by G. M. Ford
“Jesus, Densmore, get down,” Wald said, tugging at his partner’s pant leg. “Are you fucking crazy?”
Densmore’s electronic voice crackled through the darkness.
“This is the Seattle Police Department. You are surrounded. Turn off the car and put both hands out the window.”
Defeo raced the engine. Corso thought he might have heard high-pitched laughter. Wald got to his knees, in firing position. Donald rested his forearms on the roof as he aimed at the windshield. His face was taut. His mouth hung open.
“This is Detective Sergeant Andrew Densmore of the Seattle Police Department. Turn off the car and—”
Defeo came up through the sunroof. Fired half a dozen rounds before anyone could move. The force of the slugs moved Densmore backward, like he was on tracks. Moon-walking in reverse. The bullhorn arced back into the darkness. Corso threw himself into the ditch beside the driveway. The assault weapon began to spit bullets in sixes and eights. Tearing the windows from the car, sending the glass showering down onto the pavement. The force of the multiple impacts rocked the car on its springs. Gaping holes appeared on the far side as flattened slugs began to punch their way through the sheet metal. And then it stopped.
Donald crouched behind the rear tire, his arms thrown over his head.
Wald kept the engine block between himself and the van. Densmore lay in the road, one foot twitching, his arms outstretched above his head, as if he were basking on the beach. His service revolver lay in the middle of the street. Corso thought of trying to drag him from the line of fire, but, before he could force himself into action, the assault began anew. Again the flat sound of the muzzle filled the night air. The cop car began to disintegrate as the bullets tore the metal to pieces. Pieces of metal began to fall noisily to the street. The car squatted on its rims. Then silence again.
“He’s coming,” Donald shouted. The roar of the van’s engine filled the air. Corso jumped to his feet, took one step to the right, and retrieved Densmore’s revolver from the pavement. When he turned, the van was no more than fifty feet away, its worn fan belt screaming as it rocketed down the rutted track.
Wald was on his feet, pumping the shotgun. The windshield of the van was a shattered mess. Corso raised the revolver and began pulling the trigger. Over and over as the van lurched onward. He was still pulling the useless trigger when Wald dove out from behind the car and tackled him back into the ditch.
The van hit the police car doing about forty miles an hour, nearly lifting the Crown Victoria up onto its side. Six tons of scrap metal hovered in the air for a moment and then slammed back to earth. An eerie silence settled over the scene. Only the soft ticking of cooling metal was audible above the buzzing of the streetlights.
Wald scrambled up from the ground, keeping the shotgun trained on the van as he worked his way between the two cars, inching toward the driver’s door. The van’s windshield had torn loose from the frame and was about to collapse inward. Except right above the steering wheel, where a red dimple of impacted glass bulged outward like a boil.
“Put both hands out the window,” Wald screamed.
Corso gulped air, snapped his head around looking for Dougherty. She lay fifteen yards to his left. Facedown in the ditch. Unmoving. His legs were loose-jointed and seemed to have a will of their own as he covered the distance and knelt by her side.
“Hands out the window,” Wald screamed again.
Corso took her by the shoulders and carefully turned her over. Her eyes popped open in terror. She raised a hand to strike out, recognized Corso and instead threw her arms around his neck and pulled him down upon her.
“Is it over?” she breathed into his neck.
Corso said it was. “You okay?” he asked. She said she was. Corso disentangled himself and got to his feet. He took her hands and pulled her from the ground.
“We’re going to jail, huh?” she said. Corso looked back over his shoulder.
Wald had the driver’s door open. He rested the shotgun on his hip while he felt for life on the driver’s throat.
“Maybe not,” Corso said.
“Is he?” she asked.
“I think so, yeah,” Corso said, taking her by the elbow and turning her away. She wobbled, like the heels weren’t connected to her boots.
“Perp’s dead,” Wald announced. The sound of his own voice seemed to bring him around. He swiveled his head. “Chucky,” he hollered. “Andy.”
The force of the collision had driven Donald all the way across the street. He rose from the grass wiping at a nosebleed, his trousers blown out to reveal a pair of peeled, bloody knees. His unfired gun was still in his hand. “Over here,” he yelled.
