While Justice Sleeps(4)
Her eyes widened. “I don’t know what—”
“Don’t lie to me!” he barked. “For God’s sake, be the last exemplar of honesty left in this house.” A cough rattled through him, and he bowed his head as his lungs struggled for air. “How did they turn you? A bribe or a threat? Did they use your husband?”
The flush turned pale and the nurse’s head hung slightly. “Thomas is in trouble again. They’re considering arresting him for some scam. He swears he didn’t do it,” she whispered. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“You had a choice, Nurse Lewis,” he corrected tersely. “You simply chose the living over the dead.”
“They want to know if you can do your job, sir. If you still have the capacity to function. That tantrum at the commencement didn’t help.”
“That was no tantrum, you silly cow! It was strategy. It’s all strategy. Opening move of the King’s Gambit! Every breath is a movement toward the endgame.” His eyes widened, and he shook his fist. “Did you tell them about my research? That I know what happened?”
Jamie frowned in genuine confusion. “Research? For the Court?”
“Of course for the Court! Why else would they have you here? I am a threat to national security, but one they can’t prove without admitting what they’ve done. So the White House trespasser sends in his carrier pigeons to watch me like a hawk. I know their secret!”
“Justice, you’re not making sense. Please, sit down.”
“I won’t sit, and I won’t be silenced!” The bellow carried an edge of hysteria. He thought again about his estranged son. “They can’t kill my boy with their lies!”
“No one is trying to kill Jared,” Jamie soothed, her hand stroking his stiffened back. “Please, Justice, calm down.”
“It’s a prisoner’s dilemma,” he whispered as his voice shook. “My son’s life for their defeat. But I’ve outsmarted them. Lasker-Bauer, which they will never suspect.”
“Lask Bauer? Who is he?”
“Not he, you simpleton. In the middle game, both bishops will die to save him. To save the endgame.”
“Who are the bishops?” Jamie frowned in confusion and gripped his shoulder. “Justice Wynn, who am I?”
“Leave me be!”
Jamie leaned closer and demanded, “Who am I?”
His eyes snapped to hers, his mind clearing. He snarled, “Someone I cannot trust. I can’t trust anyone anymore.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“Liar. You’re telling them I’m crazy. That I’m infirm. I am still strong, madam. Stronger than he is.” Still, agitation knotted his belly. If the call came on the right day, a day when he’d forgotten his plan, he might accept their demands and ruin everything he’d so carefully plotted.
Not yet. By God, not yet. Forcing his once-agile mind to focus, Justice Wynn summoned the thread of his conversation with Nurse Lewis. “Stop staring at me.”
“What were we talking about?”
“Before you admitted your perfidy, we were discussing the intellectual capacity of my law clerks, and I made a reference to a strategy beyond your grasp. And for the record, Ms. Keene is no better and no worse than the rest of her kind. Her sole differentiation is the glimmer of potential she tries to hide. Otherwise, she is as bright as one can expect given the utter absence of scholarship among her tutors.”
Jamie closed plump, steady fingers around Justice Wynn’s upper arm and steered him to the open door. “I thought she went to Yale? Isn’t that a good school?”
“A cesspool, just like Harvard, Stanford, or any other bastion of education in this end of days. A sea of sloppy thinking posing as legal education.” He stumbled and caught himself on the hallway wall. “No wonder lawyers want strict construction of the Constitution. Hell, that way, it’s already written down for their feeble minds.”
At the staircase, Jamie nudged him to the left. Wynn halted beneath a framed photo displaying a sweep of glacier, the blue vibrant and grand. Remembering their earlier exchange, he shook his head. “Knowing the law isn’t about the school. It’s about the mind. The heart. About understanding what the law intends as much as reading beneath what it says. Knowing how to find one’s way to the truth.” He breathed deep, resting more of his weight on Jamie’s sturdy frame, confident she’d hold.
He lifted his eyes to meet hers. Staring intently, he demanded, “Do you like Avery?”
She nodded hesitantly. “She’s impressive. Well-spoken.”
“That’s all you can say?”
With a shrug, Jamie countered, “Well, she has a bit of an attitude, if you ask me. Tough. Not like that charming Mr. Brewer. He’s going places. I can tell.”
“Brewer will build shallow empires,” Wynn snorted. “But Ms. Keene is a smart girl. Very smart. A bit preoccupied with proving herself, but she’s got a brain that she occasionally puts to use. Could be brilliant if she were a more precise thinker.”
“More precise?”
“Precise, Nurse. A condition you have yet to stumble into.” Forcing his spine erect, he yanked his hand free. “I’m not an invalid. I can take myself to bed. Get me those pills of poison they’ve told you to foist upon me.”