Joe

“So what am I looking at now?” Ronnie asked.

I sat there staring in disbelief at what I’d just seen during the preliminary hearing. It was amazing how fast it all seemed to be moving. It waa had been barely a week since Gina and I had first come down to the sheriff’s office to meet with Robbie and his attorney Glenn Goodall, who was supposed to be one of the best.

Glen looked over at Ronnie and took a deep breath. That did not sound comforting to me.

“Well, it doesn’t look great,” Glen said. “You were denied bail, which I figured in a violent murder case like this that would be the case, but what concerns me most is the evidence stacked against you.”

“I didn’t kill that man,” Ronnie pleaded. “I was set up.”

“I believe you,” Glen continued. “But what we believe is neither here nor there. In our system it is all about establishing the burden of proof. And right now that is largely leaning against you.”

Ronnie leaned back and sighed heavily. He was jittery. It was like he was trying his hardest not to just leap out of his skin.

I glanced over at Gina sitting beside me. She was emotionless. I knew she was on the verge of tears but was putting on a strong front for her brother. Her mother was feeling too ill to be with us today, but she’d finally arrived. Gina had offered her Ronnie’s room, but she’d agreed to stay with her sister Pat instead to give Gina her space. But truthfully, I think she felt that by taking Ronnie’s room it meant he was not coming home.

“So, what happens next?” I asked. I was getting a bit impatient. Patience has never really been my strong suit.

“Well, now we go to trial in a month. Hopefully, by then we can find some strong evidence that will help to exonerate you. And pray that we get a jury to sympathize with you.”

Ronnie stared back in shock and horror. I could see it in his eyes he knew he was never getting out of there and that his life was completely over. He was giving up. I’d never known him to be that guy, but I guess this was just too much for even Ronnie to stand up to.

I had to wonder if I was in his shoes, would I be doing much better.

As I drove Gina home she was pretty quiet. I could only imagine what was going through her mind. Probably the same things that were going through my mind, but maybe on a grander scale. Ronnie and I were so close we were like brothers in a lot of ways, but Gina was his actual blood. She was his little sister. After her dad moved out and that relationship was so strained Ronnie became the man of the family in most respects. It had taken Gina a long time to even begin to have a cordial relationship with her father, but I’m not sure that rift, that betrayal he’d enacted on his family would ever be fixed.

I wanted to talk to her and console her, but I wasn’t sure that any words I said would have really helped. So I let her be in her silence. I tried to focus on other things to keep my mind occupied as I drove, but I couldn’t really. The tension in the air was so thick it was hard to breathe.

I turned up the air conditioning full blast and took deep, solid breaths enjoying the cool air blowing into my face. Gina seemed relieved by it, too.

A lot of people thought I was a cold person, because I never let emotions really show through. That was just the way I’d always been. To me becoming emotional and fearful over something was a waste of time. Of course the fear was there, but it was not useful in most situations in modern life. Fear could paralyze you. It would make you fail to act. It was a throwback to our cavemen days where we often had to be on constant lookout to avoid being eaten by some predator.

That didn’t really hold up in today’s world. When I found myself getting overwhelmed with emotions, I took a step back and just looked at everything logically and rationally. It was often the best way. Sometimes you had to take emotion off the table. Except anger. Anger could be much more useful at times. But even that would often lead to the wrong outcome.

It was crazy to think how everything really came together inside the kickboxing ring. It was the perfect example of our primal nature at its best.

“I keep replaying everything in my head,” Gina said when we arrived back at Ronnie’s place. “You know, just watching my brother there in front of the judge. God, that judge… how smug and self-righteous can you be? He almost smirked when he denied bail. He loved it.”

I grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a couple glasses from the small liquor cabinet Ronnie had in the corner of his living room. I poured a double for me and for Gina. She was going to need it from the sound of things.

She took the whiskey and sipped it slowly, only making the sour face on the first sip. I loved a woman who could handle the good stuff.

“The lawyer thinks he’s lost,” Gina said.

“He didn’t actually say that,” I replied. “He only said that right now it doesn’t look good. But things can change.”

“Right,” Gina replied. “This community hates my brother. They’ve always looked down on him as a hothead loser.”

I nodded as I contemplated. She wasn’t totally wrong. When Ronnie was a teenager he was a crazed hothead, much more than he was now. He was in drag races constantly, fighting all the time, and going down a bad path.

Oddly enough, his parents’ divorce pulled a lot of that rebelliousness out of him. He felt he had to grow up and be the man. And I respected him for doing so.

“Thinking that way isn’t helping anything,” I said.

“I know,” Gina replied.

“Look, we have a month. Glen is a good attorney, one of the best around. I know your father is throwing some serious cash at him to get him to take this case. He usually takes much higher profile stuff than this.”

“My father… wow, I haven’t even seen him or talked to him since this started. He is still in Europe doing business. Sometimes I miss when he used to be just an everyday guy. I guess he took his mid-life crisis to a whole other level.”

I had to agree with Gina on this one. After the divorce her father had started getting heavy into real estate and then branching into international real estate.

“Well, maybe this is his way of helping,” I said. “Do you think that Ronnie would want him here, even during a time like this?”

Gina finished off her whiskey. “No, I guess not.”

I hated seeing her this way. She was so broken-hearted, so depressed. And she had every right to be. The future was very uncertain for her, her brother, and her whole family. I wished there was more I could do, but under the circumstances the best thing to do was wait and regroup in the morning.

Gina laid her head down on the kitchen table in front of her.

“I just want it all to be over,” she said. “I just want everything to turn out ok. Until I know for sure, I don’t know how I can deal with the pressure.”

“You just have to take it day by day,” I said. “Stressing yourself out to the max is not the answer here.”

“What if we can’t find a way to prove Ronnie’s innocence?” Gina asked. “I’ve never felt so out of control before. I feel like I’m just falling down a black hole.”

I sauntered over to Gina and laid my hands on her shoulders. She was almost trembling. I wasn’t sure if it was just from the emotions of what she was going through or if it was the fact that I was touching her. Her soft, sweet skin felt so good beneath my hands. She was so precious to me. I had thought of literally nothing else since she came back into town.

And now she was scared, petrified even, and I felt there might not be anything I could do to actually ease that pain away. But I could try at least.

That was all I could do. Try.