Stephen King - The Stand

“You need to know what we’re up against,” Devin said. “They just want to make sure you don’t suffer cruel and unusual punishment, Lloyd. You ought to thank them.”

“ Thank them? I’d like to—”

“Pokerize them?” Devins asked quietly.

“No, course not,” Lloyd said unconvincingly.

“Our petition for a new trial will be turned down and all my exceptions will be quickly heaved out. If we’re lucky, the court will invite me to present witnesses. If they give me the opportunity, I’ll recall everybody that testified at the original trial, plus anyone else I can think of. At that point I’d call your junior high school chums as character witnesses, if I could find them.”

“I quit school in the sixth grade,” Lloyd said bleakly.

“After the Circuit Court turns us down, I’ll petition to be heard by the Supreme Court. I expect to be turned down on the same day.”

Devins stopped and lit a cigarette.

“Then what?” Lloyd asked.

“Then?” Devins asked, looking mildly surprised and exasperated at Lloyd’s continuing stupidity. “Why, then you go on to Death Row at state prison and just enjoy all that good food until it’s time to ride the lightning. It won’t be long.”

“They wouldn’t really do it,” Lloyd said. “You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Lloyd, the four states that have the Capital Crimes Circuit Court do it all the time . So far, forty men and women have been executed under the Markham guidelines. It costs the taxpayers a little extra for the added court, but not all that much, since they only work on a tiny percentage of first-degree murder cases. Also, the taxpayers really don’t mind opening their pocketbooks for capital punishment. They like it.”

Lloyd looked ready to throw up.

“Anyway,” Devins said, “a DA will only try a defendant under Markham guidelines if he looks completely guilty. It isn’t enough for the dog to have chicken feathers on his muzzle; you’ve got to catch him in the henhouse. Which is where they caught you.”

Lloyd, who had been basking in the cheers from the boys in Maximum Security not fifteen minutes ago, now found himself staring down a paltry two or three weeks and into a black hole.

“You scared, Sylvester?” Devins asked in an almost kindly way.

Lloyd had to lick his lips before he could answer. “Christ yes, I’m scared. From what you say, I’m a dead man.”

“I don’t want you dead,” Devins said, “just scared. If you go into that courtroom smirking and swaggering, they’ll strap you in the chair and throw the switch. You’ll be number forty-one under Markham . But if you listen to me, we might be able to squeak through. I don’t say we will; I say we might.”

“Go ahead.”

“The thing we have to count on is the jury,” Devins said. “Twelve ordinary shleps off the street. I’d like a jury filled with forty-two-year-old ladies who can still recite Winnie the Pooh by heart and have funerals for their pet birds in the back yard, that’s what I’d like. Every jury is made very aware of Markham ’s consequences when they’re empaneled. They’re not bringing in a verdict of death that may or may not be implemented in six months or six years, long after they’ve forgotten it; the guy they’re condemning in June is going to be pushing up daisies before the All-Star break.”

“You’ve got a hell of a way of putting things.”

Ignoring him, Devins went on: “In some cases, just that knowledge has caused juries to bring in verdicts of not guilty. It’s one adverse result of Markham . In some cases, juries have let blatant murderers go just because they didn’t want blood that fresh on their hands.” He picked up a sheet of paper. “Although forty people have been executed under Markham , the death penalty has been asked for under Markham a total of seventy times. Of the thirty not executed, twenty-six were found ‘not guilty’ by the empaneled juries. Only four convictions were overturned by the Capital Crimes Circuit Courts, one in South Carolina, two in Florida, and one in Alabama.”

“Never in Arizona?”

“Never. I told you. The Code of the West. Those five old men want your ass nailed to a board. If we don’t get you off in front of a jury, you’re through. I can offer you ninety-to-one on it.”

“How many people have been found not guilty by regular court juries under that law in Arizona?”

“Two out of fourteen.”

“Those are pretty crappy odds, too.”

Devins smiled his wolfish smile. “I should point out,” he said, “that one of those two was defended by yours truly. He was guilty as sin, Lloyd, just like you are. Judge Pechert raved at those ten women and two men for twenty minutes. I thought he was going to have apoplexy.”

“If I was found not guilty, they couldn’t try me again, could they?”

“Absolutely not.”

“So it’s one roll, double or nothing.”

“Yes.”

“Boy,” Lloyd said, and wiped his forehead.

“As long as you understand the situation,” Devins said, “and where we have to make our stand, we can get down to brass tacks.”

“I understand it. I don’t like it, though.”

“You’d be nuts if you did.” Devins folded his hands and leaned over them. “Now. You’ve told me and you’ve told the police that you, uh…” He took a stapled sheaf of papers out of the stack by his briefcase and riffled through them. “Ah. Here we are. ‘I never killed nobody. Poke did all the killing. Killing was his idea, not mine. Poke was crazy as a bedbug and I guess it is a blessing to the world that he has passed on.’”

“Yeah, that’s right, so what?” Lloyd said defensively.

“Just this,” Devins said cozily. “That implies you were scared of Poke Freeman. Were you scared of him?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly—”

“You were afraid for your life, in fact.”

“I don’t think it was—”

“Terrified. Believe it, Sylvester. You were shitting nickels.”

Lloyd frowned at his lawyer. It was the frown of a lad who wants to be a good student but is having a serious problem grasping the lesson.

“Don’t let me lead you, Lloyd,” Devins said. “I don’t want to do that. You might think I was suggesting that Poke was stoned almost all the time—”

“He was! We both was!”

“No. You weren’t, but he was. And he got crazy when he got stoned—”

“Boy, you’re not shitting.” In the halls of Lloyd’s memory, the ghost of Poke Freeman cried Whoop! Whoop! merrily and shot the woman in the Burrack general store.

“And he held a gun on you at several points in time—”

“No, he never—”

“Yes he did. You just forgot for a while. In fact, he once threatened to kill you if you didn’t back his play.”

“Well, I had a gun—”

“I believe,” Devins said, eyeing him closely, “that if you search your memory, you’ll remember Poke telling you that your gun was loaded with blanks. Do you remember that?”

“Now that you mention it—”

“And nobody was more surprised than you when it actually started firing real bullets, right?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said. He nodded vigorously. “I bout damn near had a hemorrhage.”

“And you were about to turn that gun on Poke Freeman when he was cut down, saving you the trouble.”

Lloyd regarded his lawyer with dawning hope in his eyes.

“Mr. Devins,” he said with great sincerity, “that’s just the way the shit went down.”

He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything Devins had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him up by the collar. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, à la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.