Chapter One

Six Years Later

"Crack-up!" Lee-Lee said. "How's that grab you, Sunny? Or maybe like, Three Strikes, You're Dead? Wait, wait, I know! Rape Factory!"

"You're serious?" I said. "You want to make a film about a convicted rapist and murderer?"

Lee-Lee nodded vigorously, her eyebrow ring flashing in the light of the bar where we were sitting.

I said, "Explain to me why this would be of interest to sane human beings. I mean, it's like sticking your camera into a train wreck."

Lee-Lee wrinkled her nose at me. "Exactly! That's the point, Sunny," she said. "Everybody wants to look at a train wreck."

I sighed. Everybody has a crazy cousin. Lee-Lee is mine. Her craziness manifests itself in the form of various obsessions, each of which inevitably leads her into some kind of ridiculous disaster. She then relies on her boundless naïveté and charm to get herself out of the inevitable disaster. Generally, she drags everybody she knows into the tragicomic storm that surrounds her, putting us all to great effort, pain, expense, or some combination there of. At various times she has announced to us that she was about to become: a professional bull rider, a painter, a swimwear designer, a banjo player, and a lot of other things. Her most recent mania was documentary filmmaking.

"So this guy is down at the death house at Jackson penitentiary?" I said.

"Germind Dale Weedlow," she said. "Date of birth, September twelve, 1969. Two years for assault, one year for possession of stolen goods, six months for receiving, and time served for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, eighteen months for attempted robbery. Then he got the big one."

"The big one."

"He got convicted of raping and killing two girls down in Flournoy County. Two death sentences: rape, murder, assault with a deadly weapon." She smiled. "He's a bad, bad, bad boy."

"Well, all I've got to say," I told her, "is don't get the idea that you're going to be the big crusader who proves this monster didn't do it."

"Au contraire, Sunny," she said. "I just want to, like, get inside this perv's mind, see what his deal is."

"How charming," I said. "Anyway, guys like this, they see some cute little sorority chickie like you, they're gonna be racking their sociopathic brains trying to figure out a million ways of using you, of abusing your trust."

Lee-Lee, more than anything else in the universe, hates being called a sorority chickie. These days, she's all nose rings and dyed black hair and tattoos. But she had spent about three weeks as a Tri Delt at UGA back when she was a freshman, and I've never let her forget it.

"Trust?" She laughed loudly, tossed a mug shot of a guy on the table. "You think I'd trust a guy like that?"

I looked at the guy in the picture; then I looked up at her. The contrast couldn't have been more stark. Weedlow had white-trash loser practically tattooed on his forehead. Small head, protuberant eyes, one tooth eaten away by decay, bad skin, a stringy mullet, a mulish expression in his eyes. Lee-Lee, on the other hand, is a child of privilege. I looked at her pretty dentistry, her flawless skin, her expensively dyed and disheