by Ninie Hammon
Princess’s own life would end; a new life would begin. There was somethin’ right and fittin’ about that.
She looked down at the pictures spread out on the table. How she longed to fall into them, spend a year just staring into the face of each one, imagining what Angel’d say and how she’d say it, what her hair smelled like when somebody brushed it and pulled it back in them dog-ears.
She picked up the final picture, the most recent shot of the pretty red-headed teenager, and let herself get lost for a few precious minutes in the face of the child—the young woman!—who was gonna have a good life. A good life with her own young ’un to love.
Princess had been strong as long as the Rev was around. But now that he was gone, she couldn’t hold it together and she let fly, burst out crying. She wasn’t immediately sure exactly what she was crying about, but knew it was about caring. It’s not so hard to leave a life if you don’t have nothing in it. All those years in solitary, it wasn’t so awful to think of dying and not living like that no more.
But now!
Now, she knew the Rev and Mr. Cunningham and had had a little peek into Angel’s life. And she so desperately didn’t want to leave all that behind.
Why, she’d just got her first look at her little girl in fourteen years and now she wouldn’t never get another one, wouldn’t never hear about her again or see a picture of her precious grandchild—
Now, you wait just a minute, Emily Gail Prentiss!
A week ago she didn’t have none of those wonderful things! Now, here she was a-whinin’ about having to leave ’em instead of being grateful she had ’em in the first place. She was a blessed woman, for a fact, and she intended to go out of this world being grateful for what she had.
* * * * *
There were eighteen metal folding chairs, three rows of six, set up for visitors in the windowless viewing area next to the execution room in the Quonset-hut looking building at the far end of the Long Dark. The six chairs on the back row were reserved for the press, the middle six for prison officials and any local or state politicians who wanted to make a statement one way or the other about the death penalty by their presence. The front six, the ones only fifteen feet away from the glass separating the spectators from the players, were reserved for the family of the victim.
Jackson Prentiss was the only man in the room. He had come an hour early and sat alone in the middle chair in the front row. The rain was making a racket on the roof of the building and the room had an unpleasant odor Jackson couldn’t quite place. He glanced at the ends of the rows, where stacks of paper sacks had been set out for weaklings to puke in, and hoped it wouldn’t stink worse later on.
He was seething. Things were not going as he’d planned and he was not a man accustomed to disappointment. His visit with Emily the day before had left him curiously unsettled. Oh, he’d put her in her place, all right. He’d hammered her with his words, bludgeoned her with the sheer force of his magnetic personality until she was a bloody heap, staring at him with those wide doe eyes he’d actually found attractive years ago. He’d cowed her!
Still …
There was a niggling itch in his soul about the woman. Something wasn’t right. She was too smug, too … what was the word? Almost serene. She’d seemed at peace in such a profound way it left him disturbed, confused, and a little frightened. There was a power in her stillness he could neither understand nor tolerate. He’d done the best he could to crush it, but he had a sense that he’d never gotten to the core of her, that his blows had been flesh wounds, had not inflicted any real damage at all.
And her claim that she’d won! That she’d somehow beaten him! If she hadn’t been under the protection of armed guards, he’d have leapt across the table and ripped her throat out with his bare hands. How dare she—a scar-faced little rat of a woman so skinny she probably wouldn’t even generate a decent-sized puff of smoke when they fried her.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was something about Emily that touched a nerve deep inside him, reached down into the depths of him and released the man he used to be. Well, he wasn’t that undisciplined, itinerant preacher anymore. He was in charge, kept company with the rich and powerful. His future looked bright and Emily didn’t have any future at all. In less than an hour, she’d be dead.
That thought calmed him. He breathed deeply and looked around the room. What he saw pegged out his blood pressure all over again.
He’d assumed all execution chambers were alike, but this room was not constructed like the one in the Kilby State Prison in Montgomery. He’d been there several times to watch niggers fry in Yellow Mama, the electric chair painted with left-over paint a prison road crew had used to mark no-passing zones. It was just one big room with the chair at one end and the visitors’ gallery at the other. The folks on the front row weren’t fifteen feet from the prisoner. You could hear him blubber like a baby and swear he didn’t do it, the way that big buck did who’d murdered a white girl. That black ape heard the girl’s family hurl obscenities at him and curse his soul. When they flipped the switch, you were close enough to smell his hair burn.
This building was different. It was divided into two separate rooms, with the electric chair in one and the visitors in another. Oh, there was a big picture window where you could see the whole thing. And they had a microphone in there so he could hear Emily’s last words, listen to her cry and beg for mercy in that ugly, gruff voice of hers. But she couldn’t hear him! And for months he’d been looking forward to his laughter ringing in her ears as she died.
He looked up when the door that led into the prison opened and in walked that suck-up guard, the skinny little guy who’d been outside Emily’s door. He wasn’t interested in chit-chat and opened his mouth to dismiss him, but the man started babbling before he had a chance. So he’d listened to the stupid guard stammer and stutter out his story. At first, Jackson scoffed, but his scorn slowly transformed through skepticism, doubt, and incredulity into belief.
