The sound was a sharp snap, like a breaking branch. Dean gasped. Percy stared at me in utter shock, his eyes so wide they looked as if they must fall out of their sockets. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like the mouth of a fish in an aquarium tank.

'Shut up and listen to me,' I said. 'You deserved to be punished for what you did to Del, and we gave you what you deserved. This was the only way we could do it. We all agreed, except for Dean, and he'll go along with us, because we'll make him sorry if he doesn't. Isn't that so, Dean?'

'Yes,' Dean whispered. He was milk-pale. 'Guess it is.'

'And we'll make you sorry you were ever born,' I went on. 'We'll see that people know about how you sabotaged the Delacroix execution—'

'Sabotaged—!'

'—how you almost got Dean killed. We'll blab enough to keep you out of almost any job your uncle can get you.'

Percy was shaking his head furiously. He didn't believe that, perhaps couldn't believe that. My handprint stood out on his pale cheek like a fortune-teller's sign.

'And no matter what, we'd see you beaten within an inch of your life. We wouldn't have to do it ourselves. We know people, too, Percy, are you so foolish you don't realize that? They aren't up in the state capital, but they still know how to legislate certain matters. These are people who have friends in here, people who have brothers in here, people who have fathers in here. They'd be happy to amputate the nose or the penis of a shitheels like you. They'd do it just so someone they care for could get an extra three hours in the exercise yard each week.'

Percy had stopped shaking his head. Now he was only staring. Tears stood in his eyes, but didn't fall. I think they were tears of rage and frustration. Or maybe I just hoped they were.

'Okay—now look on the sunny side, Percy. Your lips sting a little from having the tape pulled off them, I imagine, but otherwise there's nothing hurt but your pride... and nobody needs to know about that but the people in this room right now. And we'll never tell, will we, boys?'

They shook their heads. 'Course not,' Brutal said. 'Green Mile business stays on the Green Mile. Always has.'

'You're going on to Briar Ridge and we're going to leave you alone until you go,' I said. 'Do you want to leave it at that, Percy, or do you want to play hardball with us?'

There was a long, long silence as he considered—I could almost see the wheels turning in his head as he tried out and rejected possible counters. And at last, I think a more basic truth must have overwhelmed the rest of his calculations: the tape was off his mouth, but he was still wearing the straitjacket and probably he had to piss like a racehorse.

'All right,' he said. 'We'll consider the matter closed. Now get me out of this coat. It feels like my shoulders are—'

Brutal stepped forward, shouldering me aside, and grabbed Percy's face with one big hand—fingers denting in Percy's right cheek, thumb making a deep dimple in his left.

'In a few seconds,' he said. 'First, you listen to me. Paul here is the big boss, and so he has to talk elegant sometimes.'

I tried to remember anything elegant I might've said to Percy and couldn't come up with much. Still, I thought it might be best to keep my mouth shut; Percy looked suitably terrorized, and I didn't want to spoil the effect.

'People don't always understand that being elegant isn't the same as being soft, and that's where I come in. I don't worry about being elegant. I just say things straight out. So here it is, straight out: if you go back on your promise, we'll most likely take an ass-fucking. But then we'll find you—if we have to go all the way to Russia, we'll find you—and we will fuck you, not just up the ass but in every hole you own. We'll fuck you until you'll wish you were dead, and then we'll rub vinegar in the parts that are bleeding. Do you understand me?'

He nodded. With Brutal's hand digging into the soft sides of his face the way it was, Percy looked eerily like Old Toot-Toot.

Brutal let go of him and stepped back. I nodded to Harry, who went behind Percy and started unsnapping and unbuckling.

'Keep it in mind, Percy,' Harry said. 'Keep it in mind and let bygones be bygones.'

All of it suitably scary, three bogeymen in bluesuits... but I felt a kind of knowing despair sweep through me, all the same. He might keep quiet for a day or a week, continuing to calculate the odds on various actions, but in the end two things—his belief in his connections and his inability to walk away from a situation where he saw himself as the loser would combine. When that happened, he would spill his guts. We had perhaps helped to save Melly Moores's life by taking John to her, and I wouldn't have changed that ("not for all the tea in China," as we used to say back in those days), but in the end we were going to hit the canvas and the ref was going to count us out. Short of murder, there was no way we could make Percy keep his end of the bargain, not once he was away from us and had started to get back what passed for his guts.

I took a little sidelong glance at Brutal and saw he knew this, too. Which didn't surprise me. There were no flies on Mrs. Howell's boy Brutus, never had been. He gave me a tiny shrug, just one shoulder lifting an inch and then dropping, but it was enough. So what? that shrug said. What else is there, Paul? We did what we had to do, and we did it the best we could.

Yes. Results hadn't been half-bad, either.

Harry undid the last buckle on the straitjacket. Grimacing with disgust and rage, Percy pawed it off and let it drop at his feet. He wouldn't look at any of us, not directly.

'Give me my gun and my baton,' he said. I handed them over. He dropped the gun into its holster and shoved the hickory stick into its custom loop.

'Percy, if you think about it—'

'Oh, I intend to,' he said, brushing past me. 'I intend to think about it very hard. Starting right now. On my way home. One of you boys can clock me out at quitting time.' He reached the door of the restraint room and turned to survey us with a look of angry, embarrassed contempt—a deadly combination for the secret we'd had some fool's hope of keeping. 'Unless, of course, you want to try explaining why I left early.'

He left the room and went striding up the Green Mile, forgetting in his agitation why that green floored central corridor was so wide. He had mad this mistake once before and had gotten away with it. He would not get away with it again.

I followed him out the door, trying to think of a way to soothe him down—I didn't want him leaving E Block the way he was now, sweaty and dishevelled, with the red print of my hand still on his cheek. The other three followed me.

What happened then happened very fast—it was all over in no more than a minute, perhaps even less. Yet I remember all of it to this day—mostly, I think, because I told Janice everything when I got home and that set it in my mind. What happened afterward—the dawn meeting with Curtis Anderson, the inquest, the press-meeting Hal Moores set up for us (he was back by then, of course), and the eventual Board of Enquiry in the state capital—those things have blurred over the years like so much else in my memory. But as to what actually happened next there on the Green Mile, yes, that I remember perfectly well.

Percy was walking up the right side of the Mile with his head lowered, and I'll say this much: no ordinary Prisoner could have reached him. John Coffey wasn't an ordinary prisoner, though. John Coffey was a giant, and he had a giant's reach.

I saw his long brown arms shoot out from between the bars and yelled, 'Watch it, Percy, watch it!' Percy started to turn, his left hand dropping to the butt of his stick. Then he was seized and yanked against the front of John Coffey's cell, the right side of his face smashing into the bars.