Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Title: Kentucky
Rating: M (for language)
Word Count: 2245
Summary: Murphy moves on after Lardner.
Author's Note: It's an OZ/Justified crossover (because there really should be one) but you don't have to have watched Justified to understand what's going on here.




“Well, this is a surprise,” I said into the phone, after setting the box marked “Ma’s China” in the middle of the currently empty kitchen floor. I realized that it was probably a mistake to stop to answer the phone, but it was as good a time as any to catch my breath for a moment.

“You’re moving?” Tim McManus said, his voice taking on that high-pitched edge that happened when he was about to have a full-on hissy-fit.

“Moved.”

“What the fuck, Sean? I thought you were going to retire out here to California. With me.”

“I’m sure…” What was her name? Jessica. No. “…Jennifer would love that very much.”

“Jennifer? Oh, you mean Janine. We split up.” Since Tim hadn’t called to cry on my shoulder, I was fairly certain this was a recent development. One I had the good sense not to ask about.

“I’m not retired.”

“So you’re working in a jail out in Hicksville.”

“Courthouse actually. Signed on as a bailiff. It starts in two weeks.”

“Then there’s still plenty of time for you to change your mind and come out to California.”

“Sorry, my friend. Your offer came too late.”

“I made the offer two months ago, remember?”

I didn’t remember such a conversation. I vaguely remember talking to Tim after Ryan O’Reily… after Ryan… but I didn’t remember any of the details. Maybe it was the bottle of Jack Daniels I’d shared with Alvin, the only Lardner guard I’d counted as a friend after the two years I’d spent within its walls.

“Well, don’t expect me to move out there.”

I stared at the phone as if I could see Tim’s insanity through it. I wanted to say something about presumptuousness but I held my tongue. It was just Tim being Tim.

“I’ll bet the women are all toothless. I mean, that’s…”

“I haven’t really paid attention.”

“They don’t even have homosexuals in Kentucky. And if there are…” Tim started to hum the theme from “Deliverance”.

“I’m sure they have a fairly decent-sized homosexual population in Lexington.”

“They have six Pride festivals here a year, Sean. Six! That’s more than San Francisco.”

“Impressive,” I said. Ever since I came out to him years ago, Tim had thought that I should be one of those socially active gays, going to protests and Pride marches. I told him I’d go to one on the condition that he went with me. To this day, I haven’t been to a Pride parade.

Hearing a noise outside, I glanced out to see a couple of boys taking an interest in the remaining boxes exposed in the bed of my truck. I dropped the phone in the doorway and then yelled, “Hey!” in a voice that used to be able to intimidate even the most hardened criminal. The boys stood there for a moment, sizing me up.

Jesus, it was like being back on the job again. I strode purposefully toward the car and they skittered away, the bigger one of the two flipping me off as he ran. I sighed.

Welcome to Lexington.

The next two weeks passed in a blur of unpacking, decorating, and meeting the well-meaning, but sometimes incredibly nosy, neighbors. Everyone made a point of mentioning the distance and meeting times of the church of their choice. I just nodded, smiled, and thanked them without sharing too many personal details. I did manage to get some suggestions for restaurants in the area that delivered, including an excellent Chinese place, so all that mingling had reaped some benefits.

Finally, the day arrived when I had to drag myself out of bed at six in the morning, drink an extra-strong cup of coffee, and put on my uniform. There was something comforting about that. As different as the new job was going to be, it would have been more jarring to show up to work in a suit and tie or a flannel shirt and khakis. There was also the familiar sight of metal detectors as I entered the courthouse, but after that, the comparisons fell off.

I’d been in courtrooms more than a few times during my years on the prison circuit. They’d drag me in as a witness any time one of the dinks had a complaint. Once, in Attica, some con with a beef trumped up a brutality charge against a few of us. It was a complete fabrication. The con was transferred to Lardner and wound up dead in PC of all places. Karma could be a bitch.

The first week on the job involved basic orientation on what was expected of a courthouse employee, a lot of form filling out, and just a bit of observation of what the bailiff’s responsibilities were. I shadowed Ray, the guy whose job I was going to be taking. Ray was on the high side of sixty and looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over. He’d been Siever’s bailiff since the judge came to Lexington, fifteen years ago, something that he told me was, “A bit unusual. Most deputies move around on account that nobody wants to be stuck for more than a month with The Hammer. But Mitch is a bit of a special case who wants things a certain way all the time. We’ve actually been looking for somebody for three years, so you must have said or done something to make a helluva impression.”

“Three years?”

“They tried to get me out of here the minute I turned sixty-five, but Mitch heard none of it.”

I realized that I may have just signed on with a judge who was completely nuts and had no regard for self-preservation. Some of that must have shown on my face because Ray said, “I may look frail, but I still know a few tricks to legally restrain a strung-out junkie.”

“You get a lot of those?”

“That’s pretty much all we get. Possession, dealing, growing weed, all the shit that people do to get the drugs- theft, prostitution, occasionally we’ll get a murderer up in here. You used to work in a maximum security prison, right?”

“Yeah, upstate New York- Oswald, Lardner, Attica.”

“Hey! I saw that movie. Al Pacino. Attica! Attica! Attica! Yeah, that was a good film,” he paused. “This isn’t anything like that.”

It wasn’t long before I realized he was right. Judge Siever let his defendants off with a warning more often than not, so it was a lot of long days of standing around, watching the doors as they opened and closed.

