snakechahmah | Draft - Fragments (Part two)

Continued from Fragments (Part One)

[Four months ago.]

Acid roiled in the distended boiler of her stomach as she tried to calmly breathe through the burning bile slowly climbing up the tender tissue along her windpipe. Head down, fingers tightly interlaced between her knees, she looked like she was wilting in prayer. The words were wrong because she’s not the praying sort and can’t remember anything passed, Hail Mary, full of shiiii-grace, spoken with breath saturated in mint and whiskey.

And if she did remember the words of any other prayer, she wouldn’t utter it, praying to men on her knees never seemed to do her any good in the past. And any male deity that would allow this to happen to so many women earns him her deep disrespect as she tries to make sense of the shit show that had been these long criminal proceedings.

She didn’t tell anyone where she went off to for a few hours every day for the last three weeks. She even testified and although she couldn’t have that anonymized on the court record, there were enough murder cases in NYC that the news media didn’t blow this one up. But she hated the nickname one half-assed article from the Daily News gave her, the one that got away. As if it was that simple.

"Has the jury come to a verdict?"

She wrung her fingers together and looked at the floor. Her throat constricted and all she could do to stop it from squeezing shut entirely was to swallow. Images of broken women-dead women-flooded her memories. Her knee bounced up and down in a short frenzied pace. "Come on,” she whispered, “come on, do the right thing. Do the right thing.” If she could will it, she would. If there was some magic word, she’d utter it. “Please.”

“Yes, your honor. We have.”

The judge nodded.

The head juror nodded back. Something was wrong. Ezera felt it in the way that her mind blanked, like it couldn’t comprehend what just happened even though it didn’t happen yet. But it did, didn’t it? The decision was made and being transmitted not through words but the single curt glance, an understanding that they had come to without the need to deliberate on it.

“No,” she whispered, looking back and forth between the juror and the judge. “No, don’t you fucking do this to us.”

Us? The victims. Family members and her. The ones left behind to ask, why?

“The juror cleared his throat. “We, the jury, find the defendant, Danylo Wroclavich, not guilty of four counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder in the second degree.”

Everyone in the gallery gasped. Everyone except for Ezera. She froze in place. Her knee stopped moving. Her fingers stopped lacing themselves together in a painful weave. Shocked murmurs dissolved into sobs. Not her. She was too stunned to cry.

“Not guilty?” She said numbly to no one. The acknowledgement was purely internal, like a sacred word uttered to bring about the start of the apocalypse.

Something cracked inside. The fissures grew larger. Deeper. Longer. Seismic tremors shook her entire body. Ezera couldn’t hold it together anymore, not with a smile, not with alcohol, nothing would stop this. She didn’t feel enough to want to right now. And that was the problem. When you’re losing your shit you can hardly see that you’ve stepped in it. You couldn’t see that there would be something to clean up later while the stench followed you around for longer than it took your reason to return. She raked her fingers through her hair.

Not guilty?

The words were an ugly hollow sound that reverberated through her head, bouncing from the left to the right side of her brain as if neither knew how to process the information.

You’ve got to be shitting me.

The wave of nausea that hit her felt like a tsunami that mowed down the light of her soul like a string of eerie city lights that flickered and sputtered out under the cold rush of dark water. But the preceding earthquake that triggered it would have made this moment easy to predict for anyone that saw the signs. Hell, some of those people were probably jamming their fingers into the cracks, prying them open.

“How!?” She roared out. He murdered four women. And he nearly killed her. “How!” Never in her life has her voice roiled with an anger that sounded like it could melt someone’s skin off their body.

Detective Javier Santos inhaled sharply and shook himself out of his shock. He had worked this case for so long, saw so many casualties. He thought that they finally got the bastard. “Ezera,” he said in a low hiss, roused from his place by the anger in her voice, trying to push through the overflow of people corralled in the back gallery to get to where she was rising from her seat.

Lifting her eyes, she met Danylo’s glance. She couldn’t breathe. He was looking directly at her. And he smiled warmly. He smiled and there was pity in his glance. He smiled.

What was that feeling, it was like drowning, unable to hear the voices from the surface calling her name. She held his gaze while she drowned in something too cold and too deep.

His warm smile.

Her ass shot up outta the seat faster, lurching forward, but it wasn’t her, was it? It couldn’t be, it wasn’t like her. Someone is yelling threats. They sound angry, she thinks, not realizing it’s her. Everything feels like it’s being played in slow motion. Even her reaching into her purse. For what? Now someone is yelling at her, but it’s too distorted here beneath the dark water. The current of her anger pushes her forward and parts the crowd.

Danylo. Her father. Emcee. Tobias. And the nameless parade of men that only knew how to communicate through threats and violence against women.

It’s just too much.

