“If you would please identify yourself for the record?”
The first day of trial had finished on a rather lackluster note for everybody who had the unpleasant obligation of being present. The trio of defense attorneys came back from our extended break, and informed the judge that they wanted to present separate opening statements. The contractor’s attorney, a reedy, balding man in a navy-blue suit, had objected to this, and argued that their opening statements needed to be one joint statement because the decision hadn’t been unanimous.
Judge Friedman rejected this argument, and all three lead defense attorneys gave their opening statements without any further fighting. Those statements were… awful.
Three different renditions of functionally the same thing: “it wasn’t my client’s fault”, “it was the other guy’s fault entirely”, “even if it was partly our fault it was still the other guy’s more”, and “even if it was actually mostly our fault the plaintiff is dead and any so-called ‘proof’ died with her”.
In the interest of not subjecting anybody else to that torrid misery, we are going to assume that they don’t matter. Which is nice, because they genuinely didn’t anyway — it was quiet, very quiet, but I still heard two of our jurors (the two white men, actuary and accountant) sleeping through the property manager’s and contractor’s respective opening statements.
After that, court adjourned for the day, and we began presenting our case in earnest the next morning.
And I chose to begin with my star witness, the superhero. This was purely because he genuinely had great charisma, and not at all because my sister-in-law had been breathing down my neck to get him in, out, and away from civilians’ beck and call.
“My callsign is Barricade,” said the superhero seated upon the witness stand. He wasn’t wearing his usual superhero outfit, and instead had on what I assumed to be the National Guard’s formal dress uniform. This was paired with a helmet that left only his mouth and chin visible, as opposed to his usual modified riot police helmet. “My NMR ID number is 6625448.”
Honestly? The getup actually didn’t look half bad. Plus, there were a few medals on the commendation bars — Barricade himself hadn’t given a public statement regarding how he’d earned them, but it was easy enough to tell that it was in recognition of the civilians whose lives he had been able to save.
It wouldn’t erase the trauma he’d gone through that day, but it should be enough to help ease the pain a little.
“Thank you. Barricade, how long have you been with the NMR?” I asked, standing close enough to the jury box to lean against it, but far enough that the bailiff didn’t have an excuse to accost me over it.
“I’m in my fourth year now,” Barricade said. He sat in the witness’s chair with perfect posture: back straight, chin up, voice strong, hands clasped on the stand in front of him. “Year four of my six-year tour of duty.”
“I see. Now, I understand that NMR protocol dictates that you cannot provide as exhaustive of details as the court would probably prefer, but to the extent that you can do so without getting your CO mad at you and the Feds mad at me for asking,” I paused there, allowing some chuckles from the jurors and the gallery to quiet down before I continued, “could you please describe for the court what your superpowers are, and how they work?”
“I can make forcefields,” Barricade said. He held up one gloved hand, and a moment later, it was shining with bright, pale moonlight. “They’re strong, but not perfect. Most things can’t get through, but I do feel some feedback from big enough hits. I also just always have another mostly skintight forcefield.”
“What do you mean by mostly?”
“Well, I can eat and drink through it, but I can’t breathe in smoke, or tear gas, or other stuff in the air,” he said. Then one corner of his mouth pulled up into what I could only describe as a shit-eating grin. “So I guess I have the best superpower of them all, ‘cause I literally can’t cry while cutting onions.”
My ears flicked towards a laughing wheeze, coming from a juror that was just out of my line of sight. Retired Grandma, it sounded like. Good; she’d been there during the Civil Rights Movement and the Villains’ Strikes, so if any of our jurors were going to be biased against Barricade from the jump, it would’ve been her. But instead, he was winning her over.
That’s what we needed.
“You said your power protects you from smoke.” I walked towards the witness stand, tilting my ears back forward to show that my focus was entirely on Barricade. “Does your power also make you fireproof, by chance?”
“Objection!” An attorney from the defense’s side yelled out as he rose to his feet. It was very, very hard to keep my closer ear from turning towards the sound like a satellite dish, but I managed to keep them trained on Barricade instead. “Counsel is leading the witness!”
“Question is foundational, your Honor.” My tone was completely deadpan, and sounded like I’d answered this question hundreds of times before.
Because, well, I had.
“Overruled,” Judge Friedman said. “The witness may answer the question.”
