to the chair.”
Jeff McCullough frowned. “When is the sheriff due back on the job?”
“Couple of weeks. We’ll have an arrest by then.”
Fate Harkryder was thirty-seven years old and looked fifty. His hair was shot with iron gray. A lifetime of smoking and hard times had etched deep creases between his nose and chin, and had stitched a chain of fine lines around the hollows of his eyes. He had not run to fat, though, as so many of the prisoners did, partly because Harkryder men were built short and wiry, and partly because Fate Harkryder stopped eating when he felt his body thicken. Fat was weakness, and in prison it did not do to give the appearance of weakness. Fate Harkryder liked to be left alone. He was soft-spoken and courteous to those he encountered, but people who mistook his remoteness for weakness did so only once. He had learned long ago that if you are polite and distant, people will leave you alone. He could fight if he had to, but he avoided it if he could do so without backing down. Shouting and striking people is a form of
intimacy, and for that reason alone Fate Harkryder avoided confrontations.
His lawyer had just left. This one was an earnest kid out of Nashville who was working pro bono because he claimed to hate the death penalty. He had offered his services when the state announced its intention of executing Fate Harkryder in six weeks’ time. Maybe he was a do-gooder, or maybe he wanted to get his name in the paper by representing an infamous man. It was all the same, though. Fate didn’t think there was much the kid could do, but for zero legal fees, he was welcome to try. What the hell.
Fate had lost count of the lawyers he’d gone through in twenty years. Some of them had only been voices on the phone, staying on the case just long enough to find some other sucker to take it off their hands. None of them stayed long. Fate wasn’t notorious enough to make a name for an ambitious litigator, and his family was too poor to make it worth anybody’s while to defend him. That had been the trouble to begin with. The court-appointed lawyer at his original trial went through the motions of defending him, but his efforts had been all but useless.
He sat on a concrete bench outside Pod Five and looked up at the hill beyond the river. The sun was warm against his skin, and he yawned and stretched, savoring the smell and feel of early summer. If he kept his eyes closed, he could picture the homestead back in east Tennessee. He wondered if it had changed much in the decades that he’d been gone. Probably not. The land had been farmed out two generations before he was born. Who’d want it now? He hadn’t even seen any pictures of the home place since he left, and what little news he had from the relatives at home never touched on the farm or the changing seasons, which they all took for granted, while he, deprived of it forever, would have traded them all for a hill and a meadow.
His father’s sister was the family correspondent. Her spelling was as haphazard as her narrative skills, but at least she made the effort two or three times a year, which is more than the rest of them did. Scrawled pencil notes on lined paper informed him of the birth of a child to cousins he dimly remembered as infants themselves, or the smudged pages wished him a merry Christmas, with a spidery postscript enumerating the Harkryders’ car troubles, job losses, and the illnesses of aging relatives. As if he cared. They were all like characters in a movie he had seen once and only vaguely recalled, without any real certainty about the names or their function in the story. In his memory, time in east Tennessee stood still. Hamelin was a sleepy little seventies community still peopled by folks who were old when he was seventeen and his brothers were still young men in their twenties, with unlined faces and thick dark hair. He knew that they had grown older, as he had in the years since he had seen them. They were as old now as his father had been back then, but somehow his mind would not adjust his memories to accommodate the aging process. He could not picture Tom’s cold steel