The Judas Goat

By Adam S. Barnett

When does self-defense become murder?  Kyle Morrison is about to find out.

Kyle is an ordinary guy living a life he chose for himself. He has his own diner. He has a great girlfriend. He has his privacy and a reputation for being a good, hardworking man.

That all changes the day Kyle kills a 15-year-old would-be robber. The prosecution thinks he went beyond self-defense. His girlfriend doesn't know what to do. The Internet has made Kyle an unwilling poster child in the nation's gun control debate. His attorney knows this case can launch his own career into the stratosphere and wonders where his own lines are. 

THE JUDAS GOAT is a legal thriller told from the perspective of the accused, the victim, the accomplice and the attorneys on both sides. It dares to ask the question of who we are as a society... and who we are going to be.

Who will follow the Judas Goat?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam S. Barnett
• Release date: May 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386063544

Adam S. Barnett

Adam S. Barnett has been an attorney since 1994. His focus has been on children's rights and therapeutic alternatives to incarceration. His popular humor blog, "Comics Make No Sense," ran for over 10 years. He lives in the Plains region of the United States with his wife, Laura.

Book preview

Chapter One

Kyle had already reached the age where he had reconciled the fact that his life was going to come and go with very few people outside of his immediate circle of friends and customers noticing.  And he was fine with that.  It was comfortable.  Sure, he still had some worries, as everyone does. But he’d reached the point in life where he had to accept that he wasn’t going be much more than an animated leaf icon sprouting from a few Ancestry.com family trees.

As with everyone, he hadn’t always felt this way.  He’d had dreams of being, at the very least, a footnote in a record book here and there.  Always a tall kid for his age (particularly after that growth spurt between his sophomore and junior year of college), Kyle had worked his way through the ranks of football leagues at the Y and had endured brutal Two-a-Day drills at the high school level to become a first-string offensive lineman.  True, he hadn’t garnered the attention that All-State quarterback Jamie Parker did.  To tell the truth, he hadn’t attracted much attention at all, but at least he got to wear the letter jacket - royal blue wool with baby-blue leather sleeves, textiles that have always been and will always be the ticket to instant reverence in high school.  Like most things, football had its pros and cons, but it had provided a ready-made group of friends to hang out with and a scholarship to a Division II university, thanks to his mom’s masterful promotion of him to coaches via links to a YouTube homemade highlight reel of his best moments on the field.  A career in pro ball had been a possibility back then, and possibility is synonymous with absolute certainty when one is still young enough to have more possibilities than missed opportunities.

Perhaps he hadn’t set the collegiate world on fire, but he had managed to keep his stats high enough to see that scholarship renewed - at least, he had until that unfortunate, unseasonably warm November day when he’d blocked a tackle and taken the hit for running back Corey Marks.  Kyle had felt his knee pop, the pain feeling like a shrill scream sounds. He had gone down hard as he watched through eyes blurred by pain and sweat as Marks went the distance.  Marks would receive the write-up in the paper for his amazing run while Kyle had been given the consolation prize consisting of months of physical therapy and a nicely-worded form letter on university letterhead, regretfully informing him that his academic free ride had just come to an end.  Once Kyle had regained some movement in his leg, he’d learned that NCAA insurance wouldn’t cover the medical bills because his injury, while severe enough to keep him from playing for a year, hadn’t been catastrophic enough, at least not to a soulless, pencil-pushing insurance adjuster.  In addition to the medical bills he couldn’t pay, he also had to contend with a tuition bill for the Spring term that would have previously been covered by a scholarship he now no longer had.  The only learning he had ending up doing that semester consisted of a first-hand education in how bankruptcy court worked.

As soon as he had been upgraded to only moderately damaged merchandise, he had been able to wrangle a scholarship at an unremarkable Division III college and finish getting his Bachelor of Science in Hotel and Restaurant Management.  Playing with the pros was out of the question, but at least Kyle’s mom had been able to see him do the cap-and-gown walk.  As the fragility of Kyle’s future had been firmly established, he’d dared not take summers off and instead had knocked out as many class credits as he could as quickly as he could.   

