'Briar,' I said. That was Briar Ridge, one of two state-run hospitals. 'What's this kid doing? Touring state facilities?'

'It's an administration job. Better pay, and papers to push instead of hospital beds in the heat of the day.' He gave me a slanted grin. 'You know, Paul, you might be shed of him already if you hadn't put him in the switch-room with Van Hay when The Chief walked.'

For a moment what he said seemed so peculiar I didn't have a clue what he was getting at. Maybe I didn't want to have a clue.

'Where else would I put him?' I asked. 'Christ, he hardly knows what he's doing on the block! To make him part of the active execution team—' I didn't finish. Couldn't finish. The potential for screw-ups seemed endless.

'Nevertheless, you'd do well to put him out for Delacroix. If you want to get rid of him, that is.'

I looked at him with my jaw hung. At last I was able to get it up where it belonged so I could talk. 'What are you saying? That he wants to experience one right up close where he can smell the guy's nuts cooking?'

Moores shrugged. His eyes, so soft when he had been speaking about his wife, now looked flinty. 'Delacroix's nuts are going to cook whether Wetmore's on the team or not,' he said. 'Correct?'

'Yes, but he could screw up. In fact, Hal, he's almost bound to screw up. And in front of thirty or so witnesses... reporters all the way up from Louisiana... '

'You and Brutus Howell will make sure he doesn't,' Moores said. 'And if he does anyway, it goes on his record, and it'll still be there long after his statehouse connections are gone. You understand?'

I did. It made me feel sick and scared, but I did.

'He may want to stay for Coffey, but if we're lucky, he'll get all he needs from Delacroix. You just make sure you put him out for that one.'

I had planned to stick Percy in the switch-room again, then down in the tunnel, riding shotgun on the gurney that would take Delacroix to the meatwagon parked across the road from the prison, but I tossed all those plans back over my shoulder without so much as a second look. I nodded. I had the sense to know it was a gamble I was taking, but I didn't care. If it would get rid of Percy Wetmore, I'd tweak the devil's nose. He could take part in his execution, clamp on the cap, and then look through the grille and tell Van Hay to roll on two; he could watch the little Frenchman ride the lightning that he, Percy Wetmore, had let out of the bottle. Let him have his nasty little thrill, if that's what state-sanctioned murder was to him. Let him go on to Briar Ridge, where he would have his own office and a fan to cool it. And if his uncle by marriage was voted out of office in the next election and he had to find out what work was like in the tough old sunbaked world where not all the bad guys were locked behind bars and sometimes you got your own head whipped, so much the better.

'All right,' I said, standing up. 'I'll put him out front for Delacroix. And in the meantime, I'll keep the peace.'

'Good,' he said, and stood up himself. 'By the way, how's that problem of yours?' He pointed delicately in the direction of my groin.

'Seems a little better.'

'Well, that's fine.' He saw me to the door. 'What about Coffey, by the way? Is he going to be a problem?'

'I don't think so,' I said. 'So far he's been as quiet as a dead rooster. He's strange—strange eyes—but quiet. We'll keep tabs on him, though. Don't worry about that.'

'You know what he did, of course.'

'Sure.'

He was seeing me through to the outer office by then, where old Miss Hannah sat bashing away at her Underwood as she had ever since the last ice age had ended, it seemed. I was happy to go. All in all, I felt as if I'd gotten off easy. And it was nice to know there was a chance of surviving Percy, after all.

'You send Melinda a whole basket of my love,' I said. 'And don't go buying you an extra crate of trouble, either. It'll probably turn out to be nothing but migraine, after all.'

'You bet,' he said, and below his sick eyes, his lips smiled. The combination was damned near ghoulish.

As for me, I went back to E Block to start another day. There was paperwork to be read and written, there were floors to be mopped, there were meals to be served, a duty roster to be made out for the following week, there were a hundred details to be seen to. But mostly there was waiting—in prison there's always plenty of that, so much it never gets done. Waiting for Eduard Delacroix to walk the Green Mile, waiting for William Wharton to arrive with his curled lip and Billy the Kid tattoo, and, most of all, waiting for Percy Wetmore to be gone out of my life.

7

Delacroix's mouse was one of God's mysteries. I never saw one in E Block before that summer, and never saw one after that fall, when Delacroix passed from our company on a hot and thundery night in October—passed from it in a manner so unspeakable I can barely bring myself to recall it. Delacroix claimed that he trained that mouse, which started its life among us as Steamboat Willy, but I really think it was the other way around. Dean Stanton felt the same way, and so did Brutal. Both of them were there the night the mouse put in its first appearance, and as Brutal said, "The thing 'us half-tame already, and twice as smart as that Cajun what thought he owned it."

Dean and I were in my office, going over the record-box for the last year, getting ready to write follow-up letters to witnesses of five executions, and to write follow-ups to follow-ups in another six stretching all the way back to '29. Basically, we wanted to know just one thing: were they pleased with the service? I know it sounds grotesque, but it was an important consideration. As taxpayers they were our customers, but very special ones. A man or a woman who will turn out at midnight to watch a man die has got a special, pressing reason to be there, a special need, and if execution is a proper punishment, then that need ought to be satisfied. They've had a nightmare. The purpose of the execution is to show them that the nightmare is over. Maybe it even works that way. Sometimes.

'Hey!' Brutal called from outside the door, where he was manning the desk at the head of the hall. 'Hey, you two! Get out here!'

Dean and I gazed at each other with identical expressions of alarm, thinking that something had happened to either the Indian from Oklahoma (his name was Arlen Bitterbuck, but we called him The Chief... or, in Harry Terwilliger's case, Chief Coat Cheese, because that was what Harry claimed Bitterbuck smelled like), or the fellow we called The President. But then Brutal started to laugh, and we hurried to see what was happening. Laughing in E Block sounded almost as wrong as laughing in church.

Old Toot-Toot, the trusty who ran the food-wagon in those days, had been by with his holy-rolling cartful of goodies, and Brutal had stocked up for a long night—three sandwiches, two pops, and a couple of moon pies. Also a side of potato salad Toot had undoubtedly filched from the prison kitchen, which was supposed to be off-limits to him. Brutal had the logbook open in front of him, and for a wonder he hadn't spilled anything on it yet. Of course, he was just getting started.

'What?' Dean asked. 'What is it?'

'State legislature must have opened the pursestrings enough to hire another screw this year after all,' Brutal said, still laughing. 'Lookie yonder.'

He pointed and we saw the mouse. I started to laugh, too, and Dean joined in. You really couldn't help it, because a guard doing quarter-hour check rounds was just like that mouse looked like: a tiny, furry guard making sure no one was trying to escape or commit suicide. It would trot a little way toward us along the Green Mile, then turn its head from side to side, as if checking the cells. Then it would make another forward spurt. The fact that we could hear both of our current inmates snoring away in spite of the yelling and the laughter somehow made it even funnier.