by G. M. Ford
“Halfway?” she growled as she stretched in the seat.
“More or less.”
She headed for the ladies’ room while Corso pumped gas. She was standing by the passenger door when Corso emerged from the station. Her breath rose in front of her face.
“Cold over here.”
“At least it’s not raining.”
Overhead, a mouse-gray sky moved at warp speed. Sliding east as a single sheet of slate, rolling toward the horizon and the upper Midwest beyond.
“Really different from Seattle.”
Two totally different ecosystems. West of the Cascades, along the I-5 corridor, was what most people thought of as the Pacific Northwest. The evergreen rain belt running the length of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Puget Sound, Vancouver Island, rain forests, rocky coasts, software geeks, and the omnipresent latte stands. East of the Cascades was another world. High desert. Scrub pine and manzanita. Creosote bushes and delicate wildflowers. Hot as hell in the summer, cold as hell in the winter. Grapes, fruit trees, pickers, and cowboys.
“You ever been this side of the mountains before?”
“First time,” she said.
She watched with amusement as Corso closed his eyes and stretched his back one last time. Held his arms out horizontally and did some twists, then got back in the car. She followed suit. Buckled up. Looked over at Corso. Shook her head. “You’re a weird dude, you know that, Corso?”
He started the car. Sort of smiled, but didn’t answer, so she dropped her voice an octave and did a bad Corso impression. “‘Why do you say that?’”
“It’s the way you never seem to pick up your end of the conversation.” She saw his eyebrow move and figured he must be listening. “I tell you I was moved to tears by a piece of your work and your response is to go into a coma and then ask me if I remember Leanne Samples, which—if you don’t mind me saying, Corso—wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for.”
He pushed the accelerator several times, racing the engine in neutral. “If there’s a script, maybe you oughta give me a copy,” Corso said with a grin.
“Of course there’s a script. It’s how people get to know one another.”
She reached over and turned up the heat. “Today—you know—two minutes ago when I just told you this was the first time I’ve been over here.”
“Yeah? What about it?” he asked.
He pulled the shift lever down into drive and checked back over his shoulder. A tandem livestock carrier roared by, leaving the air full of straw. And then another screaming along in the blurred air of the wake.
“Ninety-nine guys out of a hundred would have taken that as an opportunity to ask me how long I’ve lived in Washington. Where I came from…yadda yadda. Most guys would give me some sort of little geography lesson to show me how much they know. How smart they are. You know, like showing off. That sort of stuff is just what comes next in the conversation.”
“I’m not good at small talk,” Corso said.
“Of course you are!” She slapped the paper on the seat. “Anybody who can beat an exclusive story like this out of the FBI is the Picasso of small talk.”
Corso grunted.
“Hell, you haven’t even asked about the goddamn tattoos. I know damn well you must know the story. Everybody knows the goddamn story. All the weird shit I’m supposed to have all over me. By now most guys are tripping all over themselves wondering if all the shit they heard is true.”
“Well, is it?”
“What?”
“True that you have some pretty weird shit on you.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I’m not saying it never crossed my mind,” Corso admitted.
“So why haven’t you asked?”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
“You pry for a living.”
“The cops ever find—”
“Brian,” she said, shaking her head in the darkness. “Brian Bohannon. They think maybe he’s in southern France somewhere. His parents are very wealthy. I’m sure they’re supporting him. They see the whole thing as some sort of boyish prank. Can’t understand what all the fuss is about. They offered me money not to press charges against him.”
“How’d they get them off your face?”
“Lasers,” she said. “Dermabrasion.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s where they freeze a section of your face and then sand it.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“And of course the always exciting chemical peel.”
“What’s that do?”
“That makes the rest of your face look like a burn victim’s, so you can’t see where the designs were.”
In the darkness, Corso winced. “Hurt?”
She shrugged. “The pain I can handle. It’s the money that’s killing me,” she said. “I’ve had over twenty treatments so far for my face.” She brought her fingertips to her cheek. “They say, in another year or so, I’ll just look like I had bad skin as a teenager.”
