Just Mercy: A Novel Read Free Page B

hungry faces and couldn’t help but want to feed them something. She stood up straight and gave them her sturdy, tough, midwestern housewife look.
    “Don’t even go there,” she said. “It’s not that simple.” Her voice rang with a strong maternal authority that rendered the reporters mute; even she turned to see if the words had come from someone other than herself. But when she looked down at her hands, she saw that they had begun trembling. The reporters must have noticed, too, because they went back to bombarding her with questions.
    “Will you be happy to see Raelynn Blackwell die, Mrs. Baker?”
    “No.”
    “Do you support her execution?”
    “Yes.”
    “Have you changed your position on the death penalty?”
    “No.”
    “Then what do you hope to get from witnessing the execution?”
    “Yeah, Mrs. Baker, why are you here, then?”
    “Enough.” She glowered at them. If they were going to insist on taunting her, she would refuse to answer any more questions. Not that she could have answered them anyway. She raised the palms of her hands in a peremptory gesture, and much to her surprise the reporters fell away, like the Red Sea parting. She flicked the short, coarse strands of hair off her cheeks, placed her hands on her thick hips, and forged her way along the path before her.
    With the reporters and cameras now focused on the crowds, the mob’s screaming reached a fever pitch.
    “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
    “Justice now! Justice now!”
    “Shame on Texas! Shame on Texas!”
    “An eye for an eye! A tooth for a tooth!”
    Bernadette craned her neck and looked back at the crowd, her heart leaping when she spotted a handsome young man with wavy multicolored hair. He looked like Fin. She squinted and saw that it wasn’t her son, after all, but she knew he was there and worried about him being alone.
    “Texans don’t cotton much to executing women,” Regis said.
    Bernadette nodded. She knew only two women had been executed in Texas before tonight. The first, Chipita Rodriguez, had been hung from a mesquite tree in San Patricio on November 13, 1863—falsely accused, it was later established, of robbing a man and murdering him with an ax. It would be 135 years before Texas had the stomach to execute another woman, and when Karla Faye Tucker was put to death on February 3, 1998, for murdering two people with a pickaxe, almost two thousand people from all over the country and even other countries had protested the execution. Bernadette had been there, too, shivering in the rain outside, standing next to Chipita Rodriguez’s ghost—who, with the noose still hanging around her neck, wailed at the crowd’s back-slapping, cheering, and spontaneous rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” once the official death announcement was made.
    Now, as Bernadette lifted one foot after the other up the steep steps to the main entrance of the Walls Unit, she wondered if Chipita’s ghost would be here tonight. And Karla Faye’s, too. The media had been obsessed of late with the fact that another woman was going to be executed. They were fascinated by the similarities between Raelynn Blackwell and Karla Faye Tucker: how both had stabbed their victims multiple times—had admitted their guilt—were close to the same age—had been drug abusers and prostitutes until religion found them on death row and turned them into model prisoners. How both had suffered sad and sordid childhoods.
    Thank God none of the reporters had asked Bernadette about any of that. If they had, she would have told them in no uncertain terms that none of those comparisons mattered, that Raelynn Blackwell had killed her Veronica, her precious baby girl, and that made all the difference.
    “You got your ID?” A hefty bald man behind a glass window inside the front entrance held his hand up for them to stop—or was he waving at her?
    “So many people out there,” she said as she slid her driver’s license