Emily had lied! Angela wasn’t dead at all! That’s why she was so serene, so peaceful, so smug. It all made sense now. She’d kept a live Angela away from him for fourteen years. She had beaten him.
The flames of his fury licked at the base of his skull in such white-hot rage his brain threatened to explode out the top of his head. Sweat popped out on his forehead and upper lip, his hands began to shake, and he ground his teeth back and forth.
Well, she wasn’t going to get away with it! He’d show her. He’d—What? What could he do about it? It was too late now. Emily had won.
No! There had to be something, some way to …
Wait a minute. Emily was willing to die to keep Angela away from him. But what if Emily knew he’d found out the kid was alive, that he was going to get her back from that preacher and keep her the rest of her life? What if he told Emily—
He couldn’t tell Emily anything!
Jackson cut his eyes to the picture window, then turned and kicked the nearest folding chair, slammed his foot into it so hard it bounced off two other chairs and skidded across the floor into the wall. The mealy-mouthed guard stared at him in wide-eyed surprise.
The next time Jackson saw the scared-up little woman she’d be strapped into that chair behind the glass and he couldn’t tell her anything. She couldn’t hear a word he said
He suddenly stood very still, stopped breathing.
No, she couldn’t hear him, but she could see him. What if the last thing she saw was Jackson and Angela—together! Oh, that would be rich. What if he showed her she was dying for nothing, that he had her precious Angel and wouldn’t ever let her go. What if he was sitting there with his arm draped around Angela’s shoulder, smiling as they turned on the juice and fried her. She wouldn’t win then! He’d beat her, he’d have the last laugh after all.
He whirled around to the guard, his mind racing. The kid’d be home from school by now, and with a storm brewing, surely she’d stay there. He glanced at his watch—twent
y minutes after four. He had forty minutes.
“Where does that preacher live?” he practically shouted.
“I don’t know. I don’t live in Graham.” He must have seen the black fury on Jackson’s face because he backed up like he’d spotted a rattler in the grass. “But …” he sputtered. “I could find out. I mean, if you want to talk to him—he was going home. I heard him say he was going to see to Joy.”
Suddenly, it hit Jackson, burst into his consciousness with a little sparkle, like a soap bubble popping. He knew where the preacher and his Angela lived.
Jackson turned without another word and rushed out into the pouring rain in the parking lot beside the Quonset hut. He spun out in the wet gravel, fishtailed almost all the way to the side gates in the fences that encircled the prison complex. The half-wit guard at the first one took interminably long to check him out of the facility. And Jackson Prentiss was a man in a hurry; had not, in fact, ever in his life been in as big a hurry as he was in today.
* * * * *
Oran Blackburn checked his watch and sighed. Half past four. Time to go prepare Emily Gail Prentiss to die.
Blackburn had been involved in several dozen executions in his twenty-three-year career in corrections. A couple had gone really bad. He tried not to think about them, but the images filled his mind every time a death-row inmate neared the end of the line, and Sizzlin’ Suzie’s sorry state of repair heightened his anxiety today.
He hadn’t been in charge of the worst execution he ever witnessed, was grateful he wasn’t the man who had to answer for what happened. An electric chair fires 2,000 volts of electricity through a prisoner’s body. In theory, the shock should cause immediate unconsciousness, followed by nearly instantaneous death as the inmate’s internal body temperature approaches 140 degrees.
That’s not what happened that day in a gray stone room deep in the bowels of the Rockview State Correctional Institution in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. After they strapped the prisoner into Old Smokey, he’d refused a hood, and when they hit the switch, his eyes remained open, aware—until his eyeballs popped out onto his cheeks. He’d tried to scream, but his jaws had been locked down tight. Then his body literally burst into flames.
Blackburn later learned that botched executions that tortured prisoners to death or burned them alive were almost routine in Florida. That’s when he made it his personal mission as a career corrections officer to be certain nothing like that ever happened on his watch. And it never had. Oh, some of the executions he’d performed had been … less than tidy, but in all of them death had been inflicted quickly and, he hoped, painlessly.
Most juries were reticent to sentence a woman to die in the electric chair unless her crime was particularly heinous. In more than two decades, Oklahoma juries had only handed down the death penalty to a handful of women. Prentiss would be the first among them to be executed. There had been no executions here since it became a women’s prison in 1941, so the electric chair had sat idle for twenty-two years. Blackburn had had a crew go over the machine from top to bottom this week, but Sizzlin’ Suzie was old as dirt. They’d tested her three times and she seemed to function fine. But there hadn’t been a body in the seat during the tests, of course, and they certainly hadn’t put through the full load of juice. No one could swear to what would happen when they did.
And the inmate who’d suffer whatever death Sizzlin’ Suzie chose to deal out was the mystic, the seer, the little husky-voiced woman known as Princess.
Oran hated that. But it was his job to execute her and he sincerely believed ultimate retribution was necessary to the orderly functioning of a civilized society. He viewed dispensing final justice as a high calling, felt a certain gratification that a debt was owed the community and he collected it.
But there’d be no satisfaction in taking Princess’s life.
