And homicide detective Bill Higby, wearing a brown suit with a blue tie, would stare at the jurors from the witness box and say, ‘Franky Dast raped and killed Steven Bronson and killed his brother Duane. Franky Dast’s blood was on the T-shirt worn by Duane Bronson. Franky Dast’s fingerprints and palm prints were on the car that Steven and Duane Bronson were driving. Steven and Duane Bronson’s fingerprints also were in Franky Dast’s car. Franky Dast confessed to me. Franky Dast persuaded these boys to get into his car on an empty road in the middle of the night. Or he abducted them with force. We’ll never know. But we do know that he drove these two children to a closed Shell service station and brutalized them.’
The jurors would believe every word he said. When the judge sentenced me to death, he would call me an outrage.
And it would go downhill from there.
Eight years after that night on Monument Road – and just a week after another judge told the prison warden to unlock the gates and set me free – I woke up at the Cardinal Motel and turned on the TV to see the latest on Bill Higby and the man he shot. Morning sunlight shined through the cracks around the window shade. On the concrete walkway outside my room, a man and a woman were arguing. The woman sounded frenzied, the man angry – which meant he probably was her pimp. She called him names, and he threw her against the wall to my room. I knew the price of getting involved, so I turned up the volume on the TV. A blond anchorwoman smiled, fixed the neckline on her dress, and welcomed viewers to The Good Morning Show.
The shooting led the news. Overnight, Joshua Skooner had become Josh, the well-loved but troubled son of Chief Judge Eric Skooner. ‘Josh,’ the judge said, standing on a wide lawn in front of a big house near Black Creek, ‘didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t need to die.’ The judge’s other son stood at his side. ‘We trust that there will be a full investigation into what happened only feet from the safety of my home, and we trust that the responsible party will be held accountable.’ He turned from the camera without taking questions. His son stared at the lens as if he might speak too but then followed the judge.
The on-site reporter said that yesterday evening the police received calls concerning an erratic driver and a possible hit-and-run in the Black Creek neighborhood. The officer who crashed into Josh Skooner was no regular patrolman. He was homicide detective Bill Higby, who was returning home after a fourteen-hour shift when he saw a yellow Ford Mustang blast toward him through a stop sign. He aimed his Pontiac at the car, but the Mustang kept coming. There were no skid marks leading to the collision. Josh Skooner never braked. Neither did Bill Higby.
The reporter said, ‘Detective Higby claims that, after the crash, Josh Skooner shot a gun at him. Detective Higby shot back. Neighbors say they counted seven or eight gunshots.’ The camera cut from the reporter’s face to the crash site on Byron Road. A half-dozen uniformed men and women were scouring the road shoulder, the lawns, and the bushes. ‘Evidence technicians are continuing to work the scene this morning. Officer Higby has been placed on paid administrative leave.’
The camera cut back to the anchorwoman. She said, ‘Josh Skooner was twenty-six years old and had a record of drug arrests and one minor felony.’ A picture of a thin, tan-faced man in his early twenties appeared on the screen. He had a three-day stubble and green eyes. He would have lasted about an hour at the state prison. ‘This morning, he’s being remembered by family and friends as a likeable, sociable man.’
The anchorwoman put on a thoughtful, tight-lipped face. She said, ‘Byron Road, west of Henley, remains closed this—’
I switched off the TV, ran into the bathroom, and threw up in the toilet. But when I caught my breath, I grinned at the mirror. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said, and I laughed. Bill Higby was ‘claiming’ Josh Skooner shot at him, the reporter said. Claiming. Already the doubt. ‘He’s screwed,’ I told the mirror. A much-decorated cop could get away with putting an innocent kid on death row if the innocent kid came from a family like mine. That cop could even hold his head in the clouds after a court threw out my conviction. But shooting a judge’s son? Even a judge’s son with a record?
‘Screwed,’ I said.
I went back to the bedroom and got dressed. The man and woman out on the concrete walkway were still arguing – about money. I didn’t want to hear it.
I opened my door and glared at them.
The woman had stringy blond hair and a bruised eye. The man was meth skinny, and he wore an ankle sheath with a knife in it. He glared back at me.
I slammed and locked the door. They were still arguing ten minutes later, so I called the reception desk and talked to the motel owner, Bill Hopper.
‘A guy with a knife is outside my room,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘So can you do something about him?’
