True Crime

1

Luther Plunkitt watched as Frank Beachum was rolled to the center of the death chamber. He nodded, and two of the Strap-down guards left the room. Luther closed the door after them. Now, there were six people present in the little chamber. There was the last guard, a weathered red-haired middle-ager named Highgate, who took up his station in a corner of the room, his hands folded in front of him. There was Luther’s deputy Zachary Platt, who stood in the far corner, wearing a headset and microphone. In the corner across from him, there was a white folding screen, behind which stood Dr. Smiley Chaudrhi and nurse Maura O’Brien with their EKG machine. The AMA did not allow doctors to participate in executions so Chaudrhi would stay behind the screen throughout and merely monitor Beachum’s heart until it stopped. Then there was Luther, at the foot of the gurney, and Frank, lying under the fluorescents, his taut face showing above the sheet, his wide eyes flitting from place to place.

None of them spoke and, in the absence of human voices, every other sound was magnified. Luther could hear his own heartbeat. He could hear the hiss of Platt’s headphones, and the phlegmy ripple of guard Highgate’s breath. Now, Nurse O’Brien stepped out from behind the screen, and Luther could hear her soft shoes squeegee against the floor. Her round freckled face was resolutely expressionless as she moved toward the gurney. Her movements were swift and crisp. Luther held his breath as she snapped the sheet down from Frank’s chin to his waist. He saw the prisoner’s body tense and felt his own body tense. His heartbeat grew louder. He saw Frank’s eyes dart to the nurse’s face.

“This is just for the EKG,” Maura said to him coolly. Her white hands went into the vee of Frank’s T-shirt and she attached the pads to his chest, their wires running over the gurney’s side, over the floor to the machine behind the folding screen. Then, with the same crisp movements, the nurse stepped back and took hold of the intravenous stand. The wheels clattered so loudly as she rolled it up to the gurney that Luther shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably. There was a loud metal clap as Maura clamped the stand to the end of the gurney.

Then she moved back behind the screen. Luther looked composed but he felt himself swallow acid: she seemed to be taking forever to get this done. In fact, Maura reappeared quickly. She had a cotton ball held delicately between her thumb and forefinger. Deftly, she lifted the IV needle from its hook. Luther heard the paper crackle as she pushed the needle through its wrapper. She leaned over Frank’s arm and Frank looked away, stared up at the ceiling, the corners of his mouth trembling. The nurse swabbed the bend of his elbow quickly-to prevent infection. “This will be easier if you make a fist,” she said.

Luther licked his dry lips as he saw Frank ball his hand below the wrist strap. Come on, sister, he thought, get it in one. He silently blessed Maura’s skill as she slid the needle into the blue line of vein beneath Frank’s skin. When it was in his arm securely-the tube running up into the saline pouch on the stand and down again to the hole in the cinder-block wall-Maura straightened. Luther thought he saw her breath come out in a visible sigh of relief. Slipping the used cotton ball into the pocket of her skirt, she brought out a roll of adhesive tape from the same pocket. The tape made a wet grinding noise as she pulled off two strips. Quickly, she stuck the stips onto Frank’s arm, making an X over the needle to hold it fast. The job finished, she curtly tugged the sheet back up to Frank’s throat. Frank turned his head a little and looked up at her with his bright eyes. He looked like any frightened patient on a gurney, looking up to his nurse for reassurance. Maura looked away quickly, her mouth turning down. Luther thought he saw her wobble slightly on her legs as she hurried back behind the screen.

But the warden drew a deep breath. So that was done. That was all right. He glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was only eleven thirty-eight. Luther nearly laughed. Man, he thought, there is nothing as slow as this. Not even waiting for battle. Nothing else in life took this long. Luther could feel the humming tension of the silence, the tension of the very air, the tension of the little room that seemed to have seized up between one second and the next. And he felt his own tension answering the rest, as if he were not a separate physical form but a sort of density in the general atmosphere, a thick chunk of the tension all around him. And yet, mentally, he was okay-he ran a silent check on himself and he felt completely clear in his mind. His strung nerves would only make him better at his job. He would be more alert, quicker to react.

He nodded imperceptibly. In the deep silence, he thought he could hear the plastic benches scraping behind the blinds of the soundproof window as the witnesses were brought into the witness room.

Yes. That was what happened next.

Everything was going very smoothly.

