Monument Road Read online

  The big one stripped off his T-shirt.

  I wrapped it over the cap and tried it. Pressure held it tight. I tried again. Tight. I leaned into it and wrenched it with my weight. My hand slipped, and my knuckles raked across a metal bracket.

  I swore. Shook my hand, the rain stinging the cut skin. Sucked the bloodiest knuckle. Wiped my hand on the T-shirt and threw the shirt on the ground.

  The little one said, ‘Can you—’

  I said, ‘It’s a mile and a half to the closest gas station. I’ll give you a ride.’

  The little one wanted the ride. The big one wanted to stay with the car.

  The rain came hard. The palmetto fronds on the roadside looked like slick black leather. ‘Decide,’ I said, ‘because I’m leaving.’

  The little one looked at the other one and said, ‘Please.’

  The big one balled his fists as if he might hit him, but he picked up his T-shirt and put it on, then walked to my car and got into the front passenger seat.

  The little one said, ‘Thanks,’ and ran to the back seat.

  I knew of a Shell station that I thought stayed open twenty-four hours. As we drove, the big kid hunched into himself. I guessed he’d had the idea to steal the Cavalier and he knew the blame would come down on him. When I glanced at the rearview mirror, the little one stared back with wide, nervous eyes. He was skinny, almost pretty, almost a girl.

  ‘You’re brothers, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t look it,’ the little one said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I can tell.’

  The tires hissed on the wet asphalt. The wipers snaked across the windshield. Our bodies steamed inside the car. The big one smelled of sweat and rain and cigarette smoke. You would have thought anything could happen.

  The Shell station had closed for the night. But the neon yellow glowed like a bar of gold. Icy light shined from inside the empty minimart.

  I drove under the pump canopy, and the rain silenced. Sheets of water poured from the canopy and the roof of the minimart. ‘Tough luck,’ I said.

  The little one leaned over the seat. ‘Duane?’ he said to the big one.

  ‘Shut up,’ the big one said.

  ‘Don’t you have a phone?’ I asked.

  Neither answered.

  ‘You can use mine if you want,’ I said.

  Again, no answer. I figured the big one was deciding how to get out of the mess. I figured the little one was waiting for the big one to decide.

  ‘If you want to hang out here, the station will open in a couple of hours,’ I said.

  ‘Can you give us a ride?’ the big one asked.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We live by the airport,’ the little one said.

  Twenty miles at least. ‘What were you doing over here?’

  ‘Driving,’ the big one said. ‘Some nights we do.’

  ‘Our dad used to live over here,’ the little one said, ‘before he moved to Miami.’

  ‘Shut up,’ the big one said.

  I said, ‘I can’t take you all the way to the airport.’

  They sat, silent in my car, the big one smelling of sweat and cigarette smoke, the little one looking like fear.

  ‘I’ve got to get going,’ I said.

  They sat.

  Then the big one got out of the car. The little one sat for a moment longer before getting out too.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said through the closed doors. Then I touched the gas and shot back into the thumping rain. A mile up Monument Road, I passed another car on the roadside, its hazards blinking. I turned on the radio. The Foo Fighters were playing ‘All My Life.’ More ripping guitar. More pounding drums.

  I never did ask the little one’s name.

  ‘It was Steven,’ the prosecutor would say. ‘He was thirteen years old.’

  I never did look the big one in the eyes.

  They were blue. The jurors would hand his picture down the line. ‘Fifteen,’ the prosecutor would say. ‘An innocent child.’

  I never touched either of them, aside from the big one’s T-shirt.

  Steven wore flip-flops, orange shorts that looked brown in the dark and rain, and a gray T-shirt. His big brother, Duane, wore the red T-shirt, camouflage pants, and Nike tennis shoes. They both wore white jockey underwear – Steven’s threadbare, as if they were hand-me-downs. The jurors would finger each piece of clothing, dry now and packaged in a plastic exhibit bag.

