House Standoff by Mike Lawson

Author:Mike Lawson [Lawson, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2021-03-16T15:10:43+00:00

“Well, Hiram, I have to tell you that things don’t look good,” Bill Patterson said.

Patterson had been Hiram’s lawyer for the last twenty years and he’d represented him in his battles against the federal government as well as numerous other business-related disputes. And he’d represented Sonny, the time Sonny had been accused of assaulting a man in Rock Springs, the one he’d hit on the back of the head with a beer bottle. But this . . . This was first-degree murder and Hiram wasn’t sure that Patterson was the right man for the job.

Patterson said, “They got the warrant to seize Sonny’s weapons based on someone breaking into Sonny’s house.”

“What?” Hiram said. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m saying that someone broke into Sonny’s house, fired his hunting rifle into a rain barrel, and then turned the slug over to the FBI so they could compare it to the bullet that killed the BLM agent. Apparently, they got a match.”

Sonny shouted, “Who the hell was it? Who the hell broke into my house?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” Patterson said.

“Well, goddamnit, they can’t just break into my house and—”

“Shut up, Sonny,” Hiram said.

On the one-hour drive from Sonny’s house to Patterson’s office, Hiram and Sonny had hardly said a word to each other. Hiram, a man who didn’t normally talk all that much anyway, figured that there wasn’t really anything to talk about until he’d heard what the lawyer had to say. He hadn’t seen the point of asking Sonny a second time if he’d shot Jeff Hunter in the back.

Hiram said to Patterson, “So what are you going to do?”

Patterson noticed that Hiram didn’t say: Hey, there’s no way my boy would have killed that man. He appeared to have accepted the fact that his son might be a killer. Nor, he noticed, did Sonny leap up from his chair and proclaim his innocence. Sonny just sat there looking down at the floor as if he knew his world might be coming to an end.

Patterson said, “Before the case even goes to trial, I’ll argue that because of the way the FBI obtained the warrant, any evidence resulting from it is inadmissible at a trial. It’s a legal thing called “fruit of the poisonous tree.” If that doesn’t work, then I’ll argue that if a person could break into Sonny’s house to test-fire his rifle then somebody could just as easily have broken in, used the weapon to kill the agent, and then put the rifle back. In other words, there’s a case to be made that someone is trying to frame Sonny for the crime. And because Sonny has an alibi for the time Hunter was killed, I think there’s a good possibility that I can create reasonable doubt and he won’t be convicted.”

Hiram had never seriously questioned Sonny’s alibi because he’d never seriously considered that Sonny could have killed that man. Now he had to wonder if the alibi would hold up. The man who’d alibied Sonny was almost as useless as Sonny.

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