelming thirst for knowledge.
If it was worth knowing, I had to study the thing, learn every aspect of it, and master it. It was O.C.D. behavior, for certain, but it allowed me a level of concentration that was uncanny. When combined with my advanced genetics, it meant I was a roving encyclopedia of the obscure and complex. For example, the previous summer I had gone to an art gallery, casing it for a potential job, when it struck me to know as much possible about art. A few days raiding the internet, and visiting a few local libraries later and I could tell you the difference between Cézanne’s post-Impressionistic sensibility and Jackson Pollock’s volatile abstract expressionism. Hell, I was probably the World’s foremost authority on the subject.
I smiled after getting quick look at the prosecution’s witness list because the first name was the most familiar.
“Let me see that,” Sandy said, ripping the document from my hands and giving it another, more serious, look.
“Who’s Doreen Wellington?” he asked, looking at the name of the person deposed. “And who’s Emmet Wellington,” he continued after turning through the pages. “Who’re the Wellingtons?”
I smiled, “Don’t ask,” I said.
“Hang on a second. Who’s the attorney here?”
I nodded, motioning to him.
“That’s right. So allow me to determine whether something’s important or not. Is that ok with you?”
I would have laughed if I wasn’t so nervous, but watching Sandy, who was maybe a foot shorter than I, butch up and stand up to me made my day.
“So who are these people?” he pressed.
“Doreen Wellington was my step-mother,” I told him. “Emmet Wellington was her piece of shit brother. They’re the wonderful pair that raised me from the time my father died, when I was thirteen, until I ran away. If you want to blame someone for everything, blame them,” I added, laughing.
But I didn’t blame them. I wasn’t crying and bellyaching about my horrible childhood to anyone. There was only one person that had made all the choices in my life, and I took responsibility for it all.
He looked at me, dumbfounded, and back at the deposition, then shrugged and tossed it aside, not caring about the document any further, nor, I could tell, wanting to find out more about my fractured family life, or the beatings I received as a child my brutal alcoholic step-uncle, Emmet. I didn’t expect Sandy to care; it was real and ugly.
Sandy returned to his doodling, as Blackwell came back to the prosecution’s table. He managed to argue his points against our motion to dismiss, while at the same time effortlessly wading through the mountain of paperwork to find a specific document, handing it to the Judge. Blackwell was a tall guy, though tiny next to me, and in reasonable shape. The guy did Muay Thai, Pilates, or Yoga, with a slim and athletic build, proud of how well his suit fit.
They had two dozen boxes of documents, filled with their case against me, which constituted over a hundred charges ranging from felony armed robbery, arson, extortion, destruction of private property and, of course, assault and battery. A mountain of paperwork, designed to bring me to justice. On my side, I had Sandy, with his yellow pad and a sketch of me in full costume firing arrows while flipping upside down, all done with a rather intense glare peering from beneath my cowl. It was pretty impressive, though I never recall doing a back flip in the middle of a street like Sandy had me doing. A guy my size didn’t flip much.
Blackwell started reading the list of charges, one by one, making a big deal of the whole thing, and as he started, Sandy let out a slight chuckle.
It wasn’t pretty a pretty thing, smeared in my face like that, all at once, and they had pretty much everything. In truth, the crimes weren’t that hard to figure out, to compile into one mass lump against me. They all involved a big guy, running around with a black hooded cape and a bow, firing explosive arrows all over the place. Blackwell continued into some of the more recent stuff, and I noticed Sandy’s expression change. He stood, instinctually.
“Judge,” he began. “Defendant is willing to stipulate to the entire list of charges.”
This halted Blackwell mid-sentence, which was not something he was used to, nor according to his sudden shock and surprise, something he enjoyed. The first natural reaction was a strange, bewildered face accompanied with a pleading chortle, directed at the Judge, but he quickly composed himself.
“Judge, I do believe it is within the purview of the prosecution to read the list of charges to the accused. Unless your honor has any objections, of course,” he added, skillfully massaging the Judge’s ego, drawing a slight shrug from the elderly judge that Sandy immediately understood as defeat, and Blackwell as victory.
After a moment to find his place, the prosecutor continued down the list and that funny look returned to Sandy’s face, a mixture of concern, displeasure and disgust. He tapped the pencil’s eraser end against his cheek, watching me as each new count was read and shook his head.
“What’s with all this stuff?” he asked, because the crimes Blackwell was now rattling off were nothing like the prior bank and armored car jobs, jewelry exchanges and fund brokerage robberies. This ‘stuff’ was wasn’t the usual thing I was known for. It was more personal, and he didn’t know about it because he didn’t have to.
“Additionally, the defendant is charged with four counts of arson, seventeen counts of destruction of private property, breaking and entering into a Federal Facility, violation of four counts of the Patriot Act and two charges of Treason, for the March 25th destruction of several facilities at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” Blackwell continued, and quickly moved on to another individual crime on his list, while tacking on charge after charge.
“He’s making shit up,” I told Sandy, not bothering to make eye contact.
“You’re freelancing on me? I’ll fucking walk right now, man. I won’t even ask for permission from the judge. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really care what it is. But if you did it, and they know, then I have to know. It’s not fucking rocket science, and you know rocket science, right? I mean, I’m defending you here,” he said, as if we were on the same team.
In a manner of speaking we were. Sandy wasn’t just “The Killer”, attorney to super villains, he actually acted more like an agent, and making sure we kept busy. Since he knew everyone, and everything that was happening, Sandy was in the unique position of being able to direct people to jobs that needed doing, much bigger jobs than the crap I had been doing, stuff that would make my financial situation liquid, so I would no longer be a hack suffering from hand and mouth. In that respect, he was the most important person in my life, but since I was so new, since I hadn’t really distinguished myself, Sandy never bothered with me, he never put me out there.