“I could,” said the gray man. “I could. I dearly wish to. But there are
The gray man turned to walk away. He opened the iron door and as he stood in the hall light he looked like any tramp again, just a tired old tramp with a ruined face.
“I want to know something,” said Connelly.
The gray man looked back, his expression inscrutable.
“I want to know why you killed my little girl.”
The gray man cocked his head. There was no thought in his face or his posture. He regarded Connelly for a second and said, “So that she would die.”
The door shut. Connelly began screaming again. He screamed until the guards came and beat him and threw him back into his cell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When they dumped him off Connelly spent the better part of the next hour hurling himself against his cell door. Peachy tried his best to talk him down but Connelly would not listen, could not listen. He raged and flung himself against it until his shoulders were bruised and his ankles ached and it was only when he paused that they realized they could hear another noise.
Screaming. A man somewhere in the jail was crying in fear and pain.
“What is that?” asked Peachy softly.
“Roosevelt,” whispered Connelly. “Rosie. He’s doing something to him. He’s doing something to my friend.”
“What do you think he’s doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you scared, Connelly?” asked Peachy.
“Yeah. Yeah. You?”
“Yes. What’d they do to you?”
“Hit me. And…”
“And what?”
“Nothing. They didn’t do nothing good, that’s for sure.”
“You… you think they’re going to kill me too, Connelly?”
He looked at the little crack in the wall. Somewhere Roosevelt stopped screaming. “No,” said Connelly.
“What makes you say that?”
“I-I don’t know. Just don’t think about that, Peachy. Just don’t.”
“You think we should pray?”
“I guess.”
“Come on. Pray with me, Connelly.”
“All right.”
Connelly sat on the floor and put his hands together and bowed his head. It was not until his palms touched that he realized he was trembling. He could not remember the last time he prayed. He listened to Peachy’s whispering but he could not understand any formula or any process in it. So he steeled himself and sent a wordless, desperate cry for aid up into the sky, hoping it would pierce the roof of the jail and the mantle of clouds and the net of stars behind that, venturing out beyond to where nothingness had no claim and there might be some consciousness, some intelligence that would listen and understand and sympathize. Something, just something. But it seemed unlikely that anything so vast would notice or care.
He was so small. A little man scrambling across the wilderness, trying to make the cosmos pay attention and make sense. In that midnight belly of the jail, dawn was a memory and the sun was no more than a dream, and hope tasted more of a curse to him than a blessing.
But still he steeled himself, culled those thoughts of higher powers and purpose from his mind, and thought about simpler matters—of getting out of the jail cell, and of tomorrow, and of murder, which appeared simpler by the second.
Then they waited for the executioner’s footfall. It seemed like there was something they needed to say. But they could think of nothing.
Three hours had passed when they heard a sound: a rustling, not outside, but somehow below.
“You hear that?” asked Peachy.
“Yeah,” said Connelly.
They listened. There were voices whispering, cursing and shushing one another. Connelly stood to his feet and looked down. The voices were right below him. They stopped and he heard a giggle, and then a voice said, “Hey, you.”
Connelly shrank back against the wall.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” said the voice.
“H-Hammond?” he said.
“Yeah. It’s me. Give me a sec.”
Connelly fell to the floor and grabbed at the warped wood, feverishly trying to find some way to pull the planks apart but finding none.
“Get back, you damn fool, we don’t want to cut you any.”
He stepped back and before him a small saw pierced the bottom of the floor, rising up between the cracks. It wriggled to get a better bite on the wood and then began moving up and down, sawing diagonal across one of the boards. It seemed to take hours to get through the wood. They pushed up on it and Connelly grabbed the severed end and tried to pull it back.
“Not so loud! You’ll wake up the whole damn place!” hissed Hammond’s voice.
“Connelly?” said Peachy. “What… what’s going on?”
“Who the hell is that?” said Hammond.
“Just hold on, Peachy,” Connelly said.
“Peachy?” said Hammond, incredulous.
They pried the board up and sawed through a few more and Connelly saw Hammond and Roonie crouched below in a curiously large space, like the jail was not built on any firm foundation but instead was on a basement of some kind. They were covered head to toe in mud and soil.
Roonie stared up at him, mournful and terrified. “You won’t believe what we had to dig through.” He shook his head. “You won’t believe it.”
“Shush,” said Hammond grimly. “Jesus, Con. You look like shit.”
Connelly dropped through the hole in the floor. When his bare feet touched earth he began weeping.
“It’s okay,” Hammond said. “You’ve got to… Come on, Con, buck up.”
“Peachy,” said Connelly. “We got to get Peachy out.”
“Who the hell is Peachy?” said Hammond.
“Peachy’s my friend.”
“We don’t have time for this. We still have to get Pike and Rosie out.”
“Peachy’s my friend,” insisted Connelly.
“Damn it all.”
They sawed through Peachy’s floor in minutes. When the floorboard was pulled away Connelly peered through and looked at the face above.
