“There was nothing available in prison?”
“Oh, there was stuff. The jungle juice cons made out of potatoes and raisins, and some good stuff that got smuggled in. But I wasn’t in population, so I didn’t have access. And anyway it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.”
“Well, you’re a free man now. Why don’t you drink to it? I’m driving or I’d join you.”
“Well…”
“Go ahead.”
“Why not?” he said, and uncapped the bottle and held it to the light. “Pretty colour, huh? Well, here’s to freedom, huh?” He took a long drink, shuddered at the burn of the whiskey. “Kicks like a mule,” he said.
“You’re not used to it.”
“I’m not.” He put the cap on the bottle and had a little trouble screwing it back on. “Hitting me hard,” he reported. “Like I was a little kid getting his first taste of it. Whew.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“Spinning,” Billy said, and slumped in his seat.
Paul glanced over at him, looked at him again a minute later. Then, after checking the mirror, he pulled the car off the road and braked to a stop.
Billy was conscious for a little while before he opened his eyes. He tried to get his bearings first. The last thing he remembered was a wave of dizziness after the slug of Scotch hit bottom. He was still sitting upright, but it didn’t feel like a car seat, and he didn’t sense any movement. No, he was in some sort of chair, and he seemed to be tied to it.
That didn’t make any sense. A dream? He’d had lucid dreams before and knew how real they were, how you could be in them and wonder if you were dreaming and convince yourself you weren’t. The way you broke the surface and got out of it was by opening your eyes. You had to force yourself, had to open your real eyes and not just your eyes in the dream, but it could be done.
…There!
He was in a chair, in a room he’d never seen before, looking out a window at a view he’d never seen before. An open field, woods behind it.
He turned his head to the left and saw a wall panelled in knotty cedar. He turned to the right and saw Paul Dandridge, wearing boots and jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and sitting in an easy chair with a book. He said, “Hey!” and Paul lowered the book and looked at him.
“Ah,” Paul said. “You’re awake.”
“What’s going on?”
“What do you think?”
“There was something in the whiskey.”
“There was indeed,” Paul agreed! “You started to stir just as we made the turn off the state road. I gave you a booster shot with a hypodermic needle.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You never felt it. I was afraid for a minute there that I’d given you too much. That would have been ironic, wouldn’t you say? ‘Death by lethal injection.’ The sentence carried out finally after all these years, and you wouldn’t have even known it happened.”
He couldn’t take it in. “Paul,” he said, “for God’s sake, what’s it all about?”
“What’s it about?” Paul considered his response. “It’s about time.”
“Time?”
“It’s the last act of the drama.”
“Where are we?”
“A cabin in the woods. Not the cabin. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I killed you in the same cabin where you killed Karen.
Ironic, but not really feasible. So this is a different cabin in different woods, but it will have to do.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Of course.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because that’s how it ends, Billy. That’s the point of the whole game. That’s how I planned it from the beginning.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Why is it so hard to believe? We conned each other, Billy. You pretended to repent and I pretended to believe you. You pretended to reform and I pretended to be on your side. Now we can both stop pretending.”
Billy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I was trying to con you at the beginning.”
“No kidding.”
“There was a point where it turned into something else, but it started out as a scam. It was the only way I could think of to stay alive. You saw through it?”
“Of course.”
“But you pretended to go along with it. Why?”
“Is it that hard to figure out?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. What do you gain by it? My death? If you wanted me dead all you had to do was tear up my letter. The state was all set to kill me.”
“They’d have taken forever,” Paul said bitterly. “Delay after delay, and always the possibility of a reversal and a retrial, always the possibility of a commutation of sentence.”
“There wouldn’t have been a reversal, and it took you working for me to get my sentence commuted. There would have been delays, but there’d already been a few of them before I got around to writing to you. It couldn’t have lasted too many years longer, and it would have added up to a lot less than it has now, with all the time I spent serving life and waiting for the parole board to open the doors. If you’d just let it go, I’d be dead and buried by now.”
“You’ll be dead soon,” Paul told him. “And buried. It won’t be much longer. Your grave’s already dug. I took care of that before I drove to the prison to pick you up.”
“They’ll come after you, Paul. When I don’t show up for my initial appointment with my parole officer-”
“They’ll get in touch, and I’ll tell them we had a drink and shook hands and you went off on your own. It’s not my fault if you decided to skip town and violate the terms of your parole.”
He took a breath. He said, “Paul, don’t do this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”
“Ah,” Paul said. “That’s why.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I left it to the state,” he said, “they’d have been killing a dead man. By the time the last appeal was denied and the last request for a stay of execution turned down, you’d have been resigned to the inevitable. They’d strap you to a gurney and give you a shot, and it would be just like going to sleep.”
“That’s what they say.”
“But now you want to live. You adjusted to prison, you made a life for yourself in there, and then you finally made parole, icing on the cake, and now you genuinely want to live. You’ve really got a life now, Billy, and I’m going to take it away from you.”
“You’re serious about this.”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything.”
“You must have been planning this for years.”
“From the very beginning.”
“Jesus, it’s the most thoroughly premeditated crime in the history of the world, isn’t it? Nothing I can do about it either. You’ve got me tied tight and the chair won’t tip over. Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s what I thought.” He sighed. “Get it over with.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Huh?”
“This won’t be what the state hands out,” Paul Dandridge said. “A minute ago you were begging me to let you live. Before it’s over you’ll be begging me to kill you.”
“You’re going to torture me.”
“That’s the idea.”
“In fact you’ve already started, haven’t you? This is the mental part.”
“Very perceptive of you, Billy.”
“For all the good it does me. This is all because of what I did to your sister, isn’t it?”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t do it, you know. It was another Billy Croydon that killed her, and I can barely remember what he was like.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Not to you, evidently, and you’re the one calling the shots. I’m sure Kierkegaard had something useful to say about this sort of situation, but I’m damned if I can call it to mind. You knew I was conning you, huh? Right from the jump?”
“Of course.”
“I thought it was a pretty good letter I wrote you.”