“Aaron…”
“I’m here, little bird.”
“The… the tea…” I gasped, my fingers clawing at the sleeve of his green uniform: “Every morning… Patricia brought the green tea… she told me… she told me it was organic matcha for my dizziness…”
Colonel Carter slowly, deliberately raised his head.
He looked across the well of the court toward where Patricia Whitaker stood pinned against the spectator rail.
The seventy-year-old matriarch of the Omaha Country Club was no longer smiling.
Her expensive silk scarf had slipped from her neck; her face had calcified into an apocalyptic, curdled shade of un-cured limestone. Her manicured fingers were shaking with that spastic, involuntary tremor of an embezzler whose private vault door has just been blown off its hinges by an artillery shell:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.*
“Patricia,” Colonel Carter spoke softly.
His voice had no microphone.
Yet it filled that four-thousand-square-foot courtroom with forty decibels of pure, unyielding, polar diamond:
