By the Firelights
It had been seven and a half years since Dr. Molly Beecher had killed a man. Despite swearing at the time it would be the last, she found herself once again driving through dark streets toward the town square, weapons by her side.
She spotted the small mob of reporters and protesters in the parking lot, blazing headlights cutting out their silhouettes while they watched and waited and shouted a mix of angry messages at the jailhouse entrance. She decided to take the outer loop around to the service gate. The young deputies stuck on night duty always extended the doctor an officer’s respect.
In the long hallway, her hard shoe soles beat a brisk percussion against polished concrete. The black bag containing loaded syringes of phenobarbital and potassium chloride bounced against her hip. She was unsurprised to find the death chamber empty considering that she was an hour and a half early.
She’d been called lots of names over the years. Dr. Death, Kevorkian, the Grim Beecher. Others that were less whimsical. She was well aware that physicians almost always avoided the moral minefield of lethal injections, serving to pronounce death after executions at the very most. But the people of the small, backward town were her people, guilty or innocent. She was charged with bringing them into the world and caring for them through every stage of their lives. Why shouldn’t it be her face they see at the very end?
Though blessedly rare, the executions that occasionally took place in the back of the old jailhouse invariably created within her such a persistent state of tension that afterward, she would drive home numbly in the glow of dawn and sleep for a full day and night. But, of course, this time it was different.
This was Jamie.
From day one of first grade, Jamie had been the brother she never had, even if the wheels of fate had carried them down different paths long ago. She had avoided the trial, never visiting once, fearing that she might find his plea of innocence unconvincing.
She took a slow breath, turned the corner, and walked up to the bars.
“Gentlemen.”
“Well, sonofabitch. Goodwin has some explaining to do.” Lawman Sam sat casually in the hard, square room, gut straining the buttons of his khaki shirt, looking more disappointed than angry. Another star of Piedmont County whose trajectory never overcame the rusted town’s gravitational pull, Lawman had spent many of his three decades behind a badge arresting Jamie, along with other of their former schoolmates, for crimes of all shapes and sizes. “I told him, I told all of them deputies, absolutely no one comes back here.”
“The guards know me, Sam.” She stood at the bars, black bag in hand, waiting.
With an exaggerated sigh, he stood from the cot and produced a key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and swung it wide for the doctor. It was a medium-size cell with narrow cots on opposite walls. Once she was inside, he closed and locked it again. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, returning the key to his pocket. “It’s what I believe they call a conflict of interest.” He nodded toward the prisoner.
“You’re lecturing me about conflicts of interest,” she scoffed. “The alleged victim was your sister, Sam. You shouldn’t be anywhere near this cell. Besides, after all the years the three of us have known each other, you really think I would stay away?”
“Alleged, huh? Well, I suppose that in a town with one sheriff and one doc,” Sam said, “there are bound to be some conflicts.” He sat first, then motioned for her to join them.
Molly sat at the other end of Sam’s bench and leaned out onto her knees toward the man opposite her. “I came here early to have a little time with you.”
Jamie was reclined on the cot with a pillow pinned between his back and the painted cinderblock wall, his face covered in bruises and pink-stained bandages. “It just so happens,” he said through a crimson smile, “my schedule is completely clear at the moment.”
“Who did this to you?”
“He did it to himself, Molly,” Sam said. “Boy, she always was quick to take your side, wasn’t she?”
She looked a question at Jamie. He glanced at the sheriff, then offered a curt laugh and a shrug. “Thought maybe the governor wouldn’t execute a man who’d just had the shit beaten out of him. No phone calls from the capital yet.”
“I’m sorry, Jamie,” she looked around the small space at nothing. “Did you at least get your dinner tonight?”
“Oh, he got it all right,” Sam replied. “He ended up eating chicken wings, fries, oysters, and a chocolate shake. Tell her what you ordered first.”
“A metal file on a footlong hotdog bun,” Jamie smiled. “With ketchup.”
“With ketchup,” Sam repeated. “A child to the very end.”
She gave Sam a hard look and moved over to sit beside the prisoner.
His broken face warmed once opposite hers. “It must have been fifteen years since I last laid eyes on you,” he said. “I didn’t even think you were still in this crossroad town.”
“I know,” she said. “I feel bad. For avoiding the trial, I mean. I just didn’t know how to get my head around everything.”
“I get that. Better you stayed away from this mess. But why show up now? I know you’ve done this kind of thing before, but I wasn’t expecting it’d be you holding the needle.”
Sam grunted and tapped the face of his watch.
Molly ignored him. “I didn’t want you to be alone, at the end.” She put a hand on his shackled ankle. “And I wanted to look you in the eye when I asked.”
A flash of confusion crossed Jamie’s face, replaced quickly by understanding. “Ah, okay then. Go ahead.”
“We’re at the final hour,” she said. “Sandy’s only remaining family is right here across from us.” She could hear Sam shifting on the cot. “James Livingston, did you do it? Did you kill her?”
