The second interruption came forty minutes later, and was entirely unexpected, unimagined, even. “Sir?” Alice spoke from the open door. “You have a call on line two. It’s your wife.”

“Thank you, Alice. Would you close the door?” She did as he asked, and the warden stared at the phone, almost afraid to touch it. His wife never called. “Sweetheart?” he said. “Everything okay?”

“I’m calling because I know how hard this day will be for you, and that tomorrow will be even harder, given your thoughts on execution.” She spoke softly. “We’ve not been much use to each other these past years, but I am with you in this matter.”

“Sweetheart, that is so very kind.”

“At least until tomorrow,” she said. “When you kill that horrible, wicked man, and send his soul to hell forever.”

The line went dead, and left the warden staring at the receiver as if he’d never seen one. Slowly, he replaced it on the cradle. That’s when Ripley came back to his office, and the world really went to shit.

Five miles down the state road, Reece was parked in the shade of an abandoned gas station whose windows were broken out and boarded over. The Coke machine was broken, too. So were the bathroom doors, the pumps, and the faded, plastic sign that, once upon a time, said ESSO. It was a grim place, remembered only by those who passed it by on the dusty two-lane. But the pay phone still functioned, and that’s why Reece was there.

He checked his watch, and thought, Soon.

More worried than he cared to admit, he checked his fingernails for the third time, making sure he’d scrubbed off all traces of Lonnie’s blood.

He had.

Of course he had.

“This waiting,” he said. But it wasn’t the wait.

It was X. It was the gamble.

Almost absentmindedly, he opened the trunk, and looked down into it. “You boys still breathing?” Neither could respond, taped up as they were, and jammed in so tightly. But they were still breathing, so Reece gave them a nod. “Stay quiet, and you might get out of this alive.”

Reece closed the trunk, and shaded his eyes to peer up the road. A few buses had rattled past en route to the prison, but nothing much had come from the other way, just an old sedan, a timber truck, and a combine that rolled past at twenty miles an hour. A mile down, though, there was a wink of light where the road bent north to avoid the river.

“Here we go.”

The shimmer hardened into a Buick sedan driven by a soft and balding middle-aged man who looked like every such man who’d ever lived. The car slowed, and turned into the lot; and Reece walked out to meet it. “Any problems?”