“—never worked with an expert witness before, what if I mess up?”

I hadn’t initially wanted to leave for court an hour earlier than usual. But I woke up before my alarm clock went off, and the subsequent quick glance at my phone dashed my plans to run by Yumi’s for a matcha latte before heading to court.

Thirty texts, seven emails, and four missed calls, and two voicemails. All from my second seat, who’d apparently been awake since half past five. Why?

“Julio?”

“—don’t find him credible, or we fuck up the demo and something goes wrong? Wait, shit, did I get all the right stuff!?”

Because on the eve of Julio’s big showing in court, his defeatism reared its ugly head, which had him spiraling into a panic. And worrying a hole into the lawyer’s lounge carpet, but the carpet deserved it for being such an ugly beige.

“Julio…”

“I mean, this is the biggie, the moment, the make or break! And if—”

“Julio!” I snapped. Thankfully, raising my voice was enough to pull the young man out of his doom spiral, and get him to pay attention to me. “Sit down, take a deep breath.”

“But—”

“Sit. Down.” I pointed at the sofa across from my armchair, and Julio sat without complaint. “So. I can tell you’re worried.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Julio muttered. His hands began playing with his tie and collar, and much as I wanted to tell him to cut it out and not ruin the knot, it was better that he had some outlet for the nervous energy.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Why?”

“... are you serious?” Julio scoffed. “Naomi, I’ve never had an expert witness in court before! You think I could get one as a public defender? No! I’m out of my depth, and if I mess this up — fuck, there goes our whole case!”

“And you’re so sure you’ll screw it up… why? Because I don’t see it.” I held up a hand, which kept Julio from interjecting. “Tell me: how many dry runs of the direct have you done with your witness?”

“Eight,” Julio said.

“And what about the demo?” I pressed.

“Took us a dozen attempts to get it right, but we got it dialed in enough to get ignition where we wanted it five times in a row.”

“And how many mock crosses did Fatima put you through?”

“Ugh,” he groaned. “Only three…”

“Which is still three more than I have,” I admitted. “And trust me when I say that Fatima is better on cross than all three of the defense attorneys put together.”

“So what?” Julio slouched, which had me reaching into my purse for the wrinkle remover spray I kept on hand. “None of that matters if I fuck up. Again.”

“Okay, first off, sit up straight.” He took the cue immediately, and pulled up from that awful slouch. I stood from my armchair and circled around to the other side of the sofa, leaning in closer to inspect his suit jacket. A bit of a wrinkle, but nothing I couldn’t get out. “Hold still so I can get this wrinkle out.”

“Thanks…”

“You’re welcome. Second,” I continued, talking as I worked, “you’re feeling stage fright. It’s perfectly normal, I’ve felt it plenty myself. So all I’m going to tell you is what was told to me.” I shifted around to Julio’s side and tapped him on the shoulder, drawing his eyes to mine. “You’ve memorized your lines, you’ve practiced your blocking, you’ve gone to the rehearsals. You’re as ready as you’re ever going to be, and all the worrying will do is make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. Find something else to think about.”

“... but what?” Julio asked. “What else am I supposed to think about?”

“Well, have you eaten?”

“Well—”

“Two cups of coffee doesn’t count.”

The ensuing silence was very telling. I sighed, my ears falling a bit limp in disappointment. Yes, I’d been just as bad when I was at his level, but that just made it even more important that I nip this bad habit in the bud.

“Okay, we’ve got…” I checked my watch. “Another hour until we have to be in the courtroom. There’s some decent breakfast options a few blocks away, one north and two east if memory serves, and if all else fails, there’s Dunkin. Get some food in you. It’ll help, trust me.”

“I… alright, fine.” Julio got to his feet, buttoning his suit jacket as he stood — good, our older white jurors would pick up on that reflexive buttoning and up their estimates of him a few notches. “Be right back, I guess.”

“Mhmm,” I hummed in approval, and stepped to the side to let him pass. “And Julio?”

“Yeah?” he asked, one hand on the door handle.

“No more coffee. Two’s enough.”

“... fine…”

“Your Honor, may I request the court’s indulgence for a moment?”

