Dark Passages Box Set Read online

  And on the occasional Tuesday night, the boys would have themselves a card game. Nothing fancy; Texas hold ’em with a fifty dollar limit, but it managed to happen the day after payday, and if the pharmacist brought in a few cases of beer, the boys would all sit in the back of the kitchen until about midnight or so, and the limits went away pretty quick. At first, I was just serving drinks and making sandwiches, but after a while I was invited to sit in on the game.

  You learn a lot about a fella when you’re playing cards with him. Nobody sits for three hours and doesn’t talk. And after a while, the subject came up about this old boy who was coming up for a ride on Old Sparky.

  Now, this guy, he was a crabber. Meaning, he’s one of those people you don’t see or hear of if you are normal citizen. You just go to Publix and buy yourself some crabs, or go to the Seafood Shack and order you up a crab cake dinner. Maybe you get yourself a fried soft-shell crab sandwich. But all that delicious blue crab comes from a bunch of boys to go out on a boat in the middle of the night, and they spend days and days tossing crab traps over the side—big, wood-framed boxes wrapped in chicken wire, so the crabs can go in but they can’t get back out. And inside of every one of those traps, there needs to be some bait. Crabs will pretty much eat anything, them being bottom feeders and all, as is their nature, but that’s kinda what I mean about opportunity.

  There was a girl down in the Riverview area who went missing one day. Cute little thing, no more than four years old. Big blue eyes and long blonde hair, and the picture they put in the newspaper showed her in a little twirly dress like she was a princess.

  Well, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s deputies did their job right quick, and the FBI got called in, and they got these awesome hound dogs working the case… Them boys, they tracked down the leads they had, all right. Found one of the little girl’s shoes at the end of the dock. Found the other one in the bottom of the big dark hull of that crab boat. And the new hire who was working on the crab boat, a wormy little mutt of a man who had just rolled into town, he was staying in a rented room across the street from the little girl’s house. They found some of her clothes in his room. The kind of clothes that probably only her mom or dad would ever have handled, if you know what I mean. And Florida bein’ Florida, it was probably all them deputies could do to not beat him to death right then and there.

  The picture they posted across the front of the Tampa Tribune was of a weather-worn, scraggly-haired guy with his mouth hanging open and the whiny caption, “I didn’t do nothing.”

  And the thing is, I think he meant it.

  I think it wasn’t nothing for him to take that poor little girl and strangle the life out of her and then chop her up and put her in all those crab traps. Maybe do some other despicable things in between. But that’s how you know you’re dealing with a monster. He doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. There’s the confession.

  When the FBI had the captain pull the traps up, they found bits of hair and teeth. Crabs took the rest, case closed.

  So, crab man was working his way toward Sparky, but before him was this big ol’ African-American fellow who killed his wife. You probably remember that guy—Blanchard. He got drunk and went bowling with his wife, and they got in a fight over who was winning. Apparently, he was packing a 9mm—and decided to settle more than one score. They hauled Blanchard The Bowler out of there in handcuffs—took about six deputies, because he was one big guy. When it was his turn to ride on Sparky, I was still Randy’s assistant. Randy showed me how to do what he called prepping the machine for a special show. For a regular execution, we basically wheel the chair into what they call the execution theater. It has a few rows of seats and everything, but it’s not like a movie house; it’s like a big garage, with a glass partition so people can’t hear all the screaming or smell the burning flesh. Anyway, we roll the chair out and set it up: the wires go here, the switch goes there. Then we gotta make sure everything’s working, so we do a few tests with a special voltage meter wired into the arm and head straps.

  But as it happens, on this night, we got a visit from the murdered wife’s brother. And he laid out five crisp, brand-new $100 bills on Randy’s work bench behind the execution theater. The bills were fresh—so sharp around the edges, you’d think they’d been pressed with a steam iron right before he walked in the door. And he just put them on the table and didn’t say a word, just laid ‘em down and walked right back out. But Randy the trustee nodded, slipped the bills right into his pocket, and then went about doing a final setup on the machine.

  Time comes, and there’s no stay from the governor. The big fella sat down and got strapped in. They flip the switch, and you would’ve thought he was riding a bucking bronco. He jumped and lifted, he kicked and screamed. His hair caught fire and sparks shot out a good twelve inches from the sides of his head. Popped one eye out in a big burst of blood. They let witnesses come and watch the execution from across the room. Pretty much they were all throwing up by the end of the show. All except the wife’s brother. He just smiled and nodded at the trustee, got up and walked out. There was smoke coming off the dead prisoner’s head for a good fifteen minutes after, he fried so bad.

  I think that was kind of the point.

  That’s when I learned how to do the special show.

  It’s all volts and amps, but the ohms—the resistance, or friction of electricity—is what gets ‘em. You know how they say electricity and water are a lethal combination? Well, your body is seventy percent water. Flip that switch, and they cook inside out, brains and all. With a special show, they get a longer, much more painful trip to Hell.

