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  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ . . .”

  “Don’t use that name in vain! I’m sensitive to those things.”

  “I just meant . . .”

  Blair Sullivan pitched forward again. “Do you think these chains could really hold me if I wanted to rip your face off? Do you think these puny little bars could contain me? Do you think I could not rise up and burst free and tear your body apart and drink your blood like it was the water of life in a second’s time?”

  Cowart recoiled sharply.

  “I can. So don’t anger me, Cowart.”

  He stared across the table.

  “I am not crazy and I believe in Jesus, though he’ll most likely see my ass kicked straight to hell. But it don’t bother me none, no sir, because my life’s been hell, and so should my death be.”

  Blair Sullivan was silent. Then he leaned back in the metal seat and readopted his lazy, almost insulting tone. “You see, Cowart, what separates me from you ain’t bars and chains and all that shit. It’s one simple little detail. I am not afraid of dying. Death, where is your sting, I fear it not. Put me in the chair, shoot me up with a lethal injection, plop me down in front of a firing squad, or stretch me by the neck. Hell, you can throw me to the lions and I’ll go along saying my prayers and looking forward to the next world, where I suspect I’ll raise as much hell as I have in this one. You know what’s strange, Cowart?”

  “What?”

  “I’m more afraid of living here like some damn beast than dying. I don’t want to be poked and prodded by shrinks, argued and discussed by lawyers. Hell, I don’t want to be written about by you guys. I just want to move on, you know. Move right on.”

  “That’s why you fired the attorneys? That’s why you’re not contesting your conviction?”

  He barked a laugh. “Sure. Hell, Cowart, look at me. What do you see?”

  “A killer.”

  “Right.” Sullivan smiled. “That’s right. I killed those folks. I’d of killed more if I hadn’t been caught. I’d of killed that trooper—man, he was one lucky sonuvabitch. All I had was my knife, which I was busy using on that little gal to have some fun. I left my damn gun with my pants, and he got a clean drop on me. Still don’t know why he didn’t shoot me then and save everybody so damn much trouble. But, hell, he got me fair and square. I can’t complain about that. I had my chances. He even read me my rights after he got me cuffed. His voice was cracking and his hands were twitching, and he was more excited than I was, by a long shot. And, anyway, I hear that arresting me gave his career a real boost, and I take some pride in that, yes sir. So, what I got to argue about? Just give some more fucking lawyers more fucking work. Screw ’em. It ain’t like life is so great I got a real need to hang around, you know.”

  Both men were silent, considering the words which hung in the air inside the cage.

  “So, Cowart, you got a question?”

  “Yes. Pachoula.”

  “Nice town. Been there. Real friendly. But that ain’t a question.”

  “What happened in Pachoula?”

  “You been talking to Robert Earl Ferguson. You gonna do a story about him? My old tier mate?”

  “What happened between you two?”

  “We got to talking. That’s all.”

  Blair Sullivan, faint smile flitting about his face, relaxed, toyed with his answers. Cowart wanted to shake the man, rattle the truth out of him. But instead, he kept asking questions. “What did you talk about?”

  “His unfair conviction. You know those cops beat that boy to obtain his confession? Hell, all they had to do for me was buy me a Coca-Cola and I was talking their ears off.”

  “What else?”

  “We talked about cars. Seems we were partial to similar vehicles.”

  “And?”

  “Coincidence. We talked a bit about being in the same place at about the same time. A remarkability, that, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “We talked about that little town and what happened to make it lose its virginity, like.” Again Sullivan grinned. “I like that. Lose its virginity. Ain’t that what happened? To that little girl and to that town.”

  “Did you kill that girl? Joanie Shriver. Did you kill her?”

  “Did I?” Blair Sullivan rolled his eyes and smiled. “Now, let me see if I can recollect. You know, Cowart, they all start to bunch together in my memory. . . .”

  “Did you?”

  “Hell, Cowart. You’re starting to sound all frantic and excited the way Bobby Earl did. He got so damn frustrated with my natural recollection process he like to kill me. Now, that’s an unusual thing, even for Death Row, don’t you think?”

  “Did you?”

  Blair Sullivan pitched forward in his seat again, dropping the jocular, teasing tones, whispering hoarsely, “You’d like to know, huh?” He rocked back in the seat, eyeing the reporter. “Tell me something, Cowart, will you?”

  “What?”

  “You ever felt the power of life and death in your hands? Did you ever know the sweet feeling of strength, know you control someone else’s life or death? Completely. Utterly. All of it. Right there in your hand. You ever felt that, Cowart?”

  “No.”

  “lt’s the best drug there is. It’s just like shooting electricity into your soul with a needle. There ain’t nothing like knowing that someone’s life is yours. . . .”

  He held up his fist, as if he was holding a fruit. He squeezed the air. The handcuff chain rattled in the metal bracket. “Let me tell you a few things, Cowart.” He paused, staring at the reporter. “One: I am filled with power. You may think I am an impotent prisoner, handcuffed and shackled and locked in an eight-by-seven cell each night and day, but I am filled with strength that reaches way beyond those bars, sir. Far beyond. I can touch any soul I want to, just as easy as dialing a telephone. No one is beyond my reach, Cowart. No one.”

