Hour Game (49 page)

“Keeps a reader turning pages.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“Compulsively readable… Baldacci, always strong on suspense… finds his voice here.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

“Exciting… good fun and fast-paced.”

—
Midwest Book Review

“Explosive… Readers will barely have time to catch their breath.”

—
People

“Excellent… a gripping page-turner… Baldacci knows how to hold his readers’ attention.”

—Associated Press

“Genuinely scary scenes… driven by tense action.”

—
New York Daily News

“Great… a fast-paced thriller.”

—
Denver Post

“The reader will enjoy the ride.”

—
Houston Chronicle

“A compelling storyteller… a supercharged pace.”

—
Orlando Sentinel

“A fast-paced… adrenaline-fueled story.”

—
Newark Star-Ledger

“Pulse-pounding suspense.”

—
Booklist

“Baldacci provides plenty of action and plenty of surprises.”

—
News Journal
(DE)

“A pulse-racing tale [that] offers fast-paced suspense from beginning to end.”

—
BookPage

F
OUR HUNDRED MEN LIVED HERE, MOST FOR THE REST OF
their time on earth.

And then Hell would get them for the rest of eternity.

The walls were thick concrete, and their interior sides were lathered in repulsive graffiti that spared virtually nothing in its collective depravity. And each year more filth was grafted onto the walls like sludge building up in a sewer. The steel bars were nicked and scarred but still impossible to break by human hands. There had been escapes but none for more than thirty years. Once outside the walls there was no place to go, really. The folks living on the outside around here weren’t any friendlier than the ones on the inside.

And they had more guns.

The old man had another coughing fit, spitting up multicolored chunks that were as much evidence of his terminal condition as any expert medical pronouncement. He knew he was dying; the only question was when. He had to hang on, though. He had something left to do. He would not get a second chance.

Earl Fontaine was large but had once been larger still. His body had imploded as the metastatic cancer ate him from the inside out. His face was heavily wrinkled, savaged by time, cigarettes, a poor diet, and, most of all, a bitter sense of injustice. The skin was pasty from decades inside this place where the sun did not reach.

With a struggle he sat up in his bed and looked around at the
other occupants of the ward. There were only ten of them, none as bad off as he was. They might leave this place upright. He was beyond that. Yet despite his dire condition, he smiled.

“What?” called out another inmate from across the floor as he eyed Earl and his happy expression. “What in the hell do you have to smile about, Earl? Let us in on the joke, why don’t you.”

The deep pain in his bones was akin to someone cutting through them with a brittle-bladed saw, but Earl let the grin ease all the way across his broad face like a flooded river overrunning its banks. “Gettin’ outta here, Junior,” Earl said.

“Bullshit,” said the other inmate, who was known as Junior inside these walls for no apparent reason. He was here because he’d raped and killed five women over three counties who had been unfortunate enough to cross his path. The authorities were working madly to treat his pneumonia so he could keep his execution date in two months.

Earl nodded. “Out of here.”

“How?”

“Coffin is how, Junior, just like your scrawny ass.” Earl cackled while Junior shook his head and turned back to stare glumly at his IV lines. They were similar to the ones that would carry the lethal chemicals that would end his life in the death chamber. He finally looked away, closed his eyes, and went swiftly to sleep, as though practicing up for the deepest of all slumbers to come in exactly sixty days.

Earl lay back and rattled his chain. It was attached to the cuff around his right wrist, which, in turn, was hooked to a stout though rusted iron ring in the wall.

“I’m getting away,” bellowed Earl. “Better send the coon dogs to come get me.” Then he went into another coughing spell that lasted until an LPN came over and gave him some water, a pill, and a hard slap on the back. Then he helped Earl sit up straighter.

The nurse didn’t know why Earl had been sent to prison and wouldn’t have cared if he did know. Every inmate here had done something so appallingly horrific that every guard and other
worker here was completely desensitized to it. The men in this place were animals and they would be treated as such, no matter what the law said.

“Now just settle down, Earl,” said the nurse. “You’ll only make things worse.”

Earl calmed, sat back against his pillow, and then eyed him steadily. “Can they be? Worse, I mean.”

