The Wounded Man

By Patrick Harvill

The Wounded Man is an undiscovered gem. The story moves quickly, through dialogue and stunning action. Grant Macallan is an ex-marine and ex-DA who is battling cancer while keeping together his small law office. Grant's lover Gwen Alvarez is a corporate lawyer and Harvard Law graduate. Grant and Gwen hurtle through a tapestry of corruption, sex and murder towards a shattering conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Harvill
• Release date: Mar 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452313986

Patrick Harvill

Patrick Harvill is a lawyer in Southern California. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with High Honors and Special Honors in 1987. He graduated from Columbia University School of Law in 1990, having served as the Managing Editor of the Columbia Law Review. He achieved the designation of Harlan Fiske Stone scholar each year at Columbia. In 1990, Patrick Harvill published the Columbia Law Review Note, "The Forgotten Warrior: Section 12(2) of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Battle Against Insider Trading." Patrick lives in Southern California with his wife and children.

Book preview

The Wounded Man

Copyright © 2010 Patrick D. Harvill, all rights reserved. Smashwords Edition.

Chapter 1. Boilermaker

I heard about the beginning later that night, from Gwen. The soft, rose-tinted light from the lamp beside our bed glowed on her face. She lolled her head on the feather pillow, and filled me in. Lord what a wicked grin she had on. She loved violating every rule by telling me, while lounging naked beside me. She loved it.

Bruce Fields was his name. He was a very fat man, and not young. Bruce - he was thinking about finding a prostitute, and he knew where to find them. He drove a gray company sedan west on Third Avenue through the Pico-Union slums. Some of the people who live there pick up trash for a living, but no one picks up trash for them. It’s strewn all over. The smell of garbage mixes with the diesel fumes of the buses and trucks that travel down Third. At noon that day, the streets and sidewalks were thronged. Old, brown Latina women in dull red shawls accompanied young Latina women in floral dresses, their children in tow, into and out of little groceries. Young men in groups, wearing bright clothing, talked loudly and with gestures on the street corners. Couples cooing in Spanish pushed battered baby strollers through the crowds. Men in bright silk shirts and women in tight white skirts walked into dingy bars.

Fields reached Sunset. He turned right and headed uphill to the poor, Bohemian neighborhoods near Hollywood. He stopped at the side of the road and waited. A young Latina girl in a white miniskirt and a halter top walked up to his passenger side window.

What do you like, she said in a thick Spanish accent.

Her full, brown breasts pressed against the translucent fabric of her halter-top. Her nipples were hard, and the tempting circle of pigment that surrounded them was generous. The tight skirt stopped at her upper thigh, allowing him to see a suggestion of her pubic mound. He knew she was wearing nothing beneath the skirt. If he asked her into the car, she’d take the money and climb on top of him.

Cuanto Dinero? he says.

I speak English, man. I been here my whole life. $40 for head. $60 for half-and-half.

With an act of willpower, Fields raised his eyes from her thighs, her breasts. He looked into her face. How old are you, sweetheart?

Gwen, when she was telling me about it, she couldn’t help but get a twinkle in her eye.

The prostitute had grinned, Old enough.

You remind me of my granddaughter.

I ain’t doing no kinky shit, man.

I’m sorry, he said, that’s not what I meant. You are very pretty, but no.

The prostitute stepped away from his window and scanned the street for another customer. Old faggot, she said, You can’t get it up anyway.

Fields started his car and just drove off. He needed a drink.

The little bar was in a strip mall. It showed darkly tinted windows to the outside world. Inside, the walls were lined with dusty, flickering signs reading Corona, Dos Equis, Budweiser, and Miller. Bruce Fields walked up to the bar, moving his big frame with visible effort, and thumped down onto one of the battered wooden bar stools. The bartender walked up -- a short, wiry Latino man, with black hair, lines on his face, and a gold front tooth. Cerveza?

Fields’ voice came up from deep in his heavy chest. Si. And whiskey.

The bartender brought the whiskey in a shot glass and the beer in a frosted mug. Fields poured whiskey into the mug, watching the brown liquor swirl into the beer. He drank it down. Then he drank five more of them, one after the other.

He ran his hands through his thick black hair and reached into his back pocket. He pulled his wallet out very slowly, and deliberately counted his money out on the counter of the bar. He stood and staggered a little at first, then regained his footing. He started towards the exit.

Hey, big man, the bartender said.

Yeah.

You left me a $100 tip?

No. $10.

This is a hundred dollar bill, man. I ain’t no thief.

Sorry. I mean . . . thanks . . . He wandered out to his car.

Fields drove down Third to La Brea, and then to the Santa Monica Freeway, heading west, toward his office near the coast. As he drove, all that alcohol hit him very hard. When the Highway Patrol pulled him over, he was driving fifty miles per hour, with his car centered over the Bots dots dividing the carpool lane from the rest of the freeway. It would be his fourth conviction for Driving Under the Influence, and in California four convictions can mean prison.