  FIVE

  And homicide detective Bill Higby, wearing a brown suit with a blue tie, would stare at the jurors from the witness box and say, ‘Franky Dast raped and killed Steven Bronson and killed his brother Duane. Franky Dast’s blood was on the T-shirt worn by Duane Bronson. Franky Dast’s fingerprints and palm prints were on the car that Steven and Duane Bronson were driving. Steven and Duane Bronson’s fingerprints also were in Franky Dast’s car. Franky Dast confessed to me. Franky Dast persuaded these boys to get into his car on an empty road in the middle of the night. Or he abducted them with force. We’ll never know. But we do know that he drove these two children to a closed Shell service station and brutalized them.’

  The jurors would believe every word he said. When the judge sentenced me to death, he would call me an outrage.

  And it would go downhill from there.

  Eight years after that night on Monument Road – and just a week after another judge told the prison warden to unlock the gates and set me free – I woke up at the Cardinal Motel and turned on the TV to see the latest on Bill Higby and the man he shot. Morning sunlight shined through the cracks around the window shade. On the concrete walkway outside my room, a man and a woman were arguing. The woman sounded frenzied, the man angry – which meant he probably was her pimp. She called him names, and he threw her against the wall to my room. I knew the price of getting involved, so I turned up the volume on the TV. A blond anchorwoman smiled, fixed the neckline on her dress, and welcomed viewers to The Good Morning Show.

  The shooting led the news. Overnight, Joshua Skooner had become Josh, the well-loved but troubled son of Chief Judge Eric Skooner. ‘Josh,’ the judge said, standing on a wide lawn in front of a big house near Black Creek, ‘didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t need to die.’ The judge’s other son stood at his side. ‘We trust that there will be a full investigation into what happened only feet from the safety of my home, and we trust that the responsible party will be held accountable.’ He turned from the camera without taking questions. His son stared at the lens as if he might speak too but then followed the judge.

  The on-site reporter said that yesterday evening the police received calls concerning an erratic driver and a possible hit-and-run in the Black Creek neighborhood. The officer who crashed into Josh Skooner was no regular patrolman. He was homicide detective Bill Higby, who was returning home after a fourteen-hour shift when he saw a yellow Ford Mustang blast toward him through a stop sign. He aimed his Pontiac at the car, but the Mustang kept coming. There were no skid marks leading to the collision. Josh Skooner never braked. Neither did Bill Higby.

  The reporter said, ‘Detective Higby claims that, after the crash, Josh Skooner shot a gun at him. Detective Higby shot back. Neighbors say they counted seven or eight gunshots.’ The camera cut from the reporter’s face to the crash site on Byron Road. A half-dozen uniformed men and women were scouring the road shoulder, the lawns, and the bushes. ‘Evidence technicians are continuing to work the scene this morning. Officer Higby has been placed on paid administrative leave.’

  The camera cut back to the anchorwoman. She said, ‘Josh Skooner was twenty-six years old and had a record of drug arrests and one minor felony.’ A picture of a thin, tan-faced man in his early twenties appeared on the screen. He had a three-day stubble and green eyes. He would have lasted about an hour at the state prison. ‘This morning, he’s being remembered by family and friends as a likeable, sociable man.’

  The anchorwoman put on a thoughtful, tight-lipped face. She said, ‘Byron Road, west of Henl
ey, remains closed this—’

  I switched off the TV, ran into the bathroom, and threw up in the toilet. But when I caught my breath, I grinned at the mirror. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said, and I laughed. Bill Higby was ‘claiming’ Josh Skooner shot at him, the reporter said. Claiming. Already the doubt. ‘He’s screwed,’ I told the mirror. A much-decorated cop could get away with putting an innocent kid on death row if the innocent kid came from a family like mine. That cop could even hold his head in the clouds after a court threw out my conviction. But shooting a judge’s son? Even a judge’s son with a record?

  ‘Screwed,’ I said.

  I went back to the bedroom and got dressed. The man and woman out on the concrete walkway were still arguing – about money. I didn’t want to hear it.

  I opened my door and glared at them.