  Another time, we got this guy who was some kind of a drug runner. The rumor was that he had killed ten people, including his roommate, but because he didn’t want the bodies to be identified, he cut off their heads and hands. So they found all these dead, decapitated bodies with no hands in a sugar cane field outside of Miami, and a week later they found a freezer full of heads and hands floating in Biscayne Bay. Well, I guess he wasn’t thinking about decomposition when he chained the freezer shut, but he might have invested in a better anchor. Instead, he went cheap, and it worked loose in the tide and the freezer floated up. The stuff inside was pretty much like the day it went under. It didn’t take long for the coroner to match them up like a gruesome jigsaw puzzle, and when their landlord noticed his hunting meat freezer had gone missing from the garage of his rental unit, off to Starke the drug runner went.

  That time, it was another fella, the roommate’s dad I think, who came in. Same deal. Five Benjamin Franklins go on the table, Randy the trustee sweeps them into his pocket, and then goes and does the final round of “maintenance” on the machine.

  Now, I’d seen the machine used many times, so I knew when it was set up right and when it wasn’t. Funny kind of coincidence, every time some money got put on the table, that machine seemed to have all kinds of problems—but not problems for it. Sparky worked like a charm. It just wasn’t so charming for the rider. The drug dealer had his brains cook right out his ears. Apparently, the brain is mostly water and fat, and it boiled right out of him. Looked like scrambled eggs. You don’t want to know what that smelled like. You don’t want to know.

  So when Randy moved on, the job fell to me. Later, upon my release, I was able to take over the vendor contract. Seemed like a good fit. Crab man was up next, and I decided to give him a real good sendoff.

  I even bragged a little bit about it at the poker game.

  This was not a well-kept secret. The pharmacist and the other trustees all kinda knew. The guys with the money didn’t just find their way into the back room of the execution theater, after all. I figured everybody got a cut.

  Doc Mason was the attending physician—the doctor who pronounces the convict dead and the death sentence carried out—and he was holding a pair of twos, but he liked to fold on almost every hand. He says, “So, Leon—you gonna put on a show?”

  I nodded. “I think I’ll have somet
hing real special for this fella.”

  Because remember, a monster is a person who does terrible, awful things to another human being and doesn’t feel anything bad about it. Crab man deserved a show, and on Friday, he was going to get it.

  It wasn’t anybody coming in with any five hundred dollars, but being as how I’d been working for a little while, I was able to put together some of my own money. And I asked the pharmacist for a favor. He was able to give me some stuff to sprinkle on the crab man’s food before he had his last meal—blue crabs, of course. Crab guys aren’t the brightest guys in the world.

  But what that medicine did was, right about the time crab man was supposed to get 20,000 volts through his veins from Old Sparky, he was going to have a little convulsive fit and then pass out. Doc would pronounce, and that would be that. Maintenance would cart crab man away to the waiting coroner’s van. To any onlookers, it would look like justice had been done. To the rest of us, we would know better.

  Friday at midnight rolls around, and crabby gets strapped into the chair. At one minute after twelve, with no phone call from the governor, the man in charge points his finger to the man on the switch, and the lever gets pulled. The room lights dimmed because I installed a dimmer knob that afternoon. The overhead fluorescent lights didn’t do anything, but we had a couple of lamps brought in on either side of the audience chairs. Nobody pays too much attention when you got a guy kicking around in front of you and the lamp next to you goes to half power.

  Then Doc Mason put the stethoscope to crabby’s chest and said, “We’re all done here, folks.”

  After that, the gurney man comes and puts crab man on the gurney, and wheels him out of the theater. That’s when they let me take over.

  Contractors can park close to the main buildings because we have work to do—tools to fetch and such. I parked in the back lot, behind the theater and between the air conditioning vents and the water system pumps. It’s noisy out there, but as long as there’s no deliveries, it’s secluded.

  Doc and the boys wanted to hang around and watch what I had in store. I didn’t care. Like I said, I’d learned patience in prison. I could wait for crab man to regain consciousness for as long as it took.

  It was about an hour and a half before crab man woke up. Right about that time, the toothless man started whining again. “What are you doing? I never did nothing!”

  And like I told you before, a monster is a person who does horrible, awful things to other human being and doesn’t feel any particular way about it. There’s the confession. He never said he didn’t kill her; he only said it wasn’t nothing.

  Deep inside me, I just kept thinking about that little girl, how scared she must have been when he took her away from her mom and dad, how painful it was when he strangled her and chopped her up. What she must have been thinking and what she must have been feeling. The rage boiled up inside me to the point where my ears were thumping with my pulse. I clenched my hands together, staring at crab man, holding heaven and earth inside me from bursting forth and wreaking havoc on him.

  “What are you going to do? You gotta let me go! I never did nothing!”

  And like in the shower and behind the store, and half a dozen other times in the prison that were blamed on other guys, the rage overwhelmed my system and the claws came out. It was as if my spine stretched and grew, thrusting me twelve feet into the air as daggers extended from the tips of my fingers. A twelve-foot-tall dragon-beast with giant claws stood before crab man, ready to rip its victim to shreds while enjoying his screams.

  By then the boys had scattered, running full speed back to the building. They’d seen enough.

  Crab man’s eyes were wide as pie plates. His face turned white as he shook his scraggly head. “I never did nothing!”

