Ascension Day

he’d start to panic that if he said the wrong thing, his father would then realize he was dead.

The storm outside growled and rumbled. It had been hot with the humidity sky-high before Jac went to sleep, pressure-cooking its way steadily upward through much of the day. The sort of weather that made you sweat just buttering toast, let alone making love. If it was uncomfortable here, it would be unbearable at Libreville, hot and foetid at the best of times. And for a second he had a mental snapshot of Durrant laying on his prison bed listening to the same storm, thinking about the days ahead until his execution and the many things he’d now never get to do… like holding his son in his arms again. Or maybe he was sleeping easy, like a baby. After all, he was finally going where he wanted. His Ascension Day.

He was still uneasy about misleading Durrant over his son’s e-mails; though at least he was able to console himself that the end — keeping Durrant alive — justified the means. But what was starting to unsettle him more was misleading Durrant that his clemency would buy time to prove his innocence and finally gain him freedom. Jac hadn’t even given a second thought to that, because, from what he’d seen in the police and trial files, such a quest seemed hopeless, impossible.

So while he might hopefully get Durrant clemency now, at best it would be a commute to life imprisonment. In the end all he’d be doing was sentencing Larry Durrant to another ten to fifteen in that foetid, oppressive hell- hole. And, thinking about that now, maybe Durrant had been right all along. Given that choice, maybe death would be preferable.

14

Death. Everyone at Libreville thought about it. Those on Death Row perhaps more than they should: even if their execution might be five or ten years away, with any number of possible lifelines in- between — appeals and clemency pleas, State Governors offering across the board pardons upon retirement from office, as had happened once before — death was still there in some dark corner of their minds where they pushed everything they didn’t want to face, gnawing steadily away.

But with an impending execution among their number, only thirty-six days away, it was that much harder to push away and not think about. Larry Durrant’s approaching death hung over all of them. Sudden, stark reminder that it could be them next. And maybe not so long away as they thought.

Death reached out its icy hand to every corner of the prison, trickled down cell walls along with the ingrained grime and sweat, the smeared blood and faeces, brought a chill to the air and to inmates’ spines, even when it was touching 90?. And if Death Row was the nucleus of that at Libreville, the queen bee’s hive, it didn’t lack for supporting drones.

Eighty-two per cent of inmates incarcerated at Libreville would die there; of pneumonia, heart failure, cancer, tumours, drugs overdoses, AIDS, murdered by fellow prisoners, or simply of old age. So there was a prison hospice, a chapel for prayers for the dead, and a graveyard. Libreville seemed reluctant to let go of its inmates, even in death. And while most prisoner’s families would choose to take the body home for burial — their only chance to get loved ones back — many had been so long forgotten by their families that burial at Libreville remained the only option.

Of that amount, the executioner would grim-reap less than two per cent. But that small number by far overshadowed all other deaths, because it underscored the reason they were all there. You commit murder, we kill you. When we’re good and ready.

And the passage of time, while helping inmates push the spectre of death away in their minds, also made it like a slow-drip torture; death might be trickling down their cell walls slowly, but that ensured its omnipresence. Paradoxically, of all of them Larry Durrant was probably the least worried, because he’d resigned himself to death long ago. But others on Death Row watched with foreboding that passage of approaching death as the days wound down to Larry Durrant’s execution, wondering when it might next reach out to claim them.

There were spaces though in the prison where you could escape: places that breathed life, transported you to the world outside in your mind, or simply numbed you, made you forget where you were.

For Rodriguez, it was the prison radio and communication room, all that contact with the outside world made it easy to transport himself, if only for a few moments here and there, to where that contact came from; or when he was playing songs, closing his eyes and imagining he was a DJ at some far-flung station — TKLM, Tahiti — or remembering where he’d been and what he’d been doing when he’d first heard that song. For Larry, it was the library and his books that would let him drift to other places in his mind.

And for other inmates it might be working the ranch, the annual rodeo or the muscle yard. Rodriguez had never been much for muscle training and category A prisoners weren’t allowed to work the open ranch, so the only common area where he found a quiet corner was the showers. Not for the reason they were favoured by many inmates — scoping for prison bitches — but because, with his head back, eyes closed and the water running down his body, he could escape.

He could be anywhere: under a waterfall on some South Pacific isle, waiting for one of his stable of fine women to join him under its spray, or maybe at home when he was younger and his mom calling out if he was going to be long because dinner was ready.

It washed away the sweat and grime, the invisible aura of stale and trapped humanity, of oppression and death, that seemed to cling to the skin like a sticky blanket within hours.

Wash it away. Wash it away.

Rodriguez scrubbed hard. Then, when he felt he’d washed the prison away, he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting himself drift with the spray hitting his face and running down his body. Pacific waterfalls, fine women soaping his body, at home and about to put on his best threads for a Saturday night out.

And he’d been more successful in his reverie this time, Rodriguez thought, because he’d even managed to tune out the clamour and echo of the other voices in the showers.

The hand clamping suddenly over his mouth snapped his eyes sharply open.

Two striplights his end of the showers had been switched off and the five guys showering in his section and the guard by the showers’ open entrance had suddenly gone.

Probably the other people showering and the guards further along out of sight were still there, but as Rodriguez writhed and tried to call out to get their attention, he made no more than a muted whimper. The hand across his mouth was clamped too firmly.

Rodriguez couldn’t see who was holding him — the arm too across his chest was clamped tight — only feel his breath against the back of his neck. The only person he could see, in that instant sliding into the side of his vision a few paces away, was Tally Shavell: a towel around his waist, upper body glistening, muscles tensed like steel chords, the veins in his neck taut as he grimaced malevolently.

‘Sorry. Didn’t bring no reading matter wi’ me this time.’

The open razor at towel level in Shavell’s right hand was flicked out silently, imperceptibly, as he stepped closer.

And Rodriguez knew in that moment that death had come for him sooner than he had thought.

‘Should be no problem handling two addresses. I got a friend, Mo, who does much the same as me. I’ve only got one Bell uniform, but I can head over to his place after I’ve finished and hand it to him.’

‘Are you sure it will fit?’ Nel-M quipped.

‘Very funny,’ Barry responded dryly. ‘But if it looks like there’s a problem, I can always stitch up the back for him.’

Barry Lassitter had become Barry-L, then simply ‘Barrel’, since he’d been three hundred pounds for more years than he cared to remember. But he was one of the best ex-Bell men that Nel-M knew and, from the name