He pushed himself into a more upright position, wincing at a jolt of pain, and then met her gaze. “My dad drank himself to death by the time I was five. My mom spent my childhood running the bars. I practically raised my own sister and brother. When they were hungry, I stole if I had to. I sold pot. I boosted cars. I’ve made a million bad decisions. But killing Sandy was not one of them.” His eyes shone with emotion. “I’ve never even been in a fight.”
She let a long, slow breath flow hot over her tongue and teeth. “I believe you,” she told him. He closed his eyes and dropped his head while she turned to Sam.
“Bullshit,” Sam said and spat on the floor.
Jamie looked up at him. He tried to judge that face, bearded and void of emotion.
“Sam, I’m innocent. I’ve said it from the beginning.” He pointed a trembling finger at the small window set high in the wall. “Listen to them out there. They’re yelling because they know it too. And if they make enough noise tonight, then maybe the governor will listen. If they convince him to unseal her medical records, maybe we could all finally understand why she did it. Everyone would see that I told the truth.”
“Your truth, anyway. Blame the victim, right? What I want to know is what it would take to get the real truth out of you,” Sam asked as he slid the Colt from his hip holster and balanced wrist over knee, the barrel aimed loosely in his prisoner’s direction.
“Sam,” Molly said, shock cranking up the volume knob on her words. “You are an officer of the law. Put that thing away.”
He pulled back the hammer, its dry, metallic click echoing in the cell, and did not take his eyes off the target.
Jamie turned to Molly as if for help. She looked through the cell door and was reminded that they were locked in with no one else roaming the jailhouse halls. “You’d better tell us, Jamie,” she spoke softly. “If there is anything left to tell.”
“She really did kill herself,” he pleaded. “It was just like I said in court. I found her body. I was alone and had a panic attack. Something in me took over. I knew that she was gone, that there was nothing I could do to help, and that I needed to get far away from there. I totally planned to call the cops, to request that they do a check on her or something, but the neighbor saw me leave and made the call themselves. Yes, I did lie about being there at first, but only out of fear. The neighbor’s testimony made me look like a killer, but I was just a coward. That truly is how it went down.”
Sam said nothing.
“You remember what she was like, Sam. You couldn’t fix her and neither could I.” He glanced toward Molly. “The meds couldn’t. The long stays in the psych ward couldn’t. I never knew why she suffered like she did, but she was broken and she finally just gave up, Sam. That’s all.”
“She wouldn’t have done that to us. To our mom.” Sam spoke with no emotion, though it seemed to rumble just below the floorboards of his voice. “She made promises.”
“Look, I loved Sandy,” Jamie said. “It wasn’t just you she hurt when she did it.”
“Careful,” Molly warned. “Sam, you don’t need to shoot him. He’ll be dead in an hour. You don’t want to end up on death row yourself.”
“They won’t string me up for it. Besides, it’d be worth it if that’s what it takes. You were sentenced to die tonight and I don’t care what you, or those idiot fans of yours outside, or the goddam governor have to say about it.”
“Help!” Molly stood and shouted into the hall.
“Save it,” Sam said. “It’s just us.”
“You’re not going to do anything,” Jamie said, a thin quaking in his voice. “She’ll testify that it was in cold blood and you’ll land in Hell right behind me.”
The gun moved again until the sights landed on Molly. “That does pose a problem,” Sam said.
“Don’t you dare point that thing at me,” she gave a stern look, but her eyes were wide. The sheriff returned the bead to the prisoner and stood up, hovering over them, the gun held firm. He opened his mouth to speak again, but Molly cut him off.
“I knew Sandy, too,” she said. “Not so much as kids, but she came to me as a patient a few times. She had severe PTSD her whole life. Nightmares. Flashbacks. Never talked about it, about what caused it, but I had an idea.” Her face was a sculpture of defiance aimed at the man with the gun. “I’ve thought a lot about her in the last couple of weeks. Everything with the trial had been swirling around in my head, none of it making sense, nothing adding up. Then I went to the Fourth of July fireworks last weekend and it jarred something inside me. The lights. The noise. Things suddenly became clear. I knew then that Jamie was telling the truth. I didn’t just come here tonight to visit him, or to execute him.”
Sam sat back down and waited. The fluorescents hummed in the cell and out in the hall.
“I came here to make an official call to the governor in my capacity as medical examiner. To tell him what I know and to ask him to stay the execution.”
“Wait, what are you saying,” Jamie asked, turning his swollen face to Sam. “Did you have anything to do with it, Lawman? With Sandy? Is that what this is about?”
All was still for a moment, and then the tenuous peace was torn away when the very air exploded around them. The sound wave from the gun barrel clapped against their eardrums and ricocheted from every wall. Molly leapt half a foot off her seat, but the two men hardly moved. They had been looking into each other’s eyes in that moment and both knew what was coming.
A part of her was stunned, overwhelmed, even terrified looking at the widening patch of darkness on Jamie’s jumpsuit, but a larger part had become desensitized to such things after thirty years of medical practice. Her instinct was to assess and treat. She said nothing to Sam while pulling the bag up onto the bench and digging out antiseptic and bandages. The process of organizing her supplies, the sensation of tools in her hands, gave her a center to pull herself around.
