Death Row novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Last Meal
They moved me to the holding cell at eight in the morning.
It was a concrete box with a cot, a toilet, and a slot in the door for the tray.
The last meal came at ten.
Everyone on the row gets to choose, and they let you choose anything the kitchen can make.
I had asked for fish with lemons, the way my mother made it for four hundred children.
It came on a plastic plate with a wedge of lemon cut thick.
I ate half of it and could not taste it, but I ate it anyway.
At eleven the door buzzed, and Evan walked in with his tie straight and his coat buttoned right.
He was out of breath.
"Don't get up," he said.
"You're allowed in."
"My director called me at seven this morning. She read the paper. She said the complaint against me was a mistake, and the warden's office lifted the ban." He sat on the end of the cot. "She said she would like to apologize in person after."
"After."
"Don't say it like that."
"Is there an after, Evan?"
"I don't know." He rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "Hauck has the carbon. He drove it to a judge in his bathrobe at four in the morning."
"And?"
"A judge signed a warrant for Dean Fell, for using the name of a dead man on a state license. It's good anywhere in the state. And the judge wrote a second order, a stay, a real one." He took a folded paper from his coat and showed me.
"Then they have to stop."
"Read the last line."
I read it.
The stay takes effect at the moment the person named in the warrant is in custody.
"It only works if they have him," I said.
"They can't find him. He rented the post office box with cash. The clerk never saw his face. Hauck sat on that box until midnight, and nobody came."
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