‘He with a pretty blonde?’
‘I wouldn’t call her pretty.’
‘That’s Jimmy and Susan. They live next door to you. They’re good people.’ He hung up.
I’d seen enough shanks in prison to never want another piece of metal shoved against my throat. But I could either walk out my door or hole up as if I still had bars around me. I walked out into the bright morning.
The man and the woman gave me looks that said Don’t fucking dare, but I crossed the parking lot, and they went back to arguing and slapping each other.
The bus dropped me off a block from the Justice Now Initiative office at seven forty-five. When I climbed the stairs, Jane Foley and Hank Cury already sat at their desks. Jane stared at a computer screen, and Hank read the morning paper. They looked sad and tired. They must have returned late from Sammy Nines’s execution.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
Jane kept reading the screen. Hank looked at me over the top of the paper.
‘You see the news?’ I said. ‘Bill Higby is going down for a killing.’
‘I just read the story,’ he said. ‘But why do you think he’s going down? You, of all people, know it doesn’t work that way. Not for a cop like him.’
But he couldn’t wreck it. ‘They already suspect him.’
He shook his head and came around his desk. ‘In these first months, the ups can be as dangerous as the downs,’ he said. ‘Jane and I have seen it before. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t expect the universe to realign and make things right that have been wrong for eight years or a hundred or a thousand. Men like Bill Higby don’t get caught, or, if they do, they don’t get punished. That principle is as powerful as gravity. If you ignore it, it will crush you.’
I looked at Jane. She was staring at me now too, concerned.
I grinned. ‘Nah,’ I said, ‘he’s going down.’
So they put me back to work on Thomas LaFlora, the man Judge Skooner had prosecuted for killing crackheads twenty-five years ago. Although LaFlora was on death row with me at Raiford, like a lot of the old timers he’d stopped talking with others, as if he was already dead. The woman I’d located in Callahan had been sleeping with one of the crackheads LaFlora supposedly murdered twenty-five years ago. Before we visited her, Jane wanted to know everything about her – her sympathies, her vulnerabilities to prosecution or probation revocation, her work history, whether her parents were alive – anything Jane and Hank could use to get her to come clean.
‘You’ll force her?’ I asked.
‘We want her to act according to her conscience,’ Jane said.
‘And if she has no conscience?’
‘Then we’ll force her – if we sense she’s lying.’
That sounded a lot like what Bill Higby did to me, but I sat at the reception desk and made search after search. Criminal History Services at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the woman spent eighteen months in jail twenty years ago on cocaine possession charges and later was fined three hundred dollars for marijuana possession. I found nothing that said she belonged to a church or volunteered at charitable organizations. If she had a job, she kept it off the books.
I’d just started looking into family history at ten o’clock, when Thelma Friedman came in and needed the computer. So Jane asked me to file the records on Sammy Nines.
As I worked, I opened one of his folders. At the top, there was a picture of him. At twenty-three, wearing the blue pants and orange shirts we all wore on death row, he smiled at the camera with a gold crown on one of his front teeth as if he still hadn’t fully figured out that the system bites back. As I looked at that photo of a man who, less than twelve hours earlier, had stopped breathing, my excitement over Bill Higby’s troubles dissolved.
Under the photo were Sammy Nines’s appeal records, each with the same stamp – DENIED – and each with the smell of sweat and courthouse rot. I crammed the records back into the folder and jammed the folder into a cabinet between files for other dead men. I slammed the drawer shut.
Jane looked up from her computer. ‘Is everything all right?’
I gave her my best smile, as if the system hadn’t bitten me too, but said, ‘Why did you make me do that? I didn’t need to see him again.’
She looked tired. ‘No one can make you do anything, Franky. Not now. It’s your choice. But the records needed to go into the cabinet. We have others to worry about.’
Hank said, ‘If we don’t move fast, everyone goes over the edge. It was like that when we started working with you too.’
I knew they were right, but by the end of the morning I was coming down hard. Again I wanted to crawl out of my skin, slough it off, glisten wet and new. I needed a boost.
