David Baldacci: The Last Mile

Melvin Mars, the murderer.

He cooled down, the sweat pooling off him and staining the concrete that was already badly scarred with far worse things than perspiration. Condemned men had been known to defecate on the floor before they walked to their deaths.

As his breathing normalized he sat on his bunk and tipped his head back against the wall. In his old cell he had named the walls Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben, after the superhero fighting team the Fantastic Four. It was just something do in a place where he had nothing to do. Each day filled with whatever he could think of to fill it.

Mars often fantasized about sexy Sue Storm, but he more closely related to Ben Grimm, the Thing, the freak. As an athlete Mars had been a freak, in a good way.

Yet he could be thoughtful, like the brainy Reed.

He also related to the flame ball Johnny Storm, Sue’s kid brother, because he felt like he was on fire every second of every day. Principally because every day was like every other day in here. A living hell, actually, hence the flames.

This was Day 7,342 for him. The last day for him.

He looked at his watch again.

Five ticks till Doomsday.

He had spent a year in solitary shortly after going to prison. The reason was simple. His life was over, his dreams shattered, his hard work for naught, and he was pissed beyond all reckoning.

His punishment for beating the crap out of three prisoners and then taking on a half-dozen guards and more than holding his own until they Tased and nearly clubbed him to death? Twenty-four hours a day in a sixty-square-foot cell with a slit for a window for a year. No words spoken to him. Never saw another face. Never felt the touch of someone else’s skin. The food was shoved through the door slot along with toilet paper and occasionally washcloths and soap and even less occasionally clean prison garb.

He showered in a corner where the water was either ice or scalding. He slept on the floor, and mumbled, screamed, cursed, and finally sobbed. That’s when he’d realized that human beings, for better or worse, were undeniably social creatures. Without interaction they went mad.

And Mars had nearly gone mad inside that cell. It had been Day 169. He remembered it clearly, had even scratched the numbers out on the wall with bloody fingernails. His mind had nearly gone; there was but one shred left. And he had used that shred like a life vest in a tsunami, his port in the storm. He had focused on an imaginary old girlfriend, Tatiana. In his mind she was married now with six kids, big-hipped and bloated, surly and unhappy, and so missing him. But back then this imagined person had been perfect. Her face, her body, her limitless love for him allowed him to survive Day 169 and then make it through 196 more.

When the door opened the first face he saw was Tatiana’s superimposed over the body of a three-hundred-pound racist nightmare of a young guard named, aptly, Big Dick, who told Mars to get his mulatto butt up or else he’d be eating through a straw for the rest of his life.

And when it was over Melvin Mars was a changed man. He had never done anything that would ever put him back in there. If he did, he knew that he would have killed himself. He wouldn’t have waited for the death chamber.

Death chamber .

It was right down the hall. The last mile, they called it. Yet it wasn’t a mile. It was actually only thirty feet, which was good because most guys collapsed before they got there. But they had big guards who picked you up and carried you the rest of the way.

Texas killed you dead whether you took it brave or not.

The Supreme Court had debated the cruel and unusual aspects of death by lethal injection because of quite a few instances where the inmate had been in terrible agony before he died. The court had come down on the side of letting it continue, appalling agony be damned. It wasn’t like the condemneds’ victims hadn’t suffered horrific pain and fear. So who could say they were wrong? Mars couldn’t. He just hoped they got it right with him.

The death chamber was not large, nine by twelve feet, with cheery turquoise-painted brick walls and metal door, which seemed out of place with the room’s purpose. You were being executed, not vacationing in the Caribbean.

The gurney, which came with a comfy pillow and sturdy leather straps, was set near the center of the room. There were two adjacent rooms with glass windows looking into the chamber. One was for families of the victim. The other was for family of the person being executed.

Mars knew that in his case the groups were one and the same. And he also knew that both rooms would be empty.

He sat back on his bunk soaking in the stink of his own sweat, his mind drifting back to the only good memories he had left.

He was hardly a jumbo in the world of college football, but he’d been big for a running back. Most important, he’d been long on talent. The NFL was considered a lock for someone like him. He had been a Heisman Trophy finalist his senior year, the only tailback in the group. The others had all been quarterbacks. He could run over, around, or simply through anyone. He could block, and his soft hands could catch the ball coming out of the backfield. And he nearly always made the first guy miss with an instinctive lateral move — a rare talent the NFL gurus lapped up.

And when he needed the turbos they flared to life and he was gone. The only thing left to do was hand the ball to the ref after scoring and go let coach pat his butt on the sidelines.

His official time in the forty-yard dash at the combine was 4.31 seconds. Twenty years ago that was serious speed even for a corner or a receiver, much less a monster running back with shoulders as wide as the sky who made his living smashing between the tackles. And it would still be considered exceptional wheels even today.

God-given it was. He was the total package. A freak of nature, they called him.

He felt a smile spread across his sweaty face.

Yes, a lock. A lock with a big paycheck. This was long before the salary constraints for rookies had been implemented. He could have scored big bucks from day one, millions and millions of them. A mansion, cars, women, respect.

He was a guaranteed first rounder, everyone said. Probably top five. He would probably go ahead of several of the quarterbacks he had competed against for the Heisman. It was rumored that the New York Giants, coming off a couple crappy years, and the Tampa Bay Bucs, coming off many crappy years, and both armed with a high draft pick, would love to take him and open the bank of their wealthy owners in doing so. Hell, he might even hoist some Super Bowl hardware one day. It was all looking good. He’d worked his ass off for all of it. No one had given him anything. The hurdles had been immense. He had leapt them all.

And then the jury had spoken. “We find the defendant guilty ” — and no one in the world of professional football gave a damn about 4.31 Mars, Melvin anymore.

Jumbo had crashed.

There were no survivors.

And in a few minutes, there would be no more of him. He would be laid to rest in a potter’s field because he had no one left to bury him proper.

He would have been forty-two years old in two months. His forty-first had been his very last birthday, as it turned out.

He looked at his watch again. The time was up. His watch told him that, and so did the sound of the footsteps coming down the hall.

He had long since made up his mind. He would die like a man. Back straight, head high.

Suddenly he felt a lump in his throat and his eyes moistened. He tried to breathe normally, trying to keep it all together. This was it. He looked around his cell and saw the walls of his death row cage back at the Polunsky Unit.