The Red Scream (46 page)

At the front door of the prison, the demonstrators came to life. They picked up placards and raised their voices. “Execute Justice,” they chanted, “not people!” No one, including Molly, acknowledged their presence.

The brass hand railing up the steps to the prison door gleamed, as if it had just been polished for a big party. And the whole thing did have a party feel—the undercurrent of excitement and anticipation. It was concealed under a somber facade, but it was there.

Inside the door several of the men wearing Stetsons stopped to check their sidearms at a caged-in desk.

They filed into the visitors’ lounge. There an assistant warden and a few other officials from TDCJ waited. The only one Molly recognized was Steve Demaris from the Ellis Unit.

There are so many of us here, Molly thought—wardens and assistants and reporters and witnesses and elected officials—because this way no one is responsible. Safety in numbers. This is all an exercise in passing the buck.

“Ladies,” Darryl Jones said, after they’d all gotten inside, “please leave your handbags in here. They’ll be safe. Officer Steck will be staying here with them. Members of the press, you are allowed to take into the chamber only a pen and notebook. We are required now to search you for recording devices. Bear with us, please, so we can get this done right quick.”

Three young corrections officers began to search them.

Quickly, routinely, they moved from person to person. When it was Molly’s turn she lifted her hands so the guard could feel her pockets. “ ’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said as he patted Molly’s jacket pockets and the back of her pants.

They stood around for several minutes. Molly looked at her watch, staring at the face until it was exactly twelve. Just like New Year’s Eve, standing around waiting for midnight. Waiting, but not to be kissed.

When she looked up, Molly was surprised to see that, somewhere along the way, Frank Purcell had joined the group. He was wearing a Stetson and boots instead of the business clothes she’d seen him in before. When he saw her staring, he nodded.

Alison still clung to Stuart’s arm. He looked as if he’d like to be anywhere but where he was.

The phone rang.

Darryl Jones picked it up and listened. He nodded, then said, “It’s time.”

He led the way through the visitors’ room, out a door, down a long corridor, then outside into the night air. The temperature had fallen. Molly wrapped her arms around herself for the brief walk down a cement path to a small freestanding brick building.

The second Molly stepped inside and got hit with the dank odor of ancient dungeons, she felt herself falling backward to another
century. She kept her arms wrapped across her chest. The chill. She’d never felt this before. It was as if this place, this killing place, had absorbed into its walls and floor and bars all the terror and death that had passed through. It seemed to be present now, all hundred fifty years of it swirling around her head. This is what Addie meant when she talked about this place. She had called it “corrupted air.”

This could not be happening. This was 1993, the year of Our Lord 1993, September. An enlightened age, an age of computers and faxes. It was not an age where people were put to death in cold damp prisons. But this was real. They were here, a group of people gathered behind brick walls at midnight to enact an ancient ritual. To try to cure the tidal wave of violent crime by making one blood sacrifice.

They passed by the eight tiny, empty gray cells of what had been the old death row, before the state of Texas had outgrown it. In the cell nearest the door, the one reinforced with tight mesh, stood three cardboard boxes. Probably Louie’s stuff, all packed up. Her chest ached.

Darryl Jones waited at the door until they all gathered. Then he shepherded them into the chamber. It was a small brick room, very brightly lighted and painted an intense cobalt-blue, the kind of garish color you saw on walls in Mexico. The room was empty, no chairs, no distractions, nothing. Molly found herself blinking and wishing the fluorescent lights were not so intense.

Bars painted the same color of blue separated this room from the execution chamber a few feet away. A white curtain was drawn back so they could see through the bars a tableau so strange that the only thing she could think of was a Halloween haunted house where she’d once taken Jo Beth. A gurney was bolted to the floor. On it Louie lay strapped down, his thin arms extended. He was dressed in an immaculate white prison uniform and shiny black shoes. His hair had been trimmed since she had seen him four days ago and he was freshly shaved. The state of Texas had spiffed Louie up for the party.

His scrawny bare arms were stretched out and strapped down at the wrists. IV tubes ran from both arms and disappeared into a tiny square hole in the wall, next to a one-way mirror. The slack pale skin with its network of crinkled blue tattoos looked like some grotesque illustration from an anatomy text. Like skin and limbs and veins
long dead. Yes, Molly was suddenly certain that his arms were already dead. So now it was too late to go back. The only humane thing was to go ahead and kill the rest of his body. She tried to swallow but her mouth was utterly dry. God, she was losing her mind. What if she wrote all this? Richard would be convinced she had gone mad. So would everyone else. She forced her eyes away from the dead arms.

At Louie’s head stood the warden of the Walls Unit, dressed in a dark business suit and paisley tie instead of his usual tan Western outfit. He, too, had dressed up for company. In a sudden lapse of memory, Molly couldn’t quite dredge up his name. She wasn’t doing very well. Here she was, the star crime reporter for
Lone Star Monthly
, and she’d forgotten her notebook. Furthermore, she had no idea where the real story was, where it started or where it would end, what she would write, or whether she would write anything at all. Her legs felt rubbery and her stomach so hot and churning she was grateful she hadn’t put anything in it.

Sister Addie stood at Louie’s side, holding his right hand. She wore the same pastel house dress she’d worn when Molly had first met her, and draped over her shoulders was the ugly pink and brown afghan she’d been knitting for Louie. Her head was bent down to his and they were talking in low voices, but when the group filed in, Louie looked away from her and turned his head toward the witnesses on the other side of the bars. His eyes darted and stopped on Molly. He gave her a slight nod. She nodded back and tried to smile. Instead her mouth fell open, as if she’d just got a shot of Novocain and lost control, or as if she were about to let out a scream.

