All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 193

193

“You did so much to live, only to come die in here,” Tooms said.

“I practiced what to say,” Patch said.

“Okay.”

“But now I’m here…I want to reach through the bars and grab your throat and make you tell me where she is.”

“I’m sorry,” Tooms said, and Patch looked at him, at the lines that crept from his eyes, the way his hands shook lightly, and saw that he was.

“You said she was dead.”

Tooms glanced at the window, at a sky that lay over a world he had lost.

In seven months he would be taken to a room with a single window. Straps would be placed across his legs and stomach and head, and a couple of IVs inserted in case his veins failed. Sodium thiopental would knock him out cold. Vecuronium bromide would paralyze his muscles. Potassium chloride would stop his heart from beating. After twenty years of waiting, his life would be ended in ten minutes. Activists would make it to the big gate, light their candles and sing and bear witness to their own beliefs. They would fall silent for those ten minutes when their government carried out one murder in vengeance for another. Local news would cover it, and they would speak of a crime long since forgotten, maybe note the irony that the only survivor was incarcerated in that very same prison, though that in itself was not so unusual. There would be no one there for Patch. There would be no one

there for Grace.

Patch saw Blackjack at the door.

“Did you really kill her?” Patch said, a tremor in his voice.

Marty Tooms kept his eyes on the skyline.

And then began to cry.

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