Black Lightning by John Saul Read Free Book Online Page A

cold-blooded killer, the clothing struck Anne as unseemly, as if someone had decided it wasn’t enough simply to execute him, but that he must be stripped of his last vestiges of dignity before being sent to his death.
    The guards began strapping Richard Kraven to the heavy wooden chair.
    His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair, his wrists to its arms, his torso to its back.
    A priest came into the room and spoke to Kraven, but Anne could hear nothing through the heavy glass that separated the killing chamber from the viewing gallery. Whatever the clergyman said seemed not to affect Kraven in the slightest, and he made no reply.
    After lingering for only a few more seconds, the priest left.
    The guards dampened one of the electrodes with saltwater, and taped it securely to Richard Kraven’s shaved scalp.
    They attached the second electrode to the calf of his right leg.
    After checking their work one last time, the two guards left the chamber, closing the door behind them.
    It was only after the guards had left that Anne realized an eerie silence had fallen over the gallery.
    She glanced up at the clock.
    Thirty seconds before noon.
    Now she found herself glancing around for a telephone, and realized she was half expecting that the event she was witnessing would suddenly be ended by a loud ringing, just as it used to happen in the movies.
    But there was no phone; if it existed at all, it was somewhere beyond her field of vision.
    Beyond Richard Kraven’s, too?
    Was he, too, waiting for the last minute reprieve that would release him from the chair?
    She made herself look once more at Kraven, and though she had been told that the glass was a one-way mirror and he wouldn’t be able to see the execution’s witnesses, she nonetheless had the sensation that his eyes were focused on her, and that he knew exactly at whom he was staring.
    Those cold, expressionless eyes had lost their deathly flatness. In the last moments of Richard Kraven’s life, his eyes had at last come alive and were projecting an emotion.
    A strong, powerful emotion.
    Hatred .
    Anne could feel it burning out from him, searing through the thick glass of the window, snaking toward her—
    She recoiled from Kraven’s hate-filled gaze as from a striking cobra, and had to fight against a powerful impulse to abandon her chair and escape from the scene that was unfolding in front of her eyes. But before she could move at all, Richard Kraven jerked spasmodically as every muscle and nerve in his body reacted to the two thousand volts of electricity that shot through him.
    Anne gasped, and then her whole body responded to the horror she beheld.
    She stopped breathing as every fiber in her went momentarily rigid. Then an anguished moan escaped her throat as Kraven’s body jerked again and again.
    Next to Anne, Mark Blakemoor’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched as he watched Richard Kraven die. Every muscle tensed, the detective silently counted the seconds, only relaxing when two full minutes had finally gone by and he was certain that Richard Kraven was dead. Then he spoke quietly to Anne Jeffers.
    “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
    Anne shifted slightly in her seat, but made no move to get up. As the room slowly emptied, she stayed where she was, watching silently as the guards returned to the execution chamber, this time pushing a gurney and accompanied by a doctor. After the doctor confirmed that Richard Kraven was dead, the guards removed the electrodes from his leg and scalp, unfastened the straps that bound him, and lifted him onto the gurney.
    But even after Richard Kraven’s body had been taken away, Anne Jeffers remained where she was.
    She knew that what she had just witnessed had changed her, but she didn’t yet know quite how.
    She knew she would never forget watching Richard Kraven die, nor ever get over the terrible feeling she had experienced as his final glare of pure hatred had burned through her.
    Then she thought of