“It does,” Barricade confirmed. “But I can still feel some of the heat. Normally, my personal forcefield keeps me at a comfortable seventy degrees, no matter what I’m wearing or what the weather’s like. Don’t feel cold unless I’m lying down in the snow.” Barricade took a shuddering breath. “Hadn’t felt heat in years.”
“Objection! The witness—”
“Is testifying?” Judge Friedman interrupted, raising one eyebrow at Combover. “Overruled.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, offering a slight nod and a flick of my ears. “Now, Barricade. Are you amenable to, say, demonstrate for the jury how fireproof you are?” I held out one hand, and called forth a ball of foxfire.
“Let the record reflect that counsel for the plaintiff has used her own powers and is currently holding a fireball,” Judge Friedman said.
“Objection, your Honor.” Another interruption came, this time from Pinstripes, the contractor’s attorney. “The details of Ms. Ziegler’s powers haven’t been properly introduced into evidence, nor are her powers in any way relevant to the matter at hand. I request that this entire line of questioning be discontinued and stricken from the record, and that the counselor cease using a lethal weapon,” he emphasized, “in such a flippant and threatening manner while standing so close to the jury!”
Judge Friedman didn’t immediately respond to this. He instead looked to me and waved a hand, as if to ask my opinion on the matter.
“... I’m sorry, I don’t understand the objection,” I said. “Do, do you want me to admit myself into evidence? My body?”
“What… no, just—”
“Or is it just that I’m using my powers?” I asked, letting the ball of foxfire dissipate into nothing as I reached into my blazer’s pocket and pulled out a lighter. “Would you rather I use this?”
“Counselor, Ms. Ziegler already received approval to use her powers as a demonstrative before this trial began,” Judge Friedman added. “This issue was settled during pretrial motions, and I do not appreciate you trotting it back out now just to try and, what? Scare the jury?” He shook his head. “Objection overruled. The witness may answer regarding his willingness to demonstrate that he is as fireproof as he claims.”
“Yes sir,” Barricade said with a stiff nod. “The answer is yes, ma’am, I am willing to demonstrate.”
“Splendid.”
I slipped the lighter back into my pocket and then stepped to the side of the witness stand, so that I was directly underneath the judge’s bench. Then I held out one hand and willed a sphere of foxfire into being. Barricade raised his own hand, removed the dress uniform gloves, and rolled up his sleeves.
Then he stuck his hand straight into the roiling purple foxfire, and let it sit there.
Five seconds passed. Then ten.
I pulled my hand away at the fifteen-second mark, walked over to our table, and took a folded-up piece of paper from Julio’s outstretched hand.
“Let the record show,” I said, holding up the foxfire for the entire courtroom to see, “that the witness held his hand within these flames for fifteen seconds.” I took the piece of paper I’d grabbed from Julio, and touched a corner of it to the foxfire, whereupon it promptly caught on fire itself before I blew it out. “And let the record also reflect that the same fire set paper alight, showing that it was, in fact, fire.”
I felt dozens of eyes on me as I walked back over to Barricade, and stood maybe a foot away from the witness stand once more.
“Now that we’ve established some important context for everybody,” I began, “I think we can get into the details. Barricade, I… I’m sorry that I have to ask this of you again.”
One ear flicked towards the scuffling sound of chair leg on carpet that came from the defense’s side of the courtroom, but despite my expectations, no objection came. I instead heard the sound of somebody sitting back down, followed by a feather-light tap of the judge’s gavel resting on the bench.
I very carefully did not smirk, nor did I let my ears lower in amusement, though the latter was substantially more difficult.
“It’s okay,” Barricade said. He offered me a brief smile, then schooled his face into a stoic mask.
“Very well.” I sighed ever so slightly, more to set the mood for the jury than anything else. “Barricade, would you please tell the court what you experienced on the afternoon of December 27th, 2019?”
And so, Barricade told his story. He spoke of how he arrived on the scene of a burning building, and was immediately thrown right into the thick of things. How the roof’s instability meant he was forced to go it alone, doing the job of multiple full teams because none of them could follow him inside without risking even more casualties. How he struggled, and suffered, and tried so goddamn hard to everyone he could save, find anyone he’d missed.
And how he only learned several days later that he hadn’t managed to save everyone, because without his voice, with only his eyes and too little time to search, there hadn’t been any way to know that Jerome and Elijah had hidden in the bathroom and closed the doors.