Judge Friedman looked down at Julio, who was currently standing right in front of the jury box. The judge’s incredulous expression was a thing of beauty, but it also had me slightly worried about the response we were about to get.

“Mr. Cabrera, I’ve been following your expert’s testimony rather closely,” he said. “So please don’t bullshit me on this: do I need to have the bailiff get the fire extinguisher ready? Again?”

“Uh, maybe?” Julio looked back at me from the well of the court, and gestured at me as though to say ‘come on!’ and throw him a bone.

“If I may, your Honor?” I stood from my seat at the plaintiff’s table, held up a hand, and conjured a small ball of foxfire. “If it’s a small enough fire, I can just have mine overtake it and then extinguish the whole thing. No need to cost the court, um… how much was a fire extinguisher, again?” My tone was a mite sheepish as I let out a nervous little giggle at the end, my ears folded down atop my head in embarrassment.

“The type that we keep at the courthouse?” Judge Friedman’s question wasn’t towards me, but instead towards the bailiff.

“About four hundred dollars, sir.”

“… I already have an extra three weeks of jury pay to get past the chief judge, I’d rather not add a new fire extinguisher and the maintenance cost on top of that,” Judge Friedman said. “Strike that last statement from the record, would you?”

“Yes, sir,” the court stenographer said, a smirk audible in her voice even though I couldn’t easily see her face from my angle.

“I’ll ask everyone to indulge us while Bailiff Mike fetches the fire extinguisher as a backup.” Judge Friedman raised his hand and pointed towards me with the head of his gavel. “Ms. Ziegler, please be ready to put out any fires your witness causes. Literally.”

“Of course, sir.”

With that, I sat back down, and joined the rest of the courtroom in waiting for the bailiff to return.

So, to catch everyone up to speed on what was happening here: we were about… what time was it, quarter to eleven? Right, Julio had been going on his direct examination for forty minutes now, eliciting expert testimony from the electrician that our firm liked to use for stuff like this. Now, there were a lot of things I and other women at the firm could say about John Scott, Master Electrician, and the overwhelming majority of them were… not nice. All I would say was that I made damn sure today’s blouse had a high neckline.

Despite my misgivings and issues with the content of his character, though? Mr. Scott knew his stuff scarily well, and he got really excited whenever he had a chance to talk about it.

He was probably on the spectrum, with electrical wiring or something adjacent as his special interest, but that was neither here nor there.

More than that, Mr. Scott looked the part: big man with oddly delicate-looking fingers, a well-maintained beard that gave his jaw that masculine look without being at risk of a stray spark, and best of all: shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair, tied back with electrical tape. And a closer look at his hands showed a fair bit more electrical tape apparently used as bandages or as grip tape?

Just, like… holy shit, how much more perfect did you get than an electrician who used electrical tape instead of something else?

Anyways, just like Fire Marshal Marks before him, the Master Electrician came to court in what was functionally work clothes, and had apologized to the judge for that by saying that he’d been on an emergency call since five in the morning. Judge Friedman then had his clerk go get the poor electrician a damn coffee. Which, in true blue-collar fashion, he’d practically chugged down. Like, damn. I’d been offered coffee in a few judges’ chambers before, but outside of the three times I met with the DC Circuit’s chief judge? Yeah, no, you’d best believe that my ‘coffee’ always wound up being half cream and sugar by volume.

Julio, meanwhile, started his charm campaign for the jury by giving the coffee a rather exaggerated wistful look followed by giving the impression of a perfect curious grandson when addressing the witness. Mr. Scott had been an electrician for longer than Julio had been alive, so that particular approach won him some appraising looks from the accountant and actuary jurors. He was polite, appreciative, attentive, and considerate.

Now, I would say that he didn’t handle some of the objections as well as he could have, particularly by deciding to rephrase or withdraw a question instead of arguing back. And to be fair, that might have hurt the impression he was trying to give the jury here, but at the same time, it was indicative of Julio’s main issue: he was a bit of a pessimist. He was clearly worried that fighting back too hard would derail Mr. Scott’s testimony more than just sucking it up and asking the same question phrased differently. He was operating under the principle that making the jury wait through a slight delay was better than taking the risk of making them disengage.