She laughed bitterly.
“Of course, my HMO says the removal procedures are elective and won’t pay for it.”
“No parents or anybody to help you out?”
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought perhaps she laughed. “My parents had other plans for me. They’re from a little town in Iowa. Robbinsville, Iowa. Two b’s. They didn’t approve of my moving to Seattle. They didn’t approve of photography as a career for me. They didn’t approve of my lifestyle, and they particularly didn’t approve of Brian. The way they see it, what happened to me was some kind of divine retribution.”
They rode in silence for a moment.
“What the hell was this guy thinking?” Corso asked.
“He was thinking that if he couldn’t have me, he was going to make damn sure nobody else was going to have me either. ‘Nobody leaves Brian.’ That’s what he said just as I was passing out. ‘Nobody leaves Brian.’ Like he was in the third person or something. He left a note in his shop. Said I would remain for all eternity…his palette, his personal work of art.”
She pulled her jacket over her chest and settled back against the door with her eyes closed. He mashed the accelerator and sent the white Chevy Citation lumbering out onto I-85, rolling south toward the tri-cities and the Columbia River. The eastern Cascades were capped in snow. The low hills were swathed in orchards. Rows of gray, skeletal trees filled the valleys and wound like a bezel around the cut, brown contours of the hills. Apple and pear and peach and cherry. Amputated for winter and huddled together for warmth. The kind of dead, lifeless country that comes alive and green only around the rivers and creeks, and even then after lifetimes of toil. The kind of artificial Eden that, for reasons too many to enumerate, would forever elude the likes of Walter Leroy Himes and his kin.
No…Walter Leroy and his ilk were remnants of those folks whose sole contribution to modern society has been an uncanny ability to make sagging front porches look comfortable. Walter was a direct descendant of those untimely souls who, by indolence or ignorance or both, always managed to arrive places a day late and a dollar short, always to find the rich bottomland already under the plow, and themselves relegated to the hardpan at the edge of town, to the steep, deep “gullies and hollers” between hills or to these “touch and go” arid, barren acres where the irrigated prairie suddenly becomes desert and blows away.
His parents came from North Carolina for the trial. From a little hamlet in the extreme northwestern part of the state. Damn near in Virginia, folks said. An “end-of-the-road” town called Husk, North Carolina. Neither had been outside Ashe County before. Christ the Redeemer Reformed Baptist Church held a bake sale and a raffle to raise the money for their pilgrimage. Flew out of Charlotte on a great silver bird.
They sat side by side in the front row. LO-retta-accent-on-the-first-syllable Himes was an immense woman with dyed, cat-black hair and a penchant for wildly flowered tops. No more than a couple of biscuits a
nd a piece of rhubarb pie from four hundred pounds, she sat there every day, frowning and fanning herself with a white plastic fan that had “Jesus Is Coming” stenciled on the back.
Walter Leroy inherited his height from his father, Delroy. Stoop straightened and ironed out, Delroy Himes would have measured at least six-eight. Maybe more. All sinew and bone, loose inside a clean pair of coveralls. Missing a finger from each hand. Everything knotted and twisted and worn out by a lifetime of struggle, he never said a single word. Let his wife do the talking for both of them. As Delroy was undoubtedly aware, LO-retta was more than up to the task.
Every day after the proceedings, she held forth on the courthouse steps. Rain or shine. Talked about how her boy was “tetched” and shouldn’t rightly be on trial at all; cried and told about how Walter Lee, as she called him, “dinna have a violet bone in his body.” How he “neva shoulda got so far from them thet loved and unnerstood him.” ’Bout how Jesus, whose name she miraculously transformed into a three-syllable word, loved her boy and was “just awaitin’ to take him on home.”
Another two hours and the Chevy crossed the Columbia River just north of Richland. Running fast and smooth and brown…navigable all the way up into Idaho.
