The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Bad Little Kid

1

The prison was twenty miles from the nearest small city, on an otherwise empty expanse of prairie where the wind blew almost all the time. The main building was a looming stone horror perpetrated on the landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century. Growing from either side were concrete cellblocks built one by one over the previous forty-five years, mostly with federal money that began flowing during the Nixon years and just never stopped.

At some distance from the main body of the prison was a smaller building. The prisoners called this adjunct Needle Manor. Jutting from one side of it was an outdoor corridor forty yards long, twenty feet wide, and enclosed in heavy chainlink fencing: the Chicken Run. Each Needle Manor inmate – currently there were seven – was allowed two hours in the Chicken Run each day. Some walked. Some jogged. Most simply sat with their backs against the chainlink, either staring up at the sky or looking at the low grassy ridge that broke the landscape a quarter of a mile to the east. Sometimes there was something to look at. More often there was nothing. Almost always there was the wind. For three months of the year, the Chicken Run was hot. The rest of the time it was cold. In the winter, it was frigid. The inmates usually chose to go out even then. There was the sky to look at, after all. Birds. Sometimes deer feeding along the crest of that low ridge, free to go where they pleased.

At the center of Needle Manor was a tiled room containing a Y-shaped table and a few rudimentary pieces of medical equipment. Set in one wall was a window with drawn curtains. When pulled back, they disclosed an observation chamber no bigger than the living room of a suburban tract house with a dozen hard plastic chairs where guests could view the Y-shaped table. On the wall was a sign reading KEEP SILENT AND MAKE NO GESTURES DURING THE PROCEDURE.

There were an even dozen cells in Needle Manor. Beyond them was a guardroom. Beyond the guardroom was a monitoring station which was manned 24/7. Beyond the monitoring station was a consultation room, where a table on the inmate side was separated from the table on the visitor side by thick Plexiglas. There were no phones; inmates conversed with their loved ones or legal representatives through a circle of small punched holes, like those in the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone.

Leonard Bradley sat down on his side of this communication port and opened his briefcase. He put a yellow legal pad and a Uniball pen on the table. Then he waited. The second hand on his watch made three revolutions and started a fourth before the door leading to the inner regions of Needle Manor opened with a loud clack of withdrawing bolts. Bradley knew all the guards by now. This one was McGregor. Not a bad guy. He was holding George Hallas by the arm. Hallas’s hands were free, but a steel snake of chain rattled along the floor between his ankles. There was a wide leather belt around the waist of his orange prison jumper, and when he sat down on his side of the glass, McGregor clipped another chain from a steel loop on the belt to a steel loop on the back of the chair. He locked it, gave it a tug, then tipped Bradley a two-finger salute.

‘Afternoon, Counselor.’

‘Afternoon, Mr McGregor.’

Hallas said nothing.

‘You know the deal,’ McGregor said. ‘As long as you want today. Or as long as you can take him, at least.’

‘I know.’

Ordinarily, lawyer–client consultations were limited to an hour. Beginning a month before the client’s scheduled trip into the room with the Y-shaped table, consultation time was upped to ninety minutes, during which the lawyer and his increasingly squirrelly partner in this state-mandated death waltz would discuss a diminishing number of shitty options. During the last week, there was no set time limit. This was true for close relatives as well as legal counsel, but Hallas’s wife had divorced him only weeks after his conviction, and there were no children. He was alone in the world except for Len Bradley, but seemed to want little to do with any of the appeals – and consequent delays – Bradley had suggested.

Until today, that was.

He’ll talk to you, McGregor had told him after a brief ten-minute consultation the month before, one where Hallas’s end of the conversation had mostly been no and no.

When it gets close, he’ll talk to you plenty. They get scared, see? They forget all about how they wanted to walk into the injection room with their heads up and their shoulders squared. They start figuring out it’s not a movie, they’re really going to die, and then they want to try every appeal in the book.

Hallas didn’t look scared, though. He looked the same as ever: a small man with bad posture, a sallow complexion, thinning hair, and eyes that looked painted on. He looked like an accountant – which he had been in his previous life – who had lost all interest in the numbers that had previously seemed so important to him.

‘Enjoy your visit, boys,’ McGregor said, and went over to the chair in the corner. There he sat, turned on his iPod, and stuffed his ears with music. His eyes never left them, however. The circle of speaking holes was too small to admit the passage of a pencil, but a needle was not out of the question.

‘What can I do for you, George?’

For several moments Hallas didn’t answer. He studied his hands, which were small and weak-looking – not the hands of a murderer at all, you would have said. Then he looked up.

‘You’re a pretty good guy, Mr Bradley.’

Bradley was surprised by this, and didn’t know how to reply.

Hallas nodded, as if his lawyer had tried to deny it. ‘Yes. You are. You kept on even after I made it clear I wanted you to stop and let the process run its course. Not many court-appointeds would do that. They’d just say yeah, whatever, and go on to the next loser some judge hands them. You didn’t do that. You told me what moves you wanted to make, and when I told you not to make them, you went ahead anyway. If not for you, I would’ve been in the ground a year ago.’

‘We don’t always get what we want, George.’

Hallas smiled briefly. ‘Nobody knows that better than me. But it hasn’t been all bad; I can admit that now. Mostly because of the Chicken Run. I like going out there. I like the wind on my face, even when it’s a cold wind. I like the smell of the prairie grass, or seeing the day-moon in the sky when it’s full. Or deer. Sometimes they jump around up there on the ridge and chase each other. I like that. Makes me laugh out loud, sometimes.’

‘Life can be good. It can be worth fighting for.’

‘Some lives, I’m sure. Not mine. But I admire the way you’ve fought for it, just the same. I appreciate your dedication. So I’m going to tell you what I wouldn’t say in court. And why I’ve refused to make any of the usual appeals … although I couldn’t stop you from making them for me.’

‘Appeals made without the appellant’s participation don’t swing much weight in this state’s courts. Or the higher ones.’

‘You’ve also been very good about visiting me, and I appreciate that too. Few people would show kindness to a convicted child murderer, but you have to me.’

Once again, Bradley could think of no reply. Hallas had already said more in the last ten minutes than in all their visits over the last thirty-four months.

‘I can’t pay you anything, but I can tell you why I killed that child. You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you, anyway. If you want to hear.’

Hallas peered through the holes in the scratched Plexiglas and smiled.

‘You do, don’t you? Because you’re troubled by certain things. The prosecution wasn’t, but you are.’

‘Well … certain questions have occurred, yes.’

‘But I did it. I had a forty-five revolver and I emptied it into that boy. There were plenty of witnesses, and surely you know that the appeals process would simply have dragged out the inevitable for another three years – or four, or six – even if I had participated fully. The questions you have pale before the bald fact of premeditated murder. Isn’t that so?’

‘We could have argued diminished mental capacity.’ Bradley leaned forward. ‘And that’s still possible. It’s not too late, even now. Not quite.’

‘The insanity defense is rarely successful after the fact, Mr Bradley.’

He won’t call me Len, Bradley thought. Not even after all this time. He’ll go to his death calling me Mr Bradley.

‘Rarely isn’t the same as never, George.’

‘No, but I’m not crazy now and I wasn’t crazy then. I was never more sane. Are you sure you want to hear the testimony I wouldn’t give in court? If you don’t, that’s fine, but it’s all I have to give.’

‘Of course I want to hear,’ Bradley said. He picked up his pen, but ended up not making a single note. He only listened, hypnotized, as George Hallas spoke in his soft mid-South accent.

2

My mother, who was healthy all her short life, died of a pulmonary embolism six hours after I was born. This was in 1969. It must have been a genetic defect, because she was only twenty-two. My father was eight years older. He was a good man and a good dad. He was a mining engineer, and worked mostly in the Southwest until I was eight.

A housekeeper traveled around with us. Her name was Nona McCarthy, and I called her Mama Nonie. She was black. I suppose he slept with her, although when I slipped into her bed – which I did on many mornings – she was always alone. It didn’t matter to me, one way or the other. I didn’t know what black had to do with anything. She was good to me, she made my lunches and read me the usual bedtime stories when my father wasn’t home to do it, and that was all that mattered to me. It wasn’t the usual setup, I suppose I knew that much, but I was happy enough.

