Зеленая Миля - страница 7

I did something I’d never done to a prisoner before, then—I offered him my hand. Even now I don’t know why. Him asking about the lights, maybe. It made Harry Terwilliger blink, I can tell you that. Coffey took my hand with surprising gentleness, my hand all but disappearing into his, and that was all of it. I had another moth in my killing bottle. We were done.

I stepped out of the cell. Harry pulled the door shut on its track and ran both locks. Coffey stood where he was a moment or two longer, as if he didn’t know what to do next, and then he sat down on his bunk, clasped his giant’s hands between his knees, and lowered his head like a man who grieves or prays. He said something then in his strange, almost Southern voice. I heard it with perfect clarity, and although I didn’t know much about what he’d done then—you don’t need to know about what a man’s done in order to feed him and groom him until it’s time for him to pay off what he owes—it still gave me a chill.

“I couldn’t help it, boss,” he said. “I tried to take it back, but it was too late!”

“You’re going to have you some trouble with Percy,” Harry said as we walked back up the hall and into my office. Dean Stanton, sort of my third in command—we didn’t actually have such things, a situation Percy Wetmore would have fixed up in a flash—was sitting behind my desk, updating the files, a job I never seemed to get around to. He barely looked up as we came in, just gave his little glasses a shove with the ball of his thumb and dived back into his paperwork.

“I been having trouble with that peckerwood since the day he came here,” I said, gingerly, pulling my pants away from my crotch and wincing. “Did you hear what he was shouting when he brought that big galoot down?”

“Couldn’t very well not,” Harry said. “I was there, you know.”

“I was in the john and heard it just fine,” Dean said. He drew a sheet of paper to him, held it up into the light so I could see there was a coffee-ring as well as typing on it, and then tossed it into the waste basket. ‘Dead man walking.’ Must have read that in one of those magazines he likes so much!”

And he probably had. Percy Wetmore was a great reader of Argosy and Stag and Men’s Adventure. There was a prison tale in every issue, it seemed, and Percy read them avidly, like a man doing research. It was like he was trying to find out how to act, and thought the information was in those magazines. He’d come just after we did Anthony Ray, the hatchet-killer—and he hadn’t actually participated in an execution yet, although he’d witnessed one from the switch-room.

“He knows people,” Harry said. “He’s connected. You’ll have to answer for sending him off the block, and you’ll have to answer even harder for expecting him to do some real work.”

“I don’t expect it,” I said, and I didn’t… but I had hopes. Bill Dodge wasn’t the sort to let a man just stand around and do the heavy looking-on. “I’m more interested in the big boy, for the time being. Are we going to have trouble with him?”

Harry shook his head with decision.

“He was quiet as a lamb at court down there in Trapingus County,” Dean said. He took his little rimless glasses off and began to polish them on his vest. “Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley’s ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he’d wanted. That’s a pun, son.”

“I know,” I said, although I didn’t. I just hate letting Dean Stanton get the better of me.

“Big one, ain’t he?” Dean said.

“He is,” I agreed. “Monstrous big.”

“Probably have to crank Old Sparky up to Super Bake to fry his ass!”

“Don’t worry about Old Sparky,” I said absently. “He makes the big ‘uns little.”

Dean pinched the sides of his nose, where there were a couple of angry red patches from his glasses, and nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Some truth to that, all right.”

I asked, “Do either of you know where he came from before he showed up in… Tefton? It was Tefton, wasn’t it?”

“Yep,” Dean said. “Tefton, down in Trapingus County. Before he showed up there and did what he did, no one seems to know. He just drifted around, I guess. You might be able to find out a little more from the newspapers in the prison library, if you’re really interested. They probably won’t get around to moving those until next week.” He grinned. “You might have to listen to your little buddy bitching and moaning upstairs, though.”