The thin crackle of gunfire interrupted him. He knew the gun. It was a .32 caliber subcompact Crown and it was firing into the police officers from behind. Two of the officers flinched and pulled their own triggers. The bullets flew just over Cole’s head as he threw himself down and rolled twice before leaping up and dashing for the side door. The exit came open just as he was about to throw his shoulder into it.
Another police officer had been opening it and as Cole crashed into it, the man received the full force of the blow on his chin. Although the armored cage covering his face took most of the impact, it was still enough to knock him momentarily senseless. He started to fall but caught himself. That wasn’t good enough, and Cole tackled him to the floor of the filthy alley. Punching the man would do nothing but break Cole’s knuckles, so he grabbed him by the mask and pounded the back of his helmet into the cement three times. With every strike, the officer’s eyes crossed and uncrossed. After the third time, Cole ripped the rifle from his slack hands and sprinted away.
He raced up the alley toward the front of the theater in time to see Corrina running across the street. “Go to where we slept last night!” he cried to her before aiming the rifle at the front door of the theater. Just as Hamilton appeared, Cole rattled off a dozen shots, aiming purposely high. The officers fled back inside. Afraid for Corrina, and wanting to lead the police away from her, he tossed aside the gun and ran back down the alley, leaping over the concussed man. He ran, determined not to look back even though he knew that at any second Hamilton would emerge from the theater and shoot him in the spine. He would be perfectly in his rights to do so.
The real danger lay in front of him. When he was halfway down the alley, a squad car suddenly turned in toward him, its brilliant lights blinding him. Cole turned back, his sight reduced by the strange yellow-purple blobs taking up most of his vision. After two steps he promptly tripped in a muddy pothole. Still half-blind he leapt up and ran for the closest door. It looked like any other, but instead of being polyfab and rotting, it was iron and when he slammed his shoulder into it, the frame held and Cole was sent flailing back.
A second time he tried, and although the building shook from the blow and the frame holding it in place was now twisted and bent, the door remained upright. One more hit would do it; however there was no time. Hamilton appeared like a black steel shadow and drove his mailed fist into the side of Cole’s head with the sound of an explosion. The light from the squad car mushroomed and spun. Like a marionette with all its strings cut, he fell, his limbs going suddenly loose.
He dropped, tried to get up and was hit again. After that things became a swirl of color and strange images. Cole remembered his cheek pressed against the formed ridges of a rubber mat in the footwell of a car. He remembered being held up against a wall of metal bars while his pockets were rifled. At some point he was naked and at another he was in a grey jumpsuit that smelled of bleach. Then there was darkness, cold darkness and he rolled into a ball.
Hours passed, although how many he had no idea. The darkness was not absolute. Light filtered in from around the cracks of his cell door. It was a never changing light and it gave no hint to the time of day. It revealed a hole in the floor where he could piss, chains around his ankles and wrists, and nothing else. His cell was a perfect four-foot cube. It wasn’t long enough to lie down in or to stand, for that matter. The smell from the hole was ghastly. It was the most uncomfortable place he had ever been in and the hours passed with glacial slowness.
Although they’d be his last hours, he wanted them over with. His head was thumping with pain and his conscience was throbbing with regret. He had killed an innocent man. There was no getting around it. The courts certainly wouldn’t. He had no defense against the accusation and he had no defense against the truth.
And then there was Corrina. After he was found guilty he’d be strung up by the neck in the basement of the courthouse, and his body was sent to the mulcher. Then the city would confiscate his money and his property. Corrina would have nothing except the clothes on her back and the little gun. He felt it would be better for her not to have the Crown. The desire to use it to would be too great and it would be only a matter of time before it got her in trouble.
He had other regrets that he worried and gnawed at as the night ticked over to day, Ashley Tinsley being the chief of these. He had been an idiot not to act on his feelings for her and now it was too late.