Some days it paid off.

Some days he would come in.

He was one of the Marshals from upstairs. All of the Marshals, including the Chief, would take turns with prisoner transport. Art and Rachel were friendly. They’d make small talk with me before they left. This one was all business.

Maybe it was for the best. He was young. Too young. It worked for some of the guys that I used to know, but I actually liked to have a conversation once in a while.

It didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the eye candy when it wandered into the room though.

One evening, I found myself in the small room outside the courtroom, guarding a prisoner set to head out to prison for the first time. Quiet guy, reminded me a bit of Tobias Beecher. He had none of the swagger of a con that knew the ropes. He stared up at the clock, as if watching the precious last few seconds of freedom tick by.

“Look,” I said, my voice startling him out of his thoughts. “it’s not as shitty as you think it’s going to be. I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that it’s going to be sunshine and lollipops, because it’s not. You got what? Six months? Figure you go in, don’t fuck up, and you’ll be back out in three because these taxpayers don’t want to be paying for three squares for a petty criminal for the duration. You’ll probably get beat up in your first couple of days. Take the punch and then as soon as you can, you hit him.”

“But, if I want to get off for good behavior, shouldn’t I-?

“You need to defend yourself. If somebody comes up out of the blue and offers you protection and you take it, you’re fucked. Literally. Basically what you want to do these next three months is survive. Read a lot of books, watch a mind-numbing amount of educational programming, see your family when you can, and play checkers. Don’t play chess, I don’t care if you know how- guys that play chess are some of the meanest mother-fuckers in the joint.”

“He’s right about that,” came a voice from the door.

My mouth went dry as the Marshal strolled into the room. God, he looked good up close. I could have drowned in those blue-gray eyes.

The Marshal continued, “Checkers players will punch you in the gut when they lose. Chess players will stab you the moment you say, ‘check’. Maybe a nice game of tiddlywinks is what you need.”

“What kind of faggot game is that?” the con asked.

Even after almost thirty years in the prison system, that word still could get to me. Most times it was white noise in a litany of obscenities that were screamed as I manhandled an inmate back to his cell or away from a fight. I could get away with being a little rougher in those moments. It was all part of the job.

But here in this room, I couldn’t react. I felt my fingers clench and release. The Marshal’s quiet voice penetrated my thoughts as he said, “Time to go” and led the perp away.

I stood there, long after they left and listened to the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the wall.

The next day, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria while leafing through the sports pages, when I looked up to see the young Marshal wandering around as though he was lost. There were a dozen empty tables in the vicinity so he might have been looking for something or someone in particular. I pushed a chair away from my table with my foot. It made a scraping noise that caught his attention and I gestured toward it. “Have a seat, Marshal,” I said.

He sidled into it, casting a smile in my direction. “For a second there, I thought I was going to have to make another loop.”

“Huh?” I said. I had needed to subdue a defendant’s wife that morning and she clocked me pretty good with her giant purse, but it hadn’t caused me to start hearing things. I might have said some of that out loud because the Marshal gave me another smile.

“You watch me when I come into your courtroom.”

“It’s my job.”

“Well, there’s watching and then there’s watching. You’re not very subtle.”

“I worked in prisons for thirty years. Sometimes you have to let guys know that you’re watching them.” Yes, I was playing dumb. It wasn’t my finest moment, but this guy, whose name I still didn’t know, didn’t have the right to interrogate me.

“So I’m on the same level as a prisoner now.”

Ryan O’Reily came unbidden to my mind. Ryan O’Reily who I watched and watched for years. And then I took my eyes off him for a minute and…

I closed my eyes, fighting off the memory.

The Marshal’s quiet voice filtered through my thoughts. “Do you always talk to the guilty ones like that after the trial?”

“Sometimes. Usually just with the ones that haven’t been there before. The others tell me to fuck off.”

He smiled at that.

“I don’t think we’ve actually been introduced,” I said. “I’m…”

“Sean Patrick Murphy. From New York, but not the crazy part. Age, fifty-two. Single. Never married. Could never find a reason for that and I did look.”

“Well, there’s looking and there’s looking.”

“Touché. We have to run background checks on all the courtroom employees. Just another duty of your friendly neighborhood Marshal’s service.”

“Good to know, Deputy Marshal.”

He smiled. “United States Deputy Marshal Gutterson. You can call me Tim when we aren’t on the job.”

Tim. Of course. Just what I needed.

He lowered his voice, “You might be able to call me some other things when we aren’t on the job.”

I shook my head as if to clear it. “Are you hitting on me?” I whispered.

“I’m trying the unsubtle approach.”

“Oh, okay, wow. Really? Okay, wow.” I realized I wasn’t exactly being articulate, but when I sat down to the table with a ham sandwich and the sports page, I never expected anything like this. And then I forged ahead with one of the stupidest questions I could ever utter. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine. Shouldn’t be a problem. Tell you what, if you’re interested, meet me at six-thirty just outside the employee entrance. Then you can follow me out to my place.”

“So we can ‘get to know each other better’?”

“Sure. Or we could just fuck each other’s brains out,” he said, getting up from the table. “It was nice talking to you, Sean.”

“You too,” I said. I folded the newspaper in my lap and didn’t get up. As he walked away, I caught a glimpse at the clock on the wall. Twelve-thirty. Six hours to go.