* * * * *
The old pickup made a wheezing noise that sounded like a horse ridden too hard as Jonas skidded to a stop in the dirt of the farm road in front of his house. The old man jumped down out of the cab and ran up the stone sidewalk to the front door in a limping gait, courtesy of the arthritis in his hips.
He was moving as fast as he could, but he couldn’t shake the nagging sensation of trying to walk through deep water, of moving in a dream where no matter how fast you went your destination stayed out ahead of you.
He’d felt that way during the whole frantic dash home. The front edge of the storm had struck as he got into his truck at the prison. Raindrops fell from high in the blackening sky, big fat ones that went splat on the windshield and smacked the hood with a sound like a bongo drum. By the time he got to the front gate, the protesters were already scattering. Holding their protest signs above their heads as umbrellas, they ran helter-skelter to their cars parked along the road. He had to creep along to keep from hitting one of them.
When he pulled out on the highway, the real rain set in, a deluge pouring out of the brooding clouds. The wipers on his truck couldn’t keep the windshield clear and he could barely see the road ahead of him. It had taken him dang nigh half an hour to drive twelve miles!
The half hour had seemed like three days. Because he was in such a desperate hurry and because his mind was in such chaos.
Princess knew … had seen …
How?
Joy was in danger!
Joy was pregnant. At sixteen? Why, when he was sixteen, he didn’t even know where babies came from. All right, he did, too, but only because he lived on a farm around animals. He’d certainly never translated it into human terms. What was it with kids these days? He didn’t understand none of it, the music, the dancing, not a bit of it made a lick of sense to him.
But he loved his granddaughter better than life and he would stand by Joy no matter what she did. No, not Joy. Angel. Princess’s daughter.
How do you think about somebody like that? That woman had sacrificed her life; she’d loved that much. He didn’t love his Maggie a speck less than she loved her baby girl. And he’d been planning to ...
The rain had let up, the size of the drops shrinking until the clouds were just spitting them out in a fine spray, but the sky to the southwest was boiling and bubbling. He’d never seen clouds a deep, eggplant-purple color like that and he’d lived his whole life on the plains of Oklahoma.
Jonas burst through the front door and found Guadalupe folding laundry on the wide expanse of dining room table. She looked up, startled.
“Where’s Maggie?”
“She’s asleep. About an hour ago, she—”
“We gotta get her up. Twister’s a comin’!”
Lupe crossed herself and mumbled something in Spanish. “I’ve been listening to the radio,” she said.
Jonas could hear it, turned up loud in the living room. He had a television set, but the least little bit of wind messed with the antenna on the roof and all he could get was snow.
“The weatherman said there was a tornado watch.” she said. Tornado watches were as common in springtime Oklahoma as Catholics at a fish fry.
Jonas brushed past her and headed toward Maggie’s bedroom. She trailed along behind, talking, “ …but there hasn’t been a warning yet. They didn’t say—”
Jonas stopped, turned around and grabbed Lupe by the shoulders. He put his face close to hers and spoke slowly.
“A tornado’s a-comin’. I don’t care what the radio says, it’s headed this way, and we got to git!”
Lupe turned instantly pale. “Mís híjos!” she cried.
“What about your kids?”
“They’re home by themselves.” Lupe lived four miles south of Jonas on Seminole Road. Her husband had just taken a job as a roughneck on an oil rig outside Oklahoma City and only came home on weekends. “The oldest, Juanita, is looking after the little ones, but she’s only fourteen.”
Jonas turned her body around and shoved her toward the front door. “I’ll see to Maggie. You go get those kids and run!” Jonas had never put any sto
ck in storm shelters or cellars. What was the point in hunkering down in a hole or cowering in a basement where a twister could drop the whole house on your head? He’d take his chances out in the open.
Lupe raced out the front door, didn’t even close it behind her.
“And go south!” he called after her.
Princess had said to go south.
Jonas dashed to Maggie’s darkened bedroom and flipped on the light.
She wasn’t there.
Chapter 26
Mac’s heart was in more turmoil than the boiling black storm he caught sight of every now and then when the rain let up.
He had bolted out of the Iron House, jumped into his car, and gone barreling down the road in a near panic, only to be slowed almost to a standstill by a downpour so heavy he could only inch along with the stalled traffic. Precious minutes ticked away.
Straining to see the road ahead, which appeared and then disappeared in rhythm with his wipers’ frantic effort to keep the windshield clear, he caught sight of twin red eyes through the onslaught of water. Brake lights. The car in front of him was slowing again.
Pounding his fists on the steering wheel in frustration, he roared out a cry of inarticulate rage, an animal noise: a growling howl that sounded feral and wild even to his own ears. It shocked him and somehow calmed him, allowed him to get a grip on his emotions so he could think.
Though his thoughts were tumbling around in his head the way clothes tumbled around in that dryer Jonas bought Maggie, he managed to grab one and hold on tight.
Joy’s pregnant.
It was unthinkable, so unfathomable he couldn’t seem to get his whole mind around it. It couldn’t possibly be true and yet it so obviously was. Pregnant at sixteen.
