Read Online Love Her Madly by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith - Free Book Online Page B

about how she’d come all the way from Houston and Rona Leigh wouldn’t see her. Girl told me her sister’s prayers were nothin’ but fake. Said lots of times the johns’d make ’em kneel in prayer, their eyes lifted to the heavens, their hands folded. Have them recitin’ the Lord’s Prayer while they was—excuse me—fuckin’ ’em up the ass. The sister said Rona Leigh sure knew how to pray good. Real good. They all do. Hookers, I mean.
    â€œIn my mind, Rona Leigh has played that role, on her knees, eyes lifted to heaven, prayin’, managin’ to fool ’em all, for seventeen years. And you want to know somethin’? She hasn’t slipped once. Hasn’t lost her cool, hasn’t got mad, hasn’t told us all to go do somethin’ unmentionable to ourselves when each of her appeals to the board was tossed out. I admit I thought she would. In fact, I thought she’d end up like a pig on a wet deck, slippin’ and slidin’ back to what she was.
    â€œBut who knows? Pat Robertson is a highly educated man. Maybe he’s right, but I don’t think so. My feelin’ is that Pat Robertson is a fool just like all the rest.”
    Warden had feelings after all. All right to have them as long as they don’t stray across a court’s verdict.
    The bungalow was right next to the gate. It was no more than twenty feet from State School Road.
    The same four cars were in the lot. The warden said, “This here’s where the corrections officers park. There’s a big lot for visitors back up the road at the main entrance to the complex, and that’s what the media’ll have to be content with, come Rona Leigh’s date. We have shuttle buses for visitors, but the newspaper and TV folk are goin’ to have to walk.” He smirked to himself, probably imagining Morley Safer made a fool of.
    I said, “You’re going to have a crowd right outside these windows, aren’t you?”
    â€œThe windows have shades. The night of the execution, we’ll put up barricades at the end of the drive to keep the protesters and the cheerleaders out.”
    He pressed the bell at the gate. The guard who came out was the same one I’d spoken to earlier. The warden introduced him to me.
    â€œI already had the pleasure.” I shook hands with Captain Shank.
    The warden looked at me from beneath the exquisite curve of the Stetson brim. “You been by here already, Agent?”
    I would be Agent in front of the underlings.
    â€œI came here first. I thought your office would be in the … unit.”
    He and the guard caught each other’s eye. They both laughed. Captain Shank said to me, “We don’t put our wardens in the death house.” Then he turned back to his boss. “I love these Yankees, I surely do.” They laughed some more. I joined in. I’m not a Yankee, but no Texan considers Washington, DC, as being south of the Mason-Dixon line.
    The guard let us through the fence and the warden took out his key.
    There were three rooms carved out of the bungalow, all in a row, identical signs on each door: OUT OF BOUNDS . Inside the first of them was the mesh cage, the holding pen, centered exactly in the middle of the room, no different from the one the men have. Rona Leigh would spend the end of her life like a zoo animal.
    We walked back out to the hallway and went in the next door. It was the death chamber, and it was set to go.
    The slim cot was the lone object in the room, its two paddles extending straight out at right angles, solidly primed to embrace its victim. A final embrace.
    There were no such paddles on the first cots. But they would become a necessity. It’s hard enough to get an IV drip into a relaxed still arm, let alone a flailing one. When I’d watched a condemned man secured to an identical cot and paddles, the whole scene took on the feel of a new-age crucifixion.