First Thrills - Lee Child [21]
Puff just smiled. “No fried drumsticks for my last supper, no sir. I’m starting off with a duck pâte followed by a lobster risotto and then—”
The guard let out a hearty laugh. “And for dessert, a menagerie of sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride, right? ’Night, Judd-Ass.”
Secondo
The locals call it Prison City, a small Baptist town in east Texas, a company town where the company is the penal system. I took a furlough from my weekly feasts and spent Mondays at 12 Building and “the Walls.” Each visit I brought four-dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies for the guards; I brought the inmates pastries and took their confessions: long, teary-eyed confessions. My how the predead talked and talked and talked, and always about the same old things: the past, the Lord, the shame, and the pending trip to see Joe Bryd, the name of the prison cemetery.
Except for inmate TDCJ #1962.
All he wanted to talk about was cooking.
“Guard says you a chef.”
“Of sorts,” I answer. I’m in the visitor’s booth and we’re separated by thick glass. It gives me little comfort.
“Preacher, can you use an immersion hydrothermal circulator to prepare a two-hour egg?”
“Sure, but why would you, when you can just boil it?”
“Georges Pralus says you can, but you gotta watch out for botulism poisoning at ’dem low temperatures. You ever make carrot caviar?”
“Once.”
“Did you use sodium alginate? It’s a damn good emulsifier, ain’t it?”
I listen in awe as TDCJ #1962 debates the benefits of hydrocolloid gums—obscure starches relegated to the bowels of food labels on Ring Dings and Twix. He wants to know if it’s possible to make a condiment that you could wrap around a hot dog like a string using an emulsified puree of mustard seed and xantham gum. When our time is up, I ask how he knows of such things.
“My cookers. That’s all I read. I like the ones with pictures best. I know they wash ’em in detergent and paint ’em with food coloring and all that, but still the food in ’em pictures looks mighty fine.”
“You know a lot about cooking.”
“Spent eight years planning my last supper. I deserve to die, no question about that, but I also deserve a good home-cooked meal before I go.”
“Might be tough to pull off something fancy in the kitchen here.”
“But you could cook it for me, Preacher.”
“Me?”
“Sure. Please?”
“No, Preacher can’t,” is all I say. I want to add: “Especially not for the bastard who murdered my wife,” but the good Lord holds my tongue in place.
It’s almost dawn. I can’t sleep. The Puff monster didn’t recognize me; guess I had changed a lot in eight years. How easy it is for some people to forget the taste of murder. I pull the Smith & Wesson Model 60 out from under the bed, stumble down to the kitchen, and place it on the counter next to the 9-inch Switchblade Stiletto CarbonFiber. The gun is dull, chunky, and awkward, but the silver blade dances smooth and fit under the kitchen lights. Yin and yang, male and female.
I sell the Double Action .38 caliber for $495 on eBay; the auction takes seven minutes.
I’m not going to shoot Puff, not now, not after how much I’ve grown, evolved. Mary wouldn’t want that; the man she married is a priest, not some common thug.
That day I beg Peter Radin to do everything he can to grant Judd Perkins a clemency. I pull the Bishop Neal card, too. My campaign begins: an eye-for- an-eye makes the world go blind.
And I decide to cook Puff’s last supper.
The most delicious meal of his entire wretched life.
Formaggi
Two weeks left for Puff.
I’m in the visitor’s booth at Huntsville, working through the menu. “I researched deadmaneating .com,” I report. “You’re right, not one death row inmate ever asked for mushroom pâte.”
“So you’ll do it?” he asks.
I pull out a pad and a pen. “I was thinking we’d start off with puff-ball soup, you know, given your nickname and all that.”
“No, no. I wrote it all out for you already.”
“So you knew I would agree to cook for you?”
Puff grins a yellow smile.