Percy reached up to break it. “Take your—”
Brutal grabbed his right hand—the whole thing, small and soft and white, disappeared into Brutal’s tanned fist. “Shut up your cakehole, sonny. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take this one last opportunity to dig the wax out of your ears.”
I turned him around, lifted him onto the platform, then backed him up until the backs of his knees struck the seat of the electric chair and he had to sit down. His calm was gone; the meanness and the arrogance, too. Those things were real enough, but you have to remember that Percy was very young. At his age they were still only a thin veneer, like an ugly shade of enamel paint. You could still chip through. And I judged that Percy was now ready to listen.
“I want your word,” I said.
“My word about what?” His mouth was still trying to sneer, but his eyes were terrified. The power in the switch room was locked off, but Old Sparky’s wooden seat had its own power, and right then I judged that Percy was feeling it.
“Your word that if we put you out front for it tomorrow night, you’ll really go on to Briar Ridge and leave us alone,” Brutal said, speaking with a vehemence I had never heard from him before. “That you’ll put in for a transfer the very next day.”
“And if I won’t? If I should just call up certain people and tell them you’re harassing me and threatening me? Bullying me?”
“We might get the bum’s rush if your connections are as good as you seem to think they are,” I said, “but we’d make sure you left your fair share of blood on the floor, too, Percy.”
“About that mouse? Huh! You think anyone is going to care that I stepped on a condemned murderer’s pet mouse? Outside of this looney-bin, that is?”
“No. But three men saw you just standing there with your thumb up your ass while Wild Bill Wharton was trying to strangle Dean Stanton with his wrist-chains. About that people will care, Percy, I promise you. About that even your offsides uncle the governor is going to care.”
Percy’s cheeks and brow flushed a patchy red. “You think they’d believe you?” he asked, but his voice had lost a lot of its angry force. Clearly he thought someone might believe us. And Percy didn’t like being in trouble. Breaking the rules was okay. Getting caught breaking them was not.
“Well, I’ve got some photos of Dean’s neck before the bruising went down,” Brutal said—I had no idea if this was true or not, but it certainly sounded good. “You know what those pix say? That Wharton got a pretty good shot at it before anyone pulled him off, although you were right there, and on Wharton’s blind side. You’d have some hard questions to answer, wouldn’t you? And a thing like that could follow a man for quite a spell. Chances are it’d still be there long after his relatives were out of the state capital and back home drinking mint juleps on the front porch. A man’s work-record can be a mighty interesting thing, and a lot of people get a chance to look at it over the course of a lifetime.”
Percy’s eyes flicked back and forth mistrustfully between us. His left hand went to his hair and smoothed it. He said nothing, but I thought we almost had him.
“Come on, let’s quit this,” I said. “You don’t want to be here any more than we want you here, isn’t that so?”
“I hate it here!” he burst out. “I hate the way you treat me, the way you never gave me a chance!”
That last was far from true, but I judged this wasn’t the time to argue the matter.
“But I don’t like to be pushed around, either. My Daddy taught me that once you start down that road you most likely end up letting people push you around your whole life.” His eyes, not as pretty as his hands but almost, flashed. “I especially don’t like being pushed around by big apes like this guy.” He glanced at my old friend and grunted. “Brutal—you got the right nickname, at least.”
“You have to understand something, Percy,” I said. “The way we look at it, you’ve been pushing us around. We keep telling you the way we do things around here and you keep doing things your own way, then hiding behind your political connections when things turn out wrong. Stepping on Delacroix’s mouse—” Brutal caught my eye and I backtracked in a hurry. “Trying to step on Delacroix’s mouse is just a case in point. You push and push and push; we’re finally pushing back, that’s all. But listen, if you do right, you’ll come out of this looking good—like a young man on his way up—and smelling like a rose. Nobody’ll ever know about this little talk we’re having. So what do you say? Act like a grownup. Promise you’ll leave after Del.”
He thought it over. And after a moment or two, a look came into his eyes, the sort of look a fellow gets when he’s just had a good idea. I didn’t like it much, because any idea which seemed good to Percy wouldn’t seem good to us.
“If nothing else,” Brutal said, “just think how nice it’d be to get away from that sack of pus Wharton.”
Percy nodded, and I let him get out of the chair. He straightened his uniform shirt, tucked it in at the back, gave his hair a pass-through with his comb. Then he looked at us. “Okay, I agree. I’m out front for Del tomorrow night; I’ll put in for Briar Ridge the very next day. We call it quits right there. Good enough?”
“Good enough,” I said. That look was still in his eyes, but right then I was too relieved to care.
He stuck out his hand. “Shake on it?”
I did. So did Brutal.
More fools us.
4
THE NEXT DAY was the thickest yet, and the last of our strange October heat. Thunder was rumbling in the west when I came to work, and the dark clouds were beginning to stack up there. They moved closer as the night came down, and we could see blue-white forks of lightning jabbing out of them. There was a tornado in Trapingus County around ten that night—it killed four people and tore the roof off the livery stable in Tefton—and vicious thunderstorms and gale-force winds at Cold Mountain. Later it seemed to me as if the very heavens had protested the bad death of Eduard Delacroix.
Everything went just fine to begin with. Del had spent a quiet day in his cell, sometimes playing with Mr. Jingles but mostly just lying on his bunk and petting him. Wharton tried to get trouble started a couple of times—once he hollered down to Del about the mousieburgers they were going to have after old Lucky Pierre was dancing the two-step in hell—but the little Cajun didn’t respond and Wharton, apparently deciding that was his best shot, gave it up.
At quarter past ten, Brother Schuster showed up and delighted us all by saying he would recite the Lord’s Prayer with Del in Cajun French. It seemed like a good omen. In that we were wrong, of course.
The witnesses began to arrive around eleven, most talking in low tones about the impending weather, and speculating about the possibility of a power outage postponing the electrocution. None of them seemed to know that Old Sparky ran off a generator, and unless that took a direct lightning-hit, the show would go on. Harry was in the switch room that night, so he and Bill Dodge and Percy Wetmore acted as ushers, seeing folks into their seats and asking each one if he’d like a cold drink of water. There were two women present: the sister of the girl Del had raped and murdered, and the mother of one of the fire victims. The latter lady was large and pale and determined. She told Harry Terwilliger that she hoped the man she’d come to see was good and scared, that he knew the fires in the furnace were stoked for him, and that Satan’s imps were waiting for him. Then she burst into tears and buried her face in a lace hanky that was almost the size of a pillowslip.