That night in their hotel room Toni Loam and Sovereign James had sex again and again without condoms or any other form of birth control. They hadn’t talked about the trial or the low bail set by Judge Lowell. They hadn’t worried about conviction. Sex was the only thing they were interested in.
They fucked and then had room service, fucked and fell asleep. They woke up and rolled around with such abandon that they fell off the bed laughing and fucking.
It wasn’t until three thirty that morning that they woke up and started to talk.
“I don’t know, Sovy,” Toni said.
“You don’t know what?” He kissed her left shoulder and she shuddered.
“How did we get here?”
“This hotel?”
“Standin’ trial, and you got the government on you too. Lem is in the hospital and might not ever wake up. And here we are fuckin’ our brains out like we don’t have a care in the world.”
“Better that than worrying about things we can’t change. The government doesn’t know where I am right now, and we have a good chance of being found innocent.”
“But I’m not innocent,” Toni said. “I brought Lem up there. And ’cause you came in one or the other of you was gonna get killed. That’s on me.”
Sovereign could hear the pain in her voice, see it in her face and hand gestures.
“But what if you were Lem’s father?” he asked.
“What you mean?”
“Wouldn’t his father tell him that he had no business up in my house? Wouldn’t he tell him that it was a coward who’d attack a blind man with a club?”
“Maybe.”
“And me,” Sovereign continued. “I’m the one who beat him. I was blind and then blinded by rage, but still, I didn’t have to punish him like that.”
“But you did.”
“We all did something wrong, Toni. We all did. Not one of us is innocent. We should have known better. We will the next time.”
Sovereign looked over at the girl. She was asleep just that quickly.
The trial took four and a half weeks. Every morning the couple appeared at the nondescript building on Lafayette and listened to witnesses being questioned and cross-examined: doormen and Red Rover limousine drivers; doctors Seth Offeran and Thomas Katz; nurses, waitresses, and some people whom Sovereign had never met.
A woman who lived in his neighborhood testified that Sovereign had changed his direction seemingly to avoid a dog that wasn’t on a chain. And then there was the paramedic who brought James to the hospital after Johnson had attacked him the first time.
“They told me that he was blind,” Rosa Lopez said. She had copper skin and plum-colored freckles. “But when I was reaching back and forth over his head for the oxygen mask, he swayed as if he was watchin’ what I was doing.”
Both sides had experts who did their best to negate the others’ claims. Testimony was long and tedious, repetitious and, often, needlessly specific — at least, that was what Sovereign thought.
The ex — HR manager wondered how such bland discussion could end up in prison sentences. There were people dying in wars, suffering from famine, and here he sat with a roomful of professionals asking questions like was sight associated with a sound, did he move his head every time, and how long ago did you witness this behavior?
“Why does a old man like you always have his dick so hard?” Toni complained one afternoon when court had been let out early. They’d just finished with a room-service meal.
“Because I look at you and come alive,” Sovereign said.
“You been alive for fifty years.”
“I wish. But you know, I feel like I die every day in that fake courtroom. It’s like they bunged me up in a coffin and I’m lyin’ there waiting for the gravediggers to finish before they can lay me to rest.”
Toni grinned and shrugged off the one-piece ochre dress that Sovereign loved.
“You so funny,” she said. “Gimme that dick here.”
She reached out and tugged on him. He grunted and touched her cheek.
That was when the phone rang.
“You gonna answer it?” Toni asked.
“I’m kinda busy.”
“It might be about the trial.”
Toni held on to the erection while Sovereign answered.
“Hello,” he said, stifling a moan of satisfaction.
“Bro?”
“Eddie?” Sovereign stood up and away from the bed.
“Man, I cain’t leave you alone for a minute you ain’t wandered into some quicksand?”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs.”
“Downstairs where?”
“Your hotel, baby. You know I always got the latest intelligence.”
He was sitting at far end of the dark bar. It was just after four in the afternoon, so there were few customers. Drum-Eddie James was wearing a shark-gray suit, yellow dress shirt replete with ruby cuff links, and black patent-leather shoes. He was talking to a young blond woman with dark garnet lips and gray-green eyes.
“JJ,” Drum-Eddie said as he stood away from the bar stool. “This here is... What’s your name again?”
“Carmen,” the twenty-something woman said. Her nostrils flared.
“Carmen, this is my brother — JJ. We got some business.”
“Okay,” Carmen said, a little reluctantly. “I’ll be sitting at that table over in the corner for a while.”
She touched his gray sleeve and moved away.
“You shouldn’t be here, Eddie,” Sovereign said when the young woman was out of earshot.
“I don’t think I ever been in a place I should’ve been in,” he replied. “Drink?”
“Cognac.”
“Bartender,” Eddie hailed, and when the redheaded man behind the bar looked up, “VSOP for my brother here — in a snifter.”
“Eddie, what are you doing here?”
“I heard that you got in all kindsa trouble for buyin’ my ticket, man.”
“The feds haven’t bothered me since that first day.”
“That’s ’cause I called ’em.”
“You what?”
“I met with this dude down in Havana, state department guy. I told him that I’d be happy to have an enlightening sit-down if they promised to take the weight off a’ you.”
The bartender put a very large snifter, with a good amount of brandy in it, down next to Sovereign’s elbow.
“I’m free of them?”
“Me too. Once we talked they said it was okay for me to come back to the U.S.”
“So you’re moving back?”
“Naw, man. I like it down in South America. I got wiggle room down there — wriggle room too.”
Blond Carmen was staring at the men from her seat in the corner; Sovereign could see her in the mirror behind the bar.
“What?” Eddie asked when the silence had spanned a minute.
“I don’t understand, man.”
“What?”
“Here you are crossin’ borders and makin’ deals with the federal government. You know where I’m hiding and got pretty girls waitin’ their turn. What is it you do that nobody else knows?”
Drum James sat up straight and crossed his legs. He brought the index finger of his left hand to his nose. Sovereign remembered then that his brother was ambidextrous.
“I figure it like this, Jimmy,” he said. “In this world you can either work for somebody else or do your own thing.”
“Like rob a bank?”
“Whatever. You just look at your options and pick the best one.”
“Everybody does that.”
“No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. People take jobs they don’t want, stay in marriages they hate, pay taxes for things they don’t wanna do, and live among people they don’t like. They love their enemies and hate their friends, break their promises and forget about bein’ happy altogether.
“And if you don’t do those things you will find that people are drawn to you. If you livin’ free everybody wants a piece of it. That girl in the corner, federal government too. They don’t care about that bank. They know that the bank the biggest crook there is. They don’t care about drugs or communists or ten thousand poor people starving to death. They just want people like me in the mix. They don’t know why but they do anyway.”