Her arm begins to lift. There’s a sliver of silver just slightly peeking out of her purse, but before she can lift her arm higher, before anyone can register what was happening, it’s jerked violently behind her back, her grasp loosening, the thing dropping back into her purse. She gasps in pain, searching for her breath, the words garbled through the awful hurt shooting down her arm.

He slaps handcuffs on her wrists and jerks her out of the courtroom with such force that she trips.

“Ezera, calm down. Jesus. What the actual fuck? Calm down before I have to arrest you.” She knows that voice. Javier. He bolted them out of the doors of the courthouse. Opening the back of his police car, he very nearly tossed her into the back seat but didn’t close the door. “Just. Sit down. Sit! Breathe, alright? You gotta calm down, Iz.”

Really? Because she thought that she might vomit on his shoes instead. Her entire body shook with something so violent that she cut the insides of her mouth with her teeth as they chattered. Shock.

Unzipping her jumper wouldn’t have helped much even though the cool air that brushed the nape of her neck confused the sick sweat on the back of her neck and she didn’t know whether she was hot or cold.

Her mouth felt like cotton as the words tumbled out. “You said that this was a done deal. The DA said that with my testimony and the evidence...” Everything hurt. “You said.." She paused. "How did you not see this coming?”

The ground was littered with broken promises.

He shook his head emphatically. “Look, it was a done deal. I don’t know what happened in there!” At least he was pissed about it as well. “But what the fuck happened with you, huh? What did you think that you were going to do in there? What, huh?”

He knew. He knew what she was reaching for and it made her a little sick to think about her fingers curling around the handle.

“I don’t know, I don’t know," she half-lied. "Nothing. N-nothing.”

“Yeah? That sure as fuck didn’t look like nothing. You know what that looked like to me? Do you? That looked like about 20 years in prison.”

His voice was angry and concerned. She swallowed thickly and looked away. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she managed quickly through a face hot with emotions that were too hard for her to untangle.

“I want you to deal with whatever is happening with you.”

She snorts.

“Look, I can’t imagine what it’s like to-“

“So don’t.” She snaps back. “So don’t. Because you know what the worst thing in the world is, J? Because it’s not constantly having to look over your shoulder. And it's not having to relive a traumatic event day-after-day. It’s the feeling of being utterly powerless in the face of injustice because some asshole with connections threatens a jury or pays off a judge.”

He paused and then nodded lamely. There was not much else that he could do. “I know. I know. Shit.” He ran his fingers over his face. “I don’t know what leverage he had but, Iz, let me figure it out. This is on me. Ok? I messed up. I didn't see that he was connected. I’m not going to stop going after that guy but it needs to be done by the book.”

“The book? Really. That's funny. This book of yours is the length of several encyclopedias," she says flatly.

He gives her a disappointed look for that cheap shot. “That’s not fair.”

“Neither is that murdering SOB getting off. Yet I’m the one sitting in your police car in cuffs.” She looked older and drawn, the tiredness of too many battles fought too fast, too soon, written on her face. “Uncuff me.”

“I’m just trying to protect you,” he mumbled leaning down to free her. “Something’s happening to you Iz, and I don’t know why, but I can’t reach you where you are. And it scares me, ok? It scares me.” She avoided answering him by massaging her wrists making the point to make him feel bad. But he was looking down at her with expectation. She appraised him with a quizzical brow.

“Give it to me, Ezera.”

“What?” She blinked innocently, all doe-eyed stupid. For her attempt, he gave her an impatient look.

She shrugged. “No.” Ezera ducked out of the police car. “No. Sucks my balls. I’ll give it you when he’s dead.”

He narrowed his eyes at her choice of words, something unsettled him about the tone of her voice.

“You mean, when he’s in prison.”

She held his gaze. “Sure. When he’s dead in prison. I'm not picky.”

Silence. Consideration. Both sides were already bleeding. It wouldn’t take much to hurt one another.

“You know who you sound like, right?”

Her shoulder’s tensed. There was no way that she’d let him proverbially slap her in the face when she was already down. She nodded, disappointed at him, and pressed her lips together as he made the first cut.

"Yeah? Well, if my father was still alive, you best bet that Wroclavich wouldn't be walking out of this courtroom today a free man."

More silence.

She sighed. She could ask him whether it would take seeing her dead body on the mortuary slab before he woke up. On the other hand, enough pain had already gone around today and she was just so emotionally drained and mentally exhausted.

“Welp. On that note, namaste...dick”, she says flipping him the bird with a tight smile. He snorted with a smirk and shook his head. That was the women he knew. Sorta.

She pulled out her cellphone as she walked away toward the City Hall subway station. Someone picked up but didn’t say anything on the other end of the line.

Trying to keep her voice light, trying to keep the devastating loss seem personally inconsequential, she begrudging admits, “you were right. We’re going to have to do this ourselves.”