James Patterson - The Beach House

My unsettled state of mind was compounded by a piece of mail I received from Huntsville, Texas. The Mudman had taken me up on my offer to stay in touch. He sent grim news about the prospect of ever getting his DNA analysis for a retrial. Nothing he had told me, however, prepared me for the next letter I got from him.

The execution date had been set.

THE FIRST TIME I ever saw the Mudman was on a bitterly cold February morning. It was shortly before he was put to death by the state of Texas. We were separated by a Plexiglas window between the viewing room and the death chamber.

Pauline and I had flown to Dallas the morning before, rented a car, and made the three-hour drive to Huntsville. At the last minute prison officials rescinded their permission for a private visit. Since we were on the Mudman's personal visitor list, we were permitted to view the execution.

Along with the great aunt of the victim and an even more elderly prison reporter who sat beside us on the three-plank viewing stand, we didn't see the Mudman until after his wheelchair was rolled into the death chamber just before 8:00 a.m.

The Mudman had been on death row for twenty years. They'd taken a terrible toll. The last photograph I had seen of the six-three former bouncer was almost twenty-one years old now, and although he was still a huge man and close to three hundred pounds, he was a prematurely old one. His long hair and beard had gone stone white. Degenerative arthritis in his hips had put him in a wheelchair three years before.

As the warden and prison chaplain looked on, a guard placed a pair of reading glasses on the Mudman. Then the guard held a piece of paper level with the Mudman's chest. Although he was somewhat sedated, he proceeded to read.

"This prison and my government," he said in his surprisingly high-pitched voice, "has already taken the best years of my life. This morning they will take everything I have left. They will commit a murder. God have mercy on their souls."

He turned his head and saw me in the front row. He gave me a grateful smile, and it had a gentleness that touched me deeply. I had to choke back a sob, and Pauline grabbed my arm.

The next minutes proceeded with nightmarish momentum. As sheets of freezing rain pelted the corrugated roof, the chaplain read the Twenty-third Psalm. Then guards hoisted the Mudman out of his chair and onto the gurney.

His white-haired frailty, the prison-issue wheelchair, and the practiced diligence of the guards combined to give the misleading impression that we were witnessing a medical procedure that would make a sick man well. That impression was reinforced when an orderly pushed up the white sleeve on Mudman's massive right arm. He found a vein, wiped the area with a cotton swab, and inserted an IV.

When the warden, a surprisingly kind-looking man in his late fifties, saw that the IV was attached, he raised his right arm. That signaled the release of the first poisonous dose.

Less than thirty seconds later he raised the arm again, ordering the release of the hydrochloride that would end Mudman's life.

The whole time this was going on, Mudman's eyes were locked on mine. In his last letter, he'd asked if I would be a witness to his execution. He wanted me there so that he could look into one pair of eyes he knew believed in his innocence. I had done my best to be worthy of his steely gaze.

In his last minute on earth, Mudman had tried to sing the beginning of an old Allman Brothers song he had loved since he was a kid. "Going to the country, baby, do you want to go? / Going to the country, baby, do you want to go?" Somehow, he managed to get it out.

The hydrochloride finally hit him. It knocked the air out of his huge chest as violently as if he'd been punched. He lurched forward so hard against his straps, it sent his glasses flying off his head and onto the concrete floor.

The prison doctor declared the Mudman dead by state-ordered execution at 8:17 a.m.

Pauline and I left the prison in silence. I felt hollowed-out and empty. It was almost as bad as the night I saw Peter on the beach. I felt that I had failed them both.

"That man was innocent," I said to Pauline as we rode back to Dallas from Huntsville. "And Barry Neubauer is a murderer. There has to be something we can do to that son of a bitch. A dose of hydrochloride would be nice."

She reached over and took my hand, held it gently. Then she sang very softly. "Going to the country / Baby, do you want to go?"

ON A THURSDAY MORNING in early May, I fell into the ruminative routine I'd been honing since I had returned from Texas. I went out and bought the papers, made Pauline some coffee, and kissed her good-bye as she left for her new job at the boutique law firm MacMilan and Hart. Then, after twenty minutes of push-ups and crunches on the living-room carpet, I hit the street.

First, I checked in with Philip K, a former senior magazine editor. He was a recovering heroin addict and now a regular at a methadone outpatient clinic who ran a tidy used-book store from a card table inside the northeast corner of Tompkins Square Park. An aesthete and a snob, Philip sold only books he deemed worthy of being read. Many mornings there would be no more than three or four battered volumes on the table.

That morning, Philip was touting a coffee-stained paperback novel called Night Dogs. I gave him his asking price and carried it in my back pocket to a Second Avenue diner, where I started it at the counter with my coffee and matzo brei.

Although unpierced and untattooed, I was becoming an East Villager in subtler ways. I'd acquired a taste for pierogi and blintzes and other sweet Eastern European foods sold in narrow, enduring eateries from Second to Avenue C. I loved the dark local bars whose jukeboxes were stocked with songs I'd never heard before. Mack loved them, too, and every once in a while he'd take the bus and join me and Pauline on a local pub crawl.

Macklin was such a natural hipster, he seemed more at home in the Village than I did. Wearing this funky fedora I'd bought him, he looked like Henry Miller come back from the dead for one last tour of bohemia.

Speaking of fedoras, I was buying my clothes secondhand now. That morning nothing I was wearing cost more than six dollars, so after breakfast and fifty pages of Philip's latest, I decided to wander over to Ferdi's Vintage on Seventh, where I'd made some of my better finds.

I had just started going through the rack of shirts in the back when a little guy with short hair and a goatee, both dyed peroxide white, walked in.

I watched him rummage through the old suits. It made me miss Sammy. He was around the same height and build. He even had the same cocky carriage.

The resemblance was so uncanny that I began to wonder if we didn't all have clones walking the streets in various cities around the world.

The skinny guy must have sensed my gaze because he turned to face me. I began to sputter an apology when his startled expression gave him away.

"Sammy!"

He threw a punch, and I found myself on the floor, looking up at the tattered tails of old shirts.

SAMMY WAS ALIVE? He couldn't be. But, goddamnit, he was!

I was up about as fast as I'd gone down. I ran out of Ferdi's and saw him sprinting west on Seventh. He cut south on First and vanished from sight. He was moving as if he'd just seen a ghost, but so was I.

There was a gay bar on the corner, its front window shrouded with dark red curtains. When I opened the door, the light from First Avenue caught Sammy scrambling out the back.

"Sammy, stop!" I yelled. "I have to talk to you."

I started after him through the shadows until I nearly collided with a massive bartender who had nimbly jumped from behind the bar. He was blocking my path.