The Target(3)

Earl coughed up some phlegm and spit it into his cup. He said grimly, “They was breathing. That was good enough for me.”

“Guess that’s why you’re in here all right. But you got to set it right with God, Earl. They’re all God’s children. Got to set it right. You’ll be seeing him soon.”

Earl laughed till he choked. Then he calmed and his features seemed to clear.

“I got people coming to see me.”

“That’s nice, Earl,” said the nurse as he administered a painkiller to the inmate in the next bed. “Family?”

“No. I done killed my family.”

“Why’d you do that? Were they Jews or Presbyterians or coloreds?”

“Folks coming to see me,” said Earl. “I ain’t done yet, see?”

“Uh-huh.” The nurse checked the monitor of the other inmate. “Good to make use of any time you got left, old man. Clock she is a-ticking, all right, for all of us.”

“Coming to see me today,” said Earl. “Marked it on the wall here, look.”

He pointed to the concrete wall where he had used his fingernail to chip off the paint. “They said six days and they’d be coming to see me. Got me six marks on there. Good with numbers. Mind still working and all.”

“Well, you sure tell ’em hello for me,” said the nurse as he moved away with his cart.

Later, Earl stared at the doorway to the ward, where two men had appeared. They were dressed in dark suits and white shirts and their black shoes were polished. One wore black-framed glasses. The other looked like he’d barely graduated from high school. They were both holding Bibles and sporting gentle, reverential expressions. They appeared respectable, peaceful, and law-abiding. They were actually none of those things.

Earl caught their eye. “Coming to see me,” he mumbled, his senses suddenly as clear as they had ever been. Once more he had a purpose in life. It would be right before he died, but it was still a purpose.

“Killed my family,” he said. But that wasn’t entirely accurate. He had murdered his wife and buried her body in the basement of their home. They hadn’t found it until years later. That was why he was here and had been sentenced to death. He could have found a better hiding place, he supposed, but it had not been a priority. He was busy killing others.

The federal government had let the state of Alabama try, convict, and sentence him to death for her murder. He had had a scheduled visit to Alabama’s death chamber at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. Since 2002, the state of Alabama officially killed you by lethal injection. But some death penalty proponents were advocating the return of “Old Sparky” to administer final justice by electrocution to those on death row.

None of that troubled Earl. His appeal had carried on for so long that he’d never be executed now. It was because of his cancer. Ironically enough, the law said an inmate had to be in good health in order to be put to death. Yet they’d only saved him from a quick, painless demise so that nature could substitute a longer, far more painful one in the form of lung cancer that had spread all over him. Some would call that sweet justice. He just called it shitty luck.

He waved over the two men in suits.

He had killed his wife, to be sure. And he’d killed many others, though exactly how many he didn’t remember. Jews, coloreds, maybe some Catholics. Maybe he’d killed a Presbyterian too. Hell, he didn’t know. Wasn’t like they carried ID proclaiming their faith. Anybody who got in his way was someone who needed killing. And he had allowed as many people to get in his way as was humanly possible.

Now he was chained to a wall and was dying. But still, he had something left to do.

More precisely, he had one more person to kill.





Chapter

2



THE MEN COULD NOT HAVE looked any more tense. It was as though the weight of the world was resting on each of their shoulders.

Actually, it was.

The president of the United States sat in the seat at the end of the small table. They were in the Situation Room complex in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. Sometimes referred to as the “Woodshed,” the complex was first built during President Kennedy’s term after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Kennedy no longer thought he could trust the military and wanted his own intelligence overseers who would parse the reports coming in from the Pentagon. The Truman bowling alley had been sacrificed to build the complex, which had later undergone major renovations in 2006.

During Kennedy’s era a single analyst from the CIA would man the Situation Room in an unbroken twenty-hour shift, sleeping there as well. Later, the place had been expanded to include the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Chief of Staff’s office. However, the National Security Council staff ran the complex. Five “Watch Teams” comprised of thirty or so carefully vetted personnel operated the Situation Room on a 24/7 basis. Its primary goal was to keep the president and his senior staff briefed each day on important issues and allow for instant and secure communications anywhere in the world. It even had a secure link to Air Force One in the event the president was traveling.