NaNoWriMo plus some trivia
I am now at 9,212 words, which is about 900 ahead of schedule.

I did some research on the lethal injection for this bit. Random fact: the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United Stated was Charlie Brooks.

Also, today's bit has some dialogue borrowed from one of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons. Anyone remember the exact one?


This is the humane way to kill a man.

The prisoner gets a last meal, a shave, a spiritual advisor. He is given all the amenities to make sure that he will die with dignity, knowing that the world will remember him as a criminal. In this case, as a mass murderer.

He is escorted into an empty, sterile room with a single gurney and some medical equipment. He will be facing a two-way mirror. His last vision will be of his eyes glazing over as his heart explodes inside his chest. The audience on the other side can watch with grim satisfaction as justice is done.

The prisoner gets two IVs placed in his arm. A doctor swabs the skin with alcohol before inserting the needles – no need to risk infection, not even for a dead man. The line leads to a hole in the wall. The drugs will be administered on the other side. The plastic tubing is clamped securely into place, ensuring that they will not be snapped part way through the administration of the drugs.

Saline begins to pump through the IVs, clearing out the prisoner’s veins for the cocktail that will come. Before they leave the room, the medical team makes sure that a heart monitor is correctly connected so prison personnel can know the instant the man dies. Those members of victims’ families who can’t stand to look at death can instead watch the green line on the monitor. When it bottoms out, the deed is done.

The unseen executioners inject the first drug into the IV line. Sodium pentothal, known to many as the truth serum. Injected at this dose, it renders the criminal unconscious in a matter of seconds. If the doctors were to leave the room now, the prisoner would overdose and die from this alone. Too much truth can kill.

The executioners move quicker now, making sure that the drugs are administered properly and expediently. To the audience on the other side of the mirror, the man looks dead. His eyes have rolled back in their skull as the lids dropped down. Now it’s just a matter of watching the heart monitor to see when it becomes official.

Pancuronium comes next. A paralyzing agent. Even if the prisoner somehow remains conscious, his muscles are instantly paralyzed, all the way down to the muscles that control his lungs. There will be no death rattles, no shudder as the body gives one last effort to stay alive. The man will never move again. Left alone, this drug would kill him as well. He would die of asphyxiation as his lungs struggled to start working again. But that would not be humane.

In older days, death was an ugly, sudden thing. Electric chairs filled the room with the sickly sweet smell of overcooked pork as blood from burst eyeballs ran down the prisoner’s neck. Post-mortem twitching from the gas chamber could last for hours. The prisoner would lie face-down in a puddle of foaming drool until someone dragged him away. Death has become sterilized now, clean and without any appearance of suffering.

The final drug comes through. Potassium chloride. A common enough chemical, used in fertilizer and petroleum gas and even bottled water. More than the trace elements in any of those becomes instantly lethal. The heart stops as soon as the chemical enters the vein. The monitor lets out a high-pitched buzz as the man’s life ends. Then automatic curtains draw over the window, blocking the view and letting the victims’ families know that their loved ones have been avenged.

At least, that’s what normally happens.

Once in a great while, something goes wrong. The IV didn’t quite find a vein, or the body won’t let the toxins finish it off. Then the shades come back up and the process is repeated. Again and again if necessary, until the criminal has finally served his sentence.

Lawrence Bryce has never looked forward after the first time. The sterility of death terrified him. He had decided long ago that when he died, he wanted to go out kicking and screaming. And he couldn’t imagine why anyone would willingly ask for anything else.

“Why did you do it, Al?” Bryce tapped his temples as he leaned back on his sofa and thought about memories he had tried and failed to push away. A confession had been too convenient back then – it led him to look past key evidence.

Human nature was to look for the easy way out. Doing so meant sending a petty and possibly insane criminal to death row and giving the real murderer a chance to kill again. And again. And again.

He had left the television on when he fell asleep and hadn’t bothered to turn it off when he woke up just after sunrise. Bugs Bunny mocked him from the 1940s.

And so, havin’ disposed of the monster, exit our hero through the front door, stage right, none the woise for his harrowin’ experience…

Bryce’s hand stumbled across the floor near his sofa until it found the remote. He opened one eye and raised his hand toward the television in the corner.