Wald was breathing heavily through his mouth. His lip was bleeding; his bright yellow tie had escaped the vest and now lay flopped up over his shoulder. The shotgun hung from his limp right arm. He found himself looking at the soles of Densmore’s shoes and stopped in his tracks. He gulped air and shouted to Donald on the far side of the street.
“Chucky! Call for an aide car. Officer-down call.”
Donald holstered his gun. “For Christ’s sake, Wald…come over here and look at the poor bastard. He doesn’t need an aide car. Half his head’s gone.” As if sickened by his own words, he suddenly began to retch, sending the contents of his stomach spewing out onto the pavement in a dozen raspy spasms.
Donald was right. Densmore’s head was gone from the eyebrows up. Nothing but a couple of shiny gray dreadlocks hanging down over the ears. What was left of his skull looked like a broken lava lamp.
“Listen,” Corso said.
Wald looked confused. “What?”
Corso gestured with his hand. “Listen, no sirens. No nothing.”
“So?”
“So Dougherty and I are getting out of here.”
“No,” Wald said. “You can’t…we—”
“This scene doesn’t play with us in it.”
“He’s right,” Donald croaked. “We keep this simple. An anonymous tip. We follow up on a phone tip and walk into a hornet’s nest. We’ve got a hero. We’ve got a villain. All nice and simple like.”
Corso jumped in. “Otherwise, somebody’s gonna want to know why an experienced cop like yourself found himself facing a mass murderer without backup. Especially after you’d been told what to expect.”
“Jesus,” Donald muttered. “We’re fucked here, Wald. This is a career killer.”
“Same people are gonna want an explanation of why Lieutenant Donald here never managed to get off a shot.”
Wald shot a disgusted glance at Donald and then returned his gaze to Corso.
“You think I’m betting my ass—my career—on you two keeping your mouths shut?” Wald sneered.
“There’s nothing in this for either Dougherty or me, except some time behind bars. We broke and entered. We interfered with an ongoing investigation. Tainted evidence. Maybe even recklessly endangered. It’s as much in our own best interests to keep our mouths shut as it is for you two.
“We beat it, and you guys tell the story any way you want.” He hesitated. “If not for your own asses, then maybe do it for Densmore.”
Wald looked down at Densmore. Winced. “God knows he paid for his lunch.”
“Paid in full,” Donald said.
Wald swiveled his head. Donald nodded.
“Somebody gonna call about Himes or what?” Corso demanded.
Wald pulled a phone from his inside jacket pocket. Checked his wrist.
“What you say is in that house is in there?”
“I swear.”
Wald opened the phone and dialed. “This is Detective Sergeant Steven Wald. I need to be patched through to Chief Kesey, immediately.” He began to shake his head. “Don’t start that not available crap with me. This is an emergency.” He looked up at Corso. “Wald,” he shouted into the phone, exasperated now. “Detective Sergeant Steven Wald. Don’t tell me you can’t—” He listened for a moment. “Get me a supervisor,” he
snapped. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “She says all the circuits are busy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Donald moaned.
Wald looked at Corso again. “Get outta here,” he said, then turned back to Donald.
“Make that radio call, Chucky.”
Corso moved quickly, grabbing Dougherty by the hand. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
He didn’t have to ask twice.
Chapter 29
Saturday, September 22
11:38 P.M. Day 6 of 6
It was like a small-town carnival. Bright ballpark banks of mercury vapor lights threw an unholy purple glare on the overhead coils of razor wire. The blaring music made the ominous front gate of the Washington State Penitentiary look like the clown’s-mouth entrance to the fun house. Closest to the wall, an irregular midway sported food stands, T-shirts, souvenirs, and sno-cones. The remaining commercial sprawl was spread haphazardly about the parking lot, as if the vendors had been unable to agree on any pattern of arrangement whatsoever. Farther back in the shadows, a herd of motor homes grazed placidly among the bands of vans and packs of pickups. Maybe a dozen remote TV feeds, parked hip to hip inside the first chain-link fence, pointing their blank white eyes at the sky. The seething crowd was nervous and constantly on the move. Hard to count. Two, three thousand anyway, Dorothy figured. The air was electric.
