Filled with righteous approval, she spoke as if he, himself, would drop the switch. He hesitated a moment, and she nodded a final time, her chin folding so firmly into her neck that the warden backed away, as if allergic to such utter conviction. He made his way to the northeast tower, which looked down on to the main gate and its approach. The guards nodded at his appearance, then melted into the corners to give him space. The warden mopped his face from the long climb, then looked down on to the dusty approach, and said, “Good God Almighty. How many?”

The nearest guard said, “Protesters or news vans?”

“Vans, I suppose.”

“Thirty-seven, last I counted.”

The other guard said, “Thirty-nine,” and pointed off in the distance, where two more vehicles made bright spearheads on plumes of boiling dust. The warden shaded his eyes, and stared down at TV people in their fine clothes and blown hair. As for the protesters, he guessed there were at least a few hundred, with more certain to come. He counted seven buses from churches with names like Grace Baptist and Mount Zion Church of Christ. They’d parked haphazardly in the fields, and a few were still spilling parishioners out into the heat, most of them holding placards with slogans like ONLY GOD SHOULD TAKE A LIFE or BELIEVE IN THE REDEEMER. By midday, the merely curious would begin to arrive, as would those who supported the death penalty, and those darker souls who wished nothing more than to be nearby when a human being was cooked alive from the inside out.

One of the guards said, “We could push them out to the state road, if you want.”

The warden took his time in responding. He watched the two news vans draw near; saw that another bus was trundling down the road behind them. “Let’s leave ’em be,” he said, and left the rest of it unspoken: that with all he had to do for X, a little chaos might not be a bad thing.

For the next ninety minutes, the warden worked in his office, trying to arrange seating for the family members who planned to attend the execution. It was an unpleasant job, but he wanted to do it right. That meant revisiting many of X’s murders in an attempt to discern which families had suffered the most, and thus had the better claim for good seating. The father who’d lost two sons, but quickly? Or the husband whose wife had endured a long week of brutal torture? It was painful math, and the warden welcomed each interruption when it came.

The first was Ripley with an update on X. “Still agitated. Still asking about Byrd.”

“Any more visitors?”

“Two of his lawyers. Actual lawyers, I mean.”

“Any talk of last rites?”

“None.”

Nor would there be. X would die as he’d lived, without apology or regret.