Love Her Madly (19 page)

The radio newscaster said, “The ambulance that arrived just minutes ago has left the Mountain View Unit surrounded by Texas Ranger marked cars.… Wait a minute … here is the governor now.”

There was a little dead air and then the governor's voice came on, an echo of it coming at us from the outdoor loudspeaker. Scraggs turned up the radio volume. The voice was rock-firm.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I stand here before you to say that an unpleasant duty has befallen us. I must pass along shocking news, unprecedented news. The prisoner Rona Leigh Glueck, condemned to die at this hour for the murders of Melody Scott and James Munter, did not succumb to the chemicals that were injected into her bloodstream at twelve o'clock midnight. She is dying, but she is not dead. I have had no choice but to act in humane a manner as possible. I have directed that she be removed from this unit by ambulance to a hospital that will not be named. She will receive the medical attention she requires, and if she recovers she will be returned to Mountain View, where her sentence will be carried out.

“For the sake of justice, I can only hope she will be executed as soon as possible if she does survive the … the failed attempt to”—Scraggs and I looked at each other—“to carry out her sentence. I humbly thank you, and may God bless America.”

Over the radio, the crowd came to life, mostly with cries to God for mercy.

It was all drowned out by another siren. A second ambulance flew past us toward the prison, this one escorted by two Ranger squad cars in front and two in the back.

Scraggs, his eyes straight ahead on the road, said, “Maybe someone decided to take care of the widower after all.”

Suddenly, the headlights behind us veered left and the ambulance carrying Rona Leigh shot past us.

Scraggs gripped the steering wheel. “What the fuck is he doing?” He smashed his foot down on the accelerator.

The radio announcer was describing the arrival of the second ambulance. He said, “Now no one will confirm whether or not Rona Leigh was in the first ambulance or if she's to be put into this one.…”

We approached an overpass, the entrance to the bypass that would take the ambulance to Waco. But the ambulance didn't turn into the entrance ramp, it kept going. I could see people standing on the overpass, poised. There were three of them.

I screamed “Max!” but it was too late. Concrete blocks hit the front end of our car. We went into a spin. The police car behind broadsided us. I caught one last glimpse of the taillights of the ambulance and watched them blink out. The ambulance was swallowed by the black night.

Another cruiser slammed into the one that had broadsided us, and we were sent spinning toward the concrete bridge abutment.

*   *   *

Scraggs and I got to listen to the intact radio during the long slow process of being pried out of his car. We would be black and blue over most of our bodies, but we were not killed. I knew right away by the Technicolor spirals all around my head that I'd suffered my second minor concussion in less than a week. Scraggs and I were jammed into each other by the newly concaved sides of the vehicle, plus the roof had lowered and the steering wheel had us wedged.

The first thing Scraggs said was, “Are you all right, Agent?”

I tried to get enough air into my squashed lungs to speak. I managed it. “Yeah, I am. You?”

“Yeah.” Then he said, “Fuck me.”

I said, “She escaped.” I would have added, Fuck me too, but speaking had loosed a chain saw in my brain.

So he said, “Fuck me,” again. Then, “How the fuck did they do it?” Then, “Fuck me.”

The announcer on the radio was babbling wildly. “Again, I am saying this again, Rona Leigh Glueck did not die. She was executed but she lived! She lived through it. Her execution failed!

“She is presently being transported to a hospital, we believe in Waco. Apparently, the governor made that decision once the doctor in the death chamber determined she was still alive after the execution was over.

“Folks, the ax murderer Rona Leigh Glueck, who was to be put to death at midnight—eighteen minutes ago—was not … put to death. Rather she was, but she continued to breathe after the lethal injections were administered. There is no word as to her actual condition. We are trying to get someone … wait.…”

He whispered, “Is this my producer?” Then, into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know if I'm hearing this correctly.… Jeff, is that you? This can't be true.…”

Scraggs said, “I'm afraid it is, Jack.”

