There were an even dozen cells in Needle Manor. Beyond them was a guardroom. Beyond the guardroom was a monitoring station which was manned 24/7. Beyond the monitoring station was a consultation room, where a table on the inmate side was separated from the table on the visitor side by thick Plexiglas. There were no phones; inmates conversed with their loved ones or legal representatives through a circle of small punched holes, like those in the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone.

Leonard Bradley sat down on his side of this communication port and opened his briefcase. He put a yellow legal pad and a Uniball pen on the table. Then he waited. The second hand on his watch made three revolutions and started a fourth before the door leading to the inner regions of Needle Manor opened with a loud clack of withdrawing bolts. Bradley knew all the guards by now. This one was McGregor. Not a bad guy. He was holding George Hallas by the arm. Hallas’s hands were free, but a steel snake of chain rattled along the floor between his ankles. There was a wide leather belt around the waist of his orange prison jumper, and when he sat down on his side of the glass, McGregor clipped another chain from a steel loop on the belt to a steel loop on the back of the chair. He locked it, gave it a tug, then tipped Bradley a two-finger salute.

‘Afternoon, Counselor.’

‘Afternoon, Mr McGregor.’

Hallas said nothing.

‘You know the deal,’ McGregor said. ‘As long as you want today. Or as long as you can take him, at least.’

‘I know.’

Ordinarily, lawyer–client consultations were limited to an hour. Beginning a month before the client’s scheduled trip into the room with the Y-shaped table, consultation time was upped to ninety minutes, during which the lawyer and his increasingly squirrelly partner in this state-mandated death waltz would discuss a diminishing number of shitty options. During the last week, there was no set time limit. This was true for close relatives as well as legal counsel, but Hallas’s wife had divorced him only weeks after his conviction, and there were no children. He was alone in the world except for Len Bradley, but seemed to want little to do with any of the appeals – and consequent delays – Bradley had suggested.

Until today, that was.

He’ll talk to you, McGregor had told him after a brief ten-minute consultation the month before, one where Hallas’s end of the conversation had mostly been no and no.

When it gets close, he’ll talk to you plenty. They get scared, see? They forget all about how they wanted to walk into the injection room with their heads up and their shoulders squared. They start figuring out it’s not a movie, they’re really going to die, and then they want to try every appeal in the book.

Hallas didn’t look scared, though. He looked the same as ever: a small man with bad posture, a sallow complexion, thinning hair, and eyes that looked painted on. He looked like an accountant – which he had been in his previous life – who had lost all interest in the numbers that had previously seemed so important to him.

‘Enjoy your visit, boys,’ McGregor said, and went over to the chair in the corner. There he sat, turned on his iPod, and stuffed his ears with music. His eyes never left them, however. The circle of speaking holes was too small to admit the passage of a pencil, but a needle was not out of the question.

‘What can I do for you, George?’

For several moments Hallas didn’t answer. He studied his hands, which were small and weak-looking – not the hands of a murderer at all, you would have said. Then he looked up.

‘You’re a pretty good guy, Mr Bradley.’

Bradley was surprised by this, and didn’t know how to reply.

Hallas nodded, as if his lawyer had tried to deny it. ‘Yes. You are. You kept on even after I made it clear I wanted you to stop and let the process run its course. Not many court-appointeds would do that. They’d just say yeah, whatever, and go on to the next loser some judge hands them. You didn’t do that. You told me what moves you wanted to make, and when I told you not to make them, you went ahead anyway. If not for you, I would’ve been in the ground a year ago.’

‘We don’t always get what we want, George.’

Hallas smiled briefly. ‘Nobody knows that better than me. But it hasn’t been all bad; I can admit that now. Mostly because of the Chicken Run. I like going out there. I like the wind on my face, even when it’s a cold wind. I like the smell of the prairie grass, or seeing the day-moon in the sky when it’s full. Or deer. Sometimes they jump around up there on the ridge and chase each other. I like that. Makes me laugh out loud, sometimes.’

‘Life can be good. It can be worth fighting for.’

‘Some lives, I’m sure. Not mine. But I admire the way you’ve fought for it, just the same. I appreciate your dedication. So I’m going to tell you what I wouldn’t say in court. And why I’ve refused to make any of the usual appeals … although I couldn’t stop you from making them for me.’

‘Appeals made without the appellant’s participation don’t swing much weight in this state’s courts. Or the higher ones.’

‘You’ve also been very good about visiting me, and I appreciate that too. Few people would show kindness to a convicted child murderer, but you have to me.’

Once again, Bradley could think of no reply. Hallas had already said more in the last ten minutes than in all their visits over the last thirty-four months.

‘I can’t pay you anything, but I can tell you why I killed that child. You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you, anyway. If you want to hear.’

Hallas peered through the holes in the scratched Plexiglas and smiled.

‘You do, don’t you? Because you’re troubled by certain things. The prosecution wasn’t, but you are.’

‘Well … certain questions have occurred, yes.’

‘But I did it. I had a forty-five revolver and I emptied it into that boy. There were plenty of witnesses, and surely you know that the appeals process would simply have dragged out the inevitable for another three years – or four, or six – even if I had participated fully. The questions you have pale before the bald fact of premeditated murder. Isn’t that so?’

‘We could have argued diminished mental capacity.’ Bradley leaned forward. ‘And that’s still possible. It’s not too late, even now. Not quite.’

‘The insanity defense is rarely successful after the fact, Mr Bradley.’

He won’t call me Len, Bradley thought. Not even after all this time. He’ll go to his death calling me Mr Bradley.

‘Rarely isn’t the same as never, George.’

‘No, but I’m not crazy now and I wasn’t crazy then. I was never more sane. Are you sure you want to hear the testimony I wouldn’t give in court? If you don’t, that’s fine, but it’s all I have to give.’

‘Of course I want to hear,’ Bradley said. He picked up his pen, but ended up not making a single note. He only listened, hypnotized, as George Hallas spoke in his soft mid-South accent.

2

My mother, who was healthy all her short life, died of a pulmonary embolism six hours after I was born. This was in 1969. It must have been a genetic defect, because she was only twenty-two. My father was eight years older. He was a good man and a good dad. He was a mining engineer, and worked mostly in the Southwest until I was eight.

A housekeeper traveled around with us. Her name was Nona McCarthy, and I called her Mama Nonie. She was black. I suppose he slept with her, although when I slipped into her bed – which I did on many mornings – she was always alone. It didn’t matter to me, one way or the other. I didn’t know what black had to do with anything. She was good to me, she made my lunches and read me the usual bedtime stories when my father wasn’t home to do it, and that was all that mattered to me. It wasn’t the usual setup, I suppose I knew that much, but I was happy enough.