The nurse shrugged. “Guess anything can be worse. All perspective. And maybe you should’ve thought of that before you got to this place.”

Earl said, “Hell’s bells, ain’t that so? Hey, kid, can I get me a smoke? Just slip it twixt my fingers right ’chere and light me up. Won’t tell nobody you done it. Cross and swear and all that crap, though I ain’t no God-fearing man.”

The nurse blanched at the very idea of doing such a thing. “Uh, yeah, maybe if it were
1970
. You’re hooked up to oxygen, for God’s sake. It’s explosive, Earl, as in
boom
.”

Earl grinned, revealing discolored teeth and many gaps in between. “So? I’ll take blowing up over being eaten alive.”

“Yeah? But the rest of us wouldn’t. See, that’s most people’s problem, only thinking of themselves.”

“Just one cig, kid. I like the Winstons. You got Winstons? It’s my dying wish. Got to abide by it. Like my last supper. It’s the damn law.” He rattled his chain. “Last smoke. Got to gimme it.” He rattled his chain louder. “Gimme it.”

The nurse said, “You’re dying of lung cancer, Earl. How you think you got that? Here’s a clue: they call ’em
cancer sticks
for a damn good reason. Jesus, Joseph, Mary. With that kind’a stupidity you can thank the good Lord you lived long as you have.”

“Gimme the gol-damn smoke, you little prick.”

The nurse was obviously done dealing with Earl. “Now you just settle down. I got a lot of patients to deal with. Let’s have a quiet night, what do you say, old man? I don’t want to have to call a guard. Albert’s on ward duty now, and Albert is not known for his TLC. He’ll put a baton to your skull, sick and
dying or not, and then lie in his report and not one person will dispute it. Dude’s scary and he don’t give a crap. You seen that.”

Before the nurse turned away Earl said, “You know why I’m here?”

“ ’Cause you’re dying and the corrections system won’t release someone like you to secure hospice even if you are costing them a ton of money in medical bills.”

“Not this here hospital ward. I’m talking prison,” said Earl, his voice low and throaty. “Gimme some more water, will’ya? I can get water in this gol-damn place, can’t I?”

The nurse poured a cup and Earl greedily drank it down, wiped his face dry, and said with pent-up energy, “Got behind bars over twenty-one years ago. First, just for life in a fed cage. But then they got me on the death penalty thing. Sons-a-bitches lawyers. And the state done took a hold of my ass. Feds let ’em. Just let ’em. I got rights? Hell, I got nothing if they can do that. See what I’m saying? Just ’cause I killed her. My ass. Had a nice bed in the fed place. Now look at me. Bet I got me the cancer ’cause of this here place. Know I did. In the air. Lucky for me I ain’t never got that AIDS shit.” He raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice. “You know they got that kind in here.”

“Uh-huh,” said the nurse, who was checking the file of another patient on his laptop, which was set on a rolling cart that had locked compartments where meds were kept.

Earl said, “That’s two decades plus a year. Long damn time.”

“Yep, you know your math all right, Earl,” the nurse said absently.

“The first Bush was still president, but that white boy from Arkansas done beat him in the election. Saw it on the TV when I got here. What was his name agin? They say he part colored.”

“Bill Clinton. And he wasn’t part black. He just played the saxophone and went to the African-American churches sometimes.”

“That’s right. Him. Been here since then.”

“I was seven.”

“What?” barked Earl, squinting his eyes to see better. He rubbed absently at the pain in his belly.

The nurse said, “I was seven when Clinton was elected. My momma and daddy were conflicted. They were Republicans, of course, but he was a Southern boy all right. I think they voted for him but wouldn’t admit to it. Didn’t matter none. This
is
Alabama, after all. Democrat wins here, Hell freezes over. Am I right?”

“Sweet home Alabama,” said Earl, nodding. “Lived here a long time. Had a family here. But I’m from Georgia, son. I’m a Georgia peach, see? Not no Alabama boy.”

“Okay.”

“But I got sent to this here place ’cause of what I
done
in Alabama.”

“Sure you did. Not that much difference though. Georgia, Alabama. Kissing cousins. Not like they were taking you up to New York or Massachusetts. Foreign countries up there for shit sure.”

