Chapter 1: Summons to Duty

Ralph Donovan was ready to trash the plain white envelope along with the other “junk” mail he always found in his Post Office Box each morning he opened the little metal cubicle to see if he had any interesting personal mail. He hesitated when he saw the logo on the reverse that said it was from the County Courthouse and the stamp that said “Deliver to Addressee only”.

His first inclination was to suspect it was from his poisonous ex-wife complaining to the hierarchy that he was late with his child support payments again. He pushed that unwelcome thought out of his mind because he was positive the last time he was a little late was almost a year ago when his shop closed down and things got a little tight.

Now he was working two jobs with each one paying a fair compensation for his time and effort and he didn’t have to worry about the bills from operating his small business in these times of tight economic pressure. He had felt badly about letting both of his employees go but had no other choice because the demand market had dried up when the banks told his customers they were unable to furnish capital for their projects. It was a lot less stress working for the big business clients on an independent contractor basis and he was able to actually save some funds for a “rainy day” for the first time in two years.

Ralph tossed the junk mail which was most of the stack into the trash can conveniently located right in the middle of the high flat table and opened the letter from the country courthouse with a sense of dread that something terrible was about to happen. He was relieved to discover that it was a simple form letter informing him that his presence was request at 0830 hours the following Monday to report into the Jury Pool gathering for the new month. This was the first time he had been called for jury duty in California although he had been called on two occasions in North Carolina at times when it was more than inconvenient and he remembered the judge had been adamant about attendance.

This time, he had no particular problem with reporting for duty because he had just finished a large-scale project that netted him a tidy profit and he needed a short respite to get his thoughts together for the summer rush as people started their vacations and needed travel security. It had been a long two years since his last real vacation and perhaps the jury duty was the best thing for his peace of mind at the moment. Besides, they were to receive a whopping fifty dollars a day and a free lunch for each day served.

He saw the little postcard from the Postal Service that reminded him it was time to renew his annual rental of the Post Office Box and he quickly wrote out a check and dropped it into the slot in the wall. He had this number on his business cards and also used it in his advertising when things got a little slow. It was his only expense in running his independent contractor business and well worth the money. The days of high overhead were gone and he was not the least bit sorry.

The P.O. Box was well worth small expense because he used it as a “clearing house” for different projects that were not even remotely related.

The large lobby waiting room for the drafted jury pool was almost filled to capacity.

It was quite a bit different than his experience in North Carolina and he expected it was due to the difference in size between the two courthouses. Apparently, this courthouse was running four different courtrooms at the same time all starting on the first day of the following month. They gave him a red tag and he saw the letters CR on the label of the tag. Most of the jury pool was getting blue tags with the letters CI. The older still attractive woman in a business suit sitting next to him told him,

“That means you are going to be selected from the criminal jury pool and not the civil jury pool like most of the draftees.”

She held up her red tag showing him that she was in the same jury pool as well.

The independent contractor was disappointed because judging from his limited knowledge that meant he would probably be on jury duty longer than he had originally thought. Some ploys to get excused ran through his head but he quickly put them out of his mind because he did not want to stand out for reasons of his own.

She pointed to her name tag which was from a local “box” store with bad public relations reviews.

“Happy to make your acquaintance, Gloria Stern, my name is Ralph Donovan, and I have only been in this fair state long enough to get called for jury duty.”

She laughed with one of those deep throaty tones that never failed to send signals of erotic arousal up his spine. He had long been turned off by the sound of giggling females with no proper sense of decorum when they were being taken with serious intent. This one looked like she could take a good pounding and ask for more like any self-respecting, sex-deprived woman in her forties would not hesitate to do when push came to shove.

Ms. Stern looked up into his eyes with her look of sultry submission and he knew her answer would be “yes” to any question he would ask. It was a nice thought to put in the front of his brain on the otherwise boring day.

A particularly tall and slender female clerk of court was standing in front of the lobby and raised her voice to be heard by one and all.

“All of you with blue tags, kindly move to the second floor reception area. The processing unit will break you down into individual courts and tell you if you are a primary selectee, an alternate selectee or if you are released from duty.”

The ground floor lobby was cleared out of most of the jury pool draftees and only about forty selectees were remaining. Ralph figured his odds were about fifty/fifty because they would only need twelve jurors and six alternates to fill the slots. He noticed that there were almost no young people in the criminal jury pool and he wondered if that was coincidental or if some sort of weeding out had taken place before the red tags were distributed. If it were a sorting out process, it had to be labor intensive because each wave of raw recruits must have totaled several hundred people at a bare minimum. They probably wound up with about two hundred designated jury members in each contingent and that was a lot of warm bodies to vet for appropriate behavior.