Now, show of hands here. Would anyone like to see how they get out of this???

Sue.

7/4/00.

RESTITUTION.

Disclaimers.

The characters in this novel are of my own creation. That's right, this is an 'uber' story. It's also a sequel to my novel, Retribution, which, in turn is a sequel to my novel Redemption. (That's right! It's a trilogy!) You really will want to read those first before tackling this one. Some may bear a resemblance to characters we know and love who are owned by PacRen and Universal Studios.

Violence and Naughty Language Disclaimer: Yup, both. And quite a lot of each, to be truthful. We're dealing with a bunch of ex-cons and assorted other nasty type people here.

Subtext Disclaimer: Yup, there's that too. This piece deals with the love and physical expression of that love, between two adult females. There are some graphic scenes located within this piece, but I have tried to make them as tasteful as possible so as to not avoid anyone's sensibilities. Let me know if I've succeeded.

Dedication: Well, it's that time again, to thank everyone who made the writing of this work a pleasure. It's a bit sad, as well, since this will likely be the last we hear of Ice and Angel, but heck, it's been a fun ride, huh? So, deep debts of gratitude go out from me to the following people: Carol "you'd just better have a happy ending!" Stephens; Elizabeth "Four" Baldwin, Linda "Lola" Lynch, Lisa "Sulli" Sullivan, and the rest of the Angry Beavers; Judi "you just better have a happy ending part deux" Mair, Mary "is the Pope Catholic" D, Candace "Theodyke" Chellew, the members of my SwordnQuil list for their wonderful support and feedback, my dogs Kricket and Pudderbear, and a host of other people I'm going to kick myself in the morning for not mentioning. Thanks guys!!!.

RESTITUTION.

PART 1.

TIME IS THE coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

My mother always loved Carl Sandburg. I don't know why. Reading one of his poems has always reminded me of the smell of chalk dust and mimeograph ink and the droning voice of Mrs. Davis, demanding I come forward and recite his works "by rote, Miss Moore, if you please."

I never liked Mrs. Davis.

I like Sandburg even less.

And yet, without any conscious desire, I found that quote echoing through my brain as I sat on a high-backed wooden pew near the center of the very same courtroom where, seven years ago almost to the day, my life as I knew it came to an end.

Courtrooms are interesting animals. Like prisons, they turn a blind eye to the passage of time as the rest of society knows it. Fads mean nothing. The change of seasons is measured only by the amount of overclothing the visitors enter with. To the victim, the wheels are ponderous in their slowness. To the accused, only lightening moves more quickly.

Justice, that blindfolded woman with scales in one hand and a book in the other, simply grinds on, unseeing and uncaring, bound by laws which have stood for centuries, nearly unchanged from when they were first set down.

Time, rather than a coin, seemed a tunnel through which past and present sped to merge and meld in one finite space, affecting me with a queer sense of deja vu. Though now I was sitting behind the gate which separated accused from victim instead of in front of it as I had seven years ago, my purpose was essentially the same.

I was fighting for my life.

And though the fight was very much a silent one, it was fought with more intensity and more desperation than I had ever fought for anything before.

And, as was the case seven years ago, I was losing.

Badly.

Come on, Ice. I know you know I'm here. I know you know I've been here since the trial started. Just turn around. Please. I need to see your face. I need to know that you're alright. I need to know that... you don't hate me.

If my eyes had been laser beams, they would have borne a hole straight through her skull, such was the intensity of my unconscious pleading. However, since God had seen fit only bless me with optical light catching devices, my continual stare was about as effective as putting rain galoshes on chickens.

Which is to say not very effective at all.

A murmur through the spectator section, followed by the judge's pounding gavel, broke me from my musings and I looked around, startled.

"Order in the court! There will be silence in this courtroom!" As the gavel pounded again, the noise quieted and I turned to look at Corinne, who was seated to my left, my eyebrows raised in question.

"Donita just asked for a directed verdict," my friend whispered, her lips very close to my ear, the comforting smell of her sachet drowning out, for the moment at least, the pungent odor of too many people packed too closely together in an almost airless room.

"What's a directed verdict?" I asked, softly as I could so as not to bring the attention of the imposing female judge to bear on me.

"It basically means that the defense believes that the prosecution's case is so weak that it doesn't need to put on a case of its own and wants her to render a verdict right away."

