The jury.

He caught it, mentally, like a quick hand snatching a flyfrom midair.

Bekker slumped at the defense table, the center of thecircus. His vacant blue eyes rolled back, pale and wide as aplastic baby- doll’s, wandering around the interior of thecourtroom, snagging on a light fixture, catching on an electricaloutlet, sliding past the staring faces. His hair hadbeen cut jail house short, but they had let him keep the wildblond beard. An act of mercy: The beard disguised the tangledmass of pink scar tissue that crisscrossed his face. Inthe middle of the beard, his pink rosebud lips opened andclosed, like an eel’s, damp and glistening.

Bekker looked at the thought he’d caught: The jury.House wives, retirees, welfare trash. His peers, they calledthem. A ridiculous concept: He was a doctor of medicine.He stood at the top of his profession. He was respected.Bekker shook his head.

Understand . . . ?

The word tumbled from the judge- crow’s mouth andechoed in his mind. “Do you understand, Mr. Bekker?”

What . . . ?

The idiot flat- faced attorney pulled at Bekker’s sleeve:“Stand up.”

What . . . ?

The prosecutor turned to stare at him, hate in her eyes.The hate touched him, reached him, and he opened hismind and let it flow back. I’d like to have you for five minutes,good sharp scalpel would open you up like a goddamn oyster: zip,zip. Like a goddamn clam.

The prosecutor felt Bekker’s interest. She was a hardwoman; she’d put six hundred men and women behind bars.Their petty threats and silly pleas no longer interested her.But she flinched and turned away from Bekker.

What? Standing? Time now?

Bekker struggled back. It was so hard. He’d let himselfgo during the trial. He had no interest in it. Refused to testify.The outcome was fixed, and he had more serious problemsto deal with. Like survival in the cages of the HennepinCounty Jail, survival without his medicine.

But now the time had come.

His blood still moved too slowly, oozing through his arterieslike strawberry jam. He fought, and simultaneouslyfought to hide his struggle.

Focus.

And he started, so slowly it was like walking throughpaste, trudging back to the courtroom. The trial had lastedfor twenty- one days, had dominated the papers and the television newscasts. The cameras had ambushed him, morning

The courtroom was done in blond laminated wood,with the elevated judge’s bench at the head of the room, thejury box to the right, tables for the prosecution and defensein front of the judge. Behind the tables, a long rail dividedthe room in two. Forty uncomfortable spectator’s chairswere screwed to the floor behind the rail. The chairs wereoccupied an hour before arguments began, half of them allottedto the press, the other half given out on a first- comebasis. All during the trial, he could hear his name passingthrough the ranks of spectators: Bekker Bekker Bekker.

The jury filed out. None of them looked at him. They’dbe secluded, his peers, and after chatting for a decent interval,they’d come back and report him guilty of multiplecounts of first- degree murder. The verdict was inevitable.When it was in, the crow would put him away.

The black asshole in the next cell had said it,...