So when Thelma got up to use the bathroom, I sat at her desk and searched for information on last night’s shooting. The story was developing fast. According to the Times-Union website, investigators hadn’t found the pistol that Bill Higby said Joshua Skooner shot at him. How hard could it be to find a gun in the tangle of metal that had once been the Mustang and Pontiac? Screwed, I thought, and I clicked on a link to a Fox News exclusive. According to the report, Bill Higby, who lived in a small house next door to the Skooners, had fought with the judge’s family in the past. He’d showed up seven years ago on the night that the judge and his wife, Melody, were arrested for domestic battery. Although the judge and his wife had calmed down, Higby insisted that the reporting officers take them into custody. To the surprise of no one, the prosecutors dropped the charges. ‘Detective Higby was combative,’ the judge told the prosecutor’s office. ‘We worried for our safety.’ More recently, when Josh Skooner held regular late-night parties, Higby ticketed him for noise violations. Only the intervention of the undersheriff kept Higby from arresting him.
I figured the reporter could have gotten the information only from Judge Skooner or from the Sheriff’s Office. If the judge was powerful enough to spin the news so soon after the shooting, then Higby once again was screwed. If Higby had enemies in the Sheriff’s Office willing to leak information that hurt him, then he was doubly screwed.
I realized Thelma had come back and was watching me only when she spoke. ‘His suffering won’t make you feel better,’ she said.
‘You sure about that?’ I asked.
I left the JNI at three for an appointment with my reintegration counselor. Dr Patel had an office on the eleventh floor of the Baptist Hospital Medical Services Building on the south bank of the St Johns River. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out at the river, a railroad drawbridge, a scattering of skyscrapers, and, beyond them, a mix of neighborhoods, forest, and swamp. A successfully reintegrated man might look through the window and feel at home in the surrounding city. An unsuccessfully reintegrated man might step through the glass and plunge to the brick walkway below.
‘It’s a dissociative disorder,’ Dr Patel said, when I told him about wanting to crawl out of my skin. ‘Specifically, a depersonalization disorder. Quite common among people with PTSD, if that’s any consolation. You feel detached from yourself? As if your body isn’t your own?’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘We can fix you up with medication and therapy.’ He spoke cheerfully, as if I’d told him my turn signal had stopped blinking.
‘Replace the spark plug?’ I said.
‘Not the metaphor I would use,’ he said. ‘Have you thought more about spending time with your brother’ – he looked at his notepad – ‘Jared?’
‘No.’
‘Being around those you know best – and who know you best – can sometimes help.’
He was getting tiresome. ‘I saw a girl I might be interested in,’ I said. ‘She sold me popcorn at a movie theater.’
‘You went out to the movies? That’s good. Getting out of your room is good.’
‘She’s young. Maybe eighteen.’
‘The same age you were when you were arrested?’
‘Is that too young?’
‘You aren’t eighteen anymore. You can’t pretend you are. But you missed eight years of your life, and you also can’t pretend you didn’t. Some exonerees come out and want to be kids again. It doesn’t work. Some try to jump right into the future, as if they never went away. That doesn’t work so well either. Most try to run their lives fast-forward – live all those missed years in a couple of months – and that’s worst of all. You know what happens when you drive fast when you’re used to standing still? You plow your car into a viaduct.’
‘Thanks for cheering me up.’
‘The trick is to keep a finger on your pulse,’ he said. ‘Experiment, but keep your experiments safe. Are you going to ask this girl out?’
‘I haven’t even talked with her. Except to ask for popcorn.’
He nodded. ‘You should see your brother. You should visit the house where you grew up.’
‘I would rather plow into a viaduct.’
When I came out of the appointment, thunderclouds hung heavy overhead. If I caught a bus soon enough, I could be locked inside in my room at the Cardinal Motel by the time that lightning cracked the sky and the first fat raindrops hit the ground. Instead, I boarded a bus to the Regency Mall and the AMC Cineplex.
I got off as the clouds broke open and rain pounded the dusty pavement. I ran across the parking lot, passed the department stores and another parking lot, and stepped into the Cineplex, soaking wet, twenty minutes after Toy Story started. Water ran from my hair and dripped from my clothes, but I went to the concession and looked for the popcorn girl.
A skinny boy with curly black hair and glasses worked alongside a heavier version of himself. No one else was there. The skinny boy asked what I wanted.
‘More than you can give me,’ I said.
I went to the Toy Story theater. Seven kids sat in the second row, two of them in birthday hats. I went to an end seat in a middle row.