In 1977 we moved east to Talbot, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. That’s an army town, Fort John Huie, but also coal country. My father was hired to reopen the Good Luck mines – One, Two, and Three – and bring them up to environmental specifications, which meant breaking ground on new holes and designing a disposal system that would keep the waste from polluting the local streams.

We lived in a nice little suburban neighborhood, in a house the Good Luck Company provided. Mama Nonie liked it because my father turned the garage into a two-room apartment for her. It kept the gossip down to a dull roar, I suppose. I helped him with the renovations on weekends, handing him boards and such. That was a good time for us. I was able to go to the same school for two years, which was long enough to make friends and get some stability.

One of my friends was the girl next door. In a TV show or a magazine, we would have ended up sharing our first kiss in a treehouse, falling in love, and then going to the junior prom together when we finally made it to high school. But that was never going to happen to me and Marlee Jacobs.

Daddy never led me to believe we’d be staying in Talbot. He said there was nothing meaner than encouraging false hopes in a child. Oh, I might go to Mary Day Grammar School through the fifth grade, might even through the sixth, but eventually his Good Luck would run out and we’d be moving on. Maybe back to Texas or New Mexico; maybe up to West Virginia or Kentucky. I accepted this, and so did Mama Nonie. My dad was the boss, he was a good boss, and he loved us. Just my opinion, but I don’t think you can do much better than that.

The second thing had to do with Marlee herself. She was … well, these days people would call her ‘mentally challenged,’ but back then the folks in our neighborhood just said she was soft in the head. You could call that mean, Mr Bradley, but looking back on it, I think it’s just right. Poetic, even. She saw the world that way, all soft and out of focus. Sometimes – often, even – that can be better. Again, just my opinion.

We were both in third grade when I met her, but Marlee was already eleven. We were both promoted to the fourth grade the next year, but in her case it was just so they could keep moving her along through the system. That’s how things worked in places like Talbot back then. And it wasn’t like she was the village idiot. She could read a little, and do some simple addition, but subtraction was beyond her. I tried to explain it every way I knew how, but she was just never going to get it.

We never kissed in a treehouse – never kissed at all – but we always held hands when we walked to school in the morning and back in the afternoon. I imagine we looked damn funny, because I was a shrimp and she was a big girl, at least four inches taller than me and already getting her breasts. It was her who wanted to hold hands, not me, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind that she was soft-headed, either. I would have in time, I suppose, but I was only nine when she died, still at an age when kids accept pretty much everything that’s put before them. I think that’s a blessed way to be. If everyone was soft in the head, do you think we’d still have wars? Balls we would.

If we’d lived another half a mile out, Marlee and I would have taken the bus. But since we were close to the Mary Day – six or eight blocks – we walked. Mama Nonie would hand me my bag lunch, and smooth down my cowlick, and tell me You be a good boy now, Georgie, and send me out the door. Marlee would be waiting outside her door, wearing one of her dresses or jumpers, with her hair done up in pigtails and ribbons and her lunchbox in her hand. I can still see that lunchbox. It had Steve Austin on it, the Six Million Dollar Man. Her mama would be standing in the doorway and she’d say Hey now, Georgie, and I’d say Hey now, Mrs Jacobs, and she’d say You children be good, and Marlee would say We’ll be good, Mama, and then Marlee would take hold of my hand and off we’d go down the sidewalk. We had the first couple of blocks to ourselves, but then the other kids would start streaming in from Rudolph Acres. That was where a lot of army families lived, because it was cheap and Fort Huie was only five miles north on Highway 78.

We must have looked funny – the pipsqueak with his sack lunch holding hands with the beanpole banging her Steve Austin lunchbox against one scabby knee – but I don’t remember anyone making fun or teasing. I suppose they must have from time to time, kids being kids and all, but if so it was the light kind that doesn’t mean much. Mostly once the sidewalk filled up it was boys saying stuff like Hey now, George, you want to play pickup after school or girls saying Hey now, Marlee, ain’t those hairribbons some pretty. I don’t remember anyone treating us bad. Not until the bad little kid.

One day after school Marlee didn’t come out and didn’t come out. This must have been not long after my ninth birthday, because I had my Bolo Bouncer. Mama Nonie gave it to me and it didn’t last long – I hit it too hard and the rubber snapped – but I had it that day, and was going frontsies-backsies with it while I waited for her. Nobody ever told me I had to wait for her, I just did.

Finally she came out, and she was crying. Her face was all red and there was snot coming out of her nose. I asked her what was wrong and she said she couldn’t find her lunchbox. She ate her lunch out of it same as always, she said, and put it back on the shelf in the cloakroom next to Cathy Morse’s pink Barbie lunchbox, just like she always did, but when the going-home bell rang, it was gone. Somebody stoled it, she said.

No, no, somebody just moved it and it’ll be there tomorrow, I said. You stop your fussing and stand still, now. You got a mess.

Mama Nonie always made sure I had a hankie when I left the house, but I wiped my nose on my sleeve like the other boys because a hankie seemed kind of sissy. So it was still clean and still folded when I took it out of my back pocket and wiped the snot off her face with it. She stopped crying and smiled and said it tickled. Then she took my hand and we walked on toward home, just like always, her talking six licks to the dozen. I didn’t mind, because at least she’d forgotten her lunchbox.

Pretty soon all the other kids were gone, although we could hear them laughing and skylarking their way back to Rudolph Acres. Marlee was chitter-chattering along like always, anything that came into her head. I let it wash over me, saying Yeah and Uh-huh and Hey, mostly thinking about how I’d change into my old corduroys as soon as I got back, and if Mama Nonie didn’t have any chores for me, I’d get my glove and run down to the Oak Street playground and get in on the pickup game that went on there every day until moms started yelling it was suppertime.

That is when we heard someone hollering at us from the other side of School Street. Only it was less like a voice and more like a donkey bray.

GEORGE AND MARLEE UP IN A TREE! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

We stopped. There was a kid over there, standing by a hackberry bush. I’d never seen him before, not at Mary Day or anywhere else. He wasn’t but four and a half feet tall, and stocky. He had on gray shorts that went down all the way to his knees, and a green sweater with orange stripes. It was rounded out up top with little boy-tits and a poochy belly underneath. He had a beanie on his head, the stupid kind with a plastic propeller.

His face was pudgy and hard at the same time. His hair was orange like the stripes on his sweater, that shade nobody loves. It was all sprayed out on the sides over his jug ears. His nose was a little blot underneath the brightest, greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. He had a sulky Cupid’s bow of a mouth, the lips so red it looked like he was wearing his ma’s lipstick. I’ve seen plenty of carrottops with those red lips since then, but none as red as that bad little kid’s were.

We stood and stared at him. Marlee’s chatter came to a halt. She had cat’s-eye glasses with pink rims, and behind them her eyes were wide and magnified.

The kid – he couldn’t have been more than six or seven – pooched up those red lips of his and made kissy-face noises. Then he put his hands on his butt and began to bump his hips at us.

GEORGE AND MARLEE, UP IN A TREE, F-U-C-K-I-N-G!

Braying just like a donkey. We stared, amazed.

You better wear a scumbag when you fuck her, he called over, smirking those red lips. Less you want to have a bunch of retards just like her.

You shut up your face, I said.

Or what? he said.

Or I’ll shut it up for you, I said.

I meant it, too. My father would have been mad if he knew I was threatening to beat up a kid who was younger and smaller, but he wasn’t right to be saying those things. He looked like a little kid, but those weren’t little-kid things he was saying.

Suck my dink, assface, he said, and then stepped behind the hackberry bush.

I thought about going over there, but Marlee was holding my hand so tight it almost hurt.

I don’t like that boy, she said.

I said I didn’t like him either, but to never mind. Let’s go home, I said.

But before we could start walking again, the kid came back out from behind the hackberry bush, and he had Marlee’s Steve Austin lunchbox in his hands. He held it up.

Lose something, fuckwit? he said, and laughed. Laughing wrinkled his face up and made it like a pig’s face. He sniffed at the box and said, I guess it must be yours, cause it smells like cunt. Like retarded cunt.

Give me that, it’s mine, Marlee yelled. She let go of my hand. I tried to hold it, but it greased out on the sweat of our palms.