Again: Julio had spent two years as a public defender, a position that constantly had him on the back foot, where juries were always predisposed against him. He had some confidence issues to get past, some bad habits to curtail. That was part of the reason I’d made him second seat, actually — he needed the confidence boost.

That underdog attitude was also why I had him doing our direct examinations today. We’d spent the entire trial so far completely on the offensive, hammering the other side with nastiness and brutality and hammer blows, back to back to fucking back. We needed to pull off a little bit, give the jury time to breathe. As absolutely ludicrous as it sounded, we genuinely needed to avoid making the other side look like victims. Yes, I know it sounded ridiculous, seeing multi-million-dollar corporations as the little guy in a fight. Tell that to the people who will rabidly defend corporations against this, that, or the other thing, for no reason other than somebody said something rude about them on the internet.

Hence, having Julio act as the kind, polite, appreciative young man, learning at the knee of a seasoned tradesman for the rest of the court to see.

And as Bailiff Mike returned to the courtroom, fire extinguisher in hand, it was time for the fun part.

“Permission to retrieve our demonstratives, your Honor?” Julio asked.

“Go ahead,” Judge Friedman said, waving Julio on.

With that, Julio walked around behind the bench and produced a little tarp-covered wheeled cart, the type we tended to call a dolly, which he pulled out into the well of the court. Seated upon the cart were a pair of heavy-duty work gloves, plastic safety goggles, an extension cord, a car battery, red-and-black claw hookups leading into a bundle of tape-wrapped wiring, with a yellowed plastic wall socket at the end (minus the wall, of course), a cracked plastic power strip, a few of those multi-plug bricks, and a miniature space heater.

“So, Mr. Scott!” Julio smacked the dolly with one hand, the items on it shaking ever so slightly at the impact. “I’m gonna admit I haven’t got the slightest clue what to do with all this, and I’d probably give ya a heart attack if I tried!”

This tale has been pilfered from NovelBin. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Son, you’d give yourself a heart attack first,” the electrician quipped back, drawing some laughter from the jury. “Get away from all that, would ya? Raising my blood pressure just seeing your hands so close to that car battery!”

Julio yelped and pulled his hands away from the car battery, and the jury’s laughter intensified in response.

“Okay, lesson learned,” Julio said. His tone was pitched so that it seemed like he was talking to himself, but his voice was far louder than that. Again: Julio was playing a part, as it were, and doing it with aplomb. “Your Honor, given that the witness has already told me off for doing something dangerous, the plaintiff is requesting permission for our witness to step down from the stand and do his demonstration from within the well of the court.”

“That’s the best request I’ve heard all day.” Judge Friedman gestured down to the witness’s stand at his side. “Mr. Scott, feel free to enter the well of the court. Please be aware that you won’t have a microphone, so if the stenographer asks you to repeat something, I expect you to do so. Understood?”

“I gotcha,” the master electrician replied. He stood from the stand, walked down the two stairs there, and over to Julio. Now, Julio wasn’t exactly short at five foot ten, but Mr. Scott? He had a full head of height on Julio, and his shoulders were probably half again as broad as Julio’s own. This was a big man.

Mr. Scott’s size was actually part of why he was such a good expert witness. I wasn’t sure if there was an exact name for the phenomenon as a whole, but over the years, I’d found that when you wanted to impress upon a jury how dangerous something was, you got the best results when the person talking about the danger was from one of three groups. The first of those groups was Moonshot — if the people with literal superpowers said that something was dangerous, people without superpowers tended to listen.

The second group was tiny white women, either in their twenties or senior citizens, and the blonder the better. Remember how I said I wasn’t sure if there was an overarching name? That’s because this phenomenon, this trustworthiness of a white woman’s read on danger? This one did have a name: the weaponized frailty of white women. This was also the one that tended to be abused the most. If that sounds a bit unbelievable to you, well… go ask Emmett Till. I’ll wait.

Back to the point, though, there were three circumstances under which this happened. Here, we had an example of the third: when the big, grizzled, hardened man told you something was dangerous, juries tended to believe that this was because he spoke from experience. Bonus points for military men and tradesmen.