It was more practiced and polished than when he’d spoken to us at the Joint Force Headquarters last year. Fewer skips and starts, less prompting needed. The air of self-loathing to it all was also a thing of the past. Time, distance, and understanding had all helped heal the wound on his soul, and taught the young man that he’d done all that could’ve been expected of him, and more.
And the defense just let him do it. They didn’t object at all during his testimony, not even once. It was a pure, unbroken stream of consciousness, occasionally guided by questions to help direct the jury’s attention one way or the other, but never interrupted.
When Megan saw the transcript for this whole thing? She was going to be proud of her trooper, I knew it.
But God, the Federal Moonshot Bureau was going to be so mad that we didn’t have cameras in the courtroom! Any one cut from Barricade’s direct would have just been perfect for their propaganda shoots! But it’s not like we didn’t give them the opportunity, though. Hell, I’d reached out to let them know this would be happening, that if they wanted cameras in the courtrooms they had a full two business weeks to let us know. But then again, this was the FMB.
And as per usual, they fumbled the goddamn ball. I did call them the Fumblers for a reason, after all.
“Thank you for sharing all that, Barricade.” I offered him a solemn look, my ears held low to try and direct onlookers’ eyes elsewhere. “Before I turn you over to my…” I sneered, my ears shifting from low to pulled back. “Friends on the other side, as it were… is there anything else you’d like to share with the jury about the events of December 27th that you haven’t already?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Just one thing,” Barricade said, lips pulling into a frown. “I know I talked alot about how loud it was in there, but…” Even with only the bottom half of Barricade’s face visible, the rest of his body language was sufficient to convey his confusion. “It’s odd. I thought I would’ve heard the fire alarms going off, even over the fire. At least when I was on the fifth floor, anyway. But I don’t remember hearing it at all.”
I frowned, my ears and head tilting to the side in slight confusion. That… wasn’t something that had been mentioned at all in the entire almost-year of this case, actually. It was completely new information coming out at trial, information that we probably should have known well before going in.
“Objection!” Combover yelled as he rose to his feet. “Your Honor, that statement is clearly hearsay!”
“No it isn’t,” I fired back. “It’s not an out-of-court statement, it’s not somebody else’s statement, it’s not trying to assert the truth of the matter, and it falls under one of the explicitly enumerated exceptions as a ‘present sense impression’,” I explained. “And even if it was relayed by a different witness, which would make it hearsay? The witness is right there for the defense to cross-examine,” I finished, waving a hand in Barricade’s direction.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Judge Friedman said. “Overruled. Proceed, counselor.”
“Well I would, your Honor, but I have no further questions.”
“Ah.”
There was a slight chuckle in the courtroom as my response brought the judge up short. One ear flicked over towards the jury when I caught a murmur from the retired grandma, and I glanced over there ever so briefly to see her whispering something to the young Indian man, the one who worked as a waiter at his parents’ restaurant. This was a good sign. If there was a camaraderie developing there… well. There were a few groups who knew how to gossip better than almost any others… and the two scariest were retirees and service workers.
Behold: a retiree, and a service worker.
If those two had enough motivation to be shooting the shit like this already, then odds were that they’d spread the rumors and get people asking the questions we wanted them to without any outside prompting.
“Very well, please return to your table. Defense counsel,” Judge Friedman said even as I walked over to my chair and sat down, “after how much time you wasted yesterday making almost-identical opening statements, I’m keen to only allow one of you to cross examine this witness, but that would be improper. Decide which of you will go first, and only take your own chance to cross-examine if you actually have different questions than the first man.”
“Y-yes, sir,” Navy Blue said, standing up briefly to answer the judge. I frowned, and pulled out my cell phone to toss a text message Casey’s way.
propmgmt atty, navy blu
same build/face but diff voice
check docs on dccs/pacer & firm site
see if diff atty
I got a thumbs-up emoji back from Casey, and set my phone down. In the time it took me to send my text messages, the three stooges over at the defense’s table had evidently decided to give the contractor first crack at Barricade.
“Permission to approach?”
“Granted.”
Pinstripes… wasn’t wearing pinstripes today, which meant that the name didn’t work, and that meant the nickname I’d given the property manager’s attorney wouldn’t work either. Uh. Shoot. Combover was still fine, so… okay, screw it, I’d already called them the three stooges, may as well go all the way. Pinstripes was now Larry, Combover was now Curly, and the property manager’s attorney was Moe. There. I picked up a pen to jot that down before I forgot.