A Ranger's face appeared hovering over the webbed windshield. “Sir, can you hear me?”

“Of course I can.”

“The Jaws of Life machine is on its way.”

“Ain't any a you boys got a fuckin' crowbar?”

“Yes, sir, but we don't know the extent of your injuries, and we can't take a chance that—”

“There is no extent to my injuries.”

“And your passenger?”

“She's fine.”

“Commissioner wants to know who she is.”

“Penelope Rice. FBI.”

The Ranger looked at me. “You okay with our trying to get you out manually?”

I said, “Go to it.”

In the ten minutes it took to wrench the driver's side door open, we listened to the newscaster and so did the guys with the crowbar, who kept pausing to shake their heads in disgust. Then the announcer went live to his man at the prison, who told us all:

“There is a vast amount of confusion here at the Mountain View Unit. The governor has been driven away. Rangers are arriving, van after van. The driver of the second ambulance has been telling anyone who will listen that he was responding to the call and only his ambulance was sent. There was no other ambulance. His was not the second ambulance, his was the first one and the only one. He has been taken into the prison complex by several corrections officers.

“Now, just when the witnesses began to file out of the death house, they were treated the same way: grabbed by the guards and several Rangers and taken back in, including Cardinal de la Cruz from New York. And I can tell you this—none of them much liked it.

“At this point, all we know is what you have already been told. For some extraordinary reason, the chemicals injected into Rona Leigh Glueck did not have the effect—”

He stopped. The original guy back in the station had the latest news. His voice was quaking.

“I am interrupting our man at the prison. We have just received word that … apparently the ambulance carrying Rona Leigh Glueck to the hospital…” He began mumbling to someone. He came back. “That ambulance has disappeared.”

It was harder for me to hear him because of ripping steel and the buzzing in my brain. Essentially, a reporter in the caravan of police cars heading to the hospital said that the lead car, ours, was fired upon as the ambulance sped off. Several police cars crashed into each other, but as yet there was no word of fatalities or injuries.

Then dead air. Ripping metal. Chain saw making the noise it makes. My head was splitting. Radio again. There was to be a press conference; a spokesman from the Texas Rangers would be speaking in a few minutes.

Scraggs said, “Wish we had a TV. Love to see how poor Clarence is going to find his way through this one.”

The crowbar managed an opening in the side of the car, but it wasn't large enough for Scraggs to fit through. They took their crowbars to my side. They got the door off, but when I tried to move I couldn't. Not without losing a foot.

“I'm wedged in.” I pulled a little. I said, “Shit.”

Scraggs asked me if my leg was broken.

“No, but it will be if anyone tries to get me out.”

Scraggs said, “Then no avoiding Jaws of Life. Fuck me.”

A cop said, “We got one comin', sir.”

A very noisy machine. I thought my head might break in half. When Scraggs was freed he came around to my side of the car and talked to me while they put my side of the cruiser to the rack.

I said, “Scraggs, you don't need to stay. You've got a lot to do.”

“I ain't leavin' till you're out.”

“That's nice.”

“Poppy, are you comfortable talking? Can you answer a few questions that are killin' me?”

“What?”

“Are you sure you're all right?”

“I can talk, Scraggs.”

“Poppy, what the hell went down here? Somebody substitute water for the chemicals?”

“No. She couldn't have faked what she went through. And if she got smaller amounts than what was intended, a shitload of people are in collusion. Impossible. The nurse and the technician were a couple of robots from the system, not conspirators. Brought in from Huntsville. So that leaves antidotes. She was given antidotes over a long period of time so her system could withstand the poisons.”

“Could that be?”

“No, but I can't think of anything else. All I know is she was able to resist the fatal effects of the chemicals. Soon as I get back to DC, to the lab I set up myself, I intend to find out what she got. That'll be while you're here figuring out how and who.”

Scraggs caught my eye just as mine caught his. Neither of us could speak in that moment. I chose to be the one to fill in the silence.

“The ambulance. It was the governor who said to call an ambulance.”