Warden Danson was a short, contentious-looking man with eyes like rivets. He’d met them just inside the west gate, his breath rising toward the orchard of stars in the night sky, his small hands massaging each other for warmth.
Without bothering to introduce Dorothy, Marvin Hale had pulled Danson aside. They’d spent the past five minutes forty feet away, gesturing like spastic mimes and hissing at each other in stage whispers.
What, from the outside, had appeared to be a single stone wall was actually two parallel walls, with the guard towers spanning the gap at intervals. A prisoner scaling the inside wall, instead of facing a mere half dozen steel fences, two of which were lethally electrified, found himself trapped between the proverbial rock and the hard place of song and story. Almost wasn’t fair.
Hale used one hand on Dorothy’s elbow and the other to point to the right. Dorothy looked down his arm. At that moment, a red light came on over the door at the far end. “Go down to that door,” Hale said. “They’re expecting you. Whoever’s there will take you to witness orientation.”
Dorothy pushed the little button on the side of her watch and the dial lit up: 11:40. Twenty minutes to go. Without a word she turned and began marching toward the light, stepping along, her arms swinging smoothly at her sides, her chin held high. Inexplicably, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” began to play in her head.
11:40 P.M. Day 6 of 6
“I seen seventeen of ’em go now,” said the sergeant. “You see enough of them, you learn to tell the difference.” Smitty looked reverentially at the sergeant. This was Smitty’s first execution. He’d requested the death-watch assignment because they said it was quiet in the death house. None of that screaming-in-their-sleep babble of the cell blocks. Everybody said, Hell, the state of Washington never offs anybody anyway. Easy duty, they’d said. Now Smitty wasn’t so sure. During the past week his dreams had turned increasingly gruesome. Turned to nightmares of such severity that, on three occasions, some primal instinct had been forced to intervene, shouting at him from the darkness of sleep, “Wake up; you don’t have to die; it’s just a dream,” catapulting him upright in bed, his lungs empty from gasping, his cheeks washed with tears.
“Seen the big mouths who talk a good game. They’re always the ones we got to stop halfway down the mile and hose out their pants for ’em. Seen the mealymouth little bastards you gotta carry the whole damn way. Little fuckers get so strong at the sight of the table, takes eight of us to strap ’em in.”
“How do you figure old Walter’s gonna go?” Smitty asked.
The sergeant chuckled. “Walter’s gonna walk down that hall like he’s goin’ out for an ice cream cone.”
“You really think so?”
“Count on it, kid,” the sergeant said. “That guy’s known nothin’ but hate his whole life. No way he’d give anybody the satisfaction of seeing him crawl. He’ll jump up on that damn table like Cindy Crawford’s waiting up there for him.”
For reasons he couldn’t explain, the image made Smitty feel better.
11:52 P.M. Day 6 of 6
“Please remember that Mr. Himes has a right to make a final statement,” the woman was saying. “We have no control over the content.” She looked up from the page in her hand and noticed Dorothy for the first time. “Are you…,” she began. Eight heads turned Dorothy’s way. Two Butlers, two Nisovics, two Tates, Alice Doyle, clutching a picture of her daughter Kelly in her lap, and on the far left, John Williams, come all the way from South Dakota in search of something without a name. Dorothy waved a hand at the woman, as if to tell her to carry on, which she did. “Sometimes inmates express contrition, sometimes not.” She checked the crowd. “You’ll need to be prepared for whatever he might say.”
She looked from person to person again. “We insist that you refrain from saying anything to the inmate. Although I am given to understand that Mr. Himes will not have family members in attendance, I believe his ACLU attorney, Mr. Adams, will be there. So for the sake of Mr. Adams, at least…” She let it go.
