“ Maybe I best ought to park it right here and get some damn sleep,” he said to the photograph he had pinned to the overhead visor, a picture of himself with an arm draped over Eunice's bony shoulder. The photo had been taken when they had gone to the Jersey shore to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. It had been a wonderment of nature the likes of which neither of them could muster words for, and so they had asked a stranger to snap a photo of them with the ocean as backdrop, and Eunice had said that every grain of sand on the beach was special and unique, and that she regretted that they had never found that special uniqueness that seemed buried in their boy, Jimmy. Still, they had smiled for the camera even then, even knowing that their only son had that same day been placed on death row and placed on the schedule for execution. The trip had been Eunice's swan song, he told himself; she had somehow known that her heart would give out, just as the doctors had said: a condition of the heart. Isaiah wondered how much of the condition was brought on by the situation her son now found himself in.
“ Sleep… best to sleep till dawn rise,” he said now to the photograph. Beside the photo of Eunice and himself, a photo of Jimmy Lee stared back. Short-cropped head of sandy blond hair, narrow eyes too close to each other, a beaked nose, and a freckled face. The chin was weak, near nonexistent, while the ears poked out from each side of the head like some strange pair of Brussels sprouts. He'd been a damn homely infant with the look of an opossum, and he'd not improved since.
One other photograph accompanied Isaiah on the long journey to Huntsville and later to D.C., and that was a photograph ripped from a Houston newspaper, a photograph of Judge Maureen DeCampe, posing with some other fancy judges on the steps of the courthouse.
Isaiah shut off the van lights. He'd taken a slight blow to the head against the dash. He tried to refocus and found himself staring into the rearview mirror. Behind him, he saw the shell of the van as if it had been carved out with a giant knife. He'd taken out the seats in the rear and had made a pallet of the blankets from his and Eunice's bed. Even if Eunice were alive, she might not be on the trip to see their son executed. But even in death, she was here in the spirit, inside Isaiah, and he took comfort in knowing this. “For a fact,” he muttered as he shut down the engine, locked the doors, and worked his thin, small frame to the back of the van. Once there, he lay down in his clothes and pulled the blankets up around his chin just as he and Eunice had done for forty- four years.
He lay there on his back, missing her spooning up against him. He lay there, looking out through the side tinted window at stars overhead, thinking out loud. “Eunice… this here universe is too much for me. All them stars… makes me feel so damn small. Wish you was here to see them… to see me through all this.”
He felt a tug at his old heart. He felt so alone. Still, he knew that he could never truly be alone anywhere, not in this life, not since Jimmy Lee had gotten into his head through some magical projection that had come through Eunice Mae, had somehow leaped full-blown from out of her head and into his, and it was him, Jimmy Lee come a- calling.
Jimmy Lee had sent him a mental picture, full-blown and frightful, of himself in the death chamber where they meant to throw the switch on Isaiah's boy. Isaiah watched from outside a giant glass jar inside a maximum-security prison where they officially and efficiently killed people.
Isaiah didn't begin to think he could ever understand how Jimmy Lee's voice got into his head from such a distance, except to say that perhaps it had been something like divination or sorcery; perhaps a kind of witchcraft associated with Christian curses and the Bible, something tangible though, like a cream or a gel or a jam, that oozed from Jimmy Lee's letters to Eunice's hands and then to Isaiah's head. Whatever or however, this power crept unseen and unknown into Isaiah's brain via the cells. After all, Jimmy Lee had miraculously begun reading his Bible, but Isaiah could not be certain just how much the boy had been getting from the Word until that first contact, when Jimmy Lee might as well have been in the rocker across from him on his falling-down old farmstead porch.
When Jimmy Lee's words came into his brain, only ten minutes after Isaiah had buried Eunice Mae, Isaiah had no hope of denying Jimmy or to not hear his last wish, and certainly to not act on it.
He'd buried her with a Bible passage suggested to him by Eunice Mae herself, but she might have gotten it from Jimmy Lee, in Jimmy's last letter to home. Eunice could read, and she'd read all his letters to Isaiah, but he knew she'd leave out any unpleasantness. Jimmy's kindness toward his mother and Isaiah in his last letters proved he'd been reborn, proved that his words were sincere, that he had come to that plateau of spirit that would indeed cleanse him in the next life, while the State of Texas made its feeble attempt to do likewise through several hundred thousand odd volts of electricity. Sons a bitches, he thought, one and all, and especially the judge who refused to show a stitch of mercy to my boy.
“ Just go to sleep, old man,” he told himself, there where he'd nearly been killed, there in the ditch alongside the road, his voice thin, bony fingers running over a scrub board of a face. But he'd still remained wakeful. “Get some rest. You'll be needing every ounce a' your energy, so get some damned rest.” He now ordered it, willed it, wishing to end the agitation and unrest that had created of his mind a chaotic whirlwind. His eyes closed on the dark road that lay ahead of him, and they closed on the barn, where he sat on the stool, and they closed on the image of the judge in her bonds. He had done it. He had lashed her to Jimmy Lee's body.
Jessica Coran found Washington, D.C., a city of contrasts. The tourists' finds and traps abounded, of course, the city being the so-called capital of the free world, but it also housed crime, poverty, pestilence, and the usual infrastructure problems. This along with its soft underbelly where drugs flowed freely, where an overburdened police and judicial system tolerated prostitution and other crime, and where politics meant everything and public outcry demanded more out of the current White House administration than the latest scandal.
This time of year, the cherry blossoms all along the main thoroughfares were sadly gone, and the cold chill of a fall that promised a frigid winter left homeless people in doorways within the shadow of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The city had earned the reputation of D.C.-District of Crack.
FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was nothing whatsoever like Jessica's country club atmosphere at Quantico, Virginia, where people showed attitudes more positive and goal-oriented. And the pace and stress set here proved mind-boggling, as did the number of ringing telephones. In order to think, she had to close two doors that led into the office turned over to her.
Despite the distractions and the vibes here, Jessica had immediately set out to take action. She called in all the D.C. field agents assigned to her, and she ordered them to work closely with local authorities, and to put out a street request for anyone knowing anything about the disappearance of Judge Maureen DeCampe. “Anything coming of such inquiries,” she told them, “gets reported to the task force and posted on the electronic bulletin board in the operations room.”
“ Where's that? The ops room?” one of the agents asked. “Where you're standing.” It was a room that hadn't seen use in at least a decade, but the ancient furniture was enhanced by state-of-the-art phones and computers for the operation. The room stood adjacent to the office they'd given Jessica to work from, and the moment she had stepped into the room, she had felt something, a kind of ghostly history to the place that had seen no use in such a long time. In her mind's eye, she saw a busy, frenetic office with old- fashioned furniture and dated telephones and a teletype machine in the comer. No computers. A lot of noise and movement, all in an empty room. The room begged to be put to use, and since every other room in the building that might serve was already in heavy use, she had selected this one to be outfitted for their needs, and an army of technicians had made it so.