Whisky Hernandez by J. S. Mason | Character Guest Post

“Whisky, if you need anything, just let me know,” the towering in height and cavernous nostriled judge said with an easy-going grin that seemed to be bereft of any haughtiness his raised chin and gaudily framed Ivy League fraternity diploma seemed to convey.

“I will, Edward. Thanks again for letting us stay in here,” I responded in kind before the door closed. The smile was the same; my nostrils aren’t quite so large and I’m fairly short. Petite is what I’m supposed to say. Eh. Why not just simplify things than have other words that aren’t even for precision but just mean the exact same thing? Variety, I suppose. Which can at times be quite exhilarating.

Anyway, there was dew that was clouding the window in the judge’s chambers, which was fitting. There was also the smell of leather cleaner that I didn’t think much about then. Each time I had gone through the material in front of me, the testimony, the clues, and the analysis only led me to the conclusion that Sebastian, that’s my friend and partner who takes photos for me, and I were going into more of a complex haze that slowly was only going to befuddle whatever progress we were trying to make. As you can guess, I vividly recall the case I was trying to wrap up that May.

2012 was a strange year for me in terms of caseload in large part because it seemed like I was being asked about a case every other week. I wasn’t working for the dentist’s office I’m employed at, and if I were I probably would have missed more than a few spots on some of the patients’ teeth. Much in the same way I hadn’t noticed the stain on the gavel that was right on the desk in front of me. Also, puffy vests were coming back into fashion that year, so talk about a blast from the past or the future. Either way, I was sitting in a room very few get to see who aren’t in a contentious legal position and this was only because my fiancé, my dashing Felix whose lawyerly ways had brought him fame throughout the jurisdiction, was taking part in an all-hands-on–deck approach to a case of his own entirely independent of mine. Or so I thought. It seemed that someone in the building had been muffling up a hearing and pretty much everyone that had to do with the court system was under suspicion. If I could have helped I would, but I was too busy on this case.

After I had continued to rifle through several documents and cross-checking them with pages from my notebook, the door opened again sometime later and a woman poked her head out from the other side of it.

“Miss Hernandez?” she asked.

“I do every now and again. But I have other things to keep me busy when we’re apart,” my partner chimed in.

“Never mind him.” I dismissed Sebastian with a hand wave. “How can I help you?”

“The local police have been trying to get ahold of you,” she said.

Darting at my phone with contact-free eyes and noticing there was no cell service, I glanced back up at the message carrier. “What do they need? And who are you?”

“Just a clerk, ma’am. Annette Adanger.” She had a stammer that wasn’t trustworthy, but not grounds for a polygraph either. Nor was she as scary as her surname might indicate. “A detective wanted to let you know that they’re arresting someone. Apparently, it’s someone that they warned you they were going to do earlier today.”

To steeple my hands wasn’t going to do much, but I wanted to seem in control of the situation even if the twitching of my mouth betrayed such a notion. “Thanks for letting me know.”

With a hesitancy, the clerk ducked her head out of the office and my partner and I were once again left alone in the judge’s chambers.

Fiddling with a lens cap, Sebastian pouted his lips and said, “Well, what now, Whisky?”

I didn’t move my fingers from their position nor my gaze that had been glued to the door which had just been closed. I must have sat like that for a while and my partner knew not to dismay when I was in one of those states. I took a deep contemplative breath in, coughed from the smell of the leather cleaner in the room, retracted my fingers from one another, and muttered in a barely audible voice, “I think we’re out of options for suspects.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, barely.”

See, I’m quite accurate in my recall. But moving on to the main point, my partner was as surprised as I was of my concession that the criminal had defeated us and that an innocent person was about to get sent to prison for a crime they hadn’t committed.

That was until in one last vain attempt at a grasp in my mind for help, I spun around in the red leather chair and whipped off my navy baseball cap that just managed to hook onto the rack where the judge’s robe hung.

“Nice,” Sebastian said with a clap that was meant to bring my morale up more than be a sarcastic barb.

My eyes popped open and my mouth followed suit.

Sebastian grabbed the gavel and pounded it down on the table, and said, “Hello, hello?.”

I turned to my partner and said, “Oh, wow.!”

“Whisky, easy. I think you’re becoming delirious. That was a good throw, but it’s nothing to go crazy over.”

“No, not that! And put that down! It’s evidence.” I searched for a page in my notebook and ripped it out, scanned for a photo in my phone, took a new plastic glove out of my backpack, deposited the gavel that Sebastian had placed back on the desk into a plastic bag, and sprang up.

“What’s up? You ready to order some breakfast at a late–night diner.”

“Ha. Maybe later.” Gathering up all my papers and stuffing them in my blue backpack was a lead Sebastian knew to follow. We had all of our belongings secure and I charged ahead as my partner trailed behind.

“Hey, Whisky! Are you going to let me know what’s happening? What did the gavel have to do with anything?”

“Everything.” We were rushing through the well of a courtroom at this point. “I’ve got to find Felix, the person he, I, and you are looking for is about to get away.

“Then let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I’m one step ahead of you,” I said with shortened inhalations and exhalations. “Well, maybe a few steps.”