We were going fast-I don’t know how fast: fast. I couldn’t spare a glance at the dash. My eyes were pressed as hard to the road as my shoe was to the gas pedal. I did not brake. I did not stop at lights. I slalomed through the rapid traffic, the tires screeching beneath me, burning scarlet taillights giving way before me to the white glare of oncoming heads. Horns blasted and faded behind me in an instant. The boulevard streamed by me in a strung-out blur of color. And the engine sang a single note, one ceaseless, piercing skirl, its sinews at the breaking point. The wind at the open windows was a roar, but I heard that shrilling sound all the same all around me. That sound-and the rubbery thud of my pulse which seemed to go off everywhere inside me at the same time.

In the passenger seat, Mrs. Russel sat rigid. Like some dark cliff, rearing. Her hands were fists at her sides and her eyes were lanterns beaming through the windshield. She did not turn to see the park and the brick towers and the low car lots replace one another at the side windows second by second as we bucketed past. We seemed a single presence- to me anyway-her presence seemed the same as mine, part and parcel of the speeding car. I could feel her there-I could feel her terror-or thought I could-but I could not tell her terror from my own. I was hardly aware of her as a person separate from myself, until, as we went buzzing through the heart of University City, she spoke.

“I know the boy who sold him the gun,” she said.

“What?” Clutching the wheel, I screamed it above the whine and the roar.

She screamed back. “I know the boy who sold it to him. He’s in jail. He might talk to them if they give him some time off.”

Ahead of me, a Volks pulled up at a red light. Cars jerked through the intersection into my path. I did not brake. I did not slow. I shot into the closing space between a Jaguar and a van. I heard the screech of brakes. A horn. Then both were gone, the Tempo screaming away from them.

The gun, I thought, pressing the gas even deeper into the floor. Yes, it’s enough. It will be enough.

And at that, the world went red-red and white and full of howling-a siren howling like a wild wolf at the sky-drowning out the engine and the wind and my sense of time-drowning out everything but the answering howl of fear from the core of me.

I couldn’t look up at the rearview. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road. But I could see the flashers at the edge of my vision-I could see them splash and whirl on my mirror, on my windows all around.

I knew that the cops were after me.

Suddenly, Luther realized that the moment had come. That moment he had dreaded the whole day long. He was standing at the foot of the gurney. It was eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds. It seemed as if it had been eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds for about an hour and a half. The second hand of the clock seemed to have gotten mired in the gray space between one black stroke on the dial’s perimeter and another. Worse, the room, this cramped rectangular box with its white cinderblock walls sealing it from the world around, seemed to have broken loose somehow from the planet’s mooring. Luther knew that Arnold McCardle was only a room away, watching the proceedings through the mirror on his right. He knew the witnesses were gathering behind the blinds of the window just in front of him. And yet he felt that they and the rest of the medical unit, the rest of the prison, the rest of the earth had fallen away from this place, that the death chamber had sailed off from them into deep space and was floating and tumbling end over end, connected to nothing. He felt dizzy and hollow as the room sailed and spun. And he felt alone. All alone, at eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds, with the condemned man, with Frank Beachum.

He saw Frank Beachum’s face. That’s what he had dreaded, what he had dreamed. He was confronting the face of the man on the gurney and, for all he had feared that, the actual sight of it took him by surprise. It was not what he expected. It was much more terrible somehow. He had imagined he would see the man as he had been these last six years-no matter that he knew better. He had imagined he would see the strong, sad, controlled features, the thoughtful eyes, the thin, expressive, intelligent mouth-the face that had, over all this time, communicated the unthinkable thing to him with slow insistence. He had imagined-he had dreaded-that he would see that face, that man, accusing him with his evident innocence. But that face, that man, was entirely gone.

The man on the gurney was just a container now, a person-shaped vessel brimful of mortal fear. Frank’s mouth was slack with it, and it had erased the lines of his features, of his cheeks and brow: the skin there seemed almost like a baby’s, that blank, that clean. Beneath the hairline, Frank’s bright eyes moved and moved as if disconnected from the rest of him, and all that was left of his life was in those eyes, all the white energy, the white fear.

But it was his hair-oddly enough-it was his hair that somehow struck Luther as the most awful feature: the jaunty, masculine tangle of it on his forehead as he lay there pinned down and covered to the chin. You could imagine him brushing his hair in the morning, jerking it out of his eyes with a twitch of his head, laughing out from under it-and it seemed weirdly extraneous now. It was as if someone had stuck a man’s wig on him, to taunt him, to mock him in his helplessness.