Come and get it, he said, and held it out to her.

Before I tell you what happened next, I have to tell you about Mrs Peckham. She was the first-grade teacher at Mary Day. I didn’t have her, because I went to the first grade in New Mexico, but most of the kids in Talbot did – Marlee too – and they all loved her. I loved her, and I only had her for playground, when it was her turn to be monitor. If there was kickball, boys against the girls, she was always the pitcher for the girls’ team. Sometimes she’d whip one in from behind her back, and that made everyone laugh. She was the kind of teacher you remember forty years later, because she could be kind and jolly but still make even the antsy-pantsy kids mind.

She had a big old Buick Roadmaster, sky-blue, and we used to call her Pokey Peckham because she never drove it more than thirty miles an hour, always sitting bolt straight behind the wheel with her eyes squinted. Of course, we only saw her drive in the neighborhood, which was a school zone, but I bet she drove pretty much the same way when she was on 78. Even on the interstate. She was careful and cautious. She would never hurt a child. Not on purpose, she wouldn’t.

Marlee ran into the street to get her lunchbox. The bad little kid laughed and threw it at her. It hit the street and broke open. Her Thermos bottle fell out and rolled. I saw that sky-blue Roadmaster coming and yelled for Marlee to look out, but I wasn’t really worried because it was only Pokey Peckham, and she was still a block down, going slow as ever.

You let go of her hand, so now it’s your fault, the kid said. He was looking at me and grinning, his lips drawn back so I could see all his little teeth. He said, You can’t hold onto nothing, dink-sucker. He stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry at me. Then he stepped back behind the bush.

Mrs Peckham said her accelerator stuck. I don’t know if the police believed her or not. All I know is she never taught first grade at Mary Day again.

Marlee bent over, picked up her thermos, and shook it. I could hear the rattle it made. She said, It’s all broke inside, and started crying. She bent down again, to get her lunchbox, and that was when Mrs Peckham’s gas pedal must have stuck because the engine roared and her Buick just leaped down the road. Like a wolf on a rabbit. Marlee stood up with the lunchbox clutched to her chest in one hand and the broken thermos bottle in the other, and she saw the car coming, and she never moved.

Maybe I could have pushed her out of the way and saved her. Or maybe if I’d run out into the street, I would have gotten hit too. I don’t know, because I was as frozen as she was. I just stood there. I didn’t even move when the car hit her. Not even my head moved. I just followed her with my eyes when Marlee flew and then crashed down on her poor soft head. Pretty soon I heard screaming. That was Mrs Peckham. She got out of her car and fell down and got up with her knees bleeding and ran for where Marlee was lying in the street with blood coming out of her head. So I ran too. When I got a little ways, I turned my head. By then I was far enough so I could see behind the hackberry bush. There was no one there.

3

Hallas stopped and put his face in his hands. At last he lowered them.

‘Are you all right, George?’ Bradley asked.

‘Thirsty is all. I’m not used to talking so much. There’s very little call for conversation on Death Row.’

I waved my hand at McGregor. He took out his earbuds and stood up. ‘All finished, George?’

Hallas shook his head. ‘There’s a lot more.’

Bradley said, ‘My client would like a drink of water, Mr McGregor. Is that possible?’

McGregor went to the intercom by the door to the monitoring station and spoke into it briefly. Bradley took the opportunity to ask Hallas just how big Mary Day Grammar School had been.

He shrugged. ‘Small town, small school. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty kids, grades one to six.’

The door of the monitoring room opened. A hand appeared, holding a paper cup. McGregor took it and brought it over to Hallas. He drank greedily and said thank you.

‘Very welcome,’ McGregor said. He went back to his chair, replaced the earbuds, and once more lost himself in whatever he was listening to.

‘And this kid – the bad little kid – was a carrottop? A real carrottop?’

‘Hair like a neon sign.’

‘So if he’d gone to your school, you would have recognized him.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t, and he didn’t.’

‘No. I never saw him there before, and never afterward.’

‘So how did he get the Jacobs girl’s lunchbox?’

‘I don’t know. But there’s a better question.’

‘What would that be, George?’

‘How did he get away from that hackberry bush? There was nothing but lawn on either side. He was just gone.’

‘George?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you sure there really was a kid?’

‘Her lunchbox, Mr Bradley. It was in the street.’

I don’t doubt that, Bradley thought, tapping his Uniball on his legal pad. It would have been if she’d had it all along.

Or (here was a nasty thought, but nasty thoughts were par for the course when you were listening to the bullshit story of a child-killer) maybe you had her lunchbox, George. Maybe you took it from her and threw it into the street to tease her.

Bradley looked up from his pad and saw from his client’s expression that what he was thinking might as well have been on a Teletype strip going across his forehead. He felt his face warming up.

‘Do you want to hear the rest? Or have you already made up your mind?’

‘Not at all,’ Bradley said. ‘Continue. Please.’

Hallas drank the rest of his water, and took up his tale.

4

For five years or more I dreamed about that bad little kid with the carroty hair and the beanie cap, but eventually the dreams went away. Eventually I got to a place where I believed what you must believe, Mr Bradley: that it was just an accident, that Mrs Peckham’s accelerator really did stick, as they sometimes will, and if there was a kid over there, teasing her … well, kids do tease sometimes, don’t they?

My dad finished his job for the Good Luck Company and we moved up to eastern Kentucky, where he went to work doing much the same thing as he had in Alabama, only on a grander scale. Plenty of mines in that part of the world, you know. We lived in the town of Ironville long enough for me to finish high school. In my sophomore year, just for a lark, I joined the Drama Club. People would laugh if they knew, I suppose. A little mousy fellow like me, who made a living doing tax returns for small businesses and widows, acting in things like No Exit? Talk about Walter Mitty! But I did, and I was good. Everyone said so. I thought I might even have a career in acting. I knew I was never going to be a leading man, but someone has to play the president’s economic adviser, or the bad guy’s second-in-command, or the mechanic who gets killed in the first reel of a movie. I knew I could play parts like that, and I thought people might actually hire me. I told my dad I wanted to major in drama when I got to college. He said okay, great, go for it, just make sure you have something to fall back on. I went to Pitt, where I majored in theater arts and minored in business administration.

The first play I was cast in was She Stoops to Conquer, and that’s where I met Vicky Abington. I was Tony Lumpkin and she was Constance Neville. She was a beautiful girl with masses of curly blond hair, very thin and high-strung. Far too beautiful for me, I thought, but eventually I got up enough nerve to ask her out for coffee. That was how it began. We’d sit for hours in Nordy’s – that’s the hamburger joint in Pitt Union – and she’d pour out all her troubles, which mostly had to do with her dominating mother, and tell me about her ambitions, which were all about the theater, especially serious theater in New York. Twenty-five years ago there still was such a thing.

I knew she got pills at the Nordenberg Wellness Center – maybe for anxiety, maybe for depression, maybe for both – but I thought, That’s just because she’s ambitious and creative, probably most really great actors and actresses take those pills. Probably Meryl Streep takes those pills, or did before she got famous in The Deer Hunter. And you know what? Vicky had a great sense of humor, which is something many beautiful women seem to lack, especially if they suffer from the nervous complaint. She could laugh at herself, and often did. She said being able to do that was the only thing that kept her sane.

We were cast as Nick and Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and got better reviews than the kids who played George and Martha. After that we weren’t just coffee buddies, we were a couple. Sometimes we made out in a dark corner of the Union, although those sessions often ended with her crying and saying she knew she wasn’t good enough, she’d fail at acting just like her mother said she would. One night – this was after the cast party for Deathtrap, our junior year – we had sex. It was the only time. She said she loved it, it was wonderful, but I guess it wasn’t. Not for her, anyway, because she’d never do it again.

In the summer of 2000, we stayed on campus because there was going to be a summer production of The Music Man in Frick Park. It was a huge deal because Mandy Patinkin was going to direct it. Vicky and I both tried out. I wasn’t a bit nervous, because I didn’t expect to get anything, but that show had become the biggest thing in Vicky’s life. She called it her first step to stardom, saying it the way people do when they’re joking but not really. We were called in by sixes, each of us holding a card saying the part we were most interested in, and Vicky was shaking like a leaf while we waited outside the rehearsal hall. I put my arm around her and she quieted, but just a little. She was so white her makeup looked like a mask.

