“ Please, don't shoooot,” pleaded the little man in the rumpled old suit. He was shorter by a head than she. This old coot must have witnessed her generosity toward the other fellow and wanted some shown him, she had guessed. His skin appeared as rumpled and loose as his clothing. His country drawl made him a simple fellow, and when he'd thrown up a pair of wrinkled hands in the universal posture of defeat, Judge DeCampe almost felt sorry for his having startled her into putting the muzzle of the. 45 in his face. Then she recognized him with a startled shock.
“ Mr. Purdy? James Lee Purdy's father?” she then asked, somewhat amazed to find the man so out of place and time.
“ You couldn't forget the likes of me, now could you?”
“ No… haven't forgotten, no.”
“ Guess that goes a long way to show your guilt, Your Honorable Judgess.” He uttered her tide as if spitting battery fluid.
Still, her recognition of the quiet little man who had sat for almost three months in her courtroom nearly nine years ago, month after month during his son's murder trial, listening to testimony condemning his son to die in a Texas electric chair, told her she had nothing to fear from this sad Iowa farmer. “What the hell're you doing here? In Washington? Wasn't your son's execution scheduled and carried out?”
It came as a surprise to find him here, seeking her out. His son's case had come full circle, the final appeal, and through some strange judiciary coincidence, it had fallen on her desk when she was hearing appeals in Houston. Of course, she'd immediately refused the case on grounds of conflict of interest, since no judge could try the same case twice, even if she had become an appeals judge by then and even if Jimmy Lee Purdy had kept up with her career for some perverted reason. Still, at that time and now, she suspected, the old Iowa farmer must be absolutely confused about the judicial system. A simple Iowa farmer lost amid Houston's court system with its winding, twisting corridors until he found her office.
He had entered her chambers and there he stood the entire time, pleading with her to handle the appeal, that Jimmy Lee wanted it that way, so there could not be any real conflict of interest due to Jimmy Lee Purdy's final wishes. “A man's final wishes are a sacred thing,” the senior Purdy had told her then. Of course, no amount of magical thinking on Purdy's part could convince anyone in the Texas judiciary system to break generations of protocol for “a man's final wishes.”
Now here stood old Purdy again before her in an underground lot in D.C. Part of her mind asked why had he sought her out again, here, now. She knew that his son's execution had occurred over the weekend, and this knowledge only made her clench tighter to her Remington. “I know your son's execution was set for the weekend,” she told him. Colleagues in Houston didn't let her miss much, and besides, it'd made national news and had sparked new debate on the capital punishment issue and the State of Texas's penchant for using the chair often and often again.
She had recalled how the worn-out looking little man had abandoned his crops and life on the farm to be at his son's trial, and it had surely proven an ordeal for the father of the accused and convicted defendant. The fact was that the young defendant had no defense; he'd left enough DNA at the series of rape-murders to convict hundreds of men several times over. He'd been careless and messy, meaning to be, taunting law enforcement to stop him, as if it were all a game, and he killed with the thoughtless abandon and impunity of a natural disaster, and he ought to've been put to death the day after his conviction. Instead, they had run him through all of his civil rights until finally he had no more, and Judge Parker had-just as she'd known on the day she'd handed the case over to him-found Jimmy Lee guilty on top of guilty. He'd just been executed over the previous weekend.
So seeing the father here now did not completely surprise her, yet it did surprise her, all the same.
“ Mr. Purdy, you startled me.”
“ I sure don't want that, ma'am, Your Judgess.”
“ I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Purdy,” she said without sincerity.
“ I 'predate that… coming from you, Your Judgess.” Aside from this wizened old man, no one gave a whit for Jimmy Lee Purdy. Even the opponents of the death penalty had remained strangely silent on Purdy and his execution, as if to say they'd give the state this one since Purdy was- or appeared by all rights to be-a natural born killer. Certainly, he did not make a good poster boy; he cursed, spat, and made filthy gestures whenever and wherever given the opportunity.
The old man appeared his exact opposite. The old man had sat straight and stiff throughout the proceedings like a staff, an ancient, worm-eaten wooden staff, erect and unbending, proud and sad all at once. Judge DeCampe could only imagine how a parent might react under such stress as God, Texas, his son, and circumstances had placed on him and his absent wife. DeCampe had come to think of the elder Mr. Purdy as a biblical character like Lot or even Job-the Job of Iowa Falls, Iowa.
She relaxed her arm along with the weapon, pointing it downward just as her father had always taught her. “Mr. Purdy, you damn near got your head blown off. You startled me.
Then he grinned a twisted and grimacing grin and mocked her words, “Mr. Purdy, you startled me. I plan for a heap more'n to startle you, Missy.”
Now she felt real fear of the sort that went without the blink of second-guessing, but too late! Maureen DeCampe didn't see the electric cattle prod he shoved into her abdomen from somewhere deep within the rumpled coat, through a hole in a pocket. She saw a flash of the silver tip, like the giant sting of a wasp, even as it remained somehow attached to the inner lining of his cloth overcoat. She only felt its report as it sent her into a confused convulsion, a sense of burning material and flesh filling her last thought before passing out.
“ You had your chance, woman. You done sat in judgment twic't on my boy, and you done kil't Jimmy Lee, but he ain't going outta this life without company. Electrocution… How's it feel? My boy and me're now gonna teach you a little about old time religion and justice. Call yerself a judge. Hawww!”
Her gun had fallen immediately, her hands reacting violently to the electric bolt sent through her every cell. She had slumped forward into him, unconscious, her weight against the frail figure nearly knocking Purdy over. He then must have used some sort of drug on her, she now surmised. Likely used a premeasured dose from a hypodermic.
“ I lifted your body, carried you to my waiting van, and there I deposited you… inside a pine wood coffin, same as Jimmy Lee's. You rode here right alongside one another in the back of the van. After I put you into the coffin, I nailed shut the top of the thing.”
She had a vague memory or sixth sense of having been shut up into a black inkwell.
Darkness complete.
Isaiah Purdy had grown tired, his eyes so heavy they had closed, his ears no longer registering the whimpering and animal cries of his victim. He dozed on the three-legged stool that sat in the barn. He half remembered, half dreamed now, rewinding his experience through the mechanism of his mind. What had happened? How had he found the courage and strength to carry out his dead son's wishes?
He recalled again how he had taken the woman in the garage in Washington, D.C., after he'd made a cruise by the White House and the Lincoln Memorial-places he'd always wanted to see. He recalled standing in a crowd of tourists, feeling he needed a bath or a shower.
He recalled next going to the courthouse, and what had happened after he'd jabbed her with the cattle prod and injected her with the drug. He had then banged tight the coffin lid over her unconscious form, nail after nail. When he had turned to climb from the van, he was shocked to see a vision standing there, a biblical character if ever there was one, a giant, bearded prophet, asking, “What're you doing there, mister?”