“Uh-huh.”
“That priest — that monsignor — you should’ve heard him this afternoon.” He grinned. “He was wailing and flailing like some goddamned TV minister. Man, what a jackoff that guy is.”
He came back to his desk. To his right was one of those plastic cubes you put photos of your family in. He had a nice-looking wife and a nice-looking daughter. “You eat?”
“I had a sandwich before I left New Hope,” I said.
“I’m going to grab something in the cafeteria.”
I smiled. “The food’s not as bad as the inmates say, huh?”
“Bad? Shit, it’s a hell of a lot better than you and I ever got in the goddamned Army, I’ll tell you that.” He shook his head in disgust. “Food’s the easiest target of all for these jerkoffs — to get the public upset about, I mean. The public sees all these bullshit prison movies and think, they’re for real. You know, cockroaches and everything crawling around in the chili? Hell, the state inspector checks out our kitchens and our food just the way he does all the other institutions. Even if we wanted cockroaches in the chili—” He smiled. “They wouldn’t let us.”
I said, “I need a badge.”
“Oh, right.”
He dug in his drawer and found me one and pushed it across his desk. I pinned it to my chambray shirt. The badge was “Highest Priority.” All members of the team wear them.
“The rest of them here?”
“The team, you mean?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Everybody except the goddamned doc.”
Before he could work up a lather again, I said, “Why don’t I just walk over there, then, and say hi?”
“You’ve got twenty minutes yet. You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee at least?”
“No, thanks.”
He looked at me. “You know, I was kind of surprised that he requested you.”
“Yeah.”
“You sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Some of the team, well, they had some doubts, too, said maybe it wasn’t right. You knowing him and everything.”
“I know. A couple of them called me.”
“But I said, ‘Hell, it’s his decision. If he thinks he can handle it, let him.’ Anyway, this is what the inmate wanted.”
“I appreciate that.”
“You’re a pro, and pros do what they have to.”
“Right.”
He smiled. “I’m just glad Glen Wright has to handle the media. If it was up to me, I’d just tell them to go to hell.”
He was going to upset himself again, and I wanted to get out of there before it happened. I stood up.
“You fellas used to carry little black bags,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Just like doctors. Guess you don’t need them anymore, huh? Now we provide everything.”
“Right.”
We shook hands, and I left.
There are six members on the team.
Five of us stood in the chamber and went through it all. You wouldn’t think there’d be much to rehearse, but there is.
One of the men makes certain that the room is set up properly. We want to make sure that the curtains work, that’s the first thing. When the press and the visitors come into the room outside the chamber, the curtains are drawn. Only when we’re about to begin for real are the curtains drawn back.
Then the needles have to be checked. Sometimes you get a piston that doesn’t work right, and that can play hell for everybody. They get three injections — the first to totally relax them, the second to paralyze them so they won’t squirm around, and the third to kill them. In my training courses, I learned that only two things matter in this kind of work: to kill brain and heart function almost immediately. This way, the inmate doesn’t suffer, and the witnesses don’t get upset by how inhumane it might look otherwise.
After the needles are checked, the gurney is fixed into place. If it isn’t anchored properly, a struggling guy might tear it free and make things even worse for himself.
Then we check the IV line and the EKG the doctor will use to determine heart death. Then we check the blade the doctor will use for the IV cutdown. We expose the inmate’s vein so there’s no chance of missing with the needle. That happened in Oregon. Took the man with the needle more than twenty minutes to find a vein. That wasn’t pleasant for anybody.
Then I went through my little spiel to the man about to be executed. I’m always very polite. I tell him what he can expect and how it won’t hurt in any way, especially if he cooperates. He generally has a few questions, and I always try to answer them. During all this, everybody else is rechecking the equipment, and Assistant Warden Wright is out there patiently taking questions from the press. The press is always looking for some way to discredit what we do. That’s not paranoia, that’s simple fact.
We didn’t time the first run-through, which was kind of ragged. But the second run-through, Wright used his stopwatch.
We came in a little longer than we should have.
In the courses I took, the professor suggested that fifty-one minutes is the desired time for most executions by lethal injection. This is from walking into the chamber to the prisoner being declared legally dead by the presiding doctor.
We came in at fifty-nine minutes, and Wright, properly, said that we needed to pick things up a little. The longer you’re in the chamber, he said, the more likely you are to make mistakes. And the more mistakes you make, the more the press gets on your back. Speed and efficiency were everything, Wright said. That’s what my instructors always said, too.
Finally, I checked out my own needles, went through the motions of injecting fluids. My timing was off till the third run-through. I picked up the pace then, and everything went pretty well. We hit fifty-three minutes. We needed to shave two more minutes. We’d take a break and then come back for one more run-through.
When we wrapped up, Wright said we could all have coffee and rolls if we wanted. There was a small room off the chamber that was used only by prison personnel. The rest of the team went there. I walked down the hall to another electronic gate and told him that I was the man the warden called him about. Even though visiting hours were over, I was to be admitted to see the prisoner.
The guard opened the gate for me, then another guard led me down the hall, stopping at a door at the far shadowy end.
He opened the door, and I went inside.
The man was an impostor.
David Sawyer had gotten somebody to stand in for him at the execution. Last time I’d seen him was at the trial, years ago.
The sleek and handsome David Sawyer I remembered, the one with all the black curly hair that Susan had loved to run her fingers through, was gone. Had probably fled the country.
In his place was a balding, somewhat stoop-shouldered man with thick eyeglasses and a badly twitching left hand. He was dressed in gray prisoner clothing that only made his skin seem paler.
I must have struck him the same way, as an impostor, because at first he didn’t seem to recognize me at all.
On the drive up, I tried to figure out how long it had been since I’d seen David Sawyer. Eighteen years, near as I could figure.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “You changed your mind. The warden didn’t tell me that.”
I guess what I’d expected was a frightened, depressed man eager to receive his first sedative so he wouldn’t be aware of the next three hours. You saw guys like that.
But the old merry David was in the stride, in the quick embrace, in the standing-back and taking a look-at-you.
“You’re a goddamned porker,” he said. “How much weight have you put on?”
“Forty pounds,” I said. “Or thereabouts.”