The jury may or may not have known about this phenomenon — hell, something told me that if this did have a name, the actuary on the jury would actually know it — but even if they did, it was clearly working. As Mr. Scott stepped closer to the dolly, he rolled up his sleeves, revealing that his forearms were scored and marked with old scars. The big centerpiece of it all was the Lichtenberg scar trailing across the top of his left forearm, creeping around his elbow joint, all the way up his arm, onto the bicep, and vanishing under his sleeve. He walked all the way around the dolly and nudged Julio out of the way, just so that he was facing the judge and had that scar pointed at the jury for as long as possible.

I may not have liked the man, but damn if he didn’t know how to handle a courtroom.

The heavy-duty work gloves went on with almost laborious slowness. He pulled back the collar of his shirt and tucked his long hair between his undershirt and outer layer. The safety goggles were loose, and he tightened the strap on them.

Only once all of that safety equipment was in place did he turn towards the jury.

“So, Mr. Scott,” Julio said, briefly drawing attention back to himself. “Since it’s been a few minutes, could you quickly give us a refresher on what this demo is supposed to be?”

“Objection,” Moe, the property manager’s attorney, said as he rose. “Asked and answered, your Honor.”

“Overruled,” Judge Friedman said. “It’s been a few minutes. The witness may answer the question to refresh all of our memories, and so that the question isn’t two pages back in the transcript. Also, let the record reflect that the witness has approached the plaintiff’s demonstratives and put on safety equipment.”

“Gotcha. So, what I got here!” Mr. Scott shook the dolly slightly, the tarp draped over it slightly fluttering and the objects on its surface rattling. “The most likely things to cause an electrical fire in your home. We’ve got a space heater!” He smacked a hand on the little space heater, then lifted it up for the jury to see before setting it down and grabbing the next thing. “An old power strip! Those old outlet bricks that we haven’t used since the late nineties, thank God, those things are awful. That old extension cord you forgot out in the yard for three weeks! And an old wall outlet I got from an old building. It’s, what, twenty-five years old? Not as old as the one that burned down here.” Mr. Scott looked up at the jury. “Wall not included, of course. Ah, hold on.”

Mr. Scott reached down, brushed aside the tarp that hung over the edge of the dolly, and heaved something out of the cart’s lower shelf. It was a mess of unpainted drywall and two-by-fours.

“We do have a piece of wall,” Mr. Scott said, then proceeded to thread the separated wall outlet through the piece of wall and into a waiting socket. He reached back under the tarp and pulled out a couple rolls of tape, one electrical tape, one duct tape, and used the latter to adhere the wall outlet to his faux wall. “There. It’s supposed to have insulation, but asbestos is illegal now, and the last time I brought fiberglass insulation into a courtroom, I got a night in jail for contempt.”

“Oh, that was you!” Judge Friedman blurted out. His face then went through a hilarious series of emotions, starting at ‘oh, shit’ and ending on ‘act cool’, before he sat back in his chair and cleared his throat. “My prior statement is hereby stricken from the record,” he said, his voice not giving anything away. “Please proceed.”

“... riiiiight.” Julio dragged the word out, but despite all the attention, Judge Friedman didn’t so much as blink. “In any case. Mr. Scott. How would each of these items cause a fire?”

“Well the one everyone thinks of is the space heater,” Mr. Scott said, moving right into his planned testimony. “Modern ones got this thing that’ll shut ‘em off if they tip over, but an older one like this? Say, fifteen years old?” He moved it to the far end of the dolly, and tipped it over. “Nah. You leave this on the floor, and depending on the model? It lays wrong, it burns the floor. Thick carpet will burn easy. Shag carpet is the worst.”

The electrician then plugged the space heater’s power cord into one end of the extension cable, and unfurled the cord some. He then coiled up three lengths of the cord, draped the rest over the cart in a zig-zag pattern, and set the three prongs at the end down on the cart.

“Next up is another biggie: the extension cord. First thing’s first, this?” He held up the lengths of extension cord he’d coiled up. “Never do this with a plugged-in extension cord. Electricity makes things hot. These cords are just copper wire in either plastic or rubber. Rubber is better, but plastic is cheaper, and if you don’t use an extension cord that often, you definitely bought plastic. Like this one.” He held up the cord and rolled it in his hand. “This shit wants a straight line. The less straight the line, the hotter it gets. You loop it like this,” Mr. Scott raised his other hand with the loops, “and you’re gonna get all that heat going. You melt the plastic, it boils onto something flammable, now you’ve got two fire sources.”

