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through the door. He looked nervous, too, and pale. He seemed to receive Frank’s breakfast order with great respect and gravity. There was an air of ceremony to the whole procedure. It made Frank nauseous: one step following the next in an inevitable ritual. As the minutes followed each other.
    “We’ll have that for you right away,” Reedy told him solemnly. He returned to his desk and sat down. He typedthe transaction into his report:
6:24—Breakfast order relayed to CO Drummer
.
    Seated on the edge of his cot, Frank looked down at his feet now. He tried to put poor nervous Reedy out of his mind. He tried to focus his thoughts, block out everything, until he felt as if he were alone. He put his hands between his knees and clasped them. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He began to pray: his morning prayer.
    It steadied him. He was always aware, every moment, that the eye of God was on him, but when he prayed, he could feel the eye, there, above him, very clearly. The eye was motionless, unblinking and dark, like those cameras in the ceilings of elevators that watch you just when you feel most secluded and alone. When he prayed, Frank remembered that he was not alone and he felt that eye watching him. Behind that eye, he told himself, there was a whole other world, a whole other system of justice, better than the state of Missouri’s. To that system, and to its judge, he appealed as he prayed.
    He prayed for strength. It wasn’t for himself he was asking, he said, it was for his wife, for Bonnie, and for their little girl. He asked Jesus to take them into consideration now, on this final day. He prayed that he’d be given the strength to tell them good-bye.
    After a while, he did feel stronger. The dream was half forgotten. He raised his gaze to the clock on the wall. And he felt the eye of God was ever on him.

2
    N ow, the eye of God and the eye of the news media are frequently mistaken for one another, especially by the news media. But whether or not Frank Beachum was being watched over by the former, one member of the latter had him firmly in her heart and mind.
    Michelle Ziegler of the
St. Louis News
was a formidable creature. Young, a kid really, only twenty-three. But her insecurities didn’t show, and her good looks did, and so did an alluring, intelligent and grim hauteur that struck terror in the hearts of men and an envious disdain in the minds of women. Myself, I kind of liked her. She had a soft, oval face with a Roman nose and large brown eyes that saw enough to make you sweat. She dressed like what she was: a high-octane college girl set loose upon the world. Button-down blouses that emphasized her figure—a shape that would’ve been called graceful when grace was still a concept. And skirts so short that some of the less mature males on the
News
staff had a running pool on the color of her panties. I’d won forty dollars in it once when I hit pink three times in a row.
    She was a good reporter, or was going to be one day. She had authority, and people talked to her; I think they were afraid not to. What’s more, some vast, uncompromising social vision in that big brain of hers erased whatever qualms she might’ve had about her methods. She was willing to flirt,lie, blackmail, terrorize and steal to get her hands on information. Any information: when she was on a story, she collected every detail, every document, every quote from every involved person she could find—most of which she never referred to again but kept stored in cardboard boxes tossed around the crazy loft she lived in. She couldn’t write very well, and her college ideologies were so thick and fervent on the page that the editors who had to rewrite them had nicknamed her stories “Incoming Michelle Fire.” But once you cut all that stuff out—and luckily the editors usually did—she always got the facts, did Michelle, every single time.
    She had been assigned to the Beachum case about six months before: a token of Bob