A Ghost of Justice Read online

  A Ghost of

  JUSTICE

  A NOVEL OF THE NEAR FUTURE

  Jon Blackwood

  COMING SOON BY JON BLACKWOOD

  Eaters (late summer 2013)

  A science-fiction military thriller of the future.

  Riding the Fourth Horse (fall 2013)

  A mystery at the close of the 20th century - with a fantasy twist.

  Copyright © 2012 Jon Blackwood

  All Rights Reserved

  [email protected]

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  To my wife, private editor and absolute best friend;

  Thank you for your unwavering support;

  Thank you for everything.

  32nd Amendment

  of the constitution of the United States of America.

  Enacted April 4, 2021.

  No law shall take effect that will jeopardize the fiscal integrity of the United States. The Congress shall take all such steps as is necessary to maintain balance between the Nation's expenditure and receipts.

  Section 42. There shall be no further incarceration of persons convicted of low level felonies.

  Section 43. There shall be no further incarceration of persons convicted of capital offense in Federal facilities.

  Section 43a. Such persons convicted of capital crimes will be executed by the victim's nearest capable relation (defined herein as family or friend). Each state will legislate the mechanism by which this is to be enforced.

  8th Amendment

  of the Constitution of the State of North Carolina.

  Enacted February 18,2022.

  In recognition of the 32nd Amendment to the Federal Constitution:

  Executioner of Record shall be defined as: The nearest capable next of kin (or friend if no kin is qualified) of any murdered citizen of the state. The so defined shall be charged with the execution of the duly convicted capital criminal in such case.

  Vigilante Fugitive shall be defined as: Any person convicted of a capital crime that has been released under the provisions of Amendment 6. Amendment 6 is known as The Balanced Budget Amendment.

  Amendment 8 has become known as The Vigilante Act.

  1

  Run, damn it. It didn't matter that each gasp of the wet cold air burned all the way to his lungs. It was nothing he could avoid. He had to run, had to get away.

  Damp winter grass glistened with reflected light as he ran through back yards. Passing under a porch light, he saw her blood, slick and wet, on his hands and on the shirt under his open jacket. He could smell its coppery tang over the aromas of wet clay and decaying leaves.

  A long, dark shadow appeared ahead of him: an evergreen hedge. He didn't slow but tried to leap it. Just as his leading foot cleared the shrubs the trailing foot caught on something. He was thrust forward and down, straddling the bush.

  Most of the impact was absorbed by the hedge and he was only winded by the suddenness of it. Twisting around, he couldn't see but he could tell that his right shoe was trapped. His fingers touched frozen steel wire. There was an old fence the hedge had grown around and his shoe had stuck in it.

  He panicked and tugged hard, but it only jammed in tighter. Pain through his taut thigh muscles stopped him. He tried to think. Awkwardly, he reached back and carefully pulled his foot out of the shoe. It worked. He turned around in a one-legged dance to clear the shrubbery and retrieve the shoe.

  Replacing it on his foot, the panic reasserted itself: the image of her bleeding on the patio rising fresh in his mind's eye. He ran.

  His feet hit gravel and he knew where he was. Edgar Street, a name-dignified alley of crumbling pavement. He turned to the right, heading for the street.

  Headlights were slowing and starting to swing toward him as a car began turning into the alley. A frightened moan slipped through his lips.

  The man almost slipped as he skidded and ran the other way. He didn't feel the bite of the rocks in his palm. It was uphill and his legs quickly burned from the unaccustomed strain. He knew he couldn't run much longer, but he had to get away. Run to the campus, he thought. It was close; he knew his way around there. He could slow down there.

  Glancing back, he saw the car a little below him, turning off the alley behind a house. Then he hit a pothole and fell sprawling. Coming so unexpectedly, he only had time to fling his arms out ahead of him and the blow punched his breath out with a loud grunt. Panting, he rose slowly on his hands and knees. As he looked up, red taillights and the glare of back-up beams blinded him. He dropped and rolled into the shallow ditch, then raised his head to see what this car was going to do.

  The brake lights lit as it stopped and the white back-ups went out. The rear tires began spinning, throwing bits of asphalt and dirt at him and he had to shield his face.

  The car sped uphill. As it passed under a streetlight, the man saw it had a sleek, smooth styling, and was dark in color. The license he didn't catch, but thought it was a name or something. The car vanished over the crest.

  A fluttering nearby caught his attention and he went over to it slowly, chest and knees hurting from the fall. Reaching down, he found it to be a fifty dollar bill. Then his ears picked up the sounds of sirens separating from the constant wailing that was the norm in any city, getting louder and closer. He clenched his fists to ignore the pain and began running again.

  Coming out on Tate Street, he stopped. Shoving the money in a pocket, he then pulled his jacket around tightly to hide the blood on his shirt from the few people on the sidewalks. Searching about, he looked for a campus building with lights on. Not many students would be taking night courses. Maybe he could get into a bathroom unseen, wash this blood out, and get away from here. He would feel less conspicuous without the blood.

