Four Blind Mice Read Free

man.”
    “Maybe she does. You’ll like her. Everybody does.”
    John started to laugh again. “You do find nice ladies. I’ll give you that much.” He switched subjects. “Nana Mama is some kind of piece of work, isn’t she?”
    “Yeah, she is. Eighty-two. You’d never know it. I came home the other day. She was shimmying a
refrigerator
down the back stairs of the house on an oilcloth. Wouldn’t wait for me to get home to help her.”
    “You remember that time we got caught lifting records at Spector’s Vinyl?”
    “Yeah, I remember. She loves to tell that story.”
    John continued to laugh. “I can still see the two of us sitting in that store manager’s crummy little office. He’s threatening us with everything but the death penalty for stealing his crummy forty-fives, but we are so cool. We’re almost laughing in his face.
    “Nana shows up at the record store, and she starts
hitting
both of us. She hit me in the face, bloodied my lip. She was like some kind of mad woman on a rampage, a mission from God.”
    “She had this warning:
‘Don’t cross me. Don’t ever, ever cross me, ever.’
I can still hear the way she would say it,” I said.
    “Then she let that police officer haul our asses down to the station. She wouldn’t even bring us home. I said, ‘They were only
records,
Nana.’ I thought she was going to kill me. ‘I’m already bleeding!’ I said. ‘You’re gonna bleed more!’ she yelled in my face.”
    I found myself smiling at the distant memory. Interesting how some things that weren’t real funny at the time eventually get that way. “Maybe that’s why we became big, bad cops. That afternoon in the record store. Nana’s vengeful wrath.”
    Sampson turned serious and said, “No, that’s not what straightened me out. The army did it. I sure didn’t get what I needed in my own house. Nana helped, but it was the army that set me straight. I owe the army. And I owe Ellis Cooper.
Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah!
”

Chapter 7
    WE DROVE ONTO the sobering and foreboding high-walled grounds of Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina.
    The security housing unit there was like a prison within a prison. It was surrounded by razor-sharp wire fences and a deadly electronic barrier; armed guards were in all the watchtowers. Central Prison was the only one in North Carolina with a death row. Currently there were more than a thousand inmates, with an astounding 220 on the row.
    “Scary place,” Sampson said as we got out of the car. I had never seen him look so unsettled and unhappy. I didn’t much like being at Central Prison either.
    Once we were inside the main building it was as quiet as a monastery, and the extremely high level of security continued. Sampson and I were asked to wait between two sets of steel-bar doors. We were subjected to a metal detector, then had to present photo IDs along with our badges. The security guard who checked us informed us that many of North Carolina’s “First in Flight” license plates were made here at the prison. Good to know, I suppose.
    There were hundreds of controlled steel gates in the high-security prison. Inmates couldn’t move outside their cells without handcuffs, leg irons, and security guards. Finally we were allowed to enter death row itself, and were taken to Sergeant Cooper. In this section of the prison each block consisted of sixteen cells, eight on the bottom, eight on top, with a common dayroom. Everything was painted the official color, known as “lark.”
    “John Sampson, you came after all,” Ellis Cooper said as he saw us standing in a narrow corridor outside a special hearing room. The door was opened and we were let in by a pair of armed guards.
    I sucked in a breath, but tried not to show it. Cooper’s wrists and ankles were shackled with chains. He looked like a big, powerful slave.
    Sampson went and hugged Cooper. Cooper had on the orange-red jumpsuit that all of the death row inmates wore. He kept repeating, “So