Wrong Thing by Barry Graham Page A

said.
    â€œYeah, thanks. My roommate Miguel says he can’t eat his mom’s cooking no more, since he started living with me.”
    â€œYou always cook for him?”
    â€œYeah, usually. I like cooking for people. And he don’t know how to cook.”
    â€œHe lucked out getting you as a roommate.”
    â€œThat’s what he says. He’s scared I’ll get married or something and then he’ll starve.” The Kid laughed. “I keep telling him, learn to cook. It ain’t hard.”
    â€œWill you show me?”
    He looked at her. “Yeah.”

EIGHT
    J esus Griego couldn’t believe he was going to die. He’d been waiting for more than twenty years. Every time they were about to kill him, the lawyer did something, there was another delay, and it didn’t happen. But now the lawyer was telling him that this time was different, that there would be no delay, that they were going to kill him. The lawyer was saying he was sorry, the appeals had been exhausted, and Jesus was trying to figure what he could say in return.
    When Jesus was twenty, he was working in Phoenix, cleaning swimming pools for the white people. He drank, smoked pot, did speed, sniffed paint if he couldn’t get anything else. He’d been getting high since he was ten. One Saturday afternoon he was driving his truck with a couple of friends a few miles outside of town. They picked up a hitchhiker, a guy in his forties. They drove into the desert, parked the truck and they all got out. Jesus and his friends told the guy to give them his money and ID. He did. The guy told them he was afraid of them, said he wouldn’t call the cops, he just wanted to see his son grow up. They shoved him to the ground and kicked him until there was shit in his pants and brain fluid was leaking out of his nostrils. Jesus got an idea. He told his friends, “Check this out.” He got in the truck and rolled it until one of the wheels was on the guy’s head. Then he revved it, spinning the wheels. His friends laughed and cursed as they jumped back to avoid splashes of the dirty red soup the guy’s head was turning into.
    The prosecutor gave Jesus a choice. He could forgo his right to a trial, plead guilty, and he could be paroled within fifteen years. Or he could plead not guilty and take it to trial, in which case they’d press for the death penalty.
    The public defender told him to accept the deal, told him that there was no chance of an acquittal, and that what he’d done easily met the criteria for the death penalty, that the murder be “especially heinous, cruel or depraved.” But other people told Jesus that the public defender’s job is always to talk the client into pleading guilty to avoid inconveniencing the courts. So he told him he wanted a trial. He got one, and the judge sentenced him to death.
    Now the lawyer was telling him that it was going to happen. He couldn’t feel afraid because he couldn’t believe it. He was forty-two. The longer he lived, the less plausible it seemed that they could kill him for something he’d done when he was a kid. Other people on Arizona’s death row in Florence prison, people he knew and was friends with, had been executed, so he knew it could happen, knew it was true. He knew it, but he didn’t believe it.
    â€œI’m very sorry, Jesus,” his lawyer told him.
    â€œIt’s okay. Thanks,” Jesus said. He liked the lawyer, who worked at the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Phoenix. Jesus liked to read, but in recent times death row inmates weren’t allowed to have books. The lawyer had helped him out there by giving him books as, he claimed, a part of a legal brief, telling the authorities that he wanted his client to read contemporary literature in order to find passages that he would quote when he had to present his case at the clemency hearing. They knew it was bullshit, but there wasn’t