I went in and handed over my wish-card with Mayor Shinn written on it, because that’s a smallish part in the show, and damned if I didn’t end up getting the lead role – Harold Hill, the charming con man. Vicky tried out for Marian Paroo, the librarian who gives piano lessons. She’s the female lead. She read all right, I thought – not great, not her best, but all right. Then came the singing.

It was Marian’s big number. If you don’t know it, it’s this very sweet and simple song called ‘Goodnight, My Someone.’ She’d sung it for me – a capella – half a dozen times, and she was perfect. Sweet and sad and hopeful. But that day in the rehearsal hall, Vicky screwed the pooch. That girl was just clench-your-fists-and-close-your-eyes awful. She couldn’t find her note and had to start again not once but twice. I could see Patinkin getting impatient, because he had half a dozen other girls waiting to read and sing. The accompanist was rolling her eyes. I wanted to punch her right in her stupid, horsey face.

By the time Vicky finished, she was trembling all over. Mr Patinkin thanked her, and she thanked him, all very polite, and then ran. I caught up with her before she could get out of the building and told her she had been great. She smiled and thanked me and said we both knew better. I said that if Mr Patinkin was as good as everyone said, he’d look past her nerves and see what a great actress she was. She hugged me and said I was her best friend. Besides, she said, there will be other shows. Next time I’ll take a Valium before I try out. I was just afraid it would change my voice, because I’ve heard that some pills can do that. Then she laughed and said, But how much worse could it be than it was today? I said I’d buy her an ice cream at Nordy’s, she said that sounded good, and off we went.

We were walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand, which made me remember all the times I walked back and forth to Mary Day Grammar holding hands with Marlee Jacobs. I won’t say those thoughts summoned him, but I won’t say they didn’t, either. I don’t know. I only know that some nights I lie awake in my cell, wondering.

I guess she was feeling a little better, because as we walked along she was talking about what a great Professor Hill I’d make, when someone yelled at us from the other side of the street. Only it wasn’t a yell; it was a donkey bray.

GEORGE AND VICKY UP IN A TREE! F-U-C-K-I-N-G!

It was him. The bad little kid. Same shorts, same sweater, same orange hair sticking out from under that beanie with the plastic propeller on top. Over ten years had passed and he hadn’t aged a day. It was like being thrown back in time, only now it was Vicky Abington, not Marlee Jacobs, and we were on Reynolds Street in Pittsburgh instead of School Street in Talbot, Alabama.

What in the world, Vicky said. Do you know that boy, George?

Well, what was I going to say to that? I didn’t say anything. I was so far beyond surprise I couldn’t even open my mouth.

You act like shit and you sing worse! he shouted. CROWS sing better than you do! And you’re UGLEEE! UGLEE VICKEE is what you are!

She put her hands over her mouth, and I remember how big her eyes were, and how they were filling up with tears all over again.

Suck his dink, why don’t you? he shouted. That’s the only way an ugly no-talent cunt like you will ever get a part!

I started for him, only it didn’t feel real. It felt like it was all happening in a dream. It was late afternoon and Reynolds Street was full of traffic, but I never thought of that. Vicky did, though. She caught me by the arm and pulled me back. I think I owe her my life, because a big bus went past only a second or two later, blaring its horn.

Don’t, she said. He’s not worth it, whoever he is.

There was a truck right behind the bus, and once they were both by us, we saw the kid running up the other side of the street with his big ass jouncing. He got to the corner and turned it, but before he did, he shoved down the back of his shorts, bent over, and mooned us.

Vicky sat down on a bench and I sat down beside her. She asked me again who he was, and I said I didn’t know.

Then how did he know our names? she asked.

I don’t know, I repeated.

Well, he was right about one thing, she said. If I want a part in The Music Man, I should go back and suck Mandy Patinkin’s cock. Then she laughed, and this time it was real laughing, the kind that comes all the way up from the belly. She threw back her head and just let fly. Did you see that little ugly butt? she said. Like two muffins ready for the oven!

That got me going. We put our arms around each other, and put our heads together cheek to cheek, and really howled. I thought we were okay, but the truth of it – you never see these things at the time, do you? – is that we were both hysterical. Me because it was the same kid from all those years ago, Vicky because she believed what he said: she was no good, and even if she was, she’d never be able to get on top of her nerves enough to show it.

I walked her back to Fudgy Acres, this big old apartment house that rented exclusively to young women – whom we still called coeds then – and she hugged me and told me again that I would make a great Harold Hill. Something about the way she said that worried me, and I asked if she was all right. She said, Of course I am, silly, and went running up the walk. That was the last time I saw her alive.

After the funeral, I took Carla Winston out for coffee, because she was the only girl in Fudgy Acres Vicky had been close to. I ended up pouring her cup into a glass, because her hands were shaking so badly I was afraid she’d burn herself. Carla wasn’t just brokenhearted; she blamed herself for what happened. The same way I’m sure Mrs Peckham blamed herself for what happened to Marlee.

She came across Vicky in the downstairs lounge that afternoon, staring at the TV. Only the TV was turned off. She said Vicky seemed distant and disconnected. She’d seen Vicky that way before, when she lost count of her pills and took one too many, or took them in the wrong order. She asked if Vicky wanted to go to the Wellness Center and get looked at. Vicky said no, she was fine, it had been a hard day but she’d be feeling better very soon.

There was a nasty little kid, Vicky told Carla. I fucked up my tryout, and then this kid started ragging on me.

That’s too bad, Carla said.

George knew him, Vicky said. He told me he didn’t, but I could tell he did. Do you want to know what I think?

Carla said sure. By then she was positive Vicky had screwed up her meds, smoked some dope, or both.

I think George put him up to it, she said. For a tease. But when he saw how upset I was, he was sorry and tried to make the kid stop. Only the kid wouldn’t.

Carla said, That doesn’t make sense, Vic. George would never tease you about a part. He likes you.

Vicky said, That kid was right, though. I might as well give up.

At this point in Carla’s story, I told her the kid had nothing to do with me. Carla said I didn’t even have to tell her that, she knew I was a good guy and how much I cared for Vicky. Then she started to cry.

It’s my fault, not yours, she said. I could see she was screwed up, but I didn’t do anything. And you know what happened. That’s on me, too, because she didn’t really mean to. I’m sure she didn’t.

Carla left Vicky and went upstairs to study. A couple of hours later, she went down to Vicky’s room.

I thought she might like to go out and get something to eat, she said. Or if the pills had worn off, maybe have a glass of wine. Only she wasn’t there. So I checked the lounge, but she wasn’t there, either. A couple of girls were watching TV, and one said she thought she saw Vicky going downstairs a little while ago, probably to do a wash.

Because she had some sheets, the girl said.

That worried Carla, although she wouldn’t let herself think why. She went downstairs, but there was no one in the laundry room and none of the washers was going. The next room along was the box room, where the girls stored their luggage. She heard sounds from there, and when she went in, she saw Vicky with her back to her. She was standing on a little stack of suitcases. She’d tied two sheets together to make a hanging rope. One end was noosed around her neck. The other was tied to an overhead pipe.

But the thing was, Carla told me, there were only three suitcases, and plenty of slack in the sheets. If she’d meant business, she would have used one sheet and stood some girl’s trunk on end. It was only what theater people call a dress rehearsal.

You don’t know that for sure, I said. You don’t know how many of her pills she might have taken, or how confused she was.

I know what I saw, Carla said. She could have stepped right off those suitcases and onto the floor without pulling the noose tight. But I didn’t think of that then. I was too shocked. I just yelled her name.

That loud shout from behind startled her, and instead of stepping off the suitcases, Vicky jerked and toppled forward, the suitcases sliding along the floor behind. She would have hit the concrete floor smack on her belly, Carla said, but there wasn’t that much slack in her rope. She still might have lived if the knot holding the two sheets together had given way, but it didn’t. Her falling weight pulled the noose tight and yanked her head up hard.

I heard the snap when her neck broke, Carla said. It was loud. And it was my fault.

Then she cried and cried and cried.