When Fields got to the jail, he called his secretary at Saturn Industries. He told her that he needed a lawyer. Gwen Alvarez, lead outside counsel for Saturn, took the call. She went to the county jail and met with Fields. She posted bail. Then she called me.

Chapter 2. Burn-In

That afternoon, I was in the middle of a criminal trial. Michael Webster was charged with attempted murder and I was trying to get him home. I had saved my fading strength while putting on the witnesses, sitting at counsel table across from the witness on the stand, instead of standing as in the past. I’m not interested in grandstanding, I kidded myself, I just want to get the truth out for the jury. Now, though, I was on my feet. My face flushed red, as I fought against the fatigue and pointed to the jury, Only you can vote guilty. You have the power in this courtroom - not the judge and not that young prosecutor. This young man is not guilty. It is up to you to hold the cops accountable for a flawed investigation. Let this boy – this innocent boy – go home.

The defendants in the case were charged with robbery. Two masked gunmen walked into a liquor store and shot up a lot of glass, popping the bottles in the shelves with their handguns and watching the liquor spray. They raided the cash register, while the elderly Asian couple who owned the store cowered behind the counter, hugging each other tightly and mumbling prayers to Buddha. My client was the 20-year-old kid who drove the car. He wasn’t going to snitch off his best friend. So the DA screwed him and charged him with everything in the book.

I got it as a court-appointed case the day before trial. I did what I could, but the jury convicted on attempted murder in about an hour. He ended up with fifteen to life for driving his buds to the liquor store. Sure, he knew they were up to no good, but fifteen-to-life? I did what I could.

Thank you Mr. Macallan, she said, big brown eyes rimming with tears. Webster’s mother was a very heavy black woman, with rolls of fat inside her rolls of fat, and a face that was flat and long, like a tired hound dog’s face. She was wearing plus-sized jeans and a very loose white t-shirt, The way you argued for our boy, she nodded, I thought maybe they’d see . . . they’d see he needed to come home.

Call me Grant, I said, and call me any time. I knew I would never see her again.

Afterwards, after I left her weeping about how long he’d be away, I drove up to my office in Pasadena. It’s not much. A reception room with no secretary in it. A dark, imitation wood desk with an old computer and a phone on it. My inner office opens through a doorway to the right of the vacant secretary desk. The whole setup runs me a few hundred per month. It’s recession pricing but I‘ll take it. Anyone asks, I tell them the secretary’s out. She’s been out for a couple of years, since I finally quit the DA and went to the dark side. Overhead is low and I do what I do – if it amounts to much at all - in court. I sagged into my battered old leather chair, and stared at my battered old pine desk with the imitation oak veneer. My bar card didn’t come with an invitation to a country club. I just got into the school of hard knocks.

Across from my desk were two dark wood-framed chairs with durable red fabric seat covers. No clients were sitting in them. My dark suit jacket was draped over one of the empty chairs.

I didn’t have any windows in my little office suite. There was no sign saying my name on the door. Work was not steady, and I was keeping costs low. I kept a nice background on my Windows desktop, and changed it a lot, to try to make up for having no window. On the wall across from my desk I put a big poster of Lake Tahoe on a cold day, with the trees heavy with snow, and the deep blue lake shining. I didn’t have any photos of Gwen. Lake Tahoe was enough, because her eyes were that shade of blue.

I was paying for it – for the stress and effort of the trial – just like I knew that I would. My hands were shaking. I was drained and weak. I walked over and looked in the mirror in a wood frame on the wall beside my desk – a decorative touch useful for grooming before court. The guy in the mirror had a face drained pale under a slight suntan, with black circles under his eyes. I ran my fingers through my thick, light brown hair. The reaper was sneaking up on me again.

I was weaker. It was hitting me harder this time than the last time. Non-hodgkin’s lymphoma, the doctors said. This cancer was incurable but subject to remission through chemotherapy. I had chemo, on and off, sticking with one drug until it didn’t work anymore, and then switching to a new one. For five years, the cancer had been held back. Someday, it wouldn’t work anymore. That day might be tomorrow, or it might be in thirty years. In the meantime, I had to make a living the only way I could – hustling in court.

I turned back and fell into my battered leather chair again. I dialed up my chemo nurse at Kaiser hospital on Sunset for an appointment. Oncologists come and go, but the brains behind the operation are the nurses. They stick and they know the patients.

Hey Naomi, I said when she came on the line, I’m going to need a little help.

We’ll zap it for you Grant. Is this, um . . .

She was always cheerful. A thin reed of an elderly woman, she greeted everyone with a smile that crinkled her face like a pug