Foolishly, he had expected to sit in the cell for a day or more, but he hadn’t reckoned with the hatred the police had for him. At ten that morning a bailiff brought out the heavy iron key to his cell. The key got stuck and for a few frantic seconds Cole feared that he’d be trapped in the tiny cell forever and, quite inexplicably, that frightened him more than a noose ever would. Then, with a grunting curse, his jailor managed to turn the key and heaved back on the shrieking door.
“Come on. Out you go,” the jailor said. He was a small black man with small slumped shoulders, a small round head and face that resembled a toad. He carried a “jump-up” with him, which was basically a pole with a taser attached to one end. One zap would get a prisoner moving in no time.
Cole knew the jump-up by reputation and had no desire to test its power. He pushed himself up and shuffled along after the jailor who handed him over to a stone-faced guard. “Spit on me,” the guard warned, “and you’ll lose all your teeth.”
“I’m not going to spit. Don’t worry.” The guard grunted and marched down the dark, dank hall; Cole was forced to take a half dozen mincing steps for every one of the guards to keep up. The hall was lined with stacks of cells all like the one Cole had been in. The top-level cells were being emptied in turn and there was a queue of prisoners waiting their turn to be arraigned and possibly sentenced if they pled guilty, which they usually did. The entire process felt so pre-determined that it beat a great deal of hopelessness into the prisoners.
Perhaps it would’ve been the same for Cole if he’d been allowed to stew longer in the dark. He still had plenty of fight in him and he only grew feistier when his guard bypassed the line and pushed him to the front of a room full of prisoners standing in a snaking line. Cole was brought before a judge in black robes. He was Puerto Rican and older, with grey in his otherwise thick black hair. The pouches beneath his eyes had formed pouches of their own, giving him a perpetually sleepy look.
“This is the special?” he asked someone behind Cole. “Yeah? Alright. Cole Younger, you are accused of murder in the first degree. How do you plead? Guilty?”
Raising his gavel, he looked like he was ready to move on to the sentencing phase. “N-no,” Cole answered quickly. “I’m not guilty.”
“Are you saying you didn’t kill…” The judge squinted in at the paperwork. “One Mr. Scott Davidson?”
“He’s lying your honor.” The voice made Cole want to spit fire. Bruce Hamilton had pushed forward. In his armor he looked huge compared to the meek prisoners. “We have witnesses. This is Rich Carrol. He was in the theater at the time the murder took place.”
Carrol was nodding vigorously. He was long and skinny with an adam’s apple that stuck out two inches. It went up and down as he said, “That’s the man who barged in, demanding to see Scott. He was wild-eyed and panting. And he had a gun. I saw it. Then he shot Scott and told me not to tell anyone. I ran away then, thinking he was going to come after me next.”
“That’s not how…” Cole began.
The gavel came down, interrupting him. “You’ll have your turn, Mr. Younger. Go on, sir. You were saying you thought the defendant was going to kill you? Or is that all you have?”
“That’s all he has,” Hamilton answered, pushing Carrol behind him. “We also have a witness from a bar called Nitro’s who will attest to the fact that the defendant and a young money honey committed a form of necrophilia with the murdered man’s brother’s dead body.”
“Is this true?” the judge gasped.
Cole hesitated, not sure if he was allowed
to speak even though the judge was staring angrily down at him. “No. No. I stripped the body to try to determine who it was, and it was his tattoos that led me to the theater. The uh, honey, Officer Hamilton mentioned would be able to attest to this. Is she in custody?” The judge looked to Hamilton, who shook his head. Cole jumped in, “Then your honor is only hearing half the story. I am a bounty hunter in good stead with the city. I was tasked with looking into the death of Scott’s brother. This I did to the best of my ability. His death is a matter of concern and…”
“Which doesn’t absolve him of the murder of an unarmed man. We have a witness your honor.” Hamilton pointed to Carrol who tried to stand up taller. Normally a witness wasn’t even needed to show up in court to get a conviction.