WCS=Combover=Curly
Mgmt=Navy=Moe
K’r=Pinstripes=Larry
Pinstripes, Larry, entered the well of the court, and immediately made a rookie mistake. Now, what was that mistake, you might ask?
He moved over to the side of the courtroom that held both the witness and the jury. Now, why was that a mistake, you might ask?
Because it meant that Larry and Barricade were in the same field of view, meaning the jury got to choose who they focused on. And in the attention war between a likable, charismatic witness on one side, and any attorney (myself included!) on the other?
Juries almost always, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, kept their eyes fixed to the witness. And that killed cross-examination. Your job on cross was to assault the witness’s credibility, and people tended to give more weight to a person’s words if they looked at the person while they spoke.
“Mr… ‘Barricade’,” Larry began, instantly making his second mistake. “You said in your testimony that you didn’t ask for any equipment from the firefighters, is that right?”
And then there was mistake number three.
“I didn’t have to ask,” Barricade answered. “They offered, but I followed NMR protocol and turned it down.”
Mistake two: disrespecting the witness. Mistake three: asking a yes/no question that had enough wiggle room for the witness to answer with something else.
“So you trusted your, ah, ‘Moonshot’ to protect you better than tried and true safety equipment, then?”
“Point of order, your Honor?” I began, standing up.
“Proceed,” the judge said before Larry could object to my interruption.
“The term ‘Moonshot’ refers to the people themselves,” I clarified. “Such as Barricade and myself. We just call our abilities what they are, with powers or superpowers being the two most common blanket statements.”
“So noted,” the judge said. I smirked out of the side of my mouth that didn’t face the jury, having exposed the defense as either an ignorant lout or a prejudiced jerk without having to be anything but polite and informative. I doubted any of them were listening to Larry before, but even if they had been?
Well, they certainly weren’t now.
“I’ll rephrase,” Larry said. “Sir, you trusted these powers of yours to protect you better than tried and true safety equipment, is that it?”
“I mean, not to brag, but the only thing I’ve seen get through one of my barriers is a tank shell.” Barricade did, in fact, brag. “But even without that, NMR regulations clearly state that we are not to requisition or accept an offer of equipment from other emergency responders or armed service members if our powers would adequately protect us in their stead, on the reasoning that we in the NMR need to be immediately recognizable to those around us. Our powers don’t follow any patterns, so our outfits can’t either, because they’re how we know at a glance what we’re capable of.”
“And yet,” Larry began, the hunch of his shoulders as he stepped closer to Barricade, making him look like a conman about to take an easy mark, “if you had taken some of that equipment, you would’ve had a breathing mask for fresh, cool air, wouldn’t you have?”
“And if I had?” Barricade challenged, teeing up my objection.
“Well, I’m just saying, maybe you wouldn’t have lost your voice on the fourth floor and been able to actually do your job properly, would you have?” Larry asked.
“Objection,” I said as I rose to my feet, “calls for speculation.”
“Sustained,” Judge Friedman said. “Counsel will—”
“Actually, sir?” Barricade interrupted. “I’d like to answer the question, if that’s okay?”
I opened my mouth and was moments away from saying something when Barricade turned his head to look directly at me. Then he gave me a single, certain nod. Trust me.
“If that’s okay with the objecting party,” the judge said, and turned to look at me as well. “Counselor?”
“... I withdraw my objection,” I said, ears half-lowered in worry. Withdrawing a sustained objection like that went against every instinct I had as an attorney. But… I had prepped my witness well. I wanted to trust him.
So I did.
“Very well.” Judge Friedman looked to his other side. “If the reporter could read back the question?”
“Defense counsel asked, quote: ‘Well, I’m just saying, maybe you wouldn’t have lost your voice on the fourth floor and been able to actually do your job properly, would you have?’ End quote.”
All eyes in the courtroom turned back to Barricade.
“Maybe if I had taken an air tank and a breathing mask, my voice would’ve worked a little better for a little longer, but it wouldn’t have changed anything,” he explained. “Yelling for a long time screws up your voice. If you’ve ever sung along at a concert, or cheered real hard for your favorite sports team, you probably woke up hoarse the next day. Now imagine yelling that loud, while also being in a burning building, and doing the jobs of fifteen to twenty people all by your fucking self!”