The door on Louie’s side of the bars opened. John Desmond, the state prison director, entered. “Warden,” he said in a deep voice, “you may proceed.”

The warden turned to Louie. “Do you have a last statement to make?”

Louie glanced quickly up at Sister Addie. Then he turned his head toward the witnesses but kept his eyes fixed on a spot above their heads. In a quavery, whiny voice, he said, “I want to say I’m sorry for the things I done. I want to thank my sister Carmen-Marie who’s not here but she’s been real nice to me in the past and I wish I’d
been a better brother.” He paused and ran his tongue over his thin lips. Molly thought she saw him blink once, as if to force back a tear.

“And Molly Cates,” he continued, “who tried to help. I left you something.” His chest rose and sank several times. “Thanks. Mostly, I want to thank Sister Adeline Dodgin for sticking by me and trying to show me the way to salvation. The only good thing I leave behind in this world is my poems.”

He’d spoken the last words rapid-fire and now he had to take a breath. “Oh,” he said, as if he’d just remembered something important, “I forgive everyone who’s involved with this. Jesus forgives us all. We are forgiven.”

He rolled his head on the gurney so that he was looking up at Addie. She smiled down at him, looking directly into his eyes. The room was absolutely silent. Then as if she had received a signal, though Molly couldn’t discern any movement on Louie’s part, Addie looked at the warden and nodded. The warden stepped back and nodded to the one-way mirror in the wall where the tubes from Louie’s arm led. “We are ready,” he said.

Death seemed instantaneous.

Louie took a deep breath, his eyes opened wide in surprise, he coughed twice and was still. If she had blinked she’d have missed it.

The only sound was the scratching of pens as the journalists wrote on their pads.

The door in the execution chamber opened. A man in a white coat entered, carrying a stethoscope. He leaned over Louie and put the stethoscope to his chest. Then he stood up and looked at his watch. “Twelve-fourteen,” he said, and walked out.

Louie lay still, his eyes wide open.

Molly looked around, feeling confused. That was it? As easy as that? Life hadn’t even resisted. There was no fight, no scream, nothing to mark it. The line between being alive and being dead was so narrow it was almost imperceptible.

That’s something Louie must have known, she realized—known better than anyone. A bullet or a knife in the right place and it was done. Quicker than a blink. No big deal. Happens all the time.

chapter
25

Here’s Louie Bronk’s rules

For crime-fearing fools:

There’s lots out there to fear.

Don’t believe all you hear.

Keep your distance from strangers

And all them deadly dangers.

Keep your car in good repair.

Don’t let it get stuck out there.

But here’s the truth, what the fuck,

The whole damned thing’s a

matter of luck.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

B
ack in the visitors’ lounge, Molly sat on one of the sagging brown sofas and listened to her own breathing. Stan Heffernan walked over to her and rested a hand on her shoulder. It felt so heavy, so hot, so authoritarian that she longed to shake the damn thing off.

In his whispery voice he asked, “What did he leave you?”

“Huh?”

“In his statement he said he left you something. I wondered what it was.”

“I don’t know,” Molly said.

He lifted his hand. “So, Molly, what do you think?”

“What do I think?” Dazed, she looked around at the people coming into the lounge talking quietly. “I think—” She looked up at his face for the first time. “I think that in all my years of reporting on crime I have never seen a more premeditated homicide.”

His big head nodded slowly.

“What do
you
think?” she demanded.

“I think, considering the weasel he was, he went down well. I was half expecting him to give in to the red scream.”

“The red scream?” Molly said, feeling a vibration inside her chest. “Oh, yes. If he’d done that, it sure would have been a different show, wouldn’t it? Not near so neat and tidy. If I were worth a damn, I would give it
for
him. Right now.”

She looked around the room at the prison officials, the journalists, the politicians, the curiosity seekers, all looking relaxed and relieved that it was over and had gone so well. What would happen if she stood up, opened her mouth wide, and let out the red scream that had been building up inside her all night?

She didn’t, of course.

Instead, she sat on the sofa with one hand over her heart and the other in her lap until the scream retreated and she felt confident enough to stand and talk with people.

Molly was getting ready to leave, gearing herself up for the long drive back, when she saw Addie Dodgin standing in the door of the visitors’ lounge. Addie waved and walked over to her, pulling out of her bag a folded paper. She held it out to Molly and said in a very quiet voice, “Louie asked me to give you this.”

“Is this what he meant when he said he left me something?”

Addie nodded.

Molly unfolded the paper. It was a page of wide-ruled school paper, the kind that Louie had always used for his poems; she saw at a glance that this was another one, a little longer than usual. She looked up at Addie. “Have you read this?” she asked.

“No. He said it was for Molly Cates’s eyes only. And that’s a direct quote.”

Molly looked down and read silently:

For Molly Cates

Special rates

From a friend who waits

At heavens gates.

I’m all through

Don’t you be blue

Heres the news that intrests you—

That thing I did or did not do.

Tiny yes and Tiny no

Eeny meeny miny moe.

I’ve said no and I’ve said yes

I’ve said all right I confess—

What a bloody mixt up mess

Now for the hot line—

Was she one of mine?

Yes

Yes

Yes

PS

About the car—

It took me far.

Make no misteak

Its in the lake.

Dont that take the cake?

Im sorry, I guess

Goodby and god bless

Your friend at the end

Louie Bronk

For one second she was tempted to believe it, to ignore Fort Worth, and go with a dying man’s last words. But only for a second.