A Reasonable Doubt, Susan Sloan [books for 7th graders .txt] 📗

Jason had his mouth open to reemphasize his point, but suddenly closed it.  Because he did, in fact, know who Detective Dale Scott was.  He was the very same son-of-a-bitch cop who used to get off on using him for a punching bag.

He tried to remember if he had run into the policeman last night, and if there had been an argument of any kind, but his head was throbbing so much, it was making his mind all the more muddled, and he came up blank.   The only thing he could recall, and not even that was very clear anymore, was his dream.

“You ain’t sayin’ I killed him, are you?” the Indian asked.

“Sure looks that way,” Cady replied.

“But I don’t remember doin’ nothin’ like that,” he protested.  “Why would I have done that?  That ain’t even my gun.”

“No, it isn’t,” Stiversen agreed, having examined the police issue semiautomatic weapon that was exactly like his own.  “It’s his.”

“What’s your name?” Cady asked.

“Lightfoot,” the Indian mumbled.  “Jason Lightfoot.”

“Lightfoot. . .Lightfoot. . .” the officer repeated.  “Don’t I know that name from somewhere?”

Jason shrugged.  “You might,” he conceded.  “It’s not such an uncommon name around these parts.”

The Indian wasn’t exactly clean with the law, but his offences were years old and mostly about being drunk and disorderly, which is why he knew the dead cop with the mean streak.  Even so, their encounters had never amounted to anything really serious -- a broken nose, a couple of split lips, a few cracked ribs, assorted cuts and bruises, and then the usual overnight accommodation, courtesy of the city.  He tried to think.  He barely recalled leaving The Last Call, dumping the garbage, and crawling into his box.  He didn’t remember seeing Scott, and other than that, there was nothing, nothing except his dream, until these cops had kicked him awake.

“But I got nothin’ to do with that.”

“Maybe no and maybe yes,” Cady said. “Not for us to say.”  He leveled his gun at the Indian.  “But right now, we’re going to take you in for questioning regarding the murder of Dale Scott.”

From the corner of his eye, Jason saw Stiversen starting to move around behind him, unhooking a pair of handcuffs from his belt.  In spite of the weapon pointed directly at him, in spite of his bad leg, the Indian bolted.  It was the instinct of a cornered animal, of course, because there was nowhere to go.  The alley was narrow, with the police car blocking one end of it and the two policemen blocking the other.

He froze for an instant, trying to decide what to do.  It was just long enough for Cady to whip out his baton and deliver a blow to the back of his bad leg.  Jason collapsed like an accordion.

But the law enforcement officer didn’t stop there.  Blows began to rain all over his body as he lay there on the pavement.  He managed to roll over onto his bad leg, and tried as best he could to protect it, only it didn’t help much.

“All right, all right,” he heard the other cop say.  “You don’t want to kill the guy.”

After one more blow, the beating stopped.  Jason felt Stiversen grabbing his arms and pulling them tight behind his back, and he heard the snap of the handcuffs as they locked securely around his wrists.  Then the cop began reading him his rights about being under arrest and his right to remain silent and his right to have an attorney.

“There’s gotta be some kinda mistake here,” he mumbled through a bloody lip.

“Yeah, and you made it,” Cady said.  “But look on the bright side.  Think how lucky you are that we found you before the guy’s partner did.”

“How do you mean?” the Indian asked.

“I mean our getting to you first guarantees you get a trial and then years of living off taxpayers like me before you hang.”

. . .

Port Hancock was the largest city on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.  It sprawled across a thrust of land that jutted out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca -- that strip of watery highway defining the northwestern border of the United States.

The seat of Jackson County, Port Hancock boasted a population just short of 25,000, in a county that, added all together, came in at just under 105,000.  A good public transportation network brought the major city of Seattle and the state capital of Olympia within a three-hour journey.  A reliable private ferry system regularly transported Canadians and Americans back and forth across the border.  And the Pacific Ocean was a mere ninety minutes away.

Arguably one of the most beautiful cities to be found in the Pacific Northwest, or anywhere, for that matter, Port Hancock was dominated by architectural masterpieces, crisscrossed by tree-lined avenues, and dotted with exquisite parks and gardens.  Its location was no drawback either, nestled as it was between the scenic Strait on the north and the magnificent Olympic Mountains on the south.

The city’s spectacular deep-water harbor had led early settlers to believe that Port Hancock would one day be the largest seaport on the West Coast and, as a result, a great deal of money had been invested in the fledgling town.  However, when the railroad failed to extend west onto the peninsula, despite all the pressure that was put on politicians, those dreams were dashed, and many of the investors simply wrote off their losses and deserted the place.

Port Hancock was, perhaps more accurately, two cities in one, with the residential sections to the south referred to as New Town, and the predominantly commercial district that stretched along the waterfront to the north known as Old Town.  It was a misnomer, really, considering that a good part of New Town was just as old as Old Town, but nobody, except perhaps the historians, seemed to care.

And not even the historians seem to take much note of the fact that, over time, the cultural divide, that