The master electrician then made the sign of the cross over himself, and plugged the extension cord into the square outlet brick.

“You see this shit?” He said, holding the brick and cord. “Never. Never do this. May the Lord forgive me for taking His name in vain, but Jesus fucking Christ, people. These outlet cubes are bad enough already. You put an extension cord into them? All it takes is you not paying attention, pulling that cord far out enough to expose the prongs, and anything will give you an arc. Dust, cat hair, the knit blanket your grandma made you for Christmas, doesn’t fucking matter. And that’s only if the plastic don’t melt first. It can’t get much worse than this.”

“What about the power strip?” Julio asked, pointing it out for the jury.

“Kid, I said it can’t get much worse than this,” Mr. Scott said, holding up the outlet brick and the power strip. “But if you want worse, you put the brick into the strip, and if you want to get even dumber than that? Strip into brick.” The electrician plugged the outlet brick into one of the middle outlets on the power strip, and then plugged that into the outlet he’d set in his faux-wall.

“So we’ve got… the space heater, the extension cord, the outlet brick, the power strip, and the wall outlet, correct?” Julio asked.

“Yeah, you got ‘em all,” Mr. Scott answered. He grabbed the roll of duct tape and grabbed a wad, which he used to prop up and anchor the faux-wall against the sides of the dolly, making sure the inside of the ‘wall’ was turned to face the jury.

“So which of these would you say is most likely to cause a fire?”

“How about you step away from the cart a bit and I just show you?”

Julio wasn’t one to ignore a clear warning, and stepped over to the top of the jury box, furthest from the bunch. The master electrician pulled the dolly further back towards the middle of the well of the court, and beckoned the bailiff to ready the fire extinguisher. I took that as my own signal and stood from my chair, palming a small orb of foxfire that I could use to smother and overcome whatever other fire source came.

“Once I connect the leads to the car battery, we’ll see a fire within about a minute,” Mr. Scott said. “If anyone in the court wants to place bets on what goes up first, you’ve got ten seconds! Nine! Eight!”

The countdown was absolutely perfect. The jury and gallery leaned forward as one, the shift of the spectators’ collective weight filling the courtroom with the groans of shifting wood. Hell, the defendants and their attorneys were looking, too!

“—two, one!”

Mr. Scott clamped the leads onto the car battery, one at a time. The small space heater started up, its old fan motor groaning. The silence lingered, every second that passed without a flame ramping the tension, and the near-suffocating atmosphere in the courtroom only grew heavier when we all started to smell burning plastic.

Twenty-three seconds ticked by like this, twenty-four, twenty-five—

And then it happened. A spark, light, smoke, and fire. But not in any of the locations that the master electrician had primed us to look for it.

Because behind the wall outlet, inside of the hollowed-out hunk of faux-wall, the wiring that got all of the appliances working in the first place had ignited a chunk of drywall.

The bailiff stood there dumbly for a good few seconds, the fire extinguisher in his hands completely forgotten. The flames belched out acrid smoke as they ate away at the electrical tape tying the outlet to the wall, growing brighter as more fuel fell into the fire’s greedy, grasping light.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes as I walked over to the dolly, rolled the purple foxfire out of my hand and over the yellow-orange electrical fire, and let Mr. Scott unhook the leads from the car battery before I extinguished my power’s flames with an errant wave.

“Well how ‘bout that, huh?” Mr. Scott pulled the safety goggles from his head and laid them on the dolly, then made a show of slowly walking around to the other side of the dolly while removing his gloves. I suppressed a shudder as one of Mr. Scott’s gloves accidentally brushed across the base of my tail due to a ‘careless’ motion of his, and just turned to walk back to my seat without another word.

“So I didn’t mention the wall outlet as a possible fire source on purpose, earlier.” Mr. Scott grabbed the dolly by its push-bar and swung it around, which put the faux-wall on the side closest to the jury instead of further away. “And that’s ‘cause nobody ever thinks about it. Nah, nah, nah, a fire starts, everybody looks at the shit that they can pin on a specific mistake. Nobody wants to think about how their wall outlet could just have a bad day and kill ‘em in their sleep.”