I’d seen Toy Story when I was a kid myself. Now, Woody and Buzz Lightyear competed again for the love of the boy who owned them. Their fight got vicious – Buzz fell out of a window, and he and Woody tumbled from a car – though I remembered that, after all the battles and adventures, they would work together and love each other. The movie theater was cool and calm, and the sugar in the air smelled like a place far from my troubles, but I shivered in my wet clothes, and Dr Patel’s voice rang in my head, telling me, You should see your brother. When a neighbor kid started torturing Buzz and Woody, I’d had enough. I went out to the hall and back to the concession.
The skinny boy eyed me as if he hoped I would go away. But I said to him, ‘A girl was working here yesterday. Cynthia. Is she here again?’
He looked left and right, as if she might be hiding behind the counter. ‘Haven’t seen her.’
‘What days does she work?’
He just frowned.
I turned away again, and he called after me, ‘You want a Coke with that?’
When I went back to my seat, Buzz Lightyear, realizing how rotten his life was, jumped from a banister and broke off an arm. Who could blame him? Then the neighbor kid tied him to a rocket.
I went back out to the hall to catch my breath, glanced at the concession, and then returned to my seat to watch the happy ending.
Yes, Buzz and Woody became friends. Yes, Woody saved Buzz’s life. Yes, they landed in the arms of the boy who loved them. Life might not work that way, but movies sometimes did, and that might get me through the afternoon.
As the credits ran up the screen, the birthday party kids filed from the theater, and I followed them out to the hall. I headed for the exit, eyeing the wet pavement through the glass doors.
Then a voice called to me from a corridor that led to other theaters. I turned and Cynthia smiled at me. She gave me the same fingertip wave she’d given me yesterday. ‘Hi,’ she said, and moved toward me.
I wanted to say Hi back. I wanted to go to her. But my stomach clenched. I stood for a moment, staring at her. Then I fled outside into the evening.
The bus tires hissed on the wet pavement as I rode back to the motel. The clouds were clearing, but I felt as if I was riding a nightmare bus that had left its route and plunged into holes that the city planners dug for people like me. I was falling toward places in my mind that I’d promised myself I would never revisit – toward the first night they put me into general population and three men came to my bunk, smelling like three men who come to a cell in the middle of the night. And then I was falling toward the infirmary, which smelled like an infirmary where you go after three men come to your cell in the middle of the night. And further falling – toward the solitary box that I entered a week after getting out of the infirmary.
How does one claw one’s way up the sides of an oil-slick tunnel when one is falling, falling, falling?
I dug my fingernails into the skin of my upper arms until blood rose in crescent moons. That was a start. I forced myself to remember how – after that first night in my bunk and then the infirmary afterward – I learned to fight as if my life depended on it, which is to say, fight as if I was willing to die, ready to kill or be killed before I let three men come to my bunk again. Then I blinded one of them in the left eye with a spoon – which put me into solitary for seven months – but when I got out, no one came to me in my bunk anymore and the man with the eye patch stayed clear in the exercise yard. One of the others became my friend. His name was Stuart and all he’d done was hold me down for the others, and if you can’t forgive a man who’s done no more than that, who are you going to forgive?
Now, as the sun set outside my window at the Cardinal Motel, I lay naked in bed and watched the news.
Mostly, the reporters told the same story they’d told throughout the day. But they did add that all eight bullets from Higby’s gun hit Josh Skooner – in the abdomen, the chest, and the head. A ballistics expert told an ABC reporter that, even at close range, Higby shot with exceptional accuracy.
The reporter asked, ‘Does that suggest this was an execution?’
The expert said, ‘It might indicate nothing more than Detective Higby’s high degree of professionalism.’
They flashed a picture of Higby at a practice range, and I said, ‘Give the man a cigar.’
CBS ran a short segment on Josh Skooner.
A male reporter said, ‘Two stints in drug rehab. Kicked out of both for relapsing. Assault charges for a fight outside a bar.’
A female reporter said, ‘His father says that while he was far from perfect, he was getting help. He was making an effort.’
The male reporter said, ‘Police have confirmed that, just before the shooting, he was driving erratically – speeding, driving through stop signs, cutting across lawns.’
The female reporter said, ‘The police have also said that the rumored hit-and-run never happened. Basically, this kid needed a traffic ticket.’
‘Perhaps so,’ the male reporter said.
