Andrew Klavan - True Crime

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.