  “Oh, but you did, crab man. You pushed me over the edge when you took my little girl from her bed that night. You plunged me into a hell from which I’ve never escaped, so demonized that I couldn’t get out of bed or go to work or talk to my wife until the tragedy lost me my job and my home and my life.” The homemade, welded claws shimmered in the light of the parking lot. “It was when I was at rock bottom that I learned what was truly inside me—what was in me and every other man. And inside you.”

  Lifting my arms to the skies, I roared with the voice of a dragon-beast and descended upon my prey. Crab man screamed and screamed as I ripped him apart, until there weren’t any pieces big enough to scream from. The rest lay shredded in the parking lot, covering the gurney in one big red stain.

  Prison had taught me to be patient. When I read the papers and saw that my daughter’s killer would be going to Starke, I just had to bide my time.

  I learned about Old Sparky, and learned about welding and electricity so I could join the maintenance team. The inmates, they always passed around the rumors about paying a few hundred bucks to make sure a killer got his due. I figured there might be some truth to it—and I was right.

  Now, under the moonlight, I stood gasping and exhausted, the blood of my young daughter’s killer dripping from my homemade claws like a monster.

  But if a monster is a person who does horrible, awful things to another human being, then it can’t be, by definition, a person who does horrible, awful things to somebody who could not possibly be human. And crab man was most certainly not human. Not now, laying like so much shredded cabbage on the asphalt of the parking lot, and not before, when he viciously snuffed out the life of an innocent child and said it was nothing.

  A monster ain’t some big, green man that’s been brought back to life in a graveyard. It’s not a mummy in a pyramid or a vampire. It’s definitely not some shape-shifting beast that starts out looking like a frail old man and ends up as a twelve-foot-tall dragon-beast with giant claws that rips its victims to shreds while enjoying their screams.

  That’s not a monster.

  I know what all of those things are, and they ain’t no monsters.

  A Number One Bestselling Author

  When Ferrol Grubenstein threw what would be his last party, I of course attended. I loved his work—which is to say, I loved him. I was a fan. We all were. Though we had become contemporaries, and as a result became somewhat friends, at one time he was my mentor.

  I’d attended many of Grubenstein’s lectures when I was a student—when I could. He did fewer and fewer over the years. He said he grew tedious of constantly doing in-person oratory, but in fact, with the advent of the internet and streaming videos, he may simply have grown tired of trying to compete with his earlier, more successful self.

  Fame is fleeting, he would say. And fickle. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why lesser talents made the New York Times Bestselling author list while greater talents languished in obscurity. Fate? Luck? Bedding critics? No one can know for sure. Grubenstein had his own theories about that, but he had his own theories about everything.

  I remember when he came to my college, I stood in line for hours—in the September Florida heat, that is no small challenge—and debated with other, well, let’s face it: nerds—about what he would say, what topics he would discuss, and what myths of writing he would destroy. Such was his ilk, cutting to the chase about everything and laying it bare. And probably chastising people who used the word “ilk.” Or “chastised.”

  His lectures were mesmerizing, if not often relatively . . . useless. Audience members would come away saying they enjoyed his presentation, but when pressed further, could not recite one beneficial item that had been conveyed.

  He was an entertainer.

  I recall one presentation that lasted an hour and easily could have gone on for two, wherein he showed only one slide (a castle, I believe), and spoke almost completely extemporaneously, glancing at his notes a mere half a dozen times to remind him what he was supposed to be talking about. He nearly got a standing ovation that day, and the line of enthusiastic people who had questions for him afterward lasted into the next presenter’s time. She had to ask him to leave so
she could set up. So he did, and carried on in the hallway for another thirty minutes.

  I personally took three pages of notes and could not find one useful piece of information when I reviewed them later. But I kept them, nonetheless.

  At his party, he gave what would be his last presentation. Off the cuff, I’m sure, but as he often said, if you know this stuff backwards and forwards because you do it all the time, you don’t really need to rehearse.

  That was probably his undoing, both as a lecturer and as a writer, but it would not come to light until much later. In his later lectures, it was often apparent—but his presentations were like a performance by a jazz ensemble; sometimes it all fits and a masterful piece is rendered. Other times, it’s closer to melodic noise. Grubenstein would occasionally not connect with half the audience (and not give them the information they’d come for); yet many still filled out their review cards and gave him five stars. Because he was a star. The lion in the zoo is still a wild animal, he would say; it does not roar on command.

  During one presentation, he casually referenced another speaker at the conference. He ended up getting rave reviews on several comment cards from several people who attended her presentation, even though his topic and hers were not even close to similar.

  When he connected best, I believe, was when he did rehearse. When he took the time to create a cohesive outline, make good notes, and then use them during the presentation. Less ad libs and more content, and he was a showstopper. Sadly, I feel he learned this lesson too late, after he all but stopped lecturing, but as I say, I was a fan of him, not he of me, necessarily. We were friends, of a sort, and friendly; he once said he respected my work. He invited me to his parties, after all, and cared enough to learn my tastes in wine and appetizers. But I don’t believe he ever considered us equals. And rightly so. I was a writer. He was an entertainer. Those are not always the same thing.