Kyle’s mom would succumb to cervical cancer a few years later.  Preoccupied with her injured, financially ruined and futuristically compromised child had resulted in more than a few missed Pap tests.  This would be apparently more tragedy than Kyle’s father had signed up for when he had vowed to be loyal through sickness and health and he would abruptly absent himself from the family shortly after her diagnosis via a shameless divorce and new romance with an old high school girlfriend he had reconnected with on Facebook.

So, Kyle had no longer nurtured any grandiose expectations as to how his life was going to go.  He had long since recognized that the status and easy outs that came from athletics was behind him and his existence was going to be unremarkable at best.  But he had managed to do a few things right and he had learned that trading excitement for contentment wasn’t the worst thing a person could do.

Like most people entering the workforce for the first time, Kyle had difficulty finding a job that suited him.  Managerial jobs in the area had left him with a choice of either managing a restaurant that was part of a national chain or serving the whims of the various owners of the few local eateries that still existed.  Since he hadn’t been interested in mortgaging the freedom he’d worked so hard to obtain by finishing school so quickly, Kyle had opted to turn a building that had originally been a fast food joint into a small diner he would simply name Kyle’s (for a lack of anything better when the time came to apply for licenses) and gave being his own boss a try.

Kyle had struggled at first, exhausting the modest inheritance that came from his mother’s passing.  But he had kept things going by keeping his overhead ridiculously low.  He had established an efficient routine of arriving before the sun came up, doing the food prep work before he opened the place, taking the orders, delivering the plates, running the register, doing the dishes and answering the phone (although the phone was rarely answered... customers that were already in the door were top priority).  Once word had spread of his generous hand when it came to portion-size and the open kitchen where customers could be entertained by sitting at the counter and watch him cook, Kyle had been able to afford hiring the occasional part-time help.  He’d usually taken on a high school or college kid to act as server or dishwasher, depending on the social skills of the prospective employee. 

He had initially closed up shop at three in the afternoon when he had started and that still hadn’t changed.  He hadn’t heard much demand for dinner service - certainly not enough to add six hours to his workday.  He’d paid close attention to horror stories of restaurateurs who had grown too fast, too quickly and saw their businesses collapse under their own weight.  In the back of his mind, Kyle had always been quite aware that he had no family to rely on should the diner fail, so he had been very slow to take risks.  Life had proven to be unsteady enough already.  Keeping 45 seats filled and keeping the profits slightly more robust than razor-thin had been enough of a challenge without tempting fate.

If there was one thing Kyle had always liked about owning the diner, it was the immediacy of it all.  In order to keep the place running, he had to live in the here and now.  Supplies had to be ordered, food had to be prepared, the diner had to be clean, the money had to be handled properly... it was nearly impossible to worry about what the future might bring when he had to focus on simply getting through the day.  And that had been good for him.  Kyle liked a life where his problems were the kind that could be solved right then and there.

For example, when he had first leased the building, he’d have to address the problem of the sign outside.  Because the space had previously held a chain restaurant, Kyle had already been saving quite a sum by not having to replace ventilation equipment, refrigerators, freezers, tables, bar stools, shelving and counters left by the previous tenants in exchange for being let out of their lease early.  Normally, this would have resulted in inflated rent but the landlord had been having a hard time leasing the place after an established franchise restaurant had failed there.  So, Kyle had managed to negotiate a very favorable lease and really couldn’t complain.  But the sign had presented a problem.

The previous occupants had owned a franchise that centered its menu almost entirely around fried chicken.  This meant that Kyle now had use of much larger deep fryers than he really needed but, cost of canola oil to fill the things notwithstanding, this was certainly a good problem to have.  But it also meant that Kyle had to come up with the money for a flat top grill for cooking nearly everything on his menu that wasn’t deep-fried or go in the oven.  This was a doable accommodation as Kyle was making the transition from chicken joint to diner.  But the remnants of that sign had been another matter.