"But that's crazy!" I said, a bit louder than I'd intended.

Quite a bit louder, I noticed, as the judge's dark eyes, magnified to the size of golf-balls behind her huge tortoise-shell glasses, aimed their angered gaze at me. "For those of you who have difficulty with simple comprehension," she said in a voice that simply oozed exaggerated patience, "I'll repeat myself one final time. If any of you even thinks about making another noise while this court is in session, I will personally have you escorted out of my courtroom and into a rather uncomfortable jail cell for the remainder of the day. Am I making myself perfectly clear?"

If a tornado had chosen that exact spot in which to cause a little mischief, I wouldn't have been at all adverse to just spinning away. When the sky chose instead to remain blue and sunny, I sunk down into my seat as low as I was able and tied my best not to notice as my neighbors moved quickly away, as if just learning that I was the reincarnation of Typhoid Mary herself.

When absolute, pin-dropping silence reigned in the courtroom once again, the judge nodded authoritatively and switched her gaze toward the front of the room. "Both counsels, approach the bench, please."

I watched as Donita stood and smoothed the skirt of her bright red power suit before approaching the bench, the prosecutor following closely behind. Then I turned back to Corinne, making sure to keep my voice at its lowest register. "That's crazy. Has she even been listening to the prosecution's case? I think they'll be putting this in the law dictionary next to the description of 'open and shut'."

"One might think so, yes," she whispered back. "But then again, Donita's always been somewhat of a card shark. I'm sure she has an ace or two up her sleeve."

"God, I hope you're right." Turning, I once again faced the front of the courtroom, my gaze fixed upon the glossy black head of my lover who was staring, as she had from day one of the trial, straight ahead.

"She knows you're here, Angel," Corinne whispered, reading my thoughts.

"Then why won't she look at me? It's been three months, Corinne. Three months!" I bit the inside of my cheek to keep my voice down as I felt the sting of tears welling up in my eyes.

An entire season had passed since that fateful, horrid night in late summer when my world was shattered, seemingly beyond repair. A season of tears, of guilt, of hopelessness. A season of repeated trips to the Bog, only to be turned away at the door. A season of unanswered phone calls and returned letters. A season of not eating and not sleeping.

And now, after three full months spent dying an hour at a time, I was finally close enough to touch her and she wouldn't even look my way.

"I'm sure she has her reasons, Angel."

Only then did I take my eyes off my disinterested lover, pinning Corinne to her seat with my glare. "I just hope you never find out how heartily sick I am of that piss poor excuse for an explanation, Corinne."

A good deal less than injured by my withering words, Corinne calmly turned her head forward, appearing to watch the still-silent proceedings with intent interest and leaving me, once again, to fume alone.

A clack of heels against the highly varnished wooden floor brought my attention back to the front of the courtroom. Donita caught my eye and smiled faintly before turning and resuming her seat next to my lover. I felt an irrational flash of white-hot jealousy as their heads bowed together intimately, Ice nodding and responding to her beautiful lawyer in a way I'd only known her to do with me.

Enough of that, Angel, I said, barely able to keep from voicing my thoughts aloud. She's on trial here and that woman up there just happens to be the best damn shot she has of getting out of this mess.

Still, I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief when Ice nodded and they separated, both assuming identical postures of quiet confidence as they awaited the judge's next words.

"This court will be in recess indefinitely. I expect both counsels to meet in my chambers at noon tomorrow. Dismissed."

The gavel banged as the bailiff stepped forward. "All rise."

Feeling strangely part of an extremely Fundamentalist religious congregation-Pentecostals raised to the fiftieth power, perhaps-I rose in communion with my fellow attendees, and watched as the diminutive judge, who wouldn't see five feet if she stood on tiptoes on the New York City White Pages, gathered her robes and left the courtroom through a rear door situated just to the left of her bench.

Then the jury, composed of five white men and seven white women, left through yet another door, ushered out by the ever-helpful bailiff. Their faces were expressionless as they filed out one by one, obedient children exiting the classroom on the last day of school.

Only when the final juror had left the courtroom was yet a third door opened, this one admitting four large and well armed guards, two of whom were bearing, like cruel vestments to a fallen Queen, shackles and chains with which to keep society safe from the woman I loved.

