“Okay.” He went back up to the desk, unlocked the drawer with the gun and the stick in it, and brought them back.
“Ready?” I asked them. My men – good men, and was never prouder of them than I was that night, nodded. Harry and Dean both looked nervous; Brutal as stolid as ever. “Okay. I’m going to do the talking. The less the rest of you open your mouths, the better it’ll probably be and the quicker it’ll probably wrap up … for better or worse. Okay?”
They nodded again. I took a deep breath and walked down to the Green Mile restraint room.
Percy looked up, squinting, when the light fell on him. He was sitting on the floor and licking at the tape I had slapped across his mouth. The part I’d wound around to the back of his head had come free (probably the sweat and brilliantine in his hair had loosened it), and he’d gotten a ways toward getting the rest off, as well. Another hour and he would’ve been bawling for help at the top of his lungs.
He used his feet to shove himself a little way backward when we came in, then stopped, no doubt realizing that there was nowhere to go except for the southeast corner of the room.
I took his gun and stick from Dean and held them out in Percy’s direction. “Want these back?” I asked.
He looked at me warily, then nodded his head.
“Brutal,” I said. “Harry. Get him on his feet.”
They bent, hooked him under the canvas arms of the straitjacket, and up he came. I moved toward him until we were almost nose to nose. I could smell the sour sweat in which he’d been basting. Some of it probably came from his efforts to get free of the quiet-down coat, or to administer the occasional kicks to the door Dean had heard, but I thought most of his sweat had come as a result of plain old fear: fear of what we might do to him when we came back.
I’ll be okay, they ain’t killers, Percy would think… and then, maybe, he’d think of Old Sparky and it would cross his mind that yes, in a way we were killers. I’d done seventy-seven myself, more than any of the men I’d ever put the chest-strap on, more than Sergeant York himself got credit for in World War I.
Killing Percy wouldn’t be logical, but we’d already behaved illogically, he would have told himself as he sat there with his arms behind him, working with his tongue to get the tape off his mouth. And besides, logic most likely doesn’t have much power over a person’s thoughts when that person is sitting on the floor of a room with soft walls, wrapped up as neat and tight as any spider ever wrapped a fly.
Which is to say, if I didn’t have him where I wanted now, I never would.
“I’ll take the tape off your mouth if you promise not to start yowling,” I said. “I want to have a talk with you, not a shouting match. So what do you say? Will you be quiet?”
I saw relief come up in his eyes as he realized that, if I wanted to talk, he really did stand a good chance of getting out of this with a whole skin. He nodded his head.
“If you start noising off, the tape goes back on,” I said. “Do you understand that, too?”
Another nod, rather impatient this time.
I reached up, grabbed the end of the runner he’d worked loose, and gave it a hard yank. It made a loud peeling sound. Brutal winced. Percy yipped with pain and began rubbing his lips. He tried to speak, realized he couldn’t do it with a hand over his mouth, and lowered it.
“Get me out of this nut-coat, you lugoon,” he spat.
“In a minute,” I said.
“Now! Now! Right n-”
I slapped his face. It was done before I’d even known I was going to do it … but of course I’d known it might come to that. Even back during the first talk about Percy that I’d had with Warden Moores, the one where Hal advised me to put Percy out for the Delacroix execution, I’d known it might come to that. A man’s hand is like an animal that’s only half-tame; mostly it’s good, but sometimes it escapes and bites the first thing it sees.