As required by the franchise, the previous owners had installed a monument sign, which was a huge sign on a large pole and it was meant to be permanent.  This had been an asset to the previous tenants, but a liability to Kyle.  He would look into it and learn that the cost to change the face of the sign itself would have been what he would have expected to pay for a good used car.  He had been hoping to simply cover the sign with a temporary one of his own, but zoning laws forbade that.  It was at that moment when Kyle had realized he was making a financial commitment from which there would be no takesies-backsies and bit the bullet.  But even that hadn’t solved all the problems.

The previous restaurant had sold chicken in a bucket and there was a massive steel facsimile of their trademark bucket jutting out of the top of the sign.  Kyle would obtain a few estimates before giving up on the idea of removing it as simply cost-prohibitive.  He had even contacted local scrap-metal dealers and antique dealers with the idea of giving them the bucket if they would simply remove the thing, but no one fell for that one.

So, Kyle would finally hire painters to simply paint the bucket plain white.  And that worked for about two days before someone on Yelp pointed out that the bucket now looked suspiciously like a cup in which one might give a urine sample for a drug test.  So, Kyle had to hire the painters again.  They told him of a restaurant in Canada with an identical problem who had painted the sign to look like one of their coffee cups. And although Kyle had served coffee in ceramic mugs, he bought some personalized white cups for take-out business and thus the problem was eventually solved when the markings on the sign followed suit.  Life, and his business, would soldier on.

No, his life wouldn’t be one people would talk about.  But it would be a good life.

And today, when that front door opened, Kyle met the girl who gave him reason to believe it was going to be a great one.

Chapter Two

Relationships were not Kyle’s strong suit.  He could do some arbitrary chit-chat with customers while they waited on their orders, but Kyle was very much an introvert.  He would leave conversations at the first opportunity that civility allowed and avoided crowds and telephone calls at all costs.  The down side of that was that he had managed to make his way through his college years surrounded by young ladies his age yet without finding anyone with whom he saw a future.  It wasn’t that he hadn’t been open to the possibility.  Perhaps he had simply started taking his life too seriously to be considered a potentially fun date.  But today, this one seemingly ordinary breakfast shift seemed to change everything.

She took a seat at the counter after checking the stool upholstery and laminate countertop for any spills that might transfer to her clothes.  Kyle saw what she was doing out of the corner of his eye and smirked.

She caught him and laughed a bit nervously.  What?

Kyle didn’t look up, pretending to focus intently on the eggs frying on the flat top grill.  Nothing.  Not a thing.

She laughed again.  "WHAT?!"

Kyle saw that the eggs were opaque so he gave them a flip, letting them kiss the grill ever so briefly before sliding them onto the plate.  He shoveled a generous portion of country potatoes next to them before ladling gravy on a biscuit he had waiting on a smaller plate.  He smiled... a little grimly, perhaps, but a smile nonetheless... as he walked around from behind the counter to give Sal his breakfast and muttered I know this isn’t the fanciest establishment, but I do know how to keep a counter clean.

She didn't break her smile as she gave an exaggerated sigh.  I have a job interview in half an hour and I don’t think I’d make the best impression with a coffee stain on my ass.

Kyle felt his own smile soften in spite of himself.  You’d stand out from the other applicants, he had said, finding it hard to look directly into those green eyes.

She laughed at that.  Not in a good way, she said.  And Kyle noticed that she had a really nice laugh.  It was very genuine.

He cleared the dishes off a table as he made his way back.  The diners had left little food on their dishes, which was the highest praise for Kyle.  Cleaning egg and syrup residue off plates was never much fun, but seeing his food eaten was a performance review that always gave Kyle a steady stream of validation that had gotten him through the long days.  The dishes in the plastic bin were placed in the back, adding to an already-imposing pile that had been building all morning.  He stopped to wash his hands (he had always been pretty religious about hand-washing, but he knew he had to be above reproach now that he’d made such an issue about how clean his restaurant was to this woman) and resumed his vantage point behind the counter.  What can I get you?