“Don’t touch him, Molly,” Sam commanded, the gun hot in his hand, smoke burning in all their throats. “Here’s the story, kids. This is what happened.” He spoke in methodical tones, as if he were alone and working out a problem. “The prisoner got ahold of my firearm and shot the doctor. He nearly got me and escaped before I wrestled it away from him and adjusted his execution time by about an hour.”
“You bastard,” Jamie said. “How could you even talk about hurting Molly?”
“You know,” she interjected, striving to control her panic, to keep the sheriff distracted while she tried to devise her next step. “I have a lot of memories of you guys from that summer after sophomore year when we all lived on the same street.” She unzipped the jumpsuit and lifted Jamie’s shirt. The wound was ugly and alive. “But the one that came to me on the fourth was the night of the fireworks.”
“I kissed Emily Ratner that night,” Jamie said, looking pale and calm despite the monstrousness of the moment.
“I remember,” she said. “Sandy was excited for the firelights. Remember how she would call them that? Not fireworks, but firelights. She was disappointed that you were paying attention to Emily that night. She was just eight, but she had a big crush on you, Jamie.” She dropped a pile of blood-soaked rags onto the floor with a splat. “A couple of older girls were there with my sister and one of them handed me a page from a magazine. It had been folded so many times that it was just a ball. They laughed to each other and ran away. They were gone before we could get the thing opened.”
Sam watched and listened. Leaning back against the wall, he took another look at his watch. A crackling voice rose from his walkie. He laid the gun on the cot and thumbed the box. “All good here, Allen. Stay put.”
Molly doused several pieces of gauze with sterile water. “When we finally spread it out,” she continued, “we found a wrinkled page that had come from some old porno magazine. It was an image of a young woman’s face with a surprised look, holding an man’s penis just beside her open mouth.” She laid out clean bandages and a bottle of peroxide. “Well, it happened that Sandy was standing there with us, looking on, just as curious as we were. I remember the reds and golds and purples of the firelights reflecting on the glossy picture. When I realized what we were seeing, I turned right away to Sandy, sure that I would somehow be in trouble for ruining her innocence.”
Her bloody hands went back into her bag. Both men were motionless.
“Do you know what she said?”
Jamie waited, watching her face, while Sam looked out to a place beyond the bars.
“She said ‘is that Sammy?’”
A gurgled kind of gasp arose from the prisoner. He stared, unblinking, at the man across from him, unable to see anything else. Neither of them noticed the doctor removing the syringes from their special, state-approved containers. Suddenly she made a straining grunt as she shifted next to him and brought both dripping needles down into the meat of Sam’s left thigh, thumbing the plungers and dispensing the chemicals in an instant.
Jamie watched him slap her across the face, knocking her to the ground before grabbing at the empty syringes dangling from his skin. He yanked them out and then brought his hand to the place where the gun had been.
“Easy there, Lawman.” Jamie settled back onto his bench, wincing at the pain from his raw wound. The Colt was in his right hand. Sam dropped back to the cot and swung his gaze from one of them to the other, breathing deeply.
Clanging bars echoed from far down the hall.
“Don’t shoot him,” she said.
“I’d rather not have to,” Jamie replied.
“You don’t.” She assured, scooting the spent syringes an inch or two with her toes where they made a hollow rattle against the floor.
“So, Sammy, since we’re just waiting here,” Jamie said, gun held shakily. “It’s your turn. Did you do it? Did you take liberties with Sandy? Did you hurt your little sister so bad that she ended up killing herself to escape the memories of what you did and then let them pin it on me?”
With the sad, graceless power of a buffalo riddled with arrows, dying on the prairie and giving one last thrust toward the enemy, toward vengeance, Sam rocked up on his elbows with nearly enough force to overcome gravity. Jamie placed the pad of his finger over the smooth trigger and then watched the big man collapse back against the wall awkwardly, neck bent to the side and without the strength to straighten himself.
They watched him breathe his last, listening to racing footfalls grow louder by the minute.
“I’m glad you didn’t kill anyone,” she told him.
“Yeah, I guess that’s more your thing, Doctor Death.”
“Not funny.”
“The state still thinks I did. I’m supposed to be dead soon,” he said.
“We’ll see what we can do about that.”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s changed.”
“Let’s focus on getting you to the hospital and saving your life. Then we can decide whether or not to kill you.”
“Deal.” He threw the gun across to the other cot. “Better get those mitts up. Just in case.”
They raised four red hands, palms out to the guards as they arrived.
“Not sure when I might see you again,” Jamie said. “Just so we have our stories straight, what do we tell them?”
“I think you know the only option that has a chance.”
“Right,” he said. “The dead guy did it.”
“Jamie. The truth.”
“If you insist. But let me give you some advice.”
She kept her eyes on the bars. “Alright.”
“For your last meal, I’d pass on the jailhouse oysters.”
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