“And did Mr. Carrol witness the person who shot at you, Officer Hamilton?” Cole asked. All eyes went to Carrol who shrugged and shook his head. Cole went on, quickly, “Your honor, there was an unknown person who shot at the police officers within seconds of all of this. I thought he was shooting at me too, so I ran.” This was a dead lie and it came out through a stiff throat. “It is, uh, not just a possibility that this other person, uh committed the act, it’s likely even.”
Hamilton strode forward waving his hands as if shaking them could negate Cole’s testimony. “No, your honor. The accused is just trying to muddy the water. The person who shot at us was his little whore. She was using some sort of kiddie piece, like a .32 or something. Davidson was killed by a .44, which was the same sort of gun Younger had on him.”
“Isn’t in true that I had two guns on me at the time and both were .44s?” Cole asked. Hamilton nodded at this. “And do you know how many guns the other shooter had? No, because you never saw the person. And how did you know it was a .44 that killed Davidson? Do you have a ballistic report you can show the judge?” That would’ve taken real police work and Cole knew Hamilton hadn’t bothered to cover the basics when his face went red.
The judge’s lip curled. He disliked cases that weren’t open and shut when it came to people working for the city. You never knew who had a powerful protector who could swoop in and demand answers. And he especially didn’t like cases that lingered, especially since the governor prided himself on how efficient his justice system was compared to previous administrations. Thirty-six hours from processing to sentencing was the standard that was set. “How long is the wait on the black line?” he asked one of the court assistants who sat directly behind him on the floor.
There was always a wait these days. The governor also boasted of being a kinder administration with but one executioner—they actually had six, but only one worked at a time. “There are forty-one ahead of him so about twenty hours,” was the answer.
“This is simple enough,” the judge stated. “I hereby find you guilty, Mr. Younger of murder in the first, conditioned upon the discovery of evidence to the contrary.”
“What’s that mean?” Cole asked, in something of a whisper.
The judge leaned forward and looked down at Cole over the brimming bags of his eyes. “It means you’re guilty unless evidence is found that contradicts that. Officer Hamilton? I trust you’ll do your due diligence and make a concerted effort to track down the file on Mr. Davidson? The morgue usually does an excellent job keeping the proper records for this sort of thing.” This put all the onus on the cop in case anyone got their panties in a bunch.
Hamilton knew the game and he knew how to play it. He grinned behind his cage. “Of course, your honor. I only live to see justice done.” Hamilton would put in the request for the file through the usual means and he would get it in the usual time frame: three to four days. By then Cole would be mulch, his shredded body used as bait to attract catfish or shark.
Cole’s knees wanted to buckle, however he forced them to remain locked. He wasn’t going to give Hamilton the satisfaction of seeing weakness. “This way,” the stoic guard said. There was only one exit from the courtroom. It entered onto a hall which branched. The prisoners sentenced to hard labor went to the right. Those that were sentenced to death went to the left. The city didn’t have a death row, it had a series of stacked cages, where prisoners were shoved in with no apparent order.
To keep track of things, a number was pinned on their prison jumpsuits. Cole’s was number seventy-eight. There was a crust of vomit on it. Puking was a common occurrence in the cages giving a sour edge to the air.
Number forty was called as Cole was pushed into the cramped room. “Where are you, Forty?” a jailor demanded. Number Forty ducked his head, his chains rattling as he shook. He’d been shaking for the last hour, ever since number thirty-seven had been called.
“He right here,” the woman next to Cole said in a flat voice. She had blank eyes and might as well be blind for all they saw. She had reached such an advanced state of hopelessness that she wished she was number forty.
Number Forty was pulled from the cage. His legs failed him and so he was dragged down the narrow lane between the cages. Cole was pointed to the now empty cage. It made no sense to rage against the dying of the light and he went in, meekly. He glanced once at the woman only to look away just as quickly. Her grief at her coming death had undone her and he felt sickened by her misery.
“Whatchu done to get here?” the man to his left asked. He was a Puerto Rican with deep, dark, sad eyes.
Cole shrugged. He had not murdered anyone, but he had killed an innocent man. His real crime, however, was sticking to his convictions. Just at the moment, with blood on his hands, those convictions felt antiquated and useless. “I shot a man. I killed him.”