Barricade punctuated that last statement by slamming his fist on the witness’s stand, and everybody jumped.
“If I’d had a breathing mask? Yeah, sure, maybe my voice would’ve lasted longer. Hell, it could’ve even lasted the entire time, but you know what that would’ve changed? Not one goddamn thing. If the firefighters had been able to get even one more person into that fucking building, those kids would’ve been alive!
“So yeah, sure, I didn’t get them out, and I’m gonna have to live with the fact that I left them to die for the rest of my life!” Barricade snarled. Even though there was a reflective strip over his eyes, all of us could tell that he was practically glaring a hole through Larry’s forehead. “Here’s the thing, though? I can’t even begin to list how much shit had to all go wrong for me to have been the last thing between life and death for those kids. You wanna know who could?”
Barricade nodded over towards the defense’s table.
“One of them. Or two. Hell, maybe all of them. And you wanna stand there and ask what I could’ve done differently? How about this, then: I was the only fireproof Moonshot in the DC NMR until last August. I rescued seventeen people from that building. You wanna ask if something had been different? How’s this then: what if I hadn’t been there?”
Silence followed Barricade’s statement, and Larry had no immediate response. The opposing lawyer had been backing away from Barricade the whole time the hero spoke, and eventually wound up right where he was supposed to have been standing the whole time: on his side’s half of the courtroom, in front of their table. He swallowed, the sound audible to me in the silence, and a couple of the jurors caught the way my ears swiveled to face Larry.
“... D-defense requests that the prior objection be reinstated, a-and the witness’s response be stricken from the record,” Larry forced out.
“Plaintiff objects, your Honor,” I said, standing up. “The court already ruled on this matter when it accepted the withdrawal of our motion. The defense clearly asked a question that they shouldn’t have, and now wants you to turn back time and undo their mistake.”
Larry opened his mouth to say more, but Judge Friedman raised a hand to stop anything else from being said. He took a drink from his oversized travel mug, cleared his throat, and then made his decision.
“In the ordinary course of events,” he began, “this would have been stricken from the record and the jury ordered to disregard. However, plaintiff is correct: an improper question was asked, properly objected to, and should have itself been stricken before ever receiving an answer. At the witness’s request, though, the objection was withdrawn, and the defense got its wish. But as they say: be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” Judge Friedman eyed Larry with a frown. “Your request is denied. The witness’s answer shall remain within the record.”
“... I understand, your Honor.” Larry’s shoulders fell, the fight going out of him in an instant. “I have nothing further for this witness.”
“Very well.” Judge Friedman turned to Curly and Moe. “Do either of the remaining defendants have any additional questions?”
“No, your Honor.” “No, sir.”
“Very well,” the judge said, looking at me.
“Nothing further for this witness, your Honor.”
“Very well. The witness is hereby excused.” Judge Friedman turned to Barricade. “You’re a fine hero, young man. You do your community proud.”
“S-sir!” Barricade shot to his feet in a salute, the slightest bit of pink dusting the visible parts of his cheeks. He swiftly turned away and stepped down from the bench, then power walked out of the courtroom, head low to hide his blush.
“The court will now take a two-hour lunch recess. Will the Plaintiff’s next witness be ready to testify when we return?”
“He will, your Honor,” I confirmed.
“Very well. We will reconvene at 1:20 this afternoon.” Judge Friedman banged his gavel, and that was that.
The bailiff escorted the jury out of the courtroom, and we waited for our turn to exit. As I sat there, though, I wrote a note on my legal pad, and circled it with question marks.
Barricade had remembered something new at trial: the fire alarms hadn’t been going. And since the firefighters had only been able to enter the parts of the building whose alarm system might have already been destroyed by the fire, the alarms’ absence hadn’t been something noteworthy. But Barricade had entered the parts of the building that weren’t on fire yet, and they hadn’t been going off.
And this raised a new, very important issue, one we didn’t consider initially because it hadn’t been important. After all, what did it matter if the fire alarm didn’t go off when we had dozens of people who saw the building on fire?
But now that we were expanding our focus from just proving our case to providing ammunition for more cases, we now had to consider that question. Namely: if the fire alarm didn’t go off, then there shouldn’t have been any signal to dispatchers.
But if that was the case, how did the fire department know to send trucks to the Hillside Courtyard?
