Silent Prey

one last time—a man is innocent until proven guilty—but he refused. They didn’t understand that. They thought it was another eccentricity, the plastic shoes with the seven-hundred-dollar suit. They didn’t know.
    Focus.
    Everyone was standing now, the crow-suit staring, the attorney pulling at his sleeve. And here was Raymond Shaltie . . .
    “On your feet,” Shaltie said sharply, leaning over him. Shaltie was a sheriff’s deputy, an overweight time-server in an ill-fitting gray uniform.
    “How long?” Bekker asked the attorney, looking up, struggling to get the words out, his tongue thick in his mouth.
    “Shhh . . .”
    The judge was talking, looking at them: “ . . . standing by, and if you leave your numbers with my office, we’ll get in touch as soon as we get word from the jury . . .”
    The attorney nodded, looking straight ahead. He wouldn’t meet Bekker’s eyes. Bekker had no chance. In his heart, the attorney didn’t want him to have a chance. Bekker was nuts. Bekker needed prison. Prison forever and several days more.
    “How long?” Bekker asked again. The judge had disappeared into her chambers. Like to get her, too.
    “Can’t tell. They’ll have to consider the separate counts,” the attorney said. He was court-appointed, needed the money. “We’ll come get you . . .”
    Pig’s eye, they would.
    “Let’s go,” said Shaltie. He took Bekker’s elbow, dughis fingertips into the nexus of nerves above Bekker’s elbow, an old jailer’s trick to establish dominance. Unknowingly, Shaltie did Bekker a favor. With the sudden sharp pulse of pain, Bekker snapped all the way back, quick and hard, like a handclap.
    His eyes flicked once around the room, his mind cold, its usual chaos squeezed into a high-pressure corner, wild thoughts raging like rats in a cage. Calculating. He put pain in his voice, a childlike plea: “I need to go . . . .”
    “Okay.” Shaltie nodded. Ray Shaltie wasn’t a bad man. He’d worked the courts for two decades, and the experience had mellowed him—allowed him to see the human side of even the worst of men. And Bekker was the worst of men.
    But Bekker was nevertheless human, Shaltie believed: He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.  . . . Bekker was a man gone wrong, but still a man. And in words that bubbled from his mouth in a whiny singsong, Bekker told Shaltie about his hemorrhoids. Jail food was bad for them, Bekker said. All cheese and bread and pasta. Not enough roughage. He had to go . . . .
    He always used the bathroom at noon, all through the twenty-one days of the trial. Raymond Shaltie sympathized: he’d had them himself. Shaltie took Bekker by the arm and led him past the now empty jury box, Bekker shuffling, childlike, eyes unfocused. At the door, Shaltie turned him—docile, quiet, apparently gone to another world—and put on the handcuffs and then the leg chains. Another deputy watched the process, and when Bekker was locked up, drifted away, thinking of lunch.
    “Gotta go,” Bekker said. His eyes turned up to Ray Shaltie.
    “You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Shaltie said. Shaltie’s tie had soup stains on it, and flakes of dandruff spottedhis shoulders: an oaf, Bekker thought. Shaltie led Bekker out of the courtroom, Bekker doing the jailhouse shuffle, his legs restricted to a thirty-inch stride. Behind the courtroom, a narrow hallway led to an internal stairway, and from there, to a holding cell. But to the left, through a service door, was a tiny employees-only men’s room, with a sink, a urinal, a single stall.
    Shaltie followed Bekker into the men’s room. “Now, you’re okay . . .” A warning in his voice. Ray Shaltie was too old to fight.
    “Yes,” Bekker said, his pale-blue eyes wandering in their sockets. Behind the wandering eyes, his mind was moving easily now, the adrenaline acting on his brain like a dose of the purest amphetamine. He turned, lifted his arms up and back, thrusting his wrists at Shaltie. Shaltie fitted the key, uncuffed the prisoner: Shaltie was breaking the rules, but a man can’t wipe himself if he’s wearing handcuffs. Besides, where would Bekker go, high up here in the government building, with the leg chains? He couldn’t run. And his wildly bearded face was, for the moment at least, the most recognizable face in the Cities.
    Bekker shuffled into the stall, shut the door, dropped his trousers, sat down. Eyes sharp now, focused.