Ice stood relaxed as they wound the belly chain around her narrow waist, holding her wrists easily out to be cuffed together by an officious guard as the rest stood by watching, hands on their holstered weapons. Even in flats, she towered over them all, looking elegant and refined and the very antithesis of a chained animal in her expensively tailored black suit.

Her wrists secured, another guard knelt, getting an up close and personal view of legs which went on forever-a view that I would have killed for at that point in time or any other-as he attached the leg shackles to her ankles and rose once again, an almost sheepish smile gracing his otherwise somber face.

It might have been funny, this elaborate and ritualistic chaining of a woman beautiful enough to have stepped fresh from the cover of a fashion magazine, if not for the always present air of danger which hovered around her like a tarnished halo which is almost-but not quite-visible.

I could feel my neighbors react to it as she stretched casually, the chains jangling with her easy movements, the long, muscular lines of her perfect body hardly hidden beneath the expensive cut of her suit.

All around me, the crowd of onlookers tensed, as if the courtroom was the Roman Coliseum and Ice, the hungry lion.

Would the beast leave in peace, or would it feed?

I swore I could hear at least one exhale of disappointment as Ice obediently took up her position within the center of the phalanx of guards, never once looking at anything save for the space directly in front of her, now occupied by the balding head of a guard as he led the processional from the courtroom.

Quiet murmurs rose in the vacuum left behind and I felt the walls closing in on me once again. "I've got to get out of here," I said to Corinne, blindly shouldering my way through the milling crowd, my lungs heaving and my stomach lurching. Of my heart, there was no sound. It had already been broken and so lay quietly as the rest of my body rebelled.

I could feel Corinne following in my wake, but I spared her not so much as a passing thought, such was my need to be free from room which held within its walls only the worst days of my life.

I went out through the open doors and didn't stop until I was standing outside on the steps, hands on my knees and gasping in great, sobbing lungfuls of air. My head was spinning as if I'd just stepped off a carnival ride and I found my vision reduced to a point of light at my feet.

I'm gonna faint! I thought in disbelief just as my knees started to buckle.

Fortunately, my soon-to-be intimate acquaintance with hard cement was mercifully halted by a pair of strong arms which wrapped themselves around me and pulled me back up to my feet.

When my vision finally broadened its scope, it was Donita's beautiful face I saw, her eyes narrowed in concern as she looked down at me. "Are you alright, Angel?"

I shook my head to clear it, which was a really bad idea as it almost served to start the whole process going all over again. Her arms tightened around me and I fell gratefully into her concerned embrace, using the safety and strength she offered to gather my own before somewhat reluctantly pulling away. "Yeah, I'm fine. I think."

She smiled a little. "You think?"

"Well, I've never almost fainted before, so I can't be too sure."

Her smile broadened as she fully released me, draping instead one long arm over my shoulder and guiding me away from the crowds and down the stairs. "Well, let's get you into the shade so you don't almost do it again, ok?"

"That sounds... really good right now."

Corinne attached herself to my other side, and together we walked onto the courthouse's winter-brown lawn and under a denuded oak which nevertheless provided at least a modicum of relief from the surprisingly powerful November sun.

Faux marble benches surrounded a round cement table, and I gratefully sat down on one, absorbing the stone's cool smoothness into my overheated and overstressed body. After a moment, feeling much more like my normal, albeit empty, self, I looked up at Donita, who was still standing, one elegant hand on the table's top. "Forgive me for sounding impertinent, but why are you here? Shouldn't you be with Ice?"

"She's on her way back to the Bog. I'll catch up to her later."

"The Bog? Why aren't they keeping her here for the trial?"

"She's an escape risk. The court doesn't think its little county jail can hold her."

I shook my head in disbelief. "Did they forget that she gave herself up to the police?" I didn't know how they possibly could. It was a scene that haunted every minute of my life.

Donita laughed softly. "That doesn't matter to them. She's a dangerous criminal, so they say. She escapes again, and heads will roll."

"So then... why are you here?"

Sitting down across from me, she laid her briefcase on the table and crossed her hands over it. "Because you need to be in the judge's chambers with us tomorrow, Angel. It's very important that you're there."

A feeling curiously akin to dread rolled through me, but this time I was prepared and simply went with it. "You mind telling me why?"

"I can't. Not yet. You'll know tomorrow, though."