Executioner Frack, on the other hand, was more to the general taste. A former guard would be my guess. A big, rollicking man in his fifties who generally talked baseball with the gang before he pressed the button. “I’ve got no qualms about it” was his only remark when asked. “It’s like erasing a mistake.”
The two had been trained on the machine by Reuben Skycock, who had been trained himself by the manufacturer. Their job was essentially to push a button, but it was not quite as simple as that. The machine had two buttons on its control panel. When the time came, each man would put his thumb on one of the buttons. At a nod from Luther, Executioner Frack would count out loud to three. At three, both men simultaneously would slowly depress their buttons. When the buttons clicked, they would slowly slide their thumbs off until the buttons clicked back into place. Only one of the buttons was actually operational. Only one would start the timed automatic sequence in which stainless steel plungers in the delivery module on the wall would be lowered into the canisters of chemicals, pushing their fluids down through the tubes and into Frank Beachum’s vein: the sodium pentothal, then, one minute later, pancuronium bromide and, after another full minute’s delay, the potassium chloride. A computer inside the module scrambled the circuits at random so that the two executioners would never know which of their buttons had really done the trick.
At exactly eleven-thirty-when Frank Beachum was being swiftly strapped to the gurney in his cell-Deputy Superintendent Zachary Platt ushered these two men into the death chamber down the hall. Dr. Smiley Chaudrhi and nurse Maura O’Brien were there, as well as two guards who weren’t involved in the Strap-down procedure. All four of them looked up as Platt and the executioners entered, and all four of them just as quickly looked away, running their eyes over clipboards and light fixtures and over the white walls. Platt led Frick and Frack through the chamber quickly and into the supply room where the killing equipment was.
Arnold McCardle was there, standing by the shelf of phones. The fat man nodded at the others when they came in, but he didn’t smile or offer them his hand. Reuben Skycock was stationed by the delivery module in its steel box up on the wall. He did shake hands with the executioners. Executioner Frick, the brainy one, slid a wet palm through Skycock’s grasp and then clasped his two damp hands together in front of him-nodding and smiling fatuously all the while as if trying to think of a gambit to start the conversation. Executioner Frack slapped a big mitt into Skycock’s, pumped it once and said, “Reuben. How ya doin? Been watching those Cards?”
Skycock, whose moustachioed face had grown chalky over the last hour or so, only nodded vaguely. Then he turned his back on both of them.
Executioner Frick and Executioner Frack stood together after that in a corner of the supply room. They stood in silence, as no one else would talk to them and they had nothing to say to each other.
And at about that time, just around eleven-thirty, I turned the corner onto Knight Street again. It had been a crazy drive there, crazy and intense. My front fender devouring the road. Green lights, red lights, vanishing overhead. No brake under my feet, the other cars before and around and behind me imagined out of existence, imagined into pure space, as my whole being focused through them on the night beyond the windshield and my will shielded me from the eyes of the police.
And so I made it. I turned the corner onto Knight Street. Sick now. Exhausted. Woozy and dull. There was a ceaseless, painful pulsebeat in my skull. My right hand was stiff and swollen. I could barely hold my head erect, my eyes open. Drunkenness came over me in green splashes that made my gorge rise. And yet, for all that, I was thinking more clearly now than before, seeing things more clearly. There’s nothing quite like having your hand crushed in a door to straighten out your senses in a big hurry.
I made the turn and slowed the car sharply. I cruised into the shadow of the slum. The streetlamps were busted there, and the line of grimy brick buildings seemed to hunch back from the highway into the night. Paper and soda cans crunched under my tires as I pulled the Tempo up against the curb.
I killed the engine. The street around me was empty but it felt threatening all the same. Alleys and recesses deep black. Music with jackhammer rhythms drifting down from the upper stories. A staring presence somewhere-somewhere-in a window above me. And voices from a side street, young men’s voices, laughing harshly, angry, secret. Traces of whispering congregations. And everyone but me was black on these streets, and I was afraid.
I glanced down at the dashboard clock. That’s when I saw it was eleven-thirty. Lowenstein lived-not far from my house-in a mansion on Washington Terrace. Twenty minutes away for a mortal Ford, fifteen, maybe ten, for me and the Tempo. My belly bleak, my mind panicked and desperate, I told myself that I could phone him if I had to. I could phone Alan to get the unlisted number, and then phone Lowenstein and make my case. But the thought almost made me laugh: to bring him around on my say-so, to get him to risk his friendship with the governor, to get him to beg for a delay of the execution-I knew it wasn’t going to happen unless I walked through his door with that locket, and probably with Mrs. Russel in tow as well.
I leaned over and looked out the passenger window, looked up at the building in which she lived. The lights were out in there from top to bottom.
I gathered my strength. My body felt like a dead weight carried on the shoulder of my will. I threw the weight against the car door and stepped out into the street.
By then, by eleven-thirty, Bonnie Beachum was, I guess, technically insane. Sitting alone in a visitors’ waiting room-a bare white room in the prison’s main building-sitting in one of the tube chairs around a long wooden table, her hands folded on her skirt, her bagged, sunken eyes staring at nothing.
Since she had left Frank’s cell that evening, she had spent most of her time in her motel room, praying. She had prayed aloud at first, in a low voice, on her knees by the bed, her elbows on the mattress, her red hands clasped under her chin. She had prayed till her voice was raw and then she had prayed in a whisper. She had driven back to the prison at eleven, only her lips moving as she drove, the words inaudible. And now, as she sat, unmoving, as she gazed far away, she had worked herself into a kind of hysteria, a kind of madness, a silent frenzy of supplication.
Later, when it was all over, when she had more or less recovered from the emotional collapse that followed, she did not remember much about these last minutes. It seemed to her she had been carried, disembodied, over vast distances on a torrent of wild words. She had been a child again, at times, in her childhood places, hiding in the milk farm grass giggling, working in the kitchen with her fretful mother, in her childhood shift or naked under the Missouri sky and the holy, bloodred sun to which she prayed. At other times-or was it simultaneously-she had stood stripped almost to the bone before the cloudy bar of heaven with great grim patriarchs strung above her as she raved up at them with primitive, glottal cries. As she sat, her hand strayed vaguely to her chest, she scratched softly at the space below and between her breasts, because in her mind she was tearing her whole torso open with both clawed hands, ripping her wifehood from out her ribs to hurl it gory on the altar of the Lord who could not, surely, kill her husband, let her husband die, if he saw that, if he knew that, if he only knew …