I’m not done with you, his eyes said. I’m not and I won’t be until you stop drawing breath. Maybe not even then. Maybe I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.

His head flopped over. One of his feet twitched and then went still. I put the gun down beside his body, raised my hands, and started to stand up. A couple of men grabbed me before I could. One of them kneed me in the groin. The other punched me in the face. A few more joined in. One was Mrs Hurley. She got me at least two good ones. She didn’t testify about that at the trial, did she?

Not that I blame her, Counselor. I don’t blame any of them. What they saw lying on the sidewalk that day was a little boy so disfigured by bullets that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Supposing he ever had one.

7

McGregor took Bradley’s client back into the bowels of Needle Manor for the midday count, promising to bring him back afterward.

‘I’ll bring you some soup and a sandwich, if you want it,’ McGregor told Bradley. ‘You must be hungry.’

Bradley wasn’t. Not after all that. He sat waiting on his side of the Plexiglas partition, hands folded on his blank legal pad. He was meditating on the ruination of lives. Of the two under current consideration, the demolition of Hallas’s was easier to accept, because the man was clearly mad. If he had taken the stand at his trial and told this story – and in the same reasonable, how-can-you-possibly-doubt-me tone of voice – Bradley felt sure Hallas would now be in one of the state’s two maximum security mental institutions instead of awaiting sequential injections of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride: the lethal cocktail Needle Manor inmates called Goodnight, Mother.

But Hallas, most likely pushed over the edge of sanity by the loss of his own child, had gotten at least half a life. It had clearly been an unhappy one, beset by paranoid fantasies and delusions of persecution, but – to bend an old aphorism – half a life was better than none. The little boy was a far sadder case. According to the state medical examiner, the child who had just happened to be on Barnum Boulevard at the wrong time had been no more than eight and probably closer to six or seven. That wasn’t a life, it was a prologue.

McGregor led Hallas back, chained him to his chair, and asked how much longer they’d be. ‘Because he didn’t want any lunch, but I wouldn’t mind having some.’

‘Not long,’ Bradley said. In truth he only had one question, and when Hallas was seated once more, he asked it.

‘Why you?’

Hallas raised his eyebrows. ‘Beg pardon?’

‘This demon – I presume that’s what you think he was – why did he pick you?’

Hallas smiled, but it was a mere stretching of the lips. ‘That’s rather naïve, Counselor. You might as well ask why one baby is born with a misshapen cornea, as Ronnie Gibson was, and the next fifty delivered in the same hospital are just fine. Or why a good man leading a decent life is struck down by a brain tumor at thirty and a monster who helped oversee the gas chambers of Dachau can live to be a hundred. If you’re asking why bad things happen to good people, you’ve come to the wrong place.’

You shot a fleeing child six times, Bradley thought, the last three or four at point-blank range. How in God’s name does that make you a good person?

‘Before you go,’ Hallas said, ‘let me ask you something.’

Bradley waited.

‘Have the police identified him yet?’

Hallas asked in the idle tone of a prisoner who is just making conversation in order to stay out of his cell a little longer, but for the first time since this lengthy visit began, his eyes shone with real life and interest.

‘I don’t believe so,’ Bradley replied carefully.

In fact, he knew they hadn’t. He had a source in the prosecutor’s office who would have given him the child’s name and background well before the newspapers got hold of it and published it, as they were of course eager to do; Unknown Boy Victim was a human interest story that had gone nationwide. It had died down in the last four months or so, but following Hallas’s execution, it would certainly flare up again.

‘I’d tell you to think about that,’ Hallas said, ‘but I don’t need to, do I? You’ve been thinking about it. It probably hasn’t been keeping you up nights, but yes, you’ve been thinking about it.’

Bradley didn’t reply.

This time Hallas’s smile was wide and genuine. ‘I know you don’t believe a word of what I’ve told you, and hey, who could blame you? But just for a minute engage those brains of yours and think about it. This was a white male child – the sort of kid most apt to be missed and eagerly sought after in a society that still values white male children above all others. The kiddies are fingerprinted these days as a matter of course when they start school, to help ID them if they’re lost, murdered, or abducted. I believe in this state it’s even a law. Or am I wrong?’

‘You’re not.’ Bradley said this reluctantly. ‘But it would be wrong to make too much of it, George. This kid happened to fall through the cracks, that’s all. It happens. The system is fallible.’

Hallas’s smile became a full-fledged grin. ‘Keep telling yourself that, Mr Bradley. You just keep telling yourself that.’ He turned and waved to McGregor, who removed his earbuds and got to his feet.

‘All done?’

‘Yes,’ Hallas said. He turned back to Bradley as McGregor bent to unchain him. His grin – the only one Bradley had ever seen on his face – was gone as if it had never been. ‘Will you come? When it’s time?’

‘I’ll be here,’ Bradley said.

8

And so he was, six days later, when the curtains in the observation room drew back at 11:52 a.m. to reveal the death chamber with its white tiles and Y-shaped table. Only two other witnesses were present. One was Father Patrick of St Andrew’s. Bradley sat with him in the back row. The district attorney was all the way down front with his arms folded across his chest and his eyes never leaving the room on the other side of the window.

The execution party (a grotesque term if ever there was one, Bradley thought) was in place. There were five in all: Warden Toomey; McGregor and two other guards; a pair of medical personages in white coats. The star of the show lay on the table, his outstretched arms secured by Velcro straps, but when the curtains opened, Bradley’s eye was first taken by the warden, who was weirdly sporty in an open-necked blue shirt.

Wearing a seatbelt around his waist and a three-point harness over his shoulders, George Hallas looked more ready to zoom off in a space capsule than to die by lethal injection. As per his request, there was no chaplain, but when he saw Bradley and Father Patrick, he raised one hand as far as the wrist straps would allow in a gesture of recognition.

Patrick raised a hand in return, then turned toward Bradley. His face was paper pale. ‘Have you ever attended one of these?’

Bradley shook his head. His mouth was dry, and he didn’t trust himself to speak in a normal tone of voice.

‘Me, either. I hope I’ll be all right. He …’ Father Patrick swallowed. ‘He was very good to all the children. They loved him. I just can’t believe … even now I just can’t believe …’

Bradley couldn’t, either. Yet he did. Had to.

The DA turned to them, frowning like Moses above his crossed arms. ‘Zip your lips, gentlemen.’

Hallas looked around the last room he would ever inhabit. He seemed bewildered, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was or what was happening. McGregor laid a hand on his chest in a comforting gesture. It was now 11:58.

One of the whitecoats – an IV tech, Bradley assumed – cinched a length of rubber tubing around Hallas’s right forearm, then slipped in a needle and taped it down. The needle was attached to an IV line. The line went to a wall console, where three red lamps burned above three switches. The second whitecoat moved to the console and clasped his hands before him. Now the only movement in the death chamber came from George Hallas, who was blinking his eyes rapidly.