They crossed the Snake River at Pasco, then turned onto 12 East. Sign said WALLA WALLA 45. Corso reached over and jostled Meg Dougherty awake.
To the west, a broad butte ran the length of the valley. Rock, milk-chocolate brown, rising as a gentle mound near the bottom, then suddenly straightening to cliffs for the upper hundred feet. Four antennas were spaced along the flat top, their intermittent red lights blinking against the dense gray clouds. The dark sky silhouetted a pair of red-tailed hawks, who rode the cold currents in lazy circles, heads down, feathered fingers making minute adjustments to the ever-changing wind eddies.
To the east, the Walla Walla River running straight as an arrow and the Blue Mountains barely visible through the haze. Corso checked his watch—12:15. Forty-five minutes before they were scheduled to see Walter Leroy Himes.
They were parked forty yards from the front gate of the Washington State Penitentiary. The walls were thirty feet high, concrete with the original river rock peeping through in places. Topped with a maze of coiled razor wire that somehow gleamed without the aid of sunlight. The enclosure must have been half a mile to a side. At each corner a red octagonal guard tower rose above the battlements.
A steady breeze carried mist from the river and the smells of onions and steel. Bright yellow sawhorses divided the parking lot in two, creating a gauntlet through which arriving cars must pass. Half a dozen helmeted county cops manned each side of the division. On one side, the anti-capital punishment crowd milled about, sipping lattes and waving handmade signs, demanding an end to the killing. All Volvos and fancy outdoor gear, they looked out of place on this side of the mountains.
On the other side milled the “eye-for-an-eye” crowd. Wads of chew. Beaten pickup trucks and motor homes. The damaged and the lonely and the lost. The tattered, gone-broke farmers and the slit-eyed fraternity boys who’d finally found a venue worthy of that red anger they carried inside. No surprise. The murder mavens outnumbered the forgiveness folks at least ten to one.
Dougherty and Corso both rolled down their windows. The civilized crowd was chanting something, but Corso couldn’t quite make out the words. On Dougherty’s side, Lynyrd Skynyrd blared from a scratchy speaker. “Sweet Home Alabama…”
The nearest cop detached himself from the lines and made his way over to the driver’s window. All boots and black leather, behind a gigantic pair of aviator shades. Lose the white helmet, he could take Dougherty to the prom.
“No visitors today,” he said. “They’re on lockdown.”
“We’ve got an appointment,” Corso said. “Corso and Dougherty from the Seattle Sun. We’re here to see Walter Leroy Himes.”
The cop stepped back a pace, turned his head, and spoke into the microphone on his shoulder. After a moment, he leaned down into the window. Put his black-gloved hands on the window frame. “Lemme see some ID,” he said. Corso and Dougherty fished around. Found it. Corso handed it over.
Satisfied, the cop handed the ID back to Corso. “Drive down to the gate,” he said. “And take it easy. I don’t want you to hit one of my officers.” He looked down the tube of milling humanity between the car and the front gate. “I’d put the windows up if I were you. The crowd’s a little restless today. Couple hours ago, we had a pair of good old boys sneak over into the peaceful section and kick some ass. Now even the loveniks are spoiling for a fight.”
The cop backed up, motioned with his arm. Corso eased the car forward. The minute the Chevy began to move, the crowds on both sides of the aisle began to surge toward the barricades. The cops stepped up, waving batons. On the right, one of the barriers tipped, driven onto two legs by the surge of the crowd. Corso felt his throat tighten. A pair of cops wrestled the barrier back in place. Corso pulled his eyes back to the road just in time to see a full can of Bud Lite land on the hood of the Chevy, stopping their breaths. The spewing can bounced high into the air and disappeared. A half dozen similarly slung weapons arched across the gap in front of the car. Aimed, not at the car, this time, but at the protesters on the other side.
On Corso’s side the protesters leaned out to wave their signs in his face. Someone poked at the window with a cross-country ski pole. Corso fed the Chevy more gas. Someone screamed the word “murderer.” He made out a sign. It said “SHAME.”
