Love’s Sweet Revenge(111)
Evie was softly crying.
“I’m sorry, Evie,” Lloyd told her. “I didn’t want to bring all that up.” He glanced at Brian, who still waited to help Lloyd off the stand. “Go sit with her. I’ll make it off this stand just fine on my own.” He glared at Prescott as Brian hurried over to sit down next to Evie. He moved an arm around her, and she cried against his shoulder.
“I’d like to take my wife out of here,” Brian told the judge.
“No!” Evie straightened. “I want to stay with Daddy until this is over.”
People whispered.
“Daddy?” someone muttered. “She calls Jake Harkner Daddy?”
Evie assured Brian that she was fine, while Randall Prescott slumped a little at the realization that his attempt at making Jake out to be a back-shooting murderer had failed.
The biggest mistake the prosecutor made was to call up a family member, Jeff wrote in his notebook. I could have told him that. The man’s entire family adores him. All Prescott just did was show the kind of father Jake is.
The judge told Lloyd to step down, but Peter stopped him. “Lloyd, tell the audience what the supposedly ruthless and notorious Jake Harkner has been doing these past three weeks.”
Lloyd met Jake’s eyes. “He’s been taking care of me, night and day, sometimes with no sleep those first few days, or so I’m told. I was passed out most of that time, but I damn well felt my father with me, and I knew he was holding my hand and bathing me and changing my bandages and helping with personal things, because my wife is carrying, and he didn’t want her straining herself.” He looked at the judge. “But mostly he was doing it out of love for his son. My pa grew up in hell with a father who was Satan himself. When he became a father, I think he just decided to be the kind of father he always wished he’d had. He goes almost overboard loving us sometimes, and he wouldn’t allow my mother to ever spank us or even slap our hand, and my sister and I have never hit our own children. Pa would never stand for that.”
The room grew quiet again, and Jake squeezed Randy’s hand. She knew he was struggling with a myriad of emotions.
“So,” Peter spoke up, “I think we have established that the big, bad, ruthless ex-outlaw Jake Harkner is a loving, devoted father and grandfather who has never laid a hand wrongly on his wife or his children or grandchildren. We’ve also established that he is a faithful husband.” He leaned forward and looked over at Jeff. “That man there is Jeff Trubridge, the award-winning reporter from Chicago who wrote the book about Jake that a lot of people in this courtroom have probably read. Jeff rode with Jake for a while when Jake was a lawman. If we’re judging character, I’d like to ask Jeff what he thinks of Jake. He’s seen both sides of the man—the family man and the, yes, sometimes ruthless lawman.”
Jeff rose and faced the judge. “Your Honor, a man couldn’t ask for a better friend than Jake Harkner. It takes the man a while to warm up to you and decide whether or not he trusts you, but once he does, he’ll do anything for you, and he has friends out at the J&L who would do anything for him. Jake is the most honest, straightforward man I’ve ever known. I’ve seen the ruthless side of him, but he’d never hurt an innocent person, and he’s a wonderful family man. I’m proud to call him a friend.”
The judge sighed and looked at Lloyd. “Go ahead and sit back down with your family,” he told him. “Bailiff, come help this man back to his seat.”
Lloyd grimaced with pain as he stepped down and walked back to his seat. He sat down next to Katie and moved an arm around her.
“Your Honor,” Prescott spoke up, “before all this got out of hand, my questioning of Lloyd Harkner was merely to establish the reason Mike Holt sought him out and shot him. Lloyd Harkner had shot Holt’s brother in the back. What Holt did was a crime of passion caused by the kind of ruthless things both Harkner men apparently are capable of. And the fact remains that Jake Harkner had the better of Mike Holt the night of the shooting and could have held him there until the police came, but instead he took the law into his own hands and shot Mike Holt point-blank in front of a crowd of stunned onlookers who’d never seen anything like that before and normally never would in their lifetimes. He is no longer a lawman who can use his badge for his own form of justice, and he needs to learn that being an executioner isn’t how it’s done in today’s times. He should realize some kind of punishment for what he did, and as far as the prosecution is concerned, he should hang or at least go to prison, because when it comes to men like Jake Harkner, this could happen again!”