Page 2 of The Chain House

Sal Batise and the two guards disappeared from view down below.

A heavy door clicked shut and one by one the inmates turned back around and resumed what they’d been doing in the yard before the guards had interrupted them. Several inmates stared at the door through which Sal Batise had just entered the tower, probably wondering which dead man had just passed through their hour in the sun. The warden suspected some of them had figured it out. Sal Batise, after nearly twenty years on death row, carried an aura of energy some swore they could feel like a subtle, low-level current that made arm hair stand erect and brought all senses to celebrity-like attention.

Warden Wren turned in his chair and faced the door. It wasn’t protocol for any inmate to be delivered into his office, but Sal Batise wasn’t the everyday run-of-the-mill prisoner. And with less than forty-eight hours to live, the warden figured he’d allow him a quick nature stroll through the yard. But that wasn’t the only reason Batise had been given this special privilege, and the privilege they were about to discuss for tomorrow, which to the warden still screamed as outlandish. But what was he to do? Blackmail was real, and the picture sent to his phone as a threat two weeks ago had been sent by a real person. Only God, and Sal Batise—who had often thought of himself as a god—knew who sent it. And the actual sender, of course, who Warden Wren assumed was one of Batise’s followers. He still had thousands of them who—God only knew how he’d reached them from his isolation cell—were still willing to do his bidding.

But while Warden Adrian Wren was known to be an upstanding citizen and father, he’d evolved, ashamedly, over the past year into a horrible husband who’d begun an affair he’d only ended two weeks ago, when a compromising photo of himself and his mistress had landed in his texts from an anonymous source—and Sal Batise somehow knew about it.

And here we are, Warden Wren thought as he awaited Sal Batise’s arrival in his own personal office like he was a friend, because that’s what Sal had demanded.

Like the family and friends of Sal Batise’s wildly branched victim tree, Warden Wren wanted Batise in the ground, and, like Governor Hawthorne, he’d made no secret of it. But now he especially couldn’t wait for Batise to be executed, and the blackmail to be over and done. Sal, with a whisper into the warden’s ear two weeks ago, had promised the picture would never see the light of day.

Just grant me this one last wish, he’d said.

And the warden had agreed.

The personal meeting inside his office was a show of solidarity, and deep down, perhaps, a smidge of respect. Although he wanted the psychotic son of a bitch in the ground, he secretly admired Batise’s uncanny ability to stay alive, to delay the inevitable, to continue kicking the can down the road like some death-dodging magician, pulling one trick after the next from sleeves that, for the past five years in particular, had seemed endless. With all his appeals exhausted years ago, he’d become the king of the last-minute—and in once instance, last-second—stays of execution. He’d had four last meals, and in one case had made it as far as the needle in his arm when the call came in to halt things.

Always one more trick up his sleeve.

One more buried body he claimed to know about.

One more murder he claimed to know about.

And they always checked out.

Warden Wren knew this could be one more trick, but what else could he do?

He wanted to stay married, and he wanted to keep his family intact, and Sal Batise—a man who’d never shied away from the fact that he’d had multiple wives—had made the warden promise he’d never cheat on his wife again.

Warden Wren straightened upon a heavy knock on his door. “Come in.”

The door opened and there stood Sal Batise in the red prison garb the Twisted Tree death row inmates wore every day. Chains connected his wrists. Chains connected his ankles. He shuffled instead of walked, but with his trademark grin, which was sometimes a full smile, as if constantly giving off the vibe that none of the daily grind bothered him in the least bit. And despite the fact that he now had less than two days left to live and weeks ago had dismissed the last of a long string of lawyers, he still carried himself like he had no doubt he’d one day walk away from the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Twisted Tree a free man. He took the chair Warden Wren had left for him on the opposite side of his desk.

Sal Batise was a relatively young man upon his arrest and sentencing, and while he was not old in his fifties, his hair, cut short to his scalp, was completely gray, as was his neatly trimmed beard. His skin had barely seen the sun in two decades, yet any hint of paleness somehow evaded him. But it was the sky-blue eyes that never failed to own a room and mesmerize even the most unshakable of men or women. And now, even as the warden had mentally prepared himself for this moment, as he did every time he’d met Batise face-to-face over the years, cold chills still crawled like icy spiders up and down Warden Wren’s spine.

To mask his nerves, the warden leaned forward with his elbows on his desk, hands together. Doing his best not to stare into the bottomless depth of those piercing eyes, he cut right to the chase. “Well, Sal, who will it be?”

Sal ignored the question, and instead surveyed the warden’s office with a sense of nonchalance that belied his nature. “Nice place you got here, Warden.” And then he nodded toward the framed picture of Warden Wren’s family on the corner of the desk. “That your family? Your wife sure is a looker.”

Warden Wren gently placed the picture frame face down and remained calm, but he could feel the guards’ stares and he could hear their question in his mind—Are you going to stand for this, Warden?

And the answer to that was yes, for two more days he would.

Then Sal said, “Got a pen, Warden Wren?”

One of the guards, the tall dark-haired one with a smiley-face tattoo on the top of his left hand, Billy Boyle, said, “Just spill it, Sal.”

But Warden Wren said, “It’s okay, Billy.” The warden removed an index card from a drawer and grabbed a pen from the cup at the corner of his desk and slid both in front of Sal Batise.

Sal clutched the pen in his left hand, turned the index card at an angle, and started writing like any left-hander the warden had ever seen write. But Sal used his right hand as a shield, covering the card as he wrote. Other than the heavy scrawl of pen on paper and the eerie sound of his chains moving across the desktop, the office was silent.

They waited and watched.

The bastard had perfected the art of calligraphy over the years, and the warden could tell that’s what Sal was doing now. Making a show of it.

It didn’t take long, as the warden knew it wouldn’t. It was his final answer to a simple question they’d been waiting on for fourteen days now. The result of the blackmail. The one wish Sal asked to be granted—one last interview, and the interviewer would be chosen like a contest—something Warden Wren would never have agreed to otherwise. The decision Batise had finally made after two weeks of going through snail mail—because that had been one of the rules he’d made for what he called the final contest: old-school, mailed-in pitches from all the major news networks, from Fox to MSNBC and Rolling Stone to People and every outlet in between, all practically begging to have Sal Batise’s final interview.

His first interview in nearly a decade.