She smiled.  If I ask for coffee, you aren’t going to splash it on me as some kind of passive-aggressive thing, are you?

He chuckled at that.  You’re sitting in a ‘no splash’ area.  Move a couple of stools down and anything goes.

Maybe after the interview.

He retrieved a ceramic mug from the cabinet under the counter.  Regular or decaf?

She looked at him in mock outrage.  Decaf?  What kind of horror show are you running here?

The lady wants to be good and wired for her job interview, Kyle said to no one in particular as he poured.  A wise choice for any job applicant.

I just want to make sure I don’t yawn, she said.  They might think I’m less than enthusiastic about the job.

What’s the job?

English teacher.

Really?  What grade? Kyle asked while laying down more bacon to cook on the flat-top.  Kyle had a breakfast all day policy and had learned from being caught unprepared a few times in the past that cooking bacon during the slower moments always paid off.

8th and 9th.

Adolescent boys? his eyebrows went up in genuine concern.

I have no fear, she said boldly.  Then, breaking character, she said Did that sound convincing?

I’d hire you.

Fantastic, she said with a grin.  If I crash and burn this morning, I’ll be coming by this afternoon to fill out an app.

Awesome.  But you’ll have to wear that dress to work every day as a uniform.  I like the color.

You do?

I do.  It’s the color of rainbow sherbet.

What?!

That’s not a bad thing.  Everyone likes rainbow sherbet.  It’s happy.  And it works on you.  Kyle knew that he was being way too fashion-conscious and was compromising his manliness, but the conversation was going down that road and he didn’t know how to stop.

You think?  It’s hard for redheads to find colors that don’t wash us out.

Red hair is a genetic mutation, Kyle blurted.  DEAR LORD IN HEAVEN, WHY HAD HE SAID THAT?  He searched his mind desperately for something to change the subject, but he couldn’t come up with a word.

Thankfully, she saved him.  You’re right, she said with a smile.  The MC1R gene!

You are blessed with pheomelanin! Kyle said, relieved.

Yes, I am!

Pause.

After he cleared his throat, Kyle broke the silence.  It looks good on you.

Awwwww, she said sweetly.  Thank you.  You know your genetics.

I am a wealth of insignificant information, Kyle said shyly.  I’m kind of a trivia buff.

It sounds like you’d be a good partner for Trivia Night at Opie’s.  Opie’s was a local sports bar.

You’ve been to Opie’s?

A few times.  But I’ve never seen you there.

Well, Kyle said, trying to thread the needle of letting her know he had something to offer without actually bragging, I don’t get out much in the evenings.  I have to get up at 4 a.m. to open up here and then I do all the other stuff it takes to keep things going after I close.  You know: Doing the food purchase orders, totaling out the day’s receipts for the accountant... that sort of thing.

That’s a lot, she said.  It sounds like your boss is very demanding.

He is, Kyle said honestly.  Actually, I’m my own boss.  This is my diner.

Really?  That’s so cool! she said, and she sounded like she meant it.  She was positively adorable. 

Kyle smirked and looked at his shoes, absently twirling a dishtowel in his hands.  I haven’t been called ‘cool’ in many, many moons.

Not possible, she said in exaggerated disbelief.  You lie.  Why must you lie?

That made Kyle laugh.  I’ve learned since opening the place that unless you own a fine dining establishment, owning a restaurant doesn’t impress too many people.

Well, she said, folding her arms on the counter.  I think it’s amazing that you opened your own business.  I would never have the nerve to do that.  I’m strictly a worker bee.

Nice of you to say, he said.  But if I were to be totally honest, it was more out of necessity than entrepreneurial spirit.

Honesty! she declared.  I like that in a man.  Almost as much as a man who knows his trivia.