“You may fire at will, Gridley,” he mumbled. Bugs disappeared with a satisfying click.

Fourteen years ago, he had attended the execution of Alfred Weil, the man who claimed he was the murderer the media had dubbed Mack the Knife. He knew details of the crime scene. He had a past criminal history and had been a former employee of the Michael Cassotto. Everything seemed to fit, except for the fact that nothing really did.

Bryce pushed himself up with his elbows. His old green couch had long ago faded to gray. His whole house had a similar chameleon ability. The once-white living room rug had turned brown and the ceiling had been stained a nicotine yellow years before he actually stopped smoking.

“Could just be a coincidence,” he said to no one. Not even he was listening – his mind had turned toward the bag of groceries he had left by the refrigerator last night. He got absent-minded when he got stressed out. Luckily he hadn’t bought anything that would spoil this time.

Coincidence...a man in black starts killing people in the name of protecting the Cassotto family. Coincidence didn't exist in this case. It couldn't. Alfred Weil, whose body had shaken off the effects of a lethal injection, had been dead for fourteen years. Al Weil, who had for some reason confessed to crimes that should have been beyond him.

Al, who had given his friend Lawrence a place to stay after his wife left him.

Bryce started sorting through the bag. Mostly frozen meals, now soggy after having been forgotten at room temperature for six hours. He tucked them into the freezer to join the wonderland of instant pizzas and 25-cent burritos. A loaf of bread and a can of prunes.

A six pack of cheap beer.

Bryce scrunched up his face. Had he bought that? Maybe the bag boy had mixed up an order by mistake.

He picked up the beer and put it on the tiled counter next to his steel sink. Pulling off a can, he watched as the plastic ring stretched and then contorted back to its original shape. He tugged at the metal tab, listening to the hiss of carbonation and watching a touch of foam bubble up just past the rim. With a sigh, he poured the beer down the drain.

"Don't need to go back to that," he muttered. "Not yet."

After he emptied the first can, he turned on the rest. Each one was a little harder to pull away from the plastic rings than the last. In the end, he had six empty cans and a sink that stank of cheap beer. He shook his head at his folly and then walked to the phone. After all these years, he still knew the number by heart.

"Hello?" came a woman's voice from the receiver.

"Rosa," stated Bryce.

"Who is this?"

"You tell me. You're supposed to be the fortune teller."

"I stopped doing that years ago, Larry."

"Lawrence," he corrected. "Or just Bryce. Never Larry."

"What do you want Larry?"

"Have you watched the news lately?"

A long pause on the other end of the line. Bryce rubbed his finger across a tear in his wallpaper.

"No," she said, hardly convincingly. "What happened? Have you won some prize money and come to whisk me off to some tropical getaway? I always knew you had a thing for me."

"What have they said about the killings? Has anyone made the connection and thrown out the name yet?"

"What do you want, Detective Bryce?"

"What's with the formality all of a sudden? A moment ago it was just Larry."

"I get a little bitchy when someone starts to interrogate me."

"I need to talk to you about Alfred Weir. And about Tobias McIntyre."

"Last I knew, your investigation was closed."

"The pieces never added up completely. You were always holding back, and because of that an innocent man died."

"Innocent men don't confess."

"I have some questions about that, too."

"I don't have answers." The line went dead as Rosa hung up. Bryce shrugged and replaced the phone in its cradle.

Three years after Al's execution, DNA evidence from one of thirty-six victims cleared him. Bryce had gone to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that week. Too late to keep himself out of divorce and child support. Too late to save a good man who wanted to become a villain. And too late to catch the real killer.

"They made it all the way to Shelley's bedroom," he mused out loud. "You knew they were coming, but they managed to get seconds away from putting a bullet to her. Are you rusty? Are you slow? Or are you just like me and getting old?"

Whatever the reasons, Bryce had a case to revisit. Mack the Knife, the Guardian Murderer, whatever people wanted to dub him. Rosa wouldn't wait around her home for him to show up with a badge and a series of questions, but he didn't worry about that. He knew where she would go to hide. The same place the killer had once hidden, right under his nose.