Free Fatal Decree by H. Terrell Griffin

burglary two weeks before.
    Jeff stopped at the door to the office. There were voices, a low conversation coming from inside. He had not expected anyone else to be there. He stood silently for a beat, then shoved the door open gun in hand, pointing inward.
    The owner stood stock-still, an amused look on his face. Another man stood across the room holding a pistol, pointed at Jeff. He was one of the bouncers who stood nightly at the front door. The man fired, hitting Jeff in the left shoulder. Jeff fired at the same time, hitting the bouncer in the heart. A lucky shot? It saved Jeff’s life, but put him in jail for fifteen years.
    The owner pulled his own gun and stuck it in Jeff’s face while he used his cell phone to call the police. Jeff was in too much pain from the bullet in his shoulder to resist.
    Jeff was initially charged with first-degree murder, but it turned out that the bouncer had a checkered history and warrants for his arrest were outstanding in three states. The state attorney agreed to a plea to manslaughter with a fifteen-year sentence and no chance of parole. Jeff served every minute of it and had been released from prison on June 1, five months before.
    On the day Jeff walked down the steps of the Sarasota County Judicial Center, he had no understanding of any legal doctrine and would be unable to answer even the most rudimentary legal questions. That did not present a problem to him. He had no intention of practicing law, counseling clients, appearing in court, or, heaven forbid, going to a local bar function where as best he could figure, lawyers gathered to drink and brag about the cases they had won.
    When he was released from prison, Jeff had a mission. While not absolutely necessary, his being a lawyer would make his tasks easier to accomplish, and he didn’t have time to spend seven years at some university. At the beginning of October, he was told of a young man named Ben Flagler who had finished law school and sat for and passed the Florida bar exam. Jeff was assured that Flagler had no family and no friends in the area. He was from North Dakota and had gone to school there. His parents had been killed in a car wreck while he was in his second year of law school. He had no siblings, and if he had cousins or other family, he’d never met them. He decided that sunny Florida was a better place to practice law than the Dakotas, so he applied for the Florida bar exam and took it in August. When the results were posted in late September, the young man from North Dakota was among those who passed.
    Flagler rented a furnished apartment in Sarasota, dealing with the real estate agent through the Internet and by e-mail. Jeff was made aware of all these small details by his client, and he marveled, not for the first time, at the client’s ability to acquire information. On the day Flagler showed up to move into the apartment, Jeff was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa, a silenced pistol in his hand. Flagler walked in the front door and Jeff shot him in the head. He waited until dark and moved the body into the trunk of his car. He drove east, out Fruitville Road past I-75 to an intersection that held a closed gas station. As instructed, he pulled behind the stationand waited. In a few minutes, an old Buick approached, blinked its lights twice, and pulled in next to Jeff.
    “You got the package?” asked the man behind the wheel of the Buick.
    “In the trunk,” said Jeff, and reached over and pushed the button that released the trunk lid.
    The other man wrestled the body out of Jeff’s trunk and into the Buick’s. “That one’ll keep the gators’ bellies full for a few days,” he said.
    Jeff got into his car and drove away without answering. He went back to the apartment Flagler had rented and went to bed. The next morning he would present himself to a judge at the courthouse and show the North Dakota driver’s license with his picture on it that identified him as Ben Flagler, and be sworn in