I got her out of the coffee shop and into a bus shelter on the corner. I told her over and over again that it hadn’t been her fault, and eventually she stopped crying. She even smiled a little.

She said, You’re very persuasive, George.

What I didn’t tell her – because she wouldn’t have believed it – was that my persuasiveness came from absolute certainty.

5

‘The bad little kid came after the people I cared about,’ Hallas said.

Bradley nodded. It was obvious that Hallas believed it, and if this story had come out at the trial, it might have earned the man a life sentence instead of a billet in Needle Manor. The jury very likely wouldn’t have been completely sold, but it would have given them an excuse to take the death penalty off the table. Now it was probably too late. A written motion requesting a stay based on Hallas’s story of the bad little kid would look like grasping at straws. You had to be in his presence, and see the absolute certainty on his face. To hear it in his voice.

The condemned man, meanwhile, was looking at him through the slightly clouded Plexiglas with a trace of a smile. ‘That kid wasn’t just bad; he was also greedy. For him, it always had to be a twofer. One dead; one left to baste in a nice warm gravy of guilt.’

‘You must have convinced Carla,’ Bradley said. ‘She married you, after all.’

‘I never convinced her completely, and she never believed in the bad little kid at all. If she had, she would have been at the trial, and we’d still be married.’ He stared through the barrier at Bradley, his eyes dead level. ‘If she had, she would have been glad that I killed him.’

The guard in the corner – McGregor – looked at his watch, removed his earbuds, and stood up. ‘I don’t want to hurry you along, Counselor, but it’s eleven thirty, and pretty soon your client has to be back in his cell for the midday count.’

‘I don’t see why you can’t count him right here,’ Bradley said … but mildly. It didn’t do to get on the mean side of any guard, and although McGregor was one of the better ones, Bradley was sure he had a mean side. It was a requirement for men charged with overseeing hard cons. ‘You’re looking at him, after all.’

‘Rules are rules,’ McGregor said, then raised his hand, as if to stifle a protest Bradley hadn’t made. ‘I know you’re entitled to as much time as you want this close to his date, so if you want to wait around, I’ll bring him back after count. He’ll miss his lunch, though, and probably you will too.’

They watched McGregor return to his seat and once more replace his earbuds. When Hallas turned back to the Plexi barrier, there was more than a trace of a smile on his lips. ‘Hell, you could probably guess the rest.’

Although Bradley was sure he could, he folded his hands on his blank legal pad and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me anyway?’

6

I declined the part of Harold Hill and dropped out of Drama Club. I had lost my taste for acting. During my final year at Pitt, I concentrated on my business classes, especially accounting, and Carla Winston. The year I graduated, we were married. My father was my best man. He died three years later.

One of the mines he was responsible for was in the town of Louisa. That’s a little south of Ironville, where he still lived with Nona McCarthy – Mama Nonie – as his ‘housekeeper.’ The mine was called Fair Deep. One day there was a rockfall in its second parlor, which was about two hundred feet down. Not serious, everyone got out fine, but my father went down with a couple of company guys from the front office to look at the damage and try to figure out how long it would take to get things up and running again. He never came out. None of them did.

That boy keeps calling, Nonie said later. She had always been a pretty woman, but in the year after my father died, she bloomed out in wrinkles and dewlaps. Her walk turned into a shuffle, and she hunched her shoulders whenever anyone came into the room, as if she expected to be struck. It wasn’t my father’s death that did it to her; it was the bad little kid.

He keeps calling. He calls me a nigger bitch, but I don’t mind that. I been called worse. That kind of thing rolls right off my back. What doesn’t is him saying it happened because of the present I gave your father. Those boots. That can’t be true, can it, Georgie? It had to’ve been something else. He had to’ve been wearing his felts. He never would have forgotten his felts after a mine accident, even one that didn’t seem serious.

I agreed, but I could see the doubt eating into her like acid.

The boots were Trailman Specials. She gave them to him for his birthday not two months before the explosion in Fair Deep. They must have set her back at least three hundred dollars, but they were worth every penny. Knee high, leather as supple as silk, but tough. They were the kind of boots a man could wear all his life and then pass on to his son. Hobnail boots, you understand, and nails like that can strike sparks on the right surface, just like flint on steel.

My dad never would have worn nailboots into a mine where there might be methane or firedamp, and don’t tell me he could have just forgot, not when he and those other two were toting respirators on their hips and wearing oxygen bottles on their backs. Even if he had been wearing the Specials, Mama Nonie was right – he would also have been wearing felts over them. She didn’t need me to tell her; she knew how careful he was. But even the craziest idea can work its way into your mind if you’re lonely and grief-stricken and someone keeps harping on it. It can wriggle in there like a bloodworm, and lay its eggs, and pretty soon your whole brain is squirming with maggots.

I told her to change her phone number, and she did, but the kid got the new one and kept calling, telling her my father had forgotten what he had on his feet and one of those hobnails struck a spark, and there went the old ballgame.

Never would have happened if you hadn’t given him those boots, you stupid black bitch. That’s the kind of thing he said, and probably worse that she wouldn’t tell me.

Finally she had the phone taken out altogether. I told her she had to have a phone, living by herself like she did, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said, Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night, Georgie. You don’t know how it is, lying awake and listening to the telephone ring and knowing it’s that child. What kind of parents he has to let him do such things I can’t imagine.

Unplug it at night, I said.

She said, I did. But sometimes it rings anyway.

I told her that was just her imagination. And I tried to believe it, but I never did, Mr Bradley. If that bad kid could get hold of Marlee’s Steve Austin lunchbox, and know how badly Vicky messed up her tryout, and about the Trailman Specials – if he could stay young, year after year – then sure, he could make a phone ring even if it was unplugged. Bible says the devil was set free to roam the earth, that God’s hand would not stay him. I don’t know if that bad little kid was the devil, but I know he was a devil.

Nor do I know if an ambulance call could have saved Mama Nonie. All I know is that when she had her heart attack, she couldn’t call for one because the phone was gone. She died alone, in her kitchen. A neighbor lady found her the next day.

Carla and I went to the funeral, and after Nonie was laid to rest, we spent the night in the house she and my father had shared. I woke up from a bad dream just before daybreak and couldn’t get back to sleep. When I heard the newspaper flop on the porch, I went to get it and saw the flag was up on the mailbox. I walked down to the street in my robe and slippers and opened it. Inside there was a beanie with a plastic propeller on top. I fished it out and it was hot, like the person who’d just taken it off was burning up with fever. Touching it made me feel contaminated, but I turned it over and looked inside. It was greasy with some sort of hair oil, the old-fashioned stuff hardly anyone uses anymore. There were a few orangey hairs sticking in it. There was also a note, printed the way a kid might do it – the letters all crooked and slanting downhill. The note said, KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.

I took the goddam thing inside – tweezed between my thumb and index finger, that was as much as I wanted to touch it – and stuck it in the kitchen woodstove. I put a match to it and it went up all at once: ka-floomp. The flames were greenish. When Carla came down half an hour later, she sniffed and said, What’s that awful smell? It’s like low tide!

I told her it was most likely the septic tank out back, full up and needing to be pumped, but I knew better. That was the stink of methane, probably the last thing my father smelled before something sparked and blew him and those two others to kingdom come.

By then I had a job with an accounting firm – one of the biggest independents in the Midwest – and I worked my way up the ladder pretty quickly. I find that if you come in early, leave late, and keep your eye on the ball in between, that just about has to happen. Carla and I wanted kids, and we could afford them, but it didn’t happen; she got her visit from the cardinal every month, just as regular as clockwork. We went to see an OB in Topeka, and he did all the usual tests. He said we were fine, and it was too early to talk about fertility treatments. He told us to go home, relax, and enjoy our sex life.

So that’s what we did, and eleven months later, my wife’s visits from the cardinal stopped. She had been raised Catholic, and stopped going to church when she was in college, but when she knew for sure she was pregnant, she started going again and dragged me with her. We went to St Andrew’s. I didn’t mind. If she wanted to give God the credit for the bun in her oven, that was okay with me.

She was in her sixth month when the miscarriage happened. Because of the accident that wasn’t really an accident. The baby lived for a few hours, then died. It was a girl. Because she needed a name, we named her Helen, after Carla’s grandmother.

