The Mongol Reply

Benjamin M. Schutz

Description

When an innocent woman is ambushed with divorce papers, she must learn to fight dirty

On the wall of his office, high above Washington, DC, Albert Olen Garfield keeps a letter detailing the Mongol sack of Persia. “There is a great shrieking before us,” wrote Genghis Khan’s general, “and an even greater silence behind.” When he’s in the courtroom, Garfield aims for the kind of savage devastation that would make the great Khan proud. He’s a master of total war, a divorce lawyer who takes no prisoners, and his latest target is Serena Tully.
 
Wife of one of the most brutal players to ever tear his way through the NFL, Serena is blindsided by her husband’s accusations of infidelity and his demands for a divorce. As Garfield rampages through her life, taking her kids and freezing her bank accounts, Serena must resort to guerrilla warfare to protect her family and safeguard what little she has left.
 
 

Sujets

• Suspense
• Psychology
• Legal thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 23 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781480493261
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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The Mongol Reply
Benjamin M. Schutz

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
DEDICATION
In memory of my mother
Rhoda K. Schutz (1926-2002)
All the leaves are gone-
Forever there will be a
Tiger in Paris.
And with heartfelt thanks to
Swifty Myers, Jr. and his
Lazarus Literary Agency.
It s great to be alive.
PROLOGUE
The rocking chair creaked rhythmically, rising in pitch as he rode it forward and then falling away with him. He clung to that sound, an anchor outside the storm in his head. He listened carefully. The sound was always the same. He would settle for that. Let everything stay the same. He looked out the window. No one had come yet. But they would. He would hear them before he saw them, drowning out the rocker, ending this respite.
The breeze caressed his face. He had opened the window to hear better. So he wouldn t be surprised. He didn t want to be surprised anymore.
He stroked the head pressed into his shoulder and rocked on, awaiting the announcement that once again his life had changed beyond return.
ROPER: So Now you d give the Devil benefit of Law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the Law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I d cut down every Law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last Law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the Laws all being flat? This country s planted thick with Laws from coast to coast-man s Laws, not God s-and if you cut them down-and you re just the man to do it-d you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I d give the Devil benefit of Law, for my own safety s sake.
Robert Bolt
A Man for All Seasons
Act 1
CHAPTER ONE
Morgan Reece took a seat on the Metro facing the door. After the morning rush hour, the trains from Vienna to D.C. were empty. He took the chapter he was working on out of his briefcase, flipped to the last page he d edited and began to read. The car would be pretty empty until it went underground in East Falls Church and began to burrow under Arlington towards the Potomac. By Foggy Bottom it would be packed, and he d have to quit working. Thirty minutes in, thirty minutes out. An hour s worth of work on the paper beat fighting the traffic on I-66, he thought.
At each stop, Reece looked up at the doors for a moment to see who was coming aboard and, satisfied that his life would not be enriched or endangered, went back to work. By the Court House stop, Reece was sharing his seat with a construction worker who alternated one unlaced work boot over the other while he glanced nervously up and down the car. Reece leaned a bit away from the man and slid his papers towards one end of the briefcase. At least he could still stretch out his legs. As soon as someone took the seat perpendicular to him, that would end. He decided he d stop work then and just count the stops and watch the faces.
A pair of ankle boots and leggings slid in and Reece withdrew to let them get settled. When they stayed tucked back along the edge of their seat, he reclaimed his position. He glanced up and saw hands shuffling papers in a lap. The woman had very short brown hair that stuck straight out like the first feathers on a baby bird. She was looking down at her papers while she rearranged their order. She had a long neck, Reece thought, like a Modigliani, and found himself surprised that he d noticed.
Reece returned to the section on children s drawings as indicators of sexual abuse and how they compared with their use of anatomically detailed dolls. The train slammed to a halt and Reece s papers spilled over the end of his briefcase and littered the floor of the car.
Shit. He muttered and bent forward to pick them up before the standing passengers adjusted themselves back into place and stood on them. Bending down, he saw something dark out of the corner of his eye and pulled back just before butting heads with the short-haired woman.
Sorry, she said and then slid off the chair and nimbly squatted down to scoop up her papers from the floor.