  The woman had stringy blond hair and a bruised eye. The man was meth skinny, and he wore an ankle sheath with a knife in it. He glared back at me.

  I slammed and locked the door. They were still arguing ten minutes later, so I called the reception desk and talked to the motel owner, Bill Hopper.

  ‘A guy with a knife is outside my room,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘So can you do something about him?’

  ‘He with a pretty blonde?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call her pretty.’

  ‘That’s Jimmy and Susan. They live next door to you. They’re good people.’ He hung up.

  I’d seen enough shanks in prison to never want another piece of metal shoved against my throat. But I could either walk out my door or hole up as if I still had bars around me. I walked out into the bright morning.

  The man and the woman gave me looks that said Don’t fucking dare, but I crossed the parking lot, and they went back to arguing and slapping each other.

  The bus dropped me off a block from the Justice Now Initiative office at seven forty-five. When I climbed the stairs, Jane Foley and Hank Cury already sat at their desks. Jane stared at a computer screen, and Hank read the morning paper. They looked sad and tired. They must have returned late from Sammy Nines’s execution.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  Jane kept reading the screen. Hank looked at me over the top of the paper.

  ‘You see the news?’ I said. ‘Bill Higby is going down for a killing.’

  ‘I just read the story,’ he said. ‘But why do you think he’s going down? You, of all people, know it doesn’t work that way. Not for a cop like him.’

  But he couldn’t wreck it. ‘They already suspect him.’

  He shook his head and came around his desk. ‘In these first months, the ups can be as dangerous as the downs,’ he said. ‘Jane and I have seen it before. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t expect the universe to realign and make things right that have been wrong for eight years or a hundred or a thousand. Men like Bill Higby don’t get caught, or, if they do, they don’t get punished. That principle is as powerful as gravity. If you ignore it, it will crush you.’

  I looked at Jane. She was staring at me now too, concerned.

  I grinned. ‘Nah,’ I said, ‘he’s going down.’

  So they put me back to work on Thomas LaFlora, the man Judge Skooner had prosecuted for killing crackheads twenty-five years ago. Although LaFlora was on death row with me at Raiford, like a lot of the old timers he’d stopped talking with others, as if he was already dead. The woman I’d located in Callahan had been sleeping with one of the crackheads LaFlora supposedly murdered twenty-five years ago. Before we visited her, Jane wanted to know everything about her – her sympathies, her vulnerabilities to prosecution or probation revocation, her work history, whether her parents were alive – anything Jane and Hank could use to get her to come clean.

  ‘You’ll force her?’ I asked.

  ‘We want her to act according to her conscience,’ Jane said.

  ‘And if she has no conscience?’

  ‘Then we’ll force her – if we sense she’s lying.’

  That sounded a lot like what Bill Higby did to me, but I sat at the reception desk and made search after search. Criminal History Services at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the woman spent eighteen months in jail twenty years ago on cocaine possession charges and later was fined three hundred dollars for marijuana possession. I found nothing that said she belonged to a church or volunteered at charitable organizations. If she had a job, she kept it off the books.

  I’d just started looking into family history at ten o’clock, when Thelma Friedman came in and needed the computer. So Jane asked me to file the records on Sammy Nines.

  As I worked, I opened one of his folders. At the top, there was a picture of him. At twenty-three, wearing the blue pants and orange shirts we all wore on death row, he smiled at the camera with a gold crown on one of his front teeth as if he still hadn’t fully figured out that the system bites back. As I looked at that photo of a man who, less than twelve hours earlier, had stopped breathing, my excitement over Bill Higby’s troubles dissolved.

  Under the photo were Sammy Nines’s appeal records, each with the same stamp – DENIED – and each with the smell of sweat and courthouse rot. I crammed the records back into the folder and jammed the folder into a cabinet between files for other dead men. I slammed the drawer shut.

  Jane looked up from her computer. ‘Is everything all right?’

  I gave her my best smile, as if the system hadn’t bitten me too, but said, ‘Why did you make me do that? I didn’t need to see him again.’

