The Runaway Jury Read Free

before this one, in eight different states where computers were used and rolls were purged and where, whenthe clerks handed you your list of jurors, you didn’t have to worry about who was dead and who wasn’t.
    He stared blankly at the distant lights and wondered how the greedy sharks would split the money, if they happened to win. How in the world could they ever agree to divide the bloody carcass? The trial would be a gentle skirmish compared to the throat-cutting that would ensue if they got their verdict, and their spoils.
    He hated them, and he spat on the sidewalk. He lit a cigarette, squeezing it tightly between his thick fingers.
    José pulled to the curb in a shiny, rented Suburban with dark windows. Fitch took his customary place in the front seat. José too looked up at the enemy lawyers’ office as they drove past, but he said nothing because his boss did not suffer small talk. They drove past the Biloxi courthouse, and past a semi-abandoned dime store where Fitch and associates maintained a hidden suite of offices with fresh plywood dust on the floor and cheap rented furniture.
    They turned west on Highway 90 at the beach and limped through heavy traffic. It was Friday night, and the casinos were packed with people gambling away grocery money with big plans to win it back tomorrow. They slowly made it out of Biloxi, through Gulfport, Long Beach, and Pass Christian. Then they left the coastline, and were soon passing through a security checkpoint near a lagoon.

Two
    T he beach house was modern and sprawling and built without the benefit of a beach. A whiteboard pier disappeared into the still and weedy waters of the bay, but the nearest sand was two miles away. A twenty-foot fishing boat was moored at the pier. The house had been leased from an oil man in New Orleans—three months, cash, no questions. It was being temporarily used as a retreat, a hiding place, a sleep-over for some very important people.
    On a deck high above the water, four gentlemen enjoyed drinks and managed small talk while waiting for a visitor. Though their businesses normally required them to be bitter enemies, they had played eighteen holes of golf this afternoon, then eaten shrimp and oysters off the grill. Now they drank and looked into the black waters below them. They loathed the fact that they were on the Gulf Coast, on Friday night, far away from their homes.
    But business was at hand, crucial affairs that necessitated a truce and made the golf almost pleasant.Each of the four was the CEO of a large public corporation. Each corporation was in the Fortune 500, each was traded on the NYSE. The smallest had sales last year of six hundred million, the largest, four billion. Each had record profits, large dividends, happy stockholders, and CEO’s who earned millions for their performances.
    Each was a conglomerate of sorts with different divisions and a multitude of products, fat ad budgets, and insipid names such as Trellco and Smith Greer, names designed to deflect attention from the fact that at the core they were little more than tobacco companies. Each of the four, the Big Four as they were known in financial circles, could easily trace its roots to nineteenth-century tobacco brokers in the Carolinas and Virginia. They manufactured cigarettes—together, ninety-eight percent of all cigarettes sold in the United States and Canada. They also manufactured such things as crowbars and corn chips and hair dye, but dig just below the surface and you’d find that their profits came from cigarettes. There had been mergers and name changes and various efforts at preening for the public, but the Big Four had been thoroughly isolated and vilified by consumer groups, doctors, even politicians.
    And now the lawyers were after them. The survivors of dead people out there were actually suing and asking for huge sums of money because cigarettes cause lung cancer, they claimed. Sixteen trials so far, and Big Tobacco had won them all, but the