She turned the paper over in her hand. “On the back,” she said and waited for her stunned audience to follow suit, “on the back is a description of the inmate’s final hours. “At ten-thirty this morning, Mr. Himes was transferred to a segregation cell adjacent to the death chamber. At six o’clock this evening, Mr. Himes had a final meal of cheeseburgers and French fries. Between ten o’clock and eleven, he spent an hour with his mother. Subsequently, Mr. Himes was afforded the opportunity to consult with clergy…an opportunity which Mr. Himes rejected.” She checked her watch. Dorothy did too. Ten minutes.
“So that you’ll know what to expect, let me tell you what’s going to happen.” Again she paused to let the audience catch up. She began to read from the sheet. “In the state of Washington, lethal injection comes in three phases. The inmate is first injected with thiopental sodium which many of you know as sodium pentothol, or truth serum. The first injection immobilizes the inmate.”
The first injection would immobilize a rhinoceros, Dorothy thought.
“One minute later the inmate is injected with Pavulon. Pavulon is a curare derivative that immediately halts the diaphragm.”
Mrs. Butler’s shoulders began to shake. Her husband rubbed the back of her neck. Whispered in her ear.
“One minute later the inmate is injected with potassium chloride, at which point the heart can no longer beat. Inmates generally emit an audible gasp at this point.” She checked the crowd again. “A minute later the inmate is pronounced dead.”
Sounded almost serene. Except that Dorothy had once heard a couple of medical examiners discussing the process.
“They make it look like the guy’s just gone to sleep,” one of them said.
The other had laughed out loud. “Are you shittin’ me? All three of those drugs have a pH higher than six. Must feel like the fires of hell are being injected into your veins. If they could, they’d sit straight up and make noises like nobody’s heard on earth since the Spanish Inquisition.”
The other guy had nodded grimly. “Except, strapped down, with the lungs immobile, the closest you can get to a scream is that one little gasp they all let out.”
“Yeah,” said the first guy. “In the end, all they leave you with is the whimper instead of the bang.”
And then, on the other side of the glass, Himes stepped into the death chamber. Standing there. Bald. No eyebrows. He cast a contemptuous glance at the white-covered gurney and then stood glaring at the viewing window.
“You all got your popcorn ready?” he asked.
Warden Danson now entered. “Mr. Himes would like to exer
cise his constitutional right to make a final statement,” he said.
Himes stepped closer. “I ain’t neva killed nobody,” Himes said. “So I know where I’m goin’ from here.” He took them in again, moving only his eyes. “Probably the same place you-all think you goin’. So if we both right, old Walter Lee’ll see you when you get there.” He showed the stubs of his teeth. “And if we ain’t…I’ll see you-all in hell.”
Alice Doyle got to her feet and pressed the picture of her daughter Kelly tightly against the glass. She turned back toward Dorothy, her pouchy eyes streaming.
“I want this to be the last thing he sees. The very last thing,” she cried.
Somewhere in the room somebody was making noises like a gored animal.
Dorothy turned and ground her face into the wall.
Chapter 30
Sunday, September 23
10:15 A.M. Day 6 + 1
Corso dreamed of that cobbled street again. Of the soldiers and the door intended solely for him. Only this time, in the moment when he closed the door behind himself, before putting that first foot on the tread and watching the walls fall away…this time someone began knocking on the door. The knocking got louder. He hesitated, foot in the air, torn between the insistent sound at his back and the bright promise waiting above.
Corso sat up in bed. More knocking as he struggled into a Mariners T-shirt and a pair of black sweatpants. Slipped on boat shoes. Up three steps, into the galley.
Corso checked the clock over the nav station: 10:15 A.M.
With a yawn, he pulled open the door and stepped out on deck, rubbing his eyes. The wind was up. Overhead, the sky was electric blue. No clouds at all. He checked the tops of the masts. Six, eight knots from the south. All over the marina, loose halyards banged against masts like drunken tinkers.
Wald and Donald. Cleaned and pressed. Showered, shaved, and swapped suits.
Hadn’t helped Donald as much as it helped Wald, though. On Wald, the extra lines seemed to disappear into his already pouchy face. Donald, on the other hand, looked like he’d been snorting speedballs for a week. For some reason, Corso was cheered by the sight.
