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“Ladies and gentlemen,” the news announcer said, “I’m being told there’s some type of delay. They’ve closed the curtain in the execution chamber. I don’t have much information right now, but it seems there’s been some type of problem with the administration of the chemicals. This is all I know at this point in time. I’ll keep you posted as soon as further information becomes available.”

Everyone in my house sat motionless, waiting for a report that would clear up what was going on. “Hey, Jason,” my brother teased, “looks like he escaped again.” Chuckles filled the room—a few contributed by me, though I had to force them out. Actually, I’d been apprehensive that something like this would happen, that somehow I’d have to live with the prospect that Gacy would keep pestering and threatening me. I’d imagined the Supreme Court intervening. Or possibly the governor. But I’d never dreamed Gacy would be rescued by a faulty catheter.

While Jenn and my family chattered away, eating pizza and chicken fingers my mother had ordered, I silently prayed, Please, God, let this nightmare be over. Let Gacy finally die.

It took eighteen minutes before Gacy finally stopped breathing and was pronounced dead, double the time that had been allotted. When they made the announcement, my mother and brother cheered. “Yessss!” they whooped, fists held above their outstretched arms.

Jarrod gave me a high five, then Jenn reached over and hugged me, whispering in my ear, “The monster is dead.”

After a few minutes of idle chatter, I politely excused myself and went up to my room to be alone. I looked through some of the letters Gacy had sent me, especially those in which he’d been rather normal and almost considerate. I stared at his paintings, haunting images that revealed so transparently how tortured he’d been. Then I put them all in the safe, and when I locked the door, I hoped I was putting this chapter in my life behind me.

• • •

A few days later, Ken called to pass along a last message that Gacy had left for me. I shuddered, wondering if I really wanted to hear it or not.

Before I could decide, he said, “On the last day of his life, the day he was executed, he asked about you, Jason. He wanted to know if I’d kept in contact with you. He asked how you were doing. I told him I’d last talked to you about a week or so before, and that you were doing all right and that you were just finishing up with school and your finals.

“Like I once told you,” he continued, “I think he genuinely cared about you, Jason. At least the only way he could. He certainly ended up respecting you. He knew he’d met his match with you. He kept saying you really took him for a ride. He’d say it in anger but I think he got a kick out of it, too.”

Tears started falling down my face as I heard those words. It sort of reminded me of those Westerns in which the two adversaries grudgingly show respect for each other, just before they reach for their guns. For a long time, that had been the fantasy I’d been living out—that I was a gunslinger wearing a white hat taking on the cold-blooded killer wearing the black hat.

I’d learned, though, that life isn’t a movie. Though it’s nice to believe in white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains, people are a lot more complex than that. Myself—I figured my Stetson had a few stains on it. And Gacy—well, you had to look awfully hard to find a speck of white on his black fedora. But I liked to think that everybody had a little good in them somewhere. Maybe, in Gacy’s case, it was there as a child—before abuse took his innocence away.

45

Aftermath

“Yeah, right.”

“No way!”

“That really happened, Jason?”

I wasn’t surprised by their challenges. I was used to it by now. In fact, I was downright amused by their expressions—grins of half-disbelief, half-amazement.

I was standing in front of a psychology class at the high school I’d graduated from, the school Jarrod now attended. I’d been invited to tell my story, the one that had