I wondered again how much Judge Skooner could control what came out of the TV, the prosecutor’s office, and the other big mouths in the city. He must have intimidated or coaxed powerful people to tell the story his way.
When the reporters flashed another picture of Higby on the screen, I said, ‘It sure looks bad for you.’
Twenty minutes later, CNN brought the story to a national audience. ‘Josh Skooner’s father denies his son ever owned a gun,’ the newscaster said, and then, ‘Investigators canvassing the scene have failed to produce the gun that Officer Higby claims Josh Skooner shot at him.’
The news reports sang to me like a lullaby. By midnight, I was breathing calmly again, and I smiled to think of the popcorn girl saying Hi.
Then someone knocked on the door – three taps that sounded like the warden coming to tell me it was time.
I put on pants and yanked up the zipper. The warden had skipped my turn, moving on to Sammy Nines and the others, but when the fingers knocked again – three more taps – I felt like they were poking my chest.
I looked through the security peephole.
My brother stood outside. The peephole lens made his face clownish.
When I opened the door, Jared held one side of the doorframe. His eyes hung half closed. His lips looked like he’d heard a half-funny joke. ‘You’re up?’ he said. He sounded drunk.
‘Barely,’ I said.
He looked past me to the flickering light of the TV. ‘Can I come in?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I thought we could talk.’
I blocked the door. ‘You know when I could’ve used someone to talk to? When I was locked up for eight years. You know where I would be happy to talk now? At your house, if you invited me to stay with you.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘So are you going to let me in?’
‘It’s midnight, Jared.’
‘I know. I don’t sleep so well.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about your sleep.’
‘You don’t look like you sleep so well either.’
‘Go home, Jared.’
‘Five minutes. That’s all.’
I moved aside.
He came in, went to the TV and turned it off, walked to the bathroom and peered inside, then sat down on the bed.
‘This place isn’t so bad,’ he said.
‘It’s a shithole.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, it’s a shithole. How are you settling in? You adjusting?’
‘Did my reintegration counselor ask you to come talk to me?’
He stared at me. ‘Don’t be that way.’
‘What do we have to talk about?’ I asked. ‘I mean, really.’
‘You know, we had good times together too.’
‘I don’t remember many,’ I said.
He looked at me square. ‘Are you making friends now that you’re out?’
‘I haven’t been out long enough,’ I said.
He stared some more. Then a grin broke across his lips. ‘You know what we need to do? We need to get you laid. I mean, you’re living on hooker alley, but the girls out here – they’re not what you want, right? We’ll go to a nice club, and I’ll introduce you to some girls and—’
‘Not interested,’ I said.
‘Not interested? You’ve been locked up with dudes for eight years, and you’re not interested? They turn you while you were inside?’
‘I already met someone,’ I said. ‘I don’t need—’
His grin widened. ‘You met someone? Good man. You banging her?’
‘Jesus, Jared. It takes longer than that.’
‘Why wait? You know what I did when Trina and I split? The afternoon that the papers came through, I bought a ticket to Thailand. Two days later, I was there. The night I got to Bangkok, I went straight to a sex show. They had a girl shooting ping-pong balls out of—’
‘It’s time for you to leave,’ I said.
‘No, listen,’ he said. ‘There was no passion in it. It left me cold. But – and this is what I’m telling you – I bought a hooker anyway, because either you’re in the saddle or you’re out, right?’
I went to the door and opened it. ‘Great to see you again,’ I said. ‘You can tell Doctor Patel I’m doing fine.’
But Jared just sat there. ‘Now I’m tired of porn,’ he said. ‘Bored. And I hate the soft-focus shit.’ He stared hard at me. ‘You know what I mean?’
‘It’s time for you to go,’ I said.
His grin had fallen, and I felt a sadness coming from him like a fever. ‘We did have good times too,’ he said. ‘A lot of good times.’
‘Sure we did,’ I said.
He stared. I stood with the door open, the smells and sounds of the highway leaking into the room.
He said, ‘Do you remember that night Dad got drunk and—’
‘I remember a lot of nights Dad got drunk.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK,’ and he pushed himself to his feet and stumbled toward the door. ‘I just thought we could talk.’ I moved to let him pass. But he stopped in the door and forced the grin on to his face again. ‘I mean, we were kids, Franky. Just kids.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘we were kids,’ and I closed the door behind him.