11. Panic
He felt himself falling. Tumbling down, head over heels, out of control, into a black hole.
'Mr. Cowart?'
He breathed in hard.
'Mr. Cowart, you okay, boy?'
He crashed and felt his body shatter into pieces.
'Hey, Mr. Cowart, you all there?'
Cowart opened his eyes and saw the sturdy, pale visage of Sergeant Rogers.
'You got to take your place now, Mr. Cowart. We ain't waiting on anybody, and all the official witnesses got to be seated before midnight.'
The sergeant paused, running his big hand through the short brush of his crew cut, a gesture of exhaustion and tension. 'It ain't like some movie show you can come in late on. You okay now?'
Cowart nodded his head.
'It's a tough night for everyone,' the sergeant said. 'You go on in. Right through that door. You'll see a seat in front, right next to a detective from Escambia County. That's where Sully said to put you. He was real specific about that. Can you move? You sure you're okay?'
'I'll make it, Cowart croaked.
'It ain't as bad as you think,' the hulking prison guard said. Then he shook his head. 'Nah, that's not true. It's as bad as can be. If it don't sorta turn your stomach, then you ain't a person. But you'll get through it okay. Right?'
Cowart swallowed. 'I'm okay.'
The prison guard eyed him carefully. 'Sully musta bent your ear something fierce. What'd he tell you all those hours? You look like a man who's seen a ghost.'
I have, thought Cowart. But he replied, 'About death.'
The sergeant snorted. 'He's the one who knows. Gonna see for himself, firsthand, now. You got to move right ahead, Mr. Cowart. Dying time don't wait for no man.'
Cowart knew what he was talking about and shook his head.
'Oh yes, it does,' he said. 'It bides its time.'
Sergeant Rogers looked at the reporter closely. 'Well, you ain't the one about to take the final walk. You sure you're okay? I don't want nobody passing out in there or making a scene. We got to have our decorum when we juice someone.'
The prison guard tried to smile with his irony.
Cowart took a single, unsteady step toward the execution chamber, then turned and said, 'I'll be okay.'
He wanted to burst into laughter at the depth of the lie he'd just spoken. Okay, he said to himself. I'll be okay. It was as if some foreign voice were speaking inside of him. Sure, no problem. No big deal.
All I've done is set a killer free.
He had a sudden, awful vision of Robert Earl Ferguson standing outside the small house in the Keys, laughing at him, before entering to fulfill his part of the bargain. The sound of the murderer's voice echoed in his head. Then he remembered the eighty-by-ten glossy photographs taken of Joanie Shriver at the swamp where her body had been discovered. He remembered how slick they had felt in his sweaty grasp, as if coated with blood.
I'm dead, he thought again.
But he forced his feet to drag forward. He went through the door at two minutes to twelve.
The first eyes he saw belonged to Bruce Wilcox. The bantam detective was seated in the front row wearing a brightly checked sportcoat that seemed a sick, hilarious contradiction to the dirty business at hand. He smiled grudgingly and nodded his head toward an empty seat beside him. Cowart spun his eyes about rapidly, glancing over the other two dozen or so witnesses sitting on folding chairs in two rows, gazing straight ahead as if trying to fix every detail of the event in their memories. They all seemed waxen, like figurines. No one moved.
A glass partition separated them from the execution chamber, so that it seemed as if they were watching the action on a stage or some oddly three-dimensional television set. Four men were in the chamber: two correction officers in uniform; a third man, the doctor, carrying a small black medical bag; another man in a suit – someone whispered "from the state attorney general's office" – waiting beneath a large electric clock.
He looked at the second hand as it scythed through time.
'Siddown, Cowart, the detective hissed. 'The show's about to start.'
Cowart saw two other reporters from the Tampa Tribune and the St… Petersburg Times. They looked grim but mimicked the detective by motioning him toward his seat, before continuing to scribble details in small notepads. Behind them was a woman from a Miami television station. Her eyes were staring straight ahead at the still-empty chair in the execution chamber. He saw her wind a simple white handkerchief tightly around her fist.
He half-stumbled into the seat waiting for him. The unyielding metal of the chair burned into his back.
'Tough night, huh, Cowart?' the detective whispered.
He didn't answer.
The detective grunted. 'Not as tough as some have it, though.'
'Don't be so sure about that,' Cowart replied under his breath. 'How did you get here?'
'Tanny's got friends. He wanted to see if old Sully would really go through with it. Still don't believe that bullshit you wrote about him being the killer of little Joanie. Tanny said he didn't much know what it would mean if Sullivan doesn't back out. But he thought if he didn't, and I got to see it, well, it might help teach me respect for the system of justice. Tanny is always trying to teach me things. Says it makes a man a better policeman to know what can happen in the end.'
The detective's eyes glistened with a hellish humor.
'Has it?' Cowart asked.
Wilcox shook his head. 'It ain't happened yet. Class is still in session.' He grinned at Cowart. 'You're looking a bit pale. Something on your mind?'
Before Cowart could reply, Wilcox whispered, 'Got any last words? It's midnight.'
They waited a heartbeat or two.
A side door opened and the prison warden stepped through. Blair Sullivan was next, flanked by two guards and trailed by a third. His face was rigid and pale, a corpselike appearance. His whole wiry body seemed smaller and sickly. He wore a simple white shirt buttoned tight to the neck and dark blue trousers. A priest wearing a collar, carrying a Bible and an expression of frustrated dismay, trailed the group. The priest shuffled off to the side of the chamber, pausing only to shrug in the direction of the warden, and cracked open the Good Book. He started reading quietly to himself. Cowart saw Sullivan's eyes widen when he spotted the chair. They swung abruptly to a telephone on the wall, and for the briefest moment his knees seemed to lose some strength, and he tottered. But he regained control almost instantly and the moment of hesitation was lost. It was the first time he'd seen Sullivan act in any way vaguely human, Cowart thought. Then things started to happen swiftly, with the herky-jerkiness of a silent movie.
Sullivan was steered into the seat and two guards dropped to their knees and started fastening leg and arm braces. Brown leather straps were tightened around Sullivan's chest, bunching up his white shirt. One guard attached an electrode to the prisoner's leg. Another swooped behind the chair and seized a cap, ready to bring it down over Sullivan's head.