Kyle paused, took a deep breath and looked into her face.  She was so pretty.  Not beautiful, like girls who devote their entire lives to how they look.  She was naturally pretty, with kind eyes and a warm smile that encouraged him to just say to heck with it and say what he felt he needed to say.

Kyle had learned the hard way long ago that he just didn’t have game.  About a year prior, a very attractive young lady had come into the diner.  She’d had pancakes with bananas and whipped cream.  That day, she had come in with a friend.  The next day she had come in by herself, ordered a patty melt and he had struck up a conversation with her.  The third day she came in, Kyle had taken the hint and asked for her phone number.  She wrote it down.

In his defense, Kyle would have sworn that she had said her name was Renee and she didn’t write her name on the bottom of her guest check when she handed it back to him.  As one might have predicted, when Kyle had called the number that evening, he got her name wrong and was too embarrassed to confess.  He hadn’t called the number again and she never returned to the diner.  Kyle kicked himself on a daily basis and promised himself NEVER AGAIN.

She smiled.  So, is your name ‘Kyle’ or do you call the place that to dodge creditors or something?

Kyle chuckled.  No, it’s me.  I’m Kyle.  I guess I’m not that imaginative.

Hey, I like a man who lives in the real world, she said.  You can trust an unimaginative man.  An unimaginative man is a man who can’t lie even if he wants to.

I try to stay out of situations where I’d need to lie, he said quietly.  So, to tell the truth, if you gave me your name it slipped right past me.

Oh, derp! she put her face in her hands.  "I guess there isn’t a neon sign outside with my name on it, is there?  She regained her composure and extended her hand.  I’m Brooke."

Kyle shook her hand, although it always struck him as an odd thing to do with someone in whom he had a romantic interest.  Hi, Brooke.

Hi, Kyle, she smiled sweetly.  So, what’s it like working for yourself?  Since you don’t have an annoying boss, what’s the most annoying thing you have to deal with at work?

People who ask for their eggs to be poached, Kyle said.

Seriously?

Yup, he nodded.  The poached egg is the bane of every breakfast cook’s shift.

Why? she asked, amused.

They’re a pain, Kyle said.  You have to be very careful when you crack the egg into the water and they go from perfect to ‘hard-boiled’ in two seconds.

That’s why I order them when I go out, Brooke confessed.  They’re too hard to make at home.

"Oh, you’re one of those," Kyle teased.  I’ll tell you a trade secret to keeping the egg together when you put it in the water.

Brooke leaned forward.

Stir the water clockwise real fast, Kyle said softly.  Put the egg in while the water is still spinning.

The heck you say, Brooke said.

Yup, Kyle said.  Don’t get me started on people who insist on ugly egg-white omlets.  They look gross and have zero nutritional value.

I see you also don’t think much of gluten free, Brooke pointed to the front door where a sign had been taped reading, GLUTEN-FREE REQUESTS AVAILABLE ONLY WITH A NOTE FROM YOUR DOCTOR.

Prima donnas, Kyle said with a sneer. 

Brooke rolled her eyes.  If it’s what people want to eat and you sell food, what’s the problem?

People who insist on gluten-free food slow things down.  They never know what they want and they send things back.  By the time they leave, I’ve lost money on rejected food and the amount of regular orders I can complete.

But what about the bad p.r.?

There’s not much, Kyle said with a shrug.  Not every restaurant is going to have something for everyone.  If you go to a vegetarian restaurant looking for baby back ribs, you’re going to be disappointed.  Look, this is a diner.  I sell a lot of coffee.  I’ll keep cream, half & half and every kind of sweetener imaginable stocked... even that weird saccharin syrup in a bottle that Mrs. Bowers likes.  It’s a pain, but that’s part of what I expected when I opened a diner.  But gluten-free is not part of the deal.  Either celiac disease has spread faster than the zombie virus or people are just wanting to be treated as if they were special.

Well, we’re all special, she teased.

No, we’re not, Kyle countered.  "There are billions of people on the planet and we can’t all be special.  We