Tequila smacked his hand against the hood of the Buick. “Is that enough?” he asked Watkins. “Have you got what you need?”
Watkins looked at me, and then he looked at the recorder in his hand. His jaw clenched and unclenched.
“No,” he said. “This wasn’t what I came here for. Nothing about this is right. And maybe it doesn’t matter, and maybe nobody even really cares, but you did it. You tortured that confession out of Chester. You did it, and I know you did it.”
“Yeah? Well, you know what you know, and I know what I know,” I told him.
“Splendid,” Tequila said. “We’ve reached an impasse. A man is dead and none of us are sure whether or not we’ve accomplished anything.”
I nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here, because I am ready to go eat some chicken,” Tequila said. “Put your goddamn seat belt on, Grandpa. We’ve done about as much damage as we can do in this dump.”
I was already sitting on the side of the backseat, with my legs hanging out of the car, so I turned and slid them inside, and Tequila shut the door. He walked around to the other side of the car, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition. As we backed out of the parking lot, Carlos Watkins stood in the pool of the headlights. Then, Tequila cut the wheel, and Watkins receded into the background.
“I’m going to call Dr. Feingold tomorrow,” Rose said.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m going to do the chemotherapy. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I don’t want … that.”
“All right,” I said.
So, all in all, it was a pretty good night.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Running Out of Road is a work of fiction, but the Riverbend prison is a real place and real people work for the Tennessee Department of Correction, so it’s important to acknowledge that I took some creative liberties with the layout and security procedures of the prison, and the execution protocols described in this book are based on those used in various states but may not all match the procedures used in Tennessee.
I am of the opinion that the needless complexity of execution by lethal injection creates the risk that any execution could be botched, but no execution has been botched in the manner described in this story in the state of Tennessee, with a condemned prisoner suffering chemical burns due to the infiltration of lethal drugs into the flesh around the injection site. What happened to Chester March is based on the 2006 execution of Ángel Nieves Díaz in Florida and the 2014 execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.
However, after the 2018 execution of Billy Ray Irick, during which witnesses said Irick moaned and pulled against his restraints, three condemned inmates in Tennessee opted to be executed by electrocution rather than lethal injection.
During my research for this book, I relied on the excellent coverage of executions at Riverbend by reporters from The Tennessean, including Dave Boucher, Jamie Satterfield, and Adam Tamburin. The guy who shows up with the boom box to blast AC/DC during executions at Riverbend is real, and I know about him because of the coverage in The Tennessean.
A 2014 New Republic article about the execution of Ángel Díaz by editor Ben Crair was also a valuable resource. If you found the descriptions of the chemical burns and skin slippage that occurred during the execution of Chester March insufficiently detailed, I recommend looking up Crair’s article, which contains photos from Díaz’s autopsy. If you would not like to see photos of those things, I looked at them so you don’t have to.
I’d also like to give a special acknowledgment to the great James Ellroy. I met Ellroy at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in 2014, and I asked him if he had any writerly advice to offer. He told me that I should start introducing myself to people as “Donkey Dan” to see if I could get a rumor started. But over the course of 2015 and 2016, I read his L.A. Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy, and those books are fantastic.
My original plan for this book was that Buck’s antagonist in the present-day scenes would be Ed Heffernan, the appellate lawyer. The problem I had was that, since there is no witness testimony in an appellate proceeding, there was no occasion for there ever to be any sort of confrontation between these characters. A dramatic scene in which Heffernan pleads for Chester’s life before the Tennessee Supreme Court didn’t work, because there was nothing for Buck to do there except watch. In the end, the appellate argument, which I thought was going to be the climax of the book, was something I cut out entirely, and the solution to my boring lawyer problem was Carlos Watkins and American Justice. Ellroy’s books inspired the idea to frame Watkins’s narration as transcripts from his radio broadcast—Ellroy used a similar device to depict J. Edgar Hoover in the Underworld USA trilogy.
So, you should read James Ellroy if you haven’t; he’s a peerless eminence in crime fiction, and his books are a hell of a lot of fun. And I will pass along and endorse his indispensable advice that you should always boast about the size of your genitals to people you just met, particularly in professional contexts.
I want to thank my agent, Victoria Skurnick, and the team at Levine Greenberg Rostan, particularly rights manager Elizabeth Fisher. I’d also like to thank my editor, Hannah Braaten, and editorial assistant Nettie Finn at Minotaur, as well as my former editor Marcia Markland. Also, many thanks to Yuriko Noguchi, who translates these books into Japanese for Tokyo Sogensha. My understanding is that he makes me look very good.
Thanks as well to my mother, Elaine Friedman, my bubbi Goldie Burson, my brother Jonathan Friedman, my sister-in-law Rachel Friedman, and my nieces Hannah and Lyla.
This series would never have existed without my grandparents, Buddy and Margaret Friedman. Buddy passed away in 2014, and Margaret hung on until 2018. She was born on the Oklahoma frontier in a house without plumbing or electricity, and she lived to be 101 years old. She built the preschool at the Memphis Jewish Community Center, and she outlived both of her sons. She witnessed things nobody now alive remembers, and she suffered losses no one should ever have to endure. We’re better off for having known her, and we will never again see her equal.
ALSO BY DANIEL FRIEDMAN
BUCK SCHATZ MYSTERIES
Don’t Ever Get Old
Don’t Ever Look Back
Riot Most Uncouth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL FRIEDMAN is a graduate of the University of Maryland and NYU School of Law. He lives in New York City. Don’t Ever Get Old was nominated for the Edgar Award, the Thriller Award, and the Anthony Award, and won a Macavity Award for Best First Novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part 1: 2011: Something I Don’t Want to Remember
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part 2: 1955: Jew Detective
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part 3: 2011: Kind of Racist
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part 4: 1976: Buck Schatz
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part 5: 2011: American Justice
Chapter 24
&
nbsp; Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
Also by Daniel Friedman
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
RUNNING OUT OF ROAD. Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Friedman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: background © OC Art and Design/Shutterstock.com; man © ashva/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Friedman, Daniel, 1981– author.
Title: Running out of road / Daniel Friedman.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Minotaur Books, 2020. | Series: Buck schatz series; 3
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041960 | ISBN 9781250058485 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781466862715 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Death row inmates—Fiction. | Older men—Fiction. | Retirees—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3606.R5566 R86 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041960
eISBN 9781466862715
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First Edition: March 2020
Running Out of Road Page 23