“Me too,” the Puerto Rican admitted. “I fucked up. He shoulda just…” He left off, shaking his head. He said nothing more after that. Very few people spoke, at least to their neighbors. Some found God and prayed in whispers. Some cried softly, their chests hitching. Some called out to the guards, uselessly proclaiming their innocence.
The hours crept by. The woman was hauled away in numb silence. The Puerto Rican followed soon after, his lips pursed into tiny shriveled prunes. Others left, others came. At some point, Cole received two new neighbors. The one on his right pissed himself as he was sitting in his cage. He twisted his legs together to hide it. He didn’t bother hiding his tears.
Where the Puerto Rican had been was a man with a dreadful case of slag. His face was swollen and deformed. One cheek had an immense tumor building beneath it like a volcano. The mass pushed the flesh outward so that his left eye was nearly engulfed in folds of flesh and his mouth was pulled into a continual smirking grimace. He had the number eighty pinned to his chest.
“Oh God, that guy pissed himself,” Eighty said to Cole. “It stinks. Jeeze, he smells like piss.”
“Yeah,” Cole agreed, quietly. His neighbor wanted to talk, but Cole only answered in grunts until his neighbor turned to the man above him and bitched about the unfairness of everything. After an hour, Cole wanted to reach through the bars and strangle him. Killing him would’ve been a mercy for everyone and that included the prisoner, himself. He was clearly rotting from the inside out, and yet he clung to the last minutes of his life with all the energy he had.
As Cole’s time neared, he tuned him out. He prayed, not for a last-minute reprieve, which would only delay the inevitable, but for forgiveness. He had lied on occasion and stole when there was a grey area of ownership, and he had committed adultery with three married women, and he had taken the Lord’s name in vain too many times to count. It was a long confession that was still going on when number seventy-seven was called.
He paused to look down at the number pinned to his jumpsuit. Sadly, it was still seventy-eight.
So far, the executions had taken an average of twenty-nine minutes. While one body was pulled down and shuttled off to the mulcher, the next prisoner was reminded of his sentence, given a moment to make a statement or voice a prayer before he was walked up to the scaffolding. A formal declaration was made, the noose was tied and, out of a long tradition,
the prisoner was forced to wait a full minute just in case there was a last second call from the governor. The phone never rang. Every few months someone would pick it up just to see if it had a dial tone.
The floor was then dropped beneath the prisoner and a fifteen-minute timer was set. Regardless of whether the prisoner was dead or alive he was then sent off to be mulched and the entire process repeated.
The hours had passed slowly, a year at a time or so they felt, but Cole’s last minutes were another story. They were in a race, a sprint, a mad dash for the finish line. Then there was the guard striding down the row of cages. “Fuuuck,” Cole said, exhaling. It’ll be just a little tight, he told himself, closing his eyes. It won’t hurt for but a few seconds. No big deal. You can do a few seconds.
Just as the guard raised the clipboard he was carrying, Cole looked away and found himself staring into the distorted face of the slag next to him. With the swelling it seemed as though he were giving Cole a sly winking smile. “You’re up to bat, pussy. You know what? You look like the kinda guy who’ll shit himself when the time comes. Or are you a crier? Does wittle baby want his mommy? Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”
For some reason his shrieking laughter and his warped inhuman face froze Cole and he found himself gripping the bars of his little cage with all his might. All his stoicism went out the window and just then he did in fact feel the near overwhelming need to defecate. He couldn’t believe it, he really was going to shit himself.
Chapter 11
Cole had to tighten his sphincter as if he had a hold of it with his fist, and at the same time, his head felt swimmy and his chest had constricted so that he could barely suck in half a breath. He tried to tell himself that this was normal before an execution, but that only made everything worse.
“He’s gonna puke!” the deformed slag cried out as if anyone in the room would find any sort of amusement in the pain of one of their fellows. He pointed with both his chained hands at Cole, his face going scarlet in his vile mirth.
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 10