  She looked tired. ‘No one can make you do anything, Franky. Not now. It’s your choice. But the records needed to go into the cabinet. We have others to worry about.’

  Hank said, ‘If we don’t move fast, everyone goes over the edge. It was like that when we started working with you too.’

  I knew they were right, but by the end of the morning I was coming down hard. Again I wanted to crawl out of my skin, slough it off, glisten wet and new. I needed a boost.

  So when Thelma got up to use the bathroom, I sat at her desk and searched for information on last night’s shooting. The story was developing fast. According to the Times-Union website, investigators hadn’t found the pistol that Bill Higby said Joshua Skooner shot at him. How hard could it be to find a gun in the tangle of metal that had once been the Mustang and Pontiac? Screwed, I thought, and I clicked on a link to a Fox News exclusive. According to the report, Bill Higby, who lived in a small house next door to the Skooners, had fought with the judge’s family in the past. He’d showed up seven years ago on the night that the judge and his wife, Melody, were arrested for domestic battery. Although the judge and his wife had calmed down, Higby insisted that the reporting officers take them into custody. To the surprise of no one, the prosecutors dropped the charges. ‘Detective Higby was combative,’ the judge told the prosecutor’s office. ‘We worried for our safety.’ More recently, when Josh Skooner held regular late-night parties, Higby ticketed him for noise violations. Only the intervention of the undersheriff kept Higby from arresting him.

  I figured the reporter could have gotten the information only from Judge Skooner or from the Sheriff’s Office. If the judge was powerful enough to spin the news so soon after the shooting, then Higby once again was screwed. If Higby had enemies in the Sheriff’s Office willing to leak information that hurt him, then he was doubly screwed.

  I realized Thelma had come back and was watching me only when she spoke. ‘His suffering won’t make you feel better,’ she said.

  ‘You sure about that?’ I asked.

  I left the JNI at three for an appointment with my reintegration counselor. Dr Patel had an office on the eleventh floor of the Baptist Hospital Medical Services Building on the south bank of the St Johns River. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out at the river, a railroad drawbridge, a scattering of skyscrapers, and, beyond them, a mix of neighborhoods, forest, and swamp. A successfully reintegrated man might look through the window and feel at home in the surrounding
city. An unsuccessfully reintegrated man might step through the glass and plunge to the brick walkway below.

  ‘It’s a dissociative disorder,’ Dr Patel said, when I told him about wanting to crawl out of my skin. ‘Specifically, a depersonalization disorder. Quite common among people with PTSD, if that’s any consolation. You feel detached from yourself? As if your body isn’t your own?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘We can fix you up with medication and therapy.’ He spoke cheerfully, as if I’d told him my turn signal had stopped blinking.

  ‘Replace the spark plug?’ I said.

  ‘Not the metaphor I would use,’ he said. ‘Have you thought more about spending time with your brother’ – he looked at his notepad – ‘Jared?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Being around those you know best – and who know you best – can sometimes help.’

  He was getting tiresome. ‘I saw a girl I might be interested in,’ I said. ‘She sold me popcorn at a movie theater.’

  ‘You went out to the movies? That’s good. Getting out of your room is good.’

  ‘She’s young. Maybe eighteen.’

  ‘The same age you were when you were arrested?’

  ‘Is that too young?’

  ‘You aren’t eighteen anymore. You can’t pretend you are. But you missed eight years of your life, and you also can’t pretend you didn’t. Some exonerees come out and want to be kids again. It doesn’t work. Some try to jump right into the future, as if they never went away. That doesn’t work so well either. Most try to run their lives fast-forward – live all those missed years in a couple of months – and that’s worst of all. You know what happens when you drive fast when you’re used to standing still? You plow your car into a viaduct.’

  ‘Thanks for cheering me up.’

  ‘The trick is to keep a finger on your pulse,’ he said. ‘Experiment, but keep your experiments safe. Are you going to ask this girl out?’

  ‘I haven’t even talked with her. Except to ask for popcorn.’

  He nodded. ‘You should see your brother. You should visit the house where you grew up.’