More silence. Scraggs filled in this one. “I think the governor was operating on whatever instinct he'd got left.”

I finished his thought. “They got lucky, didn't they?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever the plan had been to get the warden or maybe someone over him to call an ambulance proved unnecessary.”

He said, “Fuck me.” Then he looked up at the frantic cops. “I suppose we ain't got the ambulance yet, or you'd have informed me.”

One of them was holding a cell phone to his ear. “'Fraid that's correct, sir. But we will. We got men with bloodhounds out, we got helicopters, and we got one helluva buncha infrared equipment all over the place.”

He said to me, “How can anyone have pulled such a thing off?”

I smiled at him. “What you call your inside job, Scraggs.”

The cop on the phone said to us, “We're doin' a head count right now, I'll tell you that. Soon as someone from that prison turns up missing, we'll know who.”

I said, “He's already missing. The guard in the ambulance. I heard him volunteer to go. Harley Shank.” I must have moaned.

“What?”

“I need a couple of Tylenols.”

Scraggs said, “You sure your ankle ain't busted?”

“No. My head hurts.”

“I thought the problem was with your leg.”

“Actually, I can't feel my leg.”

“Shit.” Then he said, “Boys, you heard the Agent? You got that name? Harley Shank?”

“We got it.”

“Poppy, who put him up to it?”

“The chaplain. He had the goddamn scripture set and ready to go.”

“The husband?”

“Yeah.”

He looked up again from his squat position. “Rona Leigh's husband accounted for?”

“Bein' questioned sir. Right now. Took him directly to Austin.”

Scraggs said to me, “Our boys think just like the FBI, how about that?” He asked the phone cop, “What do we know about that boy in the ambulance? Shank.”

“Chaplain's cousin, sir. Got him the job.”

Scraggs and I made eye contact. I knew he'd say fuck me, and he did. Then he said, “Where the fuck can that ambulance have gone?”

I said, “Maybe it could fly.”

“It probably could.”

I said, “Did they get those people on the overpass?”

His brow knit. “What people?” The cops who leaned into my window were staring at me.

“Scraggs, the people who dropped the blocks.”

I was the only one who'd seen three people drop the concrete blocks. Scraggs had been concentrating on his driving. He and the rest of the cops had assumed they'd been tossed from the ersatz ambulance. But then again, someone else had thought we'd been fired on.

I assured them that the blocks had been dropped from above. That sent a couple more cops to their cell phones.

Scraggs said, “We got ourselves a full-fledged conspiracy, don't we?”

“I'd say.”

The front end of the car was lifted off my foot. I gritted my teeth and wiggled it. Squashed but nothing broken.

Not long after, a doctor at the Waco Hospital said, “Couple weeks on crutches, ma'am, is all. Wrenched real bad. Just stay off it.”

I told him to dig out his Ace bandages and wrap my ankle up extra tight. I'd limp.

*   *   *

That night, after he'd spent a few moments with his scotch in the library, the governor ordered everyone arrested who had witnessed the failed execution, including the police. Cooler heads prevailed, cooler heads who wondered aloud to him who then would do the arresting. He said, “Me.” To lighten things up, the cooler heads wondered aloud if the cardinal would make bail. The governor told the cooler heads they were fired, but that was nothing unusual so the cooler heads persevered, suggesting to the governor that he would have to arrest himself. The governor announced he was going to bed and he'd deal with it in the morning.

However, the Texas Rangers did detain everyone who was in the death house, including the warden, including the cardinal. Even the corrections officers were detained, along with all the workers and the roused off-duty guards. Replaced by various people within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, of which there are over a hundred thousand employees, the detained horde was conveyed to Fort Hood, where there was plenty of room. The cardinal was made to understand that it was necessary, and he counseled everyone else that they would just have to cooperate. They all did, too, except Gary Scott. He'd quickly recovered from the crack to his head. He needed a beer and he needed his lawyer. He wasn't given access to either.