“What’s the point?” Emily said, patting her two-pound Glock.
“Same reason you carry fresh undies in your purse. ‘Cause you never know.”
7:42 p.m.
“May I offer you a cocktail, sir?” the flight attendant asked.
The Executioner looked up. There’d been an opening in first class, and he’d happily upgraded. Coach was as cramped as the electric chair, and almost as deadly to the body.
“Well, it is after five,” he said, nodding at the striking brunette whose nametag read JAIME. The smooth-talking pilot was James, he’d learned in the post-takeoff announcement. A cute coincidence. He wondered if they called each other Jim in the galley. “Tell me, Jaime, how much longer till we land in Chicago?”
The attendant tonged ice cubes into a glass and trickled them with Maker’s Mark. The ice made a crackling sound that pleased the Executioner. “Thanks to strong tailwinds, we’re ahead of schedule,” she said. “We should be at O’Hare in seventy minutes, instead of ninety. If that changes, I’ll let you know right away.”
“No need,” the Executioner said, settling back and sipping velvet. “I don’t have to be anywhere till morning.”
JANUARY 14, 1968
“Having been found guilty of thirteen counts of murder, the sentence of this court is death by electrocution,” the judge said.
“Gee, what a shock,” Earl Monroe said back.
The judge banged the gavel. The bailiffs and Covington glared. Earl didn’t care.
They could only kill him once.
Tuesday
5:45 a.m.
Emily rounded the final curve, long legs pumping furiously. She’d decided during the backstretch to take Annie’s advice, and the relief that brought made the last mile easy.
She sprinted up the long hill of her backyard. Geese honked furiously as they scattered out of her way. Emily honked back. A minute later, she did a somersault on the concrete slab that would someday be a brick-and-cypress deck, then bounded through her back door.
In the gloom of a picnic shelter several hundred yards away, the Executioner smiled as he followed her through binoculars.
“The papers were right, Detective,” he murmured, patting the handmade knife in his jacket. “You still take the same route every morning. See you tomorrow.”
7:18 a.m.
Johnny Sanders crunched his whole-wheat toast, blinking at the glare off his backyard shed.
“Another day in paradise,” he said. Meaning it. He liked summer, even though Springfield got as sticky as Malaysia with humidity.
He reached for the mug of decaf, skim milk, and Sweet ‘n Low. Poor man’s cappuccino. It made almost bearable the fiber flakes his doctor insisted he start eating instead of his beloved pigs in a blanket.
He turned to the state-by-state roundup in USA Today, the first of two newspapers he devoured with breakfast. He’d lived a lot of places growing up as an air force brat, and enjoyed seeing items from familiar datelines.
Los Angeles - LAPD refused comment on reports that roses were lodged in the throat of Sage Farri, 19, found dead in his hospital room Sunday. Farri, recovering from knee surgery from a sports injury, was discovered by nursing staff. . . .
“Only in Hollywood,” Sanders said, shaking his head.
He finished USA Today, then turned to the hometown State Journal-Register, smiling in anticipation. The reporter had e-mailed last night, saying her story would appear today as part of the special section, “Drumbeat to Death.”
And there it was.
“A heartless pile of concrete on a moat of compressed garbage, with the narrow windows, flat roof, and crenelated snarl of a fourteenth-century battle-castle,” she called the Justice Center. “Captain Ahab,” she called Governor Covington. “The electric chair’s crash test dummy,” she called Johnny Sanders.
Cool beans!
He’d leave this open for his wife and make sure the guys at the office saw it. When was the last time a state historian was called a crash test dummy?
“Probably never,” he said to the story.
He read it twice more, then turned the page to read the Associated Press follow-up about two fatal shootings - one in a spa, the other in a roadside park - Friday in Naperville.
“Hey, I was just there,” he told their ancient cat. The orange tabby eyeballed him, went back to gumming her tuna.
Sanders sipped a little cappuccino, read deeper.
“Zabrina Reynolds,” he murmured. “Hmm. That name rings a bell.” He ran through everyone he knew - work, family, friends, church, stores, bowling league, the thousands of execution documents he strained his eyeballs to absorb - but couldn’t place it.
Oh, well. It’s not important.