Twenty yards from the gate, a beer can burst against the passenger window, which cracked but did not break, pulling a gasp from Dougherty and constricting Corso’s throat even further.
Then, suddenly, they rolled past the outermost fence and the crowd was gone. Corso’s hands shook as he braked the car at the guard gate. He swallowed twice and looked over at Dougherty. She was pale and breathing raggedly. The windshield on her side was completely covered with something pink. She looked to Corso, as if for an explanation.
“Strawberry, I think,” Corso said.
Death row. Building H of the Washington State Penitentary at Walla Walla, Washington. All the way at the back of the enclosure. Newest building in a hundred-year-old complex about the size of a small New England town. A three-story brick building. Gleaming gray linoleum floors, burnt-orange concrete walls. None of the multiple-radio-station, hip-hop, honky-tonk screaming heebie-jeebie chaos of a regular cell block. Dead-ass silence and lifeless air so thick you felt as if you needed to swim with your arms as you walked along the concrete canyons.
The bullet-headed sergeant who’d met them in reception hadn’t bothered with introductions. Just said Himes was a “dead man,” so he couldn’t leave the row. Said they had a room on the row where the condemned met with their lawyers. If they wanted to see him, it would have to be there. Since then, Corso and Dougherty had been issued badges, passed through three checkpoints, three increasingly intimate friskings, two metal detectors, and were now without shoes, belts, jewelry, wallets, cell phones, and all the other identity accoutrements of modern society. Reduced to visitors eighty-eight and eighty-nine for the day. Names not even optional.
They’d already been through the camera equipment twice, but Bullethead still checked the inspection tags at a small green table outside the entrance to death row, then handed the camera bag back to Dougherty. He punched the intercom button to the left of the orange steel door. “Clear,” he said. The door rolled open.
Bullethead walked without swinging his arms. Like he was on parade or something. He led them through the door to the first room on the right, selected a key from a ring attached to his belt, stretched the cable out, and snapped the lock. He pulled the door open and stood aside. “I’ll be right outside the door,” he announced in a flat, emotionless tone that made it impossible to tell whether he meant it as admonition or reassurance.
The room was about the size of the bathroom in an average city apartment and smelled about the same. Maybe six
by eight. That noxious green the government paints everything. A narrow counter ran across the long wall opposite the door. Two ancient oak chairs waited, the varnish on their seats worn away by a hundred years of squirming asses. The air had an acrid quality, as if it were tinctured with adrenaline.
Meg Dougherty’s eyes moved toward the door when it snapped shut. Her face looked shiny and stretched in the bright fluorescent light. “You okay?” Corso asked.
She took a deep breath. “You should have told me to wear a suit of armor,” she said. “This is…” She rolled her eyes. “I had no idea,” she said.
“Prisons are the opposite of everything else in the world,” Corso said.
Meg slung the camera bag up onto the counter just as the light in the next room burst on. She jumped. Looked to see if Corso noticed. If he had, he wasn’t letting on. He was focused on the room next door and fumbling for his notebook.
A mirror image of the room they were in. In between, three inches of wire-reinforced Plexiglas, with a stainless-steel hole in the center, like a movie theater box office, allowing attorney and client to converse with only a fine screen separating them.
Walter Leroy came into the room at a trot. Just because he was wearing ankle irons didn’t mean the guards were going to wait for his big sorry ass. In the old days, when prisoners wore chains twenty-four hours a day, men who’d been free for twenty years carried that distinctive shambling trot to their graves.
Himes stood motionless just inside the doorway while a guard checked the room. Satisfied, the guard leaned over the counter and spoke to Corso. “He looks funny to you it’s on account of how he shaves everything off,” the guy said. “Wouldn’t want you thinking we did that to him.”
He was right. Not only was Himes’s shaved head gleaming, but his eyebrows were missing also. Corso checked the V of the orange coveralls. Hairless. With his bald head, Himes looked like Crusher, the guy Bugs Bunny always wrestled in the cartoons.