The accident happened after church. When mass was over, we were going to have a nice lunch downtown, then go home, where I’d watch the football game. Carla would put her feet up and rest and enjoy being pregnant. She did enjoy it, Mr Bradley. Every day of it, even early on when she was sick in the mornings.

I saw the bad little kid as soon as we came out. Same baggy shorts, same sweater, same little round boy-tits and poochy belly. The beanie I found in the mailbox was blue, and the one he was wearing when we came out of the church was green, but it had the same kind of plastic propeller. I’d grown from a little boy to a man with the first threads of gray in his hair, but that bad little kid was still six years old. Seven at most.

He was standing back a little way. There was another kid in front of him. An ordinary kid, the kind who would grow up. He looked stunned and afraid. He had something in his hand. It looked like the ball on the end of the Bolo Bouncer Mama Nonie gave me all those years ago.

Go on, the bad little kid said. Unless you want me to take back that five bucks I gave you.

I don’t want to, the ordinary kid said. I done changed my mind.

Carla didn’t see any of this. She was standing at the top of the steps and talking to Father Patrick, telling him she’d enjoyed his homily, it had given her so much to think about. Those steps were granite, and they were steep.

I went to take her arm, I think, but maybe not. Maybe I was just frozen, the way I was when Vicky and I saw that kid after her lousy tryout for The Music Man. Before I could unfreeze, or say anything, the bad little kid stepped forward. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and whipped out a cigarette lighter. As soon as he flicked it and I saw the spark, I knew what had happened that day in the Fair Deep mine, and it had nothing to do with the hobnails on my father’s boots. Something started to fizz and spark on top of the red ball the ordinary kid was holding. He threw it just to get rid of it, and the bad little kid laughed. Except it was really a deep, snotty chuckle – hgurr-hgurr-hgurr, like that.

It struck the side of the steps, below the iron railing, and bounced back just before it went off with an ear-splitting bang and a flash of yellow light. That wasn’t a firecracker or even a cherry bomb. That was an M-80. It startled Carla the way Carla herself must have startled Vicky that day in the box room at Fudgy Acres. I grabbed for her, but she was holding one of Father Patrick’s hands in both of hers, and all I did was brush her elbow. They fell down the steps together. He broke his right arm and left leg. Carla broke an ankle and got a concussion. And she lost the baby. She lost Helen.

The kid who actually threw the M-80 walked into the police station the next day with his mother and owned up. He was devastated, of course, and said what kids always say and mostly mean after something goes wrong: it was an accident, he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. He said he wouldn’t have thrown it at all, except the other boy lit the fuse and he was scared he’d lose his fingers. No, he said, he’d never seen the other kid before. No, he didn’t know his name. Then he gave the policeman the five dollars the bad little kid had given him.

Carla didn’t want to have much to do with me in the bedroom after that, and she stopped going to church. I kept on, though, and got involved with Conquest. You know what that is, Mr Bradley, not because you’re a Catholic, but because this is where you came in. I didn’t bother with the religion part, they had Father Patrick for that, but I was happy to coach the baseball and touch football teams. I was always there for the cookouts and the campouts; I got a D code on my driver’s license so I could take the boys to swim meets, amusement park fun days, and teen retreats in the church bus. And I always carried a gun. The .45 I bought at Wise Pawn and Loan – you know, the prosecution’s Exhibit A. I carried that gun for five years, either in the glove compartment of my car, or in the toolbox of the Conquest bus. When I was coaching, I carried it in my gym bag.

Carla came to dislike my work with Conquest, because it took up so much of my free time. When Father Patrick asked for volunteers, I was always the first one to raise my hand. I’d have to say she was jealous. You’re almost never home on weekends anymore, she said. I’m starting to wonder if you might be a little queer for those boys.

Probably I did seem a little queer, because I made a habit of picking out special boys and giving them extra attention. Making friends with them, helping them out. It wasn’t hard. A lot of them came from low-income homes. Usually the single parent in those homes was a mom who had to work one minimum-wage job or even two or three to keep food on the table. If there was a car, she’d need it, so I’d be happy to pick my current special boy up for the Thursday-night Conquest meetings and bring him home again after. If I couldn’t do that, I’d give the boys bus tokens. Never money, though – I found out early that giving those kids money was a bad idea.

I had some successes along the way. One kid – I think he had maybe two pairs of pants and three shirts to his name when I met him – was a math prodigy. I got him a scholarship at a private school and now he’s a freshman at Kansas State, riding a full boat. A couple of others were dabbling in drugs, and I got at least one of them out of that. I think. You can never tell for sure. Another ran away after an argument with his mom and called me from Omaha a month later, right around the time his mother was deciding he was either dead or gone for good. I went and got him.

Working with those Conquest boys gave me a chance to do more good than I ever did filing tax returns and setting up tax-dodge corporations in Delaware. But that wasn’t why I was doing it, only a side effect. Sometimes, Mr Bradley, I’d take one of my special boys fishing out to Dixon Creek, or to the big river, on the lower city bridge. I was fishing, too, but not for trout or carp. For a long time I didn’t feel a single nibble on my line. Then along came Ronald Gibson.

Ronnie was fifteen but looked younger. He was blind in one eye, so he couldn’t play baseball or football, but he was a whiz at chess and all the other board games the boys played on rainy days. No one bullied him; he was sort of the group mascot. His father walked out on the family when he was nine or so, and he was starved for male attention. Pretty soon he was coming to me with all his problems. The main one, of course, was that bad eye. It was a congenital defect called a keratoconus – a misshapen cornea. A doctor told his mother it could be fixed with a corneal transplant, but it would be expensive, and his moms couldn’t afford anything like that.

I went to Father Patrick, and between us we ran half a dozen fundraisers called Fresh Sight for Ronnie. We even got on TV – the local news on Channel 4. There was one shot of Ronnie and me walking in Barnum Park with my arm around his thin shoulders. Carla sniffed when she saw it. If you aren’t queer for them, she said, people will say you are when they see that.

I didn’t care what people said, because not long after that news report, I got the first tug on my line. Right in the middle of my head. It was the bad little kid. I’d finally caught his attention. I could feel him.

Ronnie had the surgery. He didn’t get all the sight back in his bad eye, but he got most of it. For the first year afterward, he was supposed to wear special glasses that got dark in bright sunshine, but he didn’t mind that; he said they made him look sort of cool.

Not too long after the operation, he and his mother came to see me one afternoon after school in the little Conquest office in the basement of St Andrew’s. She said, If there’s ever anything we can do to pay you back, Mr Hallas, all you have to do is ask.

I told them that wasn’t necessary, it had been my pleasure. Then I pretended to get an idea.

There might be something, I said. Just a little thing.

What is it, Mr H? Ronnie asked.

I said, One day last month I parked behind the church, and was halfway down the stairs when I remembered I hadn’t locked up my car. I went back and saw a kid inside it, rummaging around. I shouted at him and he was out like a shot with my little change box, the one I keep in the glove compartment for tolls. I chased him, but he was too fast for me.

All I want, I told Ronnie and his moms, is to find him and talk to him. Tell him what I tell all you boys – stealing’s the wrong start in life.

Ronnie asked me what he looked like.

Short and kind of pudgy, I said. Bright orange hair, a real carrottop. When I saw him, he was wearing gray shorts and a green sweater with stripes the same color as his hair.

Mrs Gibson said, Oh my goodness. Was he wearing a little hat with a propeller on top?

Why, yes, I said, keeping my voice nice and steady. Now that you mention it, I believe he was.

I’ve seen him across the street, she said. I thought he moved into one of the projects over there.

What about you, Ronnie? I asked.

Nope, he said. Never seen him.

Well, if you do, don’t say anything to him. Just come and get me. Will you do that?

He said he would, and I was satisfied. Because I knew the bad kid was back, and I knew I’d be around when he made his move. He’d want me to be around, because that was the whole point. I was the one he wanted to hurt. All the others – Marlee, Vicky, my father, Mama Nonie – were just collateral damage.

A week went past, then two. I was beginning to think the kid had sensed what I was planning. Then one day – the day, Mr Bradley – one of the boys ran into the playground behind the church, where I was helping a bunch of them set up the volleyball net.

A kid knocked Ronnie down and stoled his glasses! this boy shouted. Then he ran off into the park! Ronnie’s chasing him!