Reece waited for her to finish, but when she was done, she twisted around to pick up his papers and handed them to him.
Here, she said, and took her seat as the car began to move.
Thanks. Reece smiled briefly, but she was looking down and shuffling the pages in her lap.
Reece tapped the edges of his papers on his briefcase and began to check the numbers. The car slowed, then stopped and the conductor called out Rosslyn. The young woman stood up, adjusted her waist pack and strode out of the car. Reece glanced up for a moment, decided that indeed her neck was long, but not too long, and went back to his paper.
Satisfied that the pages were all there, he slipped them back into his briefcase and crossed under the Potomac into Washington D.C.
CHAPTER TWO
High above the steel worm that Morgan Reece rode, above the street-side scramble, in the pastel and Muzak calm on the sixteenth floor of the Hungerford Tower, two men met to preserve family values.
I want that bitch dead, Tom Tully said.
I don t think we can help you with that, Mr. Tully, we re just divorce lawyers, Albert Olen Garfield said.
That s not what I ve heard. A friend of mine, he calls you Agent Orange. He says your shadow can kill. That s what I want. The big man jabbed his finger into space to emphasize his point. I want that bitch to beg for death. I want her left with nothing, absolutely fucking nothing. Do her like these guys would.
Tom The Bomb Tully, special teams coach of the Virginia Squires and one-time scourge of NFL wide receivers, quarterbacks, runners, anyone unwary or unprotected, rapped a lumpy knuckle against the glass that covered Albert Garfield s copy of the letter from Subutai to Genghis Khan concerning his visit to the Persians.
Contemptuous of the barbarians, the Persians had taken the Khan s gifts, killed his emissaries and not once looked to the east. Subutai and 50,000 horsemen rode in reply. Stopping briefly in his pursuit of the Shah, (whom he would ultimately catch, and, before decapitating, pour molten silver into his eyes, ears, nose and throat), Subutai wrote this:
We have come to Persia. Where we found them we killed them all, man, woman and child. Villages we burn, towns we raze. We have sown salt in their fields, fouled their rivers, slaughtered their sheep, cattle and chickens, burned their crops, leveled their forests. There is a great shrieking before us and an even greater silence behind. Rejoice, the birds have all left Persia for there is nowhere to roost .
Twenty-five years after first reading that letter, Albert Garfield was still thrilled by each word. Ornately framed, it hung on the wall near the chair for prospective clients. Every once in a while one of them would invoke the Mongol reply and Albert imagined himself on horseback leading the hordes between the shrieking and the silence.
Mr. Tully, is there any particular reason that you d like us to visit all this misery on your wife?
Goddamn right there is. Somebody else is irrigating her trench, that s why! Nobody does that to me. Nobody. Tully shook his head in disbelief.
Ten years past his prime, he was still an impressive specimen. Six-feet-one and two hundred and five pounds, bow-legged, a wedge for a torso and arms down to his knees. All this commanded by a goateed skull with gun port eyes.
This somebody who s irrigating your wife, does he have a name?
If he did, I wouldn t be here. I d be needing a defense attorney.
How do you know your wife s having an affair?
I caught the bitch, that s how. I came back early from a practice and saw her playing tonsil hockey out in front of the house.
Did you approach her?
No. I was in my car at the end of the block. They didn t see me. I hung back waiting to see if the bastard was going to come into my house. Boy, did I want that. Please Lord, please let him come into my house and do this. Boom. Tully slammed a fist into a palm. One dead motherfucker. No, two dead motherfuckers.
Was the man driving his own car?
I guess. I decided not to get too close. I d seen all that I needed to anyway. I let him drive off.
Did you get a license tag?
No. It was a Toyota though, a Camry maybe, burgundy color.
Have you talked about this with your wife?
No. I thought about going in, grabbing her by the throat and tossing her out the door. You want your dicking elsewhere, then park your sorry ass elsewhere. Then I decided her not knowing that I know was a good thing. Allow me to do it right, set her up, get on her blindside and tee off on her. I m gonna go right through her, just like I did Conway. Boom. Lights out.
Cisco Conway, the Eagles wideout, had been tackled by the cornerback, who had both of Conway s legs around the ankles. He was trying to hop free when The Bomb exploded after a twenty-five-yard cross-field dash. He hit him chest high, helmet and forearm. Conway snapped over like a slinky. His head slammed into the turf and shuddered inside his helmet like a recoiling springboard. After two years in a coma, Cisco Conway died.
And that s what you d like our help with?
Yeah. I want to blow this bitch right out of the water. I don t want her to see it coming. From what I hear, you do that better than any