The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

I turned back to the bad little kid and shot him in the chest and said, For Baby Helen. That was number five. By then blood was pouring out of his mouth and down his chin. My .45 was an old-fashioned six-shooter, so there was only one bullet left. I dropped to one knee in a puddle of his blood. It was red, but it should have been black. Like the goo that comes out of a poisonous insect when you step on it. I put the muzzle of the gun right between his eyes.

This is for me, I said. Now go back to whatever hell you came from. I pulled the trigger and that was number six. But just before I did, those green eyes of his met mine.

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.