Trial

Chapter One ; ;Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows. ;--richard ii, act 2, scene 3 ; ;Kent "Mac" McClain checked the time on the grandfather clock ;that faced him impassively from the far corner of his walnut-paneled law office. The old clock was an antique inherited from his mother's side of the family and worked perfectly as long as the weights and chains were kept in proper tension. As a child, Mac would lie in bed and listen to the old clock's solemn announcement of each passing hour from its spot in the foyer of his parents' home. Many years later he cleared a place for it in the corner of his office; however, the clock's loud striking every quarter-hour disrupted meetings with clients, so Mac disabled the chiming mechanism. Now, except for a steady ticking, the ivory face with its large, black Roman numerals kept a silent, closed-lipped vigil. ; ;It was almost 5:00 p.m. In a few minutes the office staff would pass through the reception room door and go home for the weekend. He would be alone. ; ;His neatly combed brown hair was heavily streaked with gray, but Mac was in better than average physical shape for age fifty-six. Just under six feet, he only weighed twenty-five pounds more than when he graduated from law school at the University of Georgia, and he could still spend an afternoon hiking in the mountains east of Dennison Springs. But he couldn't take total credit for his good physical condition; it was genetic. ; ;He'd also inherited his father's dry wit and his mother's compassionate brown eyes. Mac still maintained his wit, now a facade he hid behind, but it had been a long time since he felt compassion for another's pain. He hadn't blinked away tears for someone else's sorrow in years. ; ;He heard the front door close and slowly poured a beer into the cold mug sitting on the corner of his desk. Except for Friday afternoons, he never drank at the office. Friday afternoons were different. On Fridays he didn't drink to mask the malaise he carefully concealed from the eyes of the world. Rather, he renewed a ritual from a happier time, a thirty-five-year-old tradition begun on crisp autumn Fridays during college days in Athens, Georgia. Mac lived in a fraternity house his senior year, and as soon as classes were finished for the week, he would take an iced mug from the refrigerator, carefully pour a beer, sit on the front porch in a rocking chair, and watch the traffic go by on Milledge Avenue. But today was different. Today was no celebration. ; ;His heart beating a little faster than normal, he opened the bottom left drawer of his desk and took out the Colt .45 pistol issued to his father during World War II. ; ;At the beginning of the war, the standard side arm for military officers was a six-shot Smith and Wesson .38 revolver, but the ferocity of the Japanese soldiers in the Pacific forced the American military to rethink its strategy. In close combat, a .38-caliber shell might wound a charging infantryman, but it did not have sufficient mass to knock him down. The arms makers answered with a more potent weapon, and when Mac's father made the shift from head of the trust department for a local bank to captain in the U.S. Army, he acquired the drab olive weapon that now rested on his son's desk. ; ;Mac snapped out the clip. One by one, he extracted the bullets and lined them up like polished sentries on the edge of the dark wood. Bullets were small objects that could have devastating and deadly effect, especially when fired directly into the human skull at close range. ; ;Opening the narrow middle drawer of the desk, he took out a bottle of prescription pain pills. In some ways, pills and bulWhitlow, Robert is the author of 'Trial', published 2004 under ISBN 9780849945199 and ISBN 0849945194.