  He stopped, then asked, “Got that?”

  Cowart nodded.

  “Two: I ain’t going to tell you if I killed that little girl or not. Hell, if I told you the truth, it would make everything too easy. And how could you believe me, anyway? Especially after all the things the papers have written about me. What sort of credibility do I have? If killing somebody’s easy for me, how easy you think is lying?”

  Cowart started to speak, but a single glance from Sullivan made him halt, his mouth open.

  “You want to know something, Cowart? I quit school in tenth grade, but I never quit learning. I’ll bet I’m better read and better educated than you. What do you read? Time and Newsweek. Maybe The New York Times Book Review? Probably Sports Illustrated when you’re on the can. But I’ve read Freud and Jung and kinda prefer the disciple to the master. I’ve read Shakespeare, Elizabethan poetry and American history, with an emphasis on the Civil War. I like novelists, too, especially ones that are filled with the politics of irony like James Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad, and Orwell. I like to read classics. Little bit of Dickens and Proust. I enjoy Thucydides and reading about the arrogance of the Athenians, and Sophocles because he talks about each and every one of us. Prison’s a great place for reading, Cowart. Ain’t nobody gonna tell you what to read or not. And you got all the time in the world. I suspect it’s a damn sight better than most graduate schools. Of course, this time I don’t exactly have all that time, after all, so now I just occupy myself with the Good Book.”

  “Hasn’t it taught you anything about truth and charity?”

  Blair Sullivan screeched a laugh that echoed about the cage. “I like you, Cowart. You’re a funny man. You know what the Bible’s all about? It’s about cheating and killing and lying and murder and robbery and idolatry and all sorts of things that are right up my alley, so to sp
eak.”

  The prisoner stared over at Cowart. He smiled wickedly. “Okay, Cowart. Let’s have some fun.”

  “Fun?”

  “Yeah.” He giggled and wheezed. “About seven miles from the spot where little Joanie Shriver was killed, there is an intersection where County Route Fifty intersects with State Route One-Twenty. A hundred yards before that intersection there is a small culvert that runs under the roadway, right near a big old stand of willow trees that kinda droop down and toss a bit of shade on the road on a summer day. If you were to pull over your car at that spot and go down to the right-hand side of that culvert and reach your hand down under the lip where the culvert pipe protrudes out, stick your hand right under whatever greasy old water is flowing through there, you might find something. Something important. Something real interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Cowart. You don’t expect me to spoil the surprise, do you?”

  “Suppose I go and find this something, what then?”

  “Then you’ll have a real intriguing question to pose to your readers in your articles, Cowart.”

  “What question is that?”

  “How does Blair Sullivan know how this item got to that location?”

  “I . . .”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it, always? How does he know something? You’ll have to figure it out for yourself, Cowart, because you and I ain’t gonna talk again. Not at least until I can feel the breath of Mr. Death right behind my neck.”

  Blair Sullivan stood up then and suddenly bellowed, “Sergeant! I’m finished with this pig! Get him outa my sight before I eat his head right off!”

  He grinned at Cowart, rattling his chains while the air reverberated with the echo of the murderer’s voice and the impatient sound of footsteps hurrying toward the cage.

  6

  THE CULVERT

  A light breeze out of the south played with the increasing morning heat, sending great gray-white clouds sliding across the rich blue of the Gulf sky and swirling the moist air about him as he crossed the motel’s parking lot. Cowart carried a bag with a pair of gardening gloves and a large lantern-flashlight purchased the evening before at a convenience store. He quickstepped toward his car, preoccupied with what he’d heard from the two men on Death Row, confident that he was heading toward a puzzle piece that would complete the picture in his mind. He did not see the detective until he was almost upon him.

  Tanny Brown was leaning up against the reporter’s car, shading his eyes with his hand, watching him approach.

  “In a hurry to get somewhere?” the detective asked.

  Cowart stopped in his tracks. “You’ve got good sources. I only got in last night.”

  Tanny Brown nodded. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Not too much gets by us in a little place like Pachoula.”

  “You sure about that?”

  The detective refused to rise to the bait. “Perhaps I’d better not take it as a compliment,” he said slowly. Then he continued. “How long you planning on staying?”

  Cowart hesitated before replying. “This sounds like a conversation out of some B movie.”

  The detective frowned. “Let me try again. I heard last night that you’d checked into the motel here. Obviously you still have some unanswered questions, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Right.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  Cowart didn’t reply. Instead he watched as the detective shifted about. He had an odd thought: Even though it was bright daylight, the policeman had a way of narrowing the world down, compressing it the way the night does. He could sense a nervousness within him and a small, unsettling vulnerability.

  “I thought you’d already made up your mind about Mr. Ferguson and us.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  The detective smiled, shaking his head slowly, letting Cowart know he recognized this for a lie. “You’re a hard case, aren’t you, Mr. Cowart?”