  Walking onto the campus, his labored breathing slowly subsided. He made his way past the Auxiliary Records Building, housed in the old former Music Building complex, and up the hill to McIver Hall. Feeling ashamed, he remembered some of the classes he had taken in this same building he now entered. And what had he done since dropping out? Not a damned thing except to drift around and try to avoid trouble. But not now. Not this time.

  He hoped she wasn't dead.

  No one was in the corridor as he ducked into the men's room. The blood on his jacket wasn't much and was mostly on the lining. But it was all over the front of his shirt. He stripped them off, knowing the wet shirt would feel like ice when he put it back on and went outside, but it had to be. He started to knead it in the basin. The cold water quickly turned pink, then red.

  Then the door swung open. He jumped and turned.

  Wide-eyed but steady, a campus policeman pulled his pistol out and trained it on him.

  2

  Emily sorted out another cylinder seal, swept the dust from it with a soft brush and placed it in the growing pile to her right. She glanced across the undulating sand dunes, sniffing the pungent desert aromas. Then she checked on her father's progress.

  His piles were sizeable, but they weren't growing anymore. Instead he was filling a small canvas sack.

  "What are you doing?"

  Without stopping, Eric Sheafer said, "I'm going to see if I can get some of these for the schools back home. They're common enough here to not be all that valuable; and Steve would love showing them to students."

  "But he hasn't taught in years."

  "I know. He still has contact with the kids. And certainly he knows some teachers in the system that would do it. Or let him show these to their classes himself."

  Emily held out her hand. Her father obligingly dropped a piece in it.

  It
was a simple disc of fired clay, about two inches across, with a beaded edge. She turned it over, revealing a relief profile of Alexander. Tucked under his chin was a cartouche and curved above his head was inscribed some ancient Greek. She recognized his name in both.

  "Wine seals. How many were in there?"

  "I estimate nearly a thousand. With several hundred bottles. Five have the seals intact."

  "I…Five? Intact?" she exclaimed. "I knew about the bottles, but I thought they were all broken."

  "Those five were leaning in a corner of the southern anteroom."

  She handed the seal back. "Steve will like those. I hope you can get permission to send them to him."

  "Yeah," Eric said with a nod. He wrapped it in a cotton rag and put it carefully in the sack. "I'll see Albert and Amal about it first chance I get."

  Emily ran a hand across her forehead. "I'm gonna sweat to death out here."

  He looked up from the tomb relics before him. Smiling indulgently, he said, "You probably will."

  "Huh!" she responded automatically.

  With more genuine feeling, he asked, "Did you take a salt tablet after lunch?"

  Emily wrinkled her nose. "They make me feel bloated," she said bluntly. But when she found him glaring at her, she added, "Of course, Dad. I'm just picking."

  "Yes. Well." Eric surveyed the piles of artifacts. "You can finish cataloguing these while I take a break." He rose to his feet and walked away.

  Emily scrambled up, stirring a low cloud of dust. "Ha! No way. Not as bad as I need some water. You're going to have company."

  "Okay," he agreed, glancing at the sun low in the west. "It's getting late, anyhow. Let's call it a day. Break for supper."

  Eric walked ahead of her into the large community tent, shouting something to the other camp members as he went. She watched as they put down tools and began to join them. A new business came over the camp, actually louder than the work. Careful digging sounds were replaced by the more casual activity of meal prepping.

  Emily splashed a small amount of water on her face as Eric took a drink from the cooler. She patted dry with her shirttail, knowing she exposed her navel.

  "Try not to show so much belly skin," Eric cautioned her. "About three-fourths of our crew is devout."

  She felt mildly irked at the reminder but dropped her shirttail. "Sorry," she said, meaning it somewhat. "God! This desert is so dirty."

  Her father smiled, no doubt glad she'd moved on to another subject. "Not really, Em. It's just sand dust. One of the cleanest regions on the continent. Maybe in all the Eastern Hemisphere."

  "What I'd give right now for a couple of days at the beach." She didn't mention that, if she could go, she'd wear only a bikini the whole time. "We've been digging in this…this dust for two months straight, seven days a week, now. Couldn't we take off just a little, Dad? It's not like they'd miss us a whole lot. God, there's so many archeologists out here that we get in each other's way."

  "You're not one, yet." He pointed a finger at her and chuckled.

  A second time Emily said, "Huh." She straightened her shirt. "I am, too. I'm just the only one in this whole damned consortium who hasn't got her PhD yet. But I will before summer. The tomb is going to make for a great dissertation." She set her hat a bit further back than her father approved in this sun, but she didn't care. The sun didn't bother her that much and she tanned well. And right this moment she wanted to go north and trade the dust and work clothes for that bikini and the surf. The Med was absolutely beautiful this time of year. Sometimes with exciting storms.

  "Dad?"

  "Hmm?"

  "We know the tomb was broken into."

  "Right."

  "But there are so many pieces of value still inside. Seems to me the robbers couldn't have taken much."

  Eric nodded. "Alexander was god-like to the ancient Egyptians."

  "I know that. But what would have kept them from gutting the place. From stripping it clean?"

  "The Religion." He said it with a capital 'R.'

  "Still alive when it was violated, you think?"

  Eric nodded again.

