The Trials of Nikki Hill by Dick Lochte, Christopher Darden Read Free Book Online

two more brothers in the joint yesterday. Was wonderin’ why you do that, why you wanna play the white man’s game like that.”
    “Those brothers killed a baby in a drive-by shooting, Mr. Durant. A little boy. He was a brother, too. Those two gangsta punks got what they deserve. They belong in the joint. Just like you.”
    “I don’t belong here, lady.”
    “A jury believed otherwise.” This conversation was useless, she thought. It was painful but it didn’t qualify as penance. “I’m hanging up now.”
    “You took away my life,” he croaked.
    “Don’t try calling me anymore,” she said, her voice starting to shake. As she replaced the receiver, she could hear the echo of his wracking cough.
    The sleepless nights started again. She considered sending Durant’s public defender an anonymous note about the hot dog. Particles of it probably still rested in the pocket of the coat in the evidence box. The problem with that idea was that the public defender wasn’t the sort of guy who’d put himself out because of an anonymous note. She doubted the judge would, either.
    Maybe she
was
getting a little obsessive about the damned hot dog. It was not exactly a “Get Out of Jail” card. It didn’t prove anything, really.
    But what they’d done had been wrong, and she found herself unable to refuse Durant’s subsequent calls. The best she could do was to keep her end of the conversation as chilly and noncommittal as possible. Durant didn’t seem to mind. She listened to him, and that was apparently enough.
    She heard from him five or six times that first year and less each year thereafter. But he never stopped calling.
    “Yo, Nikki. It’s me.”
    “I caught that right away, Mace,” she said. She’d just stepped back into her office for a minute, to put on a pair of panty hose she’d purchased on the run from Deschamps’s interrogation.
    “You okay?” he asked with concern. “You sound a little stressed.”
    Lordy! Was he seeing a shrink?
“This’ll have to be a quickie, Mace,” she said, tearing open the package. “I’m on my way out.”
    “Busy, huh?”
    “Yep. Busy is the word I’d use,” she said, holding the phone in place with her shoulder while she pulled on the hosiery. “What’s on your mind?”
    “I need some he’p with somethin’.”
    “What is it this time?”
    “I been here at Fo’som more’n three years now,” he said, “and I doan know as I can last much longer. See, the WABs got this idea I stuck this boy, Gerry P. On’y it wasn’t me done it.” Durant’s persecution by inmate members of the White Aryan Brotherhood had become a familiar tune on his turntable.
    “Like I’ve said before,” she told him, smoothing down her dress, “if somebody’s on your case, I need a name.”
    “I can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t flip off nobody, not even pale pig meat.”
    “Gotta go, Mace.”
    “Yeah, I didn’t mean to hang you up with my problems,” he said. “Guess you got more impo’tant things on yo’ mind.”
    Why did she continue to accept his calls, she wondered? She knew that answer, of course. Still, her guilt was not overwhelming. “Good-bye, Mace,” she said.

S EVEN
    J immy Doyle had had a rough morning. The flight from D.C. had been crowded and noisy and the damned pilot had hit every air pocket the good Lord had placed in their way. Getting clear of LAX had been like treading through knee-high glue. The final indignity had been the bloody twisting and turning little streets and drives and avenues in the godforsaken Pacific Palisades. None of them seemed to be on the bloody map he’d been given to the Willins home. By the time his rented Lexus finally entered the gate at 203 Bon-ham Road, the stocky man was about ready to explode.
    When a guard seated in the wooden gatehouse requested his name, Doyle tried to keep his annoyance in check. It was time to lighten up, time to meet his new clients.
    The guard was wearing some kind of space-age