So for all his experience and expectation, the sight of Frank’s face took Luther Plunkitt off guard. It rocked him. It penetrated his professional purpose, struck through the depth of his craft to the human awareness beneath. He was like an actor, thoroughly immersed in a role, who suddenly realized the theater is on fire. He found he had to talk to himself, the warden to the man, to keep himself straight, to fight off that sense of drifting dizziness.

Now lookit, he thought, and his lips worked fitfully as he looked down at the man on the gurney. There was a girl too. There was a pregnant girl and people loved her. A father, a mother, a husband-loved her. There was a child inside her-a daughter, a son, a grandchild-who would have been in her arms, against her breast, would’ve looked up into her face. And this man-this Frank of yours, good old Frank here-he killed her, he killed all that Shot her in the throat, left her choking, dying. For some money, for a little loan-doesn’t matter what the reason was. Doesn’t matter what his life was like before, or the state his mind was in at the time. He had no goddamned right. He’s a man, like me. He had a choice, like I do. He didn’t have to do it and he did. That’s what a man is, after all, in the end. A man is the creature who can say “No.” A man … damn it.

To his amazement, Luther felt his right hand begin to tremble against his pants leg. That had never happened to him before. He slipped the hand into his pocket. For some reason this little lecture of his had only made matters worse. He had to open his mouth to breathe now. He felt the room spinning around him, spinning off through chartless depths. His fingers curled in his pocket into a fist as he tried to hold himself in place, hold the whole room, the whole operation in place, repeating, chanting determinedly against the giddy sensation:

A man is the creature who can say “No.”

“Noooooo!” I shrieked, as the cruisers closed in on me. There were two of them now: the second had come skidding out of a McDonald’s parking lot as if alerted by the first. They were both behind me, closing in to the left and the right. I jammed my foot down so hard against the gas that my whole body was pushed straight against the back of the seat, my arms stretching out to reach the wheel. My face must have looked like a skull, the skin was pulled that tight around the bone in my openmouthed desperation and fear. In front of me, the traffic was disappearing as the cars slashed off to either side to avoid the howling sirens and the whipping lights. The Tempo flew down the black highway like an arrow, like a bullet. And still, the bastards were gaining on me.

“Stop! For Jesus’ sake!” cried Mrs. Russel. “Let them help us!”

But I did not think they would help us-there was no time to make them understand-and I did not stop.

I drove on and, for a wild stretch of seconds, there was nothing but the sound of sirens and the flashing red and the hood of the Tempo crashing endlessly through the wall of night.

Then one siren changed pitch and the first cruiser zigged out to the side and overtook me.

“Pull over! Stop the car and pull over!”

The voice from the cruiser’s loudspeaker was like a thunder god’s. I glanced that way and saw the side of the cop’s car edge closer to mine. If I tried to outrace him, he would dash ahead and cut me off. If I tried to swerve and avoid him, I would lose control and die. There was no choice. I took my foot off the gas.

The Tempo’s speed broke at once. The car slowed quickly. The cruiser slipped ahead of me. Sidled in front of me, filling my windshield with red light. I saw its brake lights flare and glanced into my mirror to see the second cruiser pulling in tight behind me.

“Thank God,” Mrs. Russel said with a breath.

I hauled the wheel to the left and stomped down on the gas. The Tempo shot forward. Its front fender sliced away from the lead cruiser’s rear, found a wisp of empty air and dove into it, pulling past the cops’ left side. We were sucked into the dark road ahead and I was in front of them again. I was shooting away.

“Shit, you’re crazy!” Mrs. Russel roared.

I pushed the Tempo back up to its limit. The cop cars shuddered, then howled into pursuit behind me.

“You’re a crazy man!”

“They’ll stop us!” I screamed.

And, without thinking, I turned to look at her.

She was pushed so far back into her seat that she seemed to be trying to meld with it. Her face, slapped by the flashers as the cruisers closed in, was pulled taut, wrapped tight around a high-pitched scream.

“Watch out, watch out, watch out!” she cried.

I was already turning back to the windshield, following the white line of her wide-eyed stare. It seemed to take forever, that turning back. I could feel my head go round and the slow throb of the ache inside my head, and the weight of the alcohol squatting on my brain, and the weariness in my arms and legs, the pain behind my eyes-I could feel all of it in the slim edge of an instant. And I was aware of the first cruiser pulling up beside me again, the other car drilling through the little distance to my rear. I saw a splash of searing brightness ahead of me. I heard Mrs. Russel let fly a mindless yell.

And then the Tempo burned over the straight edge of the boulevard and tore full speed, shrieking, into Dead Man’s Curve.