  "And the tomb resealed, guarded, etcetera. The robbers hunted down and executed, their bodies cursed and so forth."

  "Something on that order, yes. We'll probably never know for sure." Eric was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I'm glad you came, Em. Missed you last time."

  Emily looked at him. "Yeah. Well, I thought I was working on a permanent relationship. But Lee started coming out with all that crap about how I 'should be doing this,' 'be like that,' 'you need to behave proper.' It was so suppressive. I thought he was more open-minded but he was like everyone else. I can't live that way. You and Mom taught me better than that. And…" She turned, giving the whole area, camp and work, a panoramic scan, stopping at the tomb's entrance. "And I missed you, too, Dad. And the digs." She laughed. "It's in my blood." Turning back to him, she had an impish thought. "It's all your fault."

  Eric looked at her over the rim of his glass, trying to hide his mirth. "You're an ungrateful brat," he said, "for all the travel and adventure that gift has brought you. If you were still a child…"

  "And if I was?" Emily challenged with a grin. He was looking past her.

  "I’d…well…Something." His voice trailed off.

  He stood, leaving the glass on the table. Emily turned to follow his attention. A singular cloud of dust was coming their way. The dark spot in its lead quickly grew, becoming the familiar shape of a Land Rover. Just as rapidly it became recognizable as one of the consortium's.

  Sooner than seemed possible, it was skidding into camp. Diving a little at its nose, the vehicle halted nearby, the whining of its turbines spooling down. The huge dust cloud drifted and whirled past. As it thinned, the Egyptian at the wheel was revealed, waving for both her and her father to come to him.

  Dr. Amal Shafiq was shouting. "Doctors Sheafer! He wants you in Siwah. Very important. Dr. Evans-Thomas, he says you must come.”

  Emily suddenly felt very dirty…dusty. "Can we bathe first and change our clothes?"

  Shafiq shook his head so vigorously his glasses threatened to give up their place on his nose. "No-no-no. Evans-Thomas said you must come right away. It is a package. From your home. A large envelope. And you must come now."

  Emily had never seen Shafiq so agitated. Normally the anthropologist was placidness itself. "Why? What's in the package?"

  "He would not say. He took one look and sent me straight away. Did not even wait to find the driver. Sent me. Please come."

  The Sheafers climbed in, Eric behind Emily. Her father said, "Why by mail? Why not n-phone?"

  "Not working," Amal Shafiq said and shoved the Rover into gear.

  Emily could only shrug before further talk was impossible as the land rover bounced toward the highway. Later, on the smooth pavement, neither felt much like conversing. They only exchanged a confused glance. Emily knew her father was beginning to worry. And so was she.

  3

  Phil Lindley stood gazing out the north window of his corner office. The First Guilford Tower stood only a few blocks away, but he didn't really see the overly familiar sight.

  "Okay," he said. "It was a pretty solid and simple case. No myriad of facts to muddle through. The defense's line about the 'mystery car' didn't go. That's why the trial went so quickly. The speed with which it went through appeals is because of the changes that occurred as a result of the events that started the century. I say that for the few of you old enough to remember all the long, drawn-out process we used to have."

  He turned to face his clients. He had been representing the family for so long that they were all as familiar as the north view. He sighed, leaning against the window sill. "I

  think that was a blessing in view of the circumstances."

  "Goddammit! How can you use the word 'blessing' in this," old Eric Senior spat out. Then he held his hand shakily up as he lowered his head. "Sorry, Phil. I…I know what you mean." T
he elder Sheafer also sighed. "And you're right. But I don't understand why he might be let loose. What is this goddamned law you keep quoting? And his dad hasn't even been told yet!"

  Phil Lindley nodded and took a slow, deep breath. Then he began, choosing his words carefully. “The law was passed four years ago, in the summer of Thirty-Six. So

  much pressure in the election year for more tax reductions gave congress and the president no choice. With the Balanced Budget Amendment ratified in twenty-two, they were forced to keep cutting deep. Job Service is gone. Welfare and Social Retirement are down to thirty percent of pre-Amendment coverage. Dismantling of Health Care and

  federal unemployment insurance. Those aren't all. A whole lot of new laws have run through state legislatures as a result. North Carolina's no different. All are simply trying to achieve the impossible: balance the budget of feds and states. The Federal Vigilante Act is just one of those. It's really only an extension of a much older law." Phil stepped next to his desk and half sat on it, his right foot pressing into the carpet. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was apologizing for a government run largely by careless

  elements, but he had to explain.

  After another deep intake of air, he continued. "Prisons are expensive. They decided not to build any new space and they even closed some. Leavenworth, SuperMax, San Quentin. All the old big ones. The states can't pick up the slack." Phil shrugged, frowning. The careless political elements only heeded to the top one percent of wealth. Everyone else was left to their own devices on far too many of the things that would

  make this a more civilized culture. "So," he resumed, "the Vigilante Act came about. No other way. The law covers more than murders, really. But the name stuck. Mr. Hardy can go free in three more days if there is no room to keep him. I checked this morning. The jails are at 127%. If they stay that way, or go up, the sheriff will have no option. It's