“And… that wiring.” Julio stepped forward into a straight line with the witness as he spoke, meaning that the jury and witness would both be looking at each other at the same time that they saw Julio. “How old did you say it was?”

“This piece o’ junk?” Mr. Scott asked, tilting the chunk of wall back and forth to draw more attention to it. “Twenty years. Twenty-five, tops.”

“And in your expert opinion as a master electrician,” Julio continued, staring down the defense’s attorneys as if to dare them to make the same objection that had been overruled yesterday, “how likely is it that thirty-plus-year-old wiring could do the same?”

“Is the insulation fiberglass or asbestos?” Mr. Scott asked.

“Fiberglass,” Julio supplied.

“And the time of year?” Mr. Scott pressed. “Late spring to early fall, it’s less likely because of humidity. Winter air’s dryer, static build up would up the odds.”

“How about end of December?”

“Easily,” the master electrician answered. “Power draw’s gonna be high, meaning more heat going through the wires. Christmas lights are probably up, too, so you’re also gonna see people using outlets they normally don’t need to, and those can have tons of problems that go unnoticed.”

“I see.” Julio reached over to the dolly, and pulled the little outlet brick out of the power strip, extension cord still plugged into the little cube. “Huh. I think mi abuelo has one of these.”

“Tell him to throw it out ASAP,” Mr. Scott said, not missing a beat. “Hell, go over there after court today and get rid of it for him.”

“Objection!” Moe rose to his feet. “That question was irrelevant, and so was its answer!”

“It was a good public service announcement, but I do agree, it was irrelevant,” Judge Friedman admitted. “Strike the question and the witness’s answer from the record.”

“Sorry about that, your Honor,” Julio said, putting the little outlet brick down as he sheepishly rubbed at the back of his head. “Anyway, uh. Mr. Scott, thank you so much for your time today. I have no more questions for the witness at this time.”

“Very well.”

Judge Friedman nodded at the bailiff, who appeared to have gotten his wits back about him some time in the last few minutes. The bailiff laid his fire extinguisher atop the dolly and wheeled it back behind the bench, and once the man had returned to his post, Judge Friedman cleared his throat into the microphone.

“We’ll take a brief, ten-minute recess before the defense has their turn to cross-examine this witness. I do not want my courtroom smelling like a smoker’s lounge.” There was a brief smattering of laughter, and the judge cracked the briefest of grins before his expression sobered up, and he turned towards the defense’s table. “During that recess, Mr. Munroe, I expect you to follow up on the location of the next witness,” he said to the defense attorney.

“Your Honor,” Moe began as he stood (huh, my nickname had gotten the right letter, neat), “the defense would like to again renew its objections to letting the plaintiff cross-examine my client’s employee during their case-in-chief—”

“Are you renewing this objection because Mrs. King is delayed and you’re buying time for her to arrive?” Judge Friedman asked. “Or is it because she plans to ignore my subpoena for her testimony?”

“I…” Moe swallowed, his brief silence speaking volumes. “My client believes it to be the former, sir.”

“Mhmm.” Judge Friedman turned back to me. “Ms. Ziegler, should the defense not be able to produce Mrs. King in time for your planned hostile witness examination this afternoon, will you be able to shift around your witness schedule to accommodate?”

“I… think so, your Honor? A moment, please?” The judge nodded, and wasting no time, I pulled out my phone to check something I’d written down as a just-in-case. “Okay, um… last I heard from Mr. Arroyo was that he’d be spending the day with his nieces at George Washington University Hospital. I think he should still be there?”

“Use the recess to ask if he’d be okay with moving his testimony up to late afternoon today,” Judge Friedman said. “Only if the scheduled witness no-shows.”

“Understood, sir,” I said, sitting back down.

“Very well. Ten-minute recess.” Judge Friedman brought down his gavel.

He then reached under the bench and pulled out a thing of air freshener, which he started spraying into the well of the court with reckless abandon,

“By the way?” The judge paused in his spraying to look at those of us who hadn’t quite left the courtroom. “If anybody has objections to honeysuckle vanilla scent, please don’t hesitate to let me know. I will happily relay your complaints to my wife.”