While Justice Sleeps
Stacey Abrams
To the ones who taught me to love a good story, my parents, Carolyn and Robert Abrams. To those who help me tell the new stories, my siblings, Andrea, Leslie, Richard, Walter, and Jeanine. And to my nephews and nieces, Jorden, Faith, Cameron, Riyan, Ayren, and Devin, whose stories are yet to be told.
Chess grips its exponent, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom and independence of even the strongest character cannot remain unaffected.
—attributed to albert einstein
PROLOGUE
Sunday, June 18
His brain died at 11:47 p.m.
At nine o’clock on Sunday night, Supreme Court justice Howard Wynn shifted testily in his favorite leather chair, the high-backed Chesterfield purportedly commissioned by Chief Justice William Howard Taft. The wide seat resembled a settee more than a chair, but the latter Howard appreciated the capacious width. Unlike the robust former president, Justice Wynn was built along trimmer lines, a sleek sloop to the fearsome cargo ship of a man who preceded him on the bench. But he enjoyed the chair for its unexpected utility. Extra space at his hip for the books he habitually tucked to his side, on the off chance the chosen tome for his nightly read bored him.
Howard Wynn did not suffer boredom or mediocrity well.
He felt equally dismissive of willful ignorance—his description of the modern press—and smug stupidity, his bon mot for politicians. To his mind, they were a gang of vapid and arrogant thugs all, who greedily snatched their information from one another like disappearing crumbs as society spiraled merrily toward hell. With the current crop of pundits, bureaucrats, and hired guns in charge, America was destined to repeat the cycles of intellectual torpor that toppled Rome and Greece and Mali and the Incas and every empire that stumbled into short-lived, debauched existence. Show man ignoble work and easy sex, and there went civilization.
“A righteous flood, that’s what we need,” he muttered into the dimly lit study. “Drown the bastards out.”
Behind him, a chessboard stood in mid-play, the antique wooden pieces beginning to attract particles of dust from disuse. Once, he’d played the game with a ferocity that rivaled that of grandmasters, a prodigy in his youth. Careful maneuvers and contemplations of endgames had been sufficient until he learned that he could do the same in real life, when his mind became destined for the law. The game in progress was with a man he’d never met, who lived half a world away. But even his new friend had deserted him to this last room of refuge.
The door to the study had been shut tight for hours, leaving him alone in his sanctuary. Beyond the study, an early summer storm rattled the windows. White flashed in the distance, and then came the inevitable bark of thunder. Wynn nodded in weary recognition of the tumult. To drown the thunder, he turned on the small television he kept in the room. As a rule, he despised the idiot box, but now he reluctantly acknowledged its utility. Tonight, it would tell him if he’d destroyed his life’s mission or saved it.
A commercial offered discount car insurance, followed by the opening graphics for a popular evening talk show of comedic and political invective. Wynn watched with hawkish eyes as the host wasted no time before launching his shtick. “And earlier today…the epic meltdown at American University by Justice Howard Wynn…or, perhaps he should be called Justice ‘Where the Hell Am I?’?”
The studio audience roared with laughter as the screen flickered to a shot of Wynn speaking that afternoon at the university’s commencement ceremony. He’d done this countless times, offering pithy lies about the promise of the next generation. The clip caught him as he leaned over the podium, clad in his academic regalia—simply another meaningless black robe. A tight shot of his face flashed on-screen, mouth sneering.
“Science is the greatest trick the Devil ever played on man!” he pronounced to the undergraduates squirming uncomfortably in their metal chairs. The man he watched on-screen lifted his fist in anger. “He let us believe we could control our destiny, but we’ve only built our demise. Breaking the laws of nature to construct a shrine to Satan’s handiwork. We must be stopped!”
The television screen filled to frame a shot of a stone-faced Brandon Stokes, the president of the United States, staring stoically ahead as Justice Wynn raged on. The graduation of the president’s youngest daughter had brought him to the festivities, and he’d graciously agreed to share the podium with the jurist who reveled in swatting down his initiatives and eviscerating the laws signed by his administration. The animus between the men had been the source of great debate at the college—one brought to a head by Zoe Stokes’s unexpected early graduation, fulfilled by a recalculation of her study-abroad hours. With the invitation to the Supreme Court justice already accepted, the college had no graceful way to rescind his speaking engagement.
Wynn stared at the crowd, his face frozen in irascibility. In the next image, clearly realizing her grave error, the college’s president warily approached from the side of the podium, extending her hand in the universal gesture of nice doggy. Her voice was faint but clearly heard by the cameraman. “Justice Wynn? Are you okay?”
Wynn spun around and swatted at the proffered hand, his voice dismissive. “Of course I’m not. I’m trying to warn you of the coming apocalypse, and you want me to tell these children that the world awaits them. What waits is death. It will come for the others first, but the Devil will have his due.”