“ ’Cause of what I done,” said Earl, breathlessly rubbing at the belly hurt. “Can’t stand Jews, coloreds, and Catholics. Don’t much care for Presbyterians, neither.”

The nurse looked at him and said in an amused tone, “Presbyterians? What the hell they ever done to you, Earl? That’s like hating the Amish.”

“Squealed like hogs getting butchered, swear to God they did. Jews and coloreds mostly.” He shrugged and absently wiped sweat from his brow using his sheet. “Truth is, I never killed me a Presbyterian. They just don’t stand out, see, but I would’a if I got the chance.” His smiled deepened, reaching all the way to his eyes. And in that look it was easy to see that despite age and illness Earl Fontaine was a killer. Was
still
a killer. Would always be a killer until the day he died, which couldn’t come soon enough for lawful-minded citizens.

The nurse unlocked a drawer on his cart and drew out some meds. “Now why’d you want to go and do something like that? Them folks done nothing to you, I bet.”

Earl coughed up some phlegm and spit it into a cup. He said grimly, “They was breathing. That was enough for me.”

“Guess that’s why you’re in here all right. But you got to set it right with God, Earl. They’re all God’s children. Got to set it right. You be seeing him soon.”

Earl laughed till he choked. Then he calmed and his features seemed to clear. “I got people coming to see me.”

“That’s nice, Earl,” said the nurse as he administered a painkiller to the inmate in the next bed. “Family?”

“No. I done killed my family.”

“Why’d you do that? Were they Jews or Presbyterians or coloreds?”

“Folks coming to see me,” said Earl as though he hadn’t heard the nurse. “I ain’t done yet, see?”

“Uh-huh,” said the nurse as he checked the monitor of the other inmate. “Good to make use of any time you got left, old man. Clock she is a’ticking all right, for all of us.”

“Coming to see me today,” said Earl. “Marked it on the wall here, look.”

He pointed to the concrete wall where he had used his fingernail to chip off the paint. “They said six days and they’d be coming to see me. Got me six marks on there. Good with numbers. Mind still working and all.”

“Well you sure tell ’em hello for me,” said the nurse as he moved away with his cart.

Earl sat in his bed and stared at the doorway to the ward where two men had suddenly appeared. They were dressed in dark suits and white shirts and their black shoes were polished. One wore black-framed glasses. The other looked like he’d barely graduated high school. They were both holding Bibles and sporting gentle, reverential expressions. They appeared respectable, peaceful, and law-abiding. They were actually none of these things.

Earl caught their eye. “Coming to see me,” he mumbled nearly incoherently, but his senses were suddenly as clear as they had
ever been. Once more he had a purpose in life. It would be right before he died, but it was still a purpose.

“Killed my family,” he said. But that wasn’t entirely accurate. He had murdered his wife and buried her body in the basement of their home. They hadn’t found it until years later. That was why he was here and had been sentenced to death. He could have found a better hiding place, he supposed, but it had not been a priority. He was busy killing others.

But the federal government had let the state of Alabama try and convict him and sentence him to death for her murder. He had had a scheduled visit to Alabama’s death chamber at the Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore. Since 2002, the state of Alabama officially killed you by lethal injection. But some death penalty proponents were advocating the return of “Old Sparky” to administer final justice by electrocution to those on death row.

None of that troubled Earl. His appeal had carried on for so long that he’d never be executed now. It was because of his cancer. Ironically enough, the law said an inmate had to be in good health in order to be put to death. Yet they’d only saved him from a quick, painless demise so that nature could substitute a longer, far more painful one in the form of lung cancer that had spread all over him. Some would call that sweet justice. He just called it shitty luck.

He waved the two men in suits over.

He had killed his wife, to be sure. And he’d killed many others, exactly how many he didn’t remember. Jews, coloreds, maybe some Catholics, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d killed a Presbyterian, too. Hell, he didn’t know. Wasn’t like they carried ID proclaiming their faith. Anybody that got in his way was someone that needed killing. And he allowed as many people to get in his way as was humanly possible.

Now he was chained to a wall and was dying. But still, he had goals in mind. He hadn’t killed his whole family. Not yet.

He had one more to go.