Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

During “my” second death by lethal injection, the execution technician gave the inmate too weak a dose of the chemicals, causing him to choke and heave blood for nearly fifteen minutes before he died with a blue face.

The third and last time I witnessed an execution, the conditions were considered perfect all around though the “patient” heaved, spit, choked and even broke a rib from the strain.

I’d witnessed three lethal injections during my time in the department, all of them in states where execution was still legal. If I ever found the man who’d killed Fran, I’d see a fourth. That is, if I ever got myself out of this mess. But first I had to find Cassandra. Without her and her testimony, I faced jail. What I faced in jail was more horrible and just as deadly as lethal injection.

I took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. I sucked in the smoke and felt the rush of nicotine and the slight rise in blood pressure that always accompanied it. I knew I had no choice but to try and relax, to try and think logically. It was a beautiful spring day with unusually warm temperatures. Maybe Cassandra had spring fever, literally. Maybe fourteen hours spent in a five-room cabin had become too confining for her.

I had to do something to prevent myself from thinking, because I didn’t want to suffer the anxiety that went with thinking. So I busied myself with transporting the supplies from the trunk of the Pontiac to the cabin. I made every attempt to be as organized as possible, making slow deliberate movements under the assumption that this would make the time pass faster. Maybe, I thought, she would come back while I was working.

I placed the extra clothing on the bed in the back bedroom and stacked the few canned goods on the exposed shelves in the kitchen. I put the milk and the beer in the refrigerator, and the three loaves of white bread on the table my grandfather had built into the kitchen wall. I checked the chambers and the chokes on the two Remington 1187 twelve gauges to make certain they weren’t loaded, and then I leaned them against the waist-high bookshelves beside the fireplace.

When there was nothing left to do, I started thinking again, and this gave new life to the old anxieties.

In the seventeen or so minutes it had taken to transfer the supplies from the car to the cabin and to arrange it systematically, Cassandra had not come back. I knew then, as I slammed the trunk of the Pontiac closed, that if she was not coming back to me, I’d have to go looking for her. And that’s exactly what I set my mind to doing.

I SEARCHED THE PERIMETER of the cabin looking for footprints. But the earth around the cabin, although muddy in spots, was fairly dry from the strange bout of spring heat that had affected the entire northeast, even as far up as the Adirondack mountains (although the nights were still cool, if not downright cold).

I swatted a black fly from the sweat-covered skin on the back of my neck and I walked the length of the driveway, downhill, until I came to the hard-packed east-west road. I looked across the road and across the trout stream, and I surveyed the empty field beyond it.

Again, not a thing.

I turned west and then faced east.

Nothing but open road and the constant hum of black flies.

Suddenly, I felt like the lost one.

Standing there in the middle of the open road, I turned and faced my grandfather’s cabin. Directly behind it, I could see Old Iron Top, its bald, granite summit sparkling in the late-morning sunshine.

And then it hit me. That’s where I would find her.

I walked back up the drive and went to the edge of the second-growth forest surrounding the base of Old Iron Top. The trail my grandfather had cut decades ago was still accessible about thirty yards southwest of the cabin. The summer renters must have used the trail often because the narrow footpath was still freshly cut. Footprints were plainly visible in the mud. Cassandra wore cowboy boots similar to my own. But the heels on her boots were shorter and flatter. The prints at the beginning of the trail could not have been made more than an hour earlier. I could even see how the groundwater that had been squeezed away from the dirt had puddled in the heel area of the print.

Here’s what I did before I entered the woods: I pulled out the.45, pointed the barrel up toward the tops of the trees, and chambered a round, safety on. I slipped the piece back through my belt, this time against my backbone, and walked into the woods.

Maybe the forest had lived without me for more than three decades, but there was something about it-about the birch trees and the scattered sections of pine and the grouse that nearly made my heart stop when it drummed and took off from the soft, pine-needled floor-that made it seem like time had stood still. But the forest was not the same, and I knew it had changed as I had changed. But then there was the rich smell of vegetation, there was the way the sunlight broke through the leaves and branches of the trees, and the way the mosquitoes buzzed around my face that made it all seem the same. These were sights and sounds and feelings you just did not get inside a maximum security prison. A few feet in, I felt the tingle of a spider web that broke off against my face when I unknowingly walked through it. My blue-jean work shirt turned damp at the arms from the dew that clung to the vegetation even at midmorning on this hot spring day, and the world seemed suddenly foreign to me. Foreign but the same.

The dimensions of the trail were as I remembered them, too.

The trail dipped at first, descending for about twenty-five yards until it reached the base of the hill where the trail went severely vertical again. I wasted no time starting the climb, wishing, after five or six raised steps, that I was wearing hiking boots instead of cowboy boots. In a word, these boots weren’t made for hiking. But then, what choice did I have? I moved uphill, the branches scratching and snapping at my face, stinging the sensitive facial skin beneath the three-day beard growth. A small twig poked me in the eye, filled me with enough pain to draw a tear.

But I didn’t stop for anything, not even to take the breath that I desperately needed.

One thing was certain: I was drowning in my own inhalations. Too many cigarettes for too many years. As the arteries pressing against my temples began to pound with blood, I promised myself that if I got out of this mess, I would quit smoking for good. I would get my life back together, start living the good life again-like a man who cares about the life he’s got left.

But in the woods, I began to drown in something else, too. I couldn’t shake the image of Cassandra being left for dead on the summit of Old Iron Top. This time I was seeing the future, and the future in my mind was crazy, morbid even. What if Pelton’s men had followed us out to the cabin, gotten to Cassandra this morning when I was with Val? What if Pelton’s men had dragged her into the woods and shot her or sliced her neck with a straight razor? In my mind, I pictured a razor moving across the smooth bronze flesh of Cassandra’s neck the same way I had witnessed a CO die at Attica. As I forced myself up the hillside, I knew that with Cassandra dead I was as good as finished- porn film or no porn film to use against Pelton. I needed Cassandra alive to testify on behalf of what she’d witnessed, not only during the last five days, but during all the years of her relationship with Vasquez.

Maybe it was the lung-scraping breaths or the way the blood pulsed and boiled inside my skull, but I couldn’t prevent an image of Cassandra’s head cut completely away from her body, just the way Fran’s had been when the black, four-door Buick sedan ignored the do-not-enter and slammed into the side of the car at sixty-five-per in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. It had taken only a split second for Fran to be thrust forward, her head and shoulders through the windshield, the jagged edge of which, like a razor, took her head clean off at the base of the neck, her body slumping back into the passenger seat like nothing had ever happened. Like our lives had not been changed by the split second of time it took for a windshield to shatter. And then nothing but the sight and sound of the battered Buick tearing away from the scene of the accident, only the back of a man’s shaved head visible…