The Last Mile (Amos Decker, #2)(2)

He dropped to the coolness of the concrete floor and did two hundred push-ups, first on fists and then on fingertips, and finally from the downward dog position, lightly touching the crown of his bald head on the concrete with each pass. Next he performed three hundred deep squats in sets of six, exploding up with every rep—depth charges, he called them. Then followed yoga and Pilates for strength, balance, range of motion, and, most important, flexibility. He could touch his toes to his forehead with his legs ramrod straight, no small feat for a big, ropy-muscled man.

Then came the thousand stomach and core reps that seared his abs like acid. It was the reason he had rock-hard obliques, and an eight-pack, his belly button stretched so tight it looked more like a mole than where his umbilical cord had once attached. Next came flat-out plyomania where he pushed off all four walls and the floor in a series of maneuvers, many of his own devising.

He was like Spider-Man, or Fred Astaire dancing on ceilings. He had a lot of hours to plan such things in prison. His life was very structured, but it also offered up a load of free time. Most inmates just sat around doing nothing. There were no classes, no rehabilitation of any kind.

The unofficial prison motto was straightforward:

Rehab is for pussies.

Finally, Mars ran in place for so long that he lost track of time, high-kneeing it the whole way. It was crazy that he was doing this today of all days. But he had done it pretty much every day since he’d been in here, and part of him felt this was his last act of defiance. They would not rob him of it. At least he didn’t have to refuse the traditional final meal, because Texas no longer offered one. He didn’t want their crap inside him at the end. He preferred to die on an empty stomach.

No one had visited him, because he had no one who wanted to visit him. He was alone, as he had been the last twenty years. He wondered what the papers would say the next day. It would be a small story probably. There was nothing new about another black man getting the Lone Star State’s lethal spa treatment. Hell, it was hardly worth a photo. But they would recount the crimes of which he’d been convicted. Surely they would. And that would be the only memory of him for many.

Melvin Mars, the murderer.

He cooled down, the sweat pooling off him and staining the concrete that was already badly scarred with far worse things than perspiration. Condemned men had been known to defecate on the floor before they walked to their deaths.

As his breathing normalized he sat on his bunk and tipped his head back against the wall. In his old cell he had named the walls Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben, after the superhero fighting team the Fantastic Four. It was just something do in a place where he had nothing to do. Each day filled with whatever he could think of to fill it.

Mars often fantasized about sexy Sue Storm, but he more closely related to Ben Grimm, the Thing, the freak. As an athlete Mars had been a freak, in a good way.

Yet he could be thoughtful, like the brainy Reed.

He also related to the flame ball Johnny Storm, Sue’s kid brother, because he felt like he was on fire every second of every day. Principally because every day was like every other day in here. A living hell, actually, hence the flames.

This was Day 7,342 for him. The last day for him.

He looked at his watch again.

Five ticks till Doomsday.

He had spent a year in solitary shortly after going to prison. The reason was simple. His life was over, his dreams shattered, his hard work for naught, and he was pissed beyond all reckoning.

His punishment for beating the crap out of three prisoners and then taking on a half-dozen guards and more than holding his own until they Tased and nearly clubbed him to death? Twenty-four hours a day in a sixty-square-foot cell with a slit for a window for a year. No words spoken to him. Never saw another face. Never felt the touch of someone else’s skin. The food was shoved through the door slot along with toilet paper and occasionally washcloths and soap and even less occasionally clean prison garb.

He showered in a corner where the water was either ice or scalding. He slept on the floor, and mumbled, screamed, cursed, and finally sobbed. That’s when he’d realized that human beings, for better or worse, were undeniably social creatures. Without interaction they went mad.

And Mars had nearly gone mad inside that cell. It had been Day 169. He remembered it clearly, had even scratched the numbers out on the wall with bloody fingernails. His mind had nearly gone; there was but one shred left. And he had used that shred like a life vest in a tsunami, his port in the storm. He had focused on an imaginary old girlfriend, Tatiana. In his mind she was married now with six kids, big-hipped and bloated, surly and unhappy, and so missing him. But back then this imagined person had been perfect. Her face, her body, her limitless love for him allowed him to survive Day 169 and then make it through 196 more.

When the door opened the first face he saw was Tatiana’s superimposed over the body of a three-hundred-pound racist nightmare of a young guard named, aptly, Big Dick, who told Mars to get his mulatto butt up or else he’d be eating through a straw for the rest of his life.

And when it was over Melvin Mars was a changed man. He had never done anything that would ever put him back in there. If he did, he knew that he would have killed himself. He wouldn’t have waited for the death chamber.

Death chamber.

It was right down the hall. The last mile, they called it. Yet it wasn’t a mile. It was actually only thirty feet, which was good because most guys collapsed before they got there. But they had big guards who picked you up and carried you the rest of the way.