  He did not say this angrily or aggressively, but mildly, as if prompted by a bemused curiosity.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Lieutenant.”

  “I mean, you got an idea in your head and you aren’t gonna let go of it, are you?”

  “If you mean have I got some serious doubts about the guilt of Robert Earl Ferguson, well, yes, that’s true.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Mr. Cowart?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The detective took a deep breath, then leaned forward, speaking barely above a whisper. “You’ve seen him. You’ve talked to him. You’ve stood right next to the man and smelled him. Felt him. What do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t tell me that your skin didn’t shrivel up a bit and you didn’t feel a little sweat under the arms when you were talking with Mr. Ferguson, can you? That what you’d expect talking to an innocent man?”

  “You’re talking about impressions, not evidence.”

  “That’s right. Don’t tell me that you don’t deal in impressions. Now what do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hell you don’t”

  In that moment, Cowart remembered the tattoos on the pale flesh of Blair Sullivan’s arms. Some painstaking artist had constructed a pair of ornate Oriental dragons, one on each forearm, which seemed to slither down across the skin, undulating with each small flex of the man’s tendons. The dragons were a faded red and blue ornamented with green scales. Their claws were extended and their jaws gaped open in menace so that when Sullivan reached out his arms to seize something or someone, so did the pair of dragons. He thought, right then, of blurting out Sullivan’s name and watching its impact on the detective, but it was too important a clue to waste like that.

  The detective stared at the reporter, shifting his weight forward and speaking softly. “You ever watched a pair of old, mean dogs, Mr. Cowart? You know the way they sort of snuffle about, circling around, measuring each other up? The thing that always made me wonder was how it was those old dogs decided to fight. Sometimes, you know, they get the scent and then just back on down, maybe wag their old tails a bit, and then go on about their business of being a dog, whatever it is. But sometimes, just quick as you know, one dog’ll growl and bare those teeth and they all of a sudden start to rip into each other as if their damn lives depended on tearing the other’s throat out.” He paused. “You tell me, Mr. Cowart. Why do those dogs walk away sometimes? And why sometimes do they fight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Suppose they can smell something?”

  “I guess so.”

  Tanny Brown leaned back against the ear, lifting his head up into the sunlight, staring up at the clouds that slid past. He directed his words toward the expanse of pale blue. “You know, when I was a little boy, I thought all white folks were special somehow. It was real easy to think that way. All I had to see was that they always had the good jobs and the big cars and the nice houses. I hated white folks for a long time. Then I got older. Got to go to high school with whites. Went to the army, fought alongside whites. Came back, got my degree in a college with whites. Became a policeman, one of the first black cops on an all-white force. Now we’re twenty percent black and rising. Put white folks in jail right alongside black folks. And I learned a little bit more every step of the way. And you know what I learned? That evil is color-blind. It don’t make no difference what color you are. If you’re a wrong one, you’re wrong, black, white, green, yellow, red.”

  He looked down out of the sky. “Now, that’s simple, isn’t it, Mr. Cowart?”

  “Too simple.”

  “That must be because I’m a country fellow at heart,” Tanny Brown replied. “I’m an old dog. And I got the scent.”

  The two men stood next to the car,
silently staring at each other. Brown seemed to sigh, and he rubbed a large hand through his closely cropped hair. “I ought to be laughing at all this, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll figure it out. So where are you going?”

  “On a treasure hunt.”

  The detective smiled. “Can I come along? You make it sound like a game, and I could certainly use some childish pleasure, don’t you think? Not much easy laughter in being a policeman, just lots of gallows humor. Or do I have to follow you?”

  Cowart realized that as much as he wanted to, he would not be able to hide from the policeman. He made the easy decision. “Jump in,” he said, gesturing toward the passenger seat.

  The two men drove in silence for a few miles. Cowart watched the highway wash through the windshield, while the detective stared out at the passing countryside. The quiet seemed uncomfortable, and Cowart shifted about in his seat, trying to stretch his arms out stiffly toward the steering wheel. He was used to rapid assessments about personality and character, and so far Tanny Brown had eluded him. He glanced over at the detective, who seemed to be lost in thought himself. Cowart tried to appraise the man, like an auctioneer before the start of bidding. Despite his musculature and imposing size, Brown’s modest tan suit hung loosely about his arms and shoulders, as if he’d purposefully had it cut two sizes too large to diminish his physique. Although the day was warming, he wore his red tie tight to the neck of a pale blue button-down shirt. As Cowart stole glances away from the roadway, he watched the detective clean a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses and put them on, giving him a bookish appearance that again contradicted his bulk. Then Brown took out a small pen and notepad and made some notations swiftly, a motion not unlike a reporter’s. After finishing his writing, the detective put away pad, pen, and glasses and continued to stare through the window. He lifted his hand slightly, as if pushing an idea up into the air, and gestured at the passing countryside. “It was all different ten years ago. And twenty years ago, it was different again.”

  “How so?”