I didn’t wait, just grabbed up my gym bag – I took it everywhere with me during the years when I had special boys – and ran through the gate into Barnum Park. I knew it wasn’t the bad little kid who stole Ronnie’s glasses; that wasn’t his style. The glasses stealer would be as ordinary as the M-80 thrower, and just as sorry after whatever the bad little kid was planning played out. If I let it play out.

Ronnie wasn’t an athletic boy, and he couldn’t run fast. The glasses-stealing boy must have seen that, because he pulled up short on the far side of the park, waving them over his head and shouting, Come and get em, Ray Charles! Come and get em, Stevie Wonder!

I could hear the traffic on Barnum Boulevard, and knew exactly what that bad boy was planning. He thought what worked once would work again. It was a pair of special glare-reducing glasses instead of a Steve Austin lunchbox, but the basic idea was the same. Later the kid who took Ronnie’s glasses would cry and say he didn’t know what was going to happen, he thought it was just a joke, or a tease, or maybe payback for Ronnie pushing the pudgy little carrottop down on the sidewalk.

I could easily have caught up with Ronnie, but at first I didn’t. He was my lure, you see, and the last thing I wanted was to reel him in too soon. When Ronnie got close, the boy doing the bad little kid’s dirty work darted through the stone arch between the park and Barnum Boulevard, still waving Ronnie’s glasses over his head. Ronnie ran after him and I came third. I jogged as I unzipped my gym bag, but once I had the revolver in my hand, I dropped the bag and went into overdrive.

Stay back! I shouted at Ronnie as I ran past him. Don’t you go one step further!

He did what I said, and thank God for that. If anything had happened to him, I wouldn’t be here waiting for the needle, Mr Bradley; I would have killed myself.

When I got through the arch, I saw the bad little kid waiting on the sidewalk. He was the same as always. The big kid was handing him Ronnie’s glasses, and the bad little kid was handing him a bill. When he saw me coming, he lost the nasty little smirk on those weird red lips of his for the first time. Because that wasn’t the plan. The plan was Ronnie first, then me. Ronnie was supposed to chase the bad little kid into the street and be hit by a truck or a bus. I was supposed to come last. And see it.

Carrottop ran into Barnum Boulevard. You know what it looks like outside the park – at least you ought to, after the prosecution showed their video three times at the trial. Three lanes in each direction, two for travel and one for turning, with a concrete divider in the middle. The bad little kid looked back when he got to the divider, and by then he was a lot more than startled. That look was pure fear. Seeing it made me happy for the first time since Carla went upsy-turvy down those church steps.

One quick glimpse was all I got, then he charged into the southbound lanes without a single look to see what might be coming at him. I ran into the northbound lanes the same way. I knew I might get hit, but I didn’t care. At least it would be a genuine accident, no mysterious stuck accelerator. You can call that suicidal, but it wasn’t. I just couldn’t let him slip away. I might not have seen him for another twenty years, and by then I would have been an old man.

I don’t know how close I came to getting creamed, but I heard plenty of screeching brakes and squalling tires. A car swerved to avoid the kid and sideswiped a panel truck. Someone called me a crazy asshole. Someone else shouted, What the fuck is he doing? That was just background noise. I had all my attention fixed on the bad little kid – eyes on the prize, right?

He was running as fast as he could, but no matter what kind of monster he was on the inside, on the outside he was stuck with short legs and a fat ass, and he never had a chance. All he could hope for was that a car would hit me, but none of them did.

He got to the far side and stumbled on the curb. I heard some woman – a stout lady with dyed blond hair – scream, That man has a gun! Mrs Jane Hurley. She testified at the trial.

The kid tried to get up. I said, This is for Marlee, you little sonofabitch, and shot him in the back. That was number one.

He started crawling on his hands and knees. Blood was dripping onto the sidewalk. I said, This is for Vicky, and put another one in his back. That was number two. Then I said, This is for my dad and Mama Nonie, and put a bullet into the back of each knee, just where those baggy gray shorts ended. That was three and four.

Lots of people were screaming by then. Some man was yelling, Get it away from him, just tackle him! But no one did.

The bad little kid rolled over and looked at me. When I saw his face, I almost stopped. He didn’t look six or seven anymore. Bewildered and in pain, he looked no more than five. His beanie had fallen off and lay next to him on its side. One of the two plastic propeller blades was all crooked. My God, I thought. I have shot a blameless child, and he’s lying here at my feet, mortally wounded.

Yes, he almost got me. It was a good act, Mr Bradley, real Academy Award stuff, but then the mask slipped. He could make most of his face all wounded and hurt, but not his eyes. That thing was still in his eyes. You can’t stop me, his eyes were saying. You won’t stop me until I’m done with you, and I’m not done with you yet.

Get the gun away from him, somebody! a woman yelled. Before he murders that child!

A big fellow ran toward me – he testified too, I believe – but I pointed my gun at him and he stepped away fast with his hands raised.

I turned back to the bad little kid and shot him in the chest and said, For Baby Helen. That was number five. By then blood was pouring out of his mouth and down his chin. My .45 was an old-fashioned six-shooter, so there was only one bullet left. I dropped to one knee in a puddle of his blood. It was red, but it should have been black. Like the goo that comes out of a poisonous insect when you step on it. I put the muzzle of the gun right between his eyes.

This is for me, I said. Now go back to whatever hell you came from. I pulled the trigger and that was number six. But just before I did, those green eyes of his met mine.

I’m not done with you, his eyes said. I’m not and I won’t be until you stop drawing breath. Maybe not even then. Maybe I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.

His head flopped over. One of his feet twitched and then went still. I put the gun down beside his body, raised my hands, and started to stand up. A couple of men grabbed me before I could. One of them kneed me in the groin. The other punched me in the face. A few more joined in. One was Mrs Hurley. She got me at least two good ones. She didn’t testify about that at the trial, did she?

Not that I blame her, Counselor. I don’t blame any of them. What they saw lying on the sidewalk that day was a little boy so disfigured by bullets that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Supposing he ever had one.

7

McGregor took Bradley’s client back into the bowels of Needle Manor for the midday count, promising to bring him back afterward.

‘I’ll bring you some soup and a sandwich, if you want it,’ McGregor told Bradley. ‘You must be hungry.’

Bradley wasn’t. Not after all that. He sat waiting on his side of the Plexiglas partition, hands folded on his blank legal pad. He was meditating on the ruination of lives. Of the two under current consideration, the demolition of Hallas’s was easier to accept, because the man was clearly mad. If he had taken the stand at his trial and told this story – and in the same reasonable, how-can-you-possibly-doubt-me tone of voice – Bradley felt sure Hallas would now be in one of the state’s two maximum security mental institutions instead of awaiting sequential injections of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride: the lethal cocktail Needle Manor inmates called Goodnight, Mother.

But Hallas, most likely pushed over the edge of sanity by the loss of his own child, had gotten at least half a life. It had clearly been an unhappy one, beset by paranoid fantasies and delusions of persecution, but – to bend an old aphorism – half a life was better than none. The little boy was a far sadder case. According to the state medical examiner, the child who had just happened to be on Barnum Boulevard at the wrong time had been no more than eight and probably closer to six or seven. That wasn’t a life, it was a prologue.

McGregor led Hallas back, chained him to his chair, and asked how much longer they’d be. ‘Because he didn’t want any lunch, but I wouldn’t mind having some.’

‘Not long,’ Bradley said. In truth he only had one question, and when Hallas was seated once more, he asked it.

‘Why you?’

Hallas raised his eyebrows. ‘Beg pardon?’

‘This demon – I presume that’s what you think he was – why did he pick you?’

Hallas smiled, but it was a mere stretching of the lips. ‘That’s rather naïve, Counselor. You might as well ask why one baby is born with a misshapen cornea, as Ronnie Gibson was, and the next fifty delivered in the same hospital are just fine. Or why a good man leading a decent life is struck down by a brain tumor at thirty and a monster who helped oversee the gas chambers of Dachau can live to be a hundred. If you’re asking why bad things happen to good people, you’ve come to the wrong place.’

You shot a fleeing child six times, Bradley thought, the last three or four at point-blank range. How in God’s name does that make you a good person?

‘Before you go,’ Hallas said, ‘let me ask you something.’

Bradley waited.

‘Have the police identified him yet?’

Hallas asked in the idle tone of a prisoner who is just making conversation in order to stay out of his cell a little longer, but for the first time since this lengthy visit began, his eyes shone with real life and interest.

‘I don’t believe so,’ Bradley replied carefully.

In fact, he knew they hadn’t. He had a source in the prosecutor’s office who would have given him the child’s name and background well before the newspapers got hold of it and published it, as they were of course eager to do; Unknown Boy Victim was a human interest story that had gone nationwide. It had died down in the last four months or so, but following Hallas’s execution, it would certainly flare up again.

‘I’d tell you to think about that,’ Hallas said, ‘but I don’t need to, do I? You’ve been thinking about it. It probably hasn’t been keeping you up nights, but yes, you’ve been thinking about it.’

Bradley didn’t reply.

This time Hallas’s smile was wide and genuine. ‘I know you don’t believe a word of what I’ve told you, and hey, who could blame you? But just for a minute engage those brains of yours and think about it. This was a white male child – the sort of kid most apt to be missed and eagerly sought after in a society that still values white male children above all others. The kiddies are fingerprinted these days as a matter of course when they start school, to help ID them if they’re lost, murdered, or abducted. I believe in this state it’s even a law. Or am I wrong?’

‘You’re not.’ Bradley said this reluctantly. ‘But it would be wrong to make too much of it, George. This kid happened to fall through the cracks, that’s all. It happens. The system is fallible.’

Hallas’s smile became a full-fledged grin. ‘Keep telling yourself that, Mr Bradley. You just keep telling yourself that.’ He turned and waved to McGregor, who removed his earbuds and got to his feet.

‘All done?’

‘Yes,’ Hallas said. He turned back to Bradley as McGregor bent to unchain him. His grin – the only one Bradley had ever seen on his face – was gone as if it had never been. ‘Will you come? When it’s time?’

‘I’ll be here,’ Bradley said.

8

And so he was, six days later, when the curtains in the observation room drew back at 11:52 a.m. to reveal the death chamber with its white tiles and Y-shaped table. Only two other witnesses were present. One was Father Patrick of St Andrew’s. Bradley sat with him in the back row. The district attorney was all the way down front with his arms folded across his chest and his eyes never leaving the room on the other side of the window.

The execution party (a grotesque term if ever there was one, Bradley thought) was in place. There were five in all: Warden Toomey; McGregor and two other guards; a pair of medical personages in white coats. The star of the show lay on the table, his outstretched arms secured by Velcro straps, but when the curtains opened, Bradley’s eye was first taken by the warden, who was weirdly sporty in an open-necked blue shirt.

Wearing a seatbelt around his waist and a three-point harness over his shoulders, George Hallas looked more ready to zoom off in a space capsule than to die by lethal injection. As per his request, there was no chaplain, but when he saw Bradley and Father Patrick, he raised one hand as far as the wrist straps would allow in a gesture of recognition.

Patrick raised a hand in return, then turned toward Bradley. His face was paper pale. ‘Have you ever attended one of these?’

Bradley shook his head. His mouth was dry, and he didn’t trust himself to speak in a normal tone of voice.

‘Me, either. I hope I’ll be all right. He …’ Father Patrick swallowed. ‘He was very good to all the children. They loved him. I just can’t believe … even now I just can’t believe …’

Bradley couldn’t, either. Yet he did. Had to.

The DA turned to them, frowning like Moses above his crossed arms. ‘Zip your lips, gentlemen.’

Hallas looked around the last room he would ever inhabit. He seemed bewildered, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was or what was happening. McGregor laid a hand on his chest in a comforting gesture. It was now 11:58.

One of the whitecoats – an IV tech, Bradley assumed – cinched a length of rubber tubing around Hallas’s right forearm, then slipped in a needle and taped it down. The needle was attached to an IV line. The line went to a wall console, where three red lamps burned above three switches. The second whitecoat moved to the console and clasped his hands before him. Now the only movement in the death chamber came from George Hallas, who was blinking his eyes rapidly.

‘Are they doing it?’ Father Patrick whispered. ‘I can’t tell.’

‘I can’t either,’ Bradley whispered back. ‘Maybe, but—’

There was an amplified click that made them both jump (the state’s legal representative remained as still as a statue). The warden said, ‘Can you folks hear me okay in there?’

The DA gave a thumbs-up, then crossed his arms again.

The warden turned to Hallas. ‘George Peter Hallas, you have been condemned to death by a jury of your peers, a sentence affirmed by this state’s supreme court and the Supreme Court of the United States of America.’

Like they ever said balls about it one way or the other, Bradley thought.

‘Do you have any last words before sentence is carried out?’

Hallas began to shake his head, then appeared to change his mind. He peered through the glass and into the observation room.

‘Hello, Mr Bradley. I’m glad you came. Listen, okay? I’d watch out, if I were you. Remember, it comes as a child.’

‘Is that it?’ the warden asked, almost jovially.

Hallas regarded the warden. ‘One more thing, I guess. Where in the Christ did you get that shirt?’

Warden Toomey blinked as if someone had suddenly flicked cold water in his face, then turned to the doctor. ‘Are you prepared?’

The whitecoat standing beside the panel nodded. The warden recited a mouthful of legal rigamarole, checked the clock, and frowned. It was 12:01 p.m. which made them a minute late. He pointed to the whitecoat like a stage director cueing an actor. The whitecoat flicked the switches and the three red lights turned green.

The intercom was still open and Bradley heard Hallas paraphrase Father Patrick. ‘Is it happening?’

No one answered. It didn’t matter. His eyes closed. He made a snoring sound. A minute passed. Another long, ragged snore. Then two minutes. Then four. No snores and no movement. Bradley looked around. Father Patrick was gone.

9

A cold prairie wind was blowing when Bradley left Needle Manor. He zipped his coat and stood taking long breaths, trying to get as much outside as possible into his insides, and as fast as he could. It wasn’t the execution per se; except for the warden’s bizarre blue shirt, it had seemed as prosaic as getting a tetanus shot or a shingles vaccination. That was actually the horror of it.

Something moved at the corner of his eye in the Chicken Run, where the condemned prisoners took their exercise. Except there wasn’t supposed to be anyone there. Exercise periods were canceled on days when an execution was scheduled. McGregor had told him this. And sure enough, when he turned his head, he saw the Chicken Run was empty.

Bradley thought, It comes as a child.

He laughed. He made himself laugh. It was just a well-deserved case of the whim-whams, no more than that. As if to prove it to himself, he shivered.

Father Patrick’s elderly Volvo had departed. There was no car but his own in the small visitors’ parking lot adjacent to Needle Manor. Bradley walked a few steps in that direction, then whirled suddenly toward the Chicken Run, the hem of his overcoat flapping around his knees. No one there. Of course not, Jesus Christ. George Hallas had been mad, and even if his bad little kid had been real, he was dead now. Six shots from a .45 pretty much guaranteed dead.

Bradley resumed walking, but when he got around the hood of his car, he once more came to a halt. An ugly scratch ran all the way from his Ford’s front bumper to the rear left taillight. Someone had keyed his car. In a maximum security prison where you had to pass three walls and a like number of checkpoints, someone had keyed his car.

Bradley’s first thought was of the DA, who had sat there with his arms crossed over his chest, a portrait of Talmudic self-righteousness. But the idea had no logic to support it. The DA had gotten what he wanted, after all; he had watched George Hallas die.

Bradley opened the car door, which he had not bothered to lock – he was in a prison, after all – and stood stock-still for several seconds. Then, as if controlled by a force outside himself, his hand rose slowly to his mouth and covered it. Lying on the driver’s seat was a beanie with a propeller on top. One of the two plastic blades was crooked.

At last he bent and plucked it up, tweezing it between two fingers just as Hallas had done. Bradley turned it over. A note had been tucked inside, the letters crooked and bunched together and downslanted. A kid’s printing.

KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.

He heard a child’s laughter, high and bright. He looked toward the Chicken Run, but it was still empty.

He turned the note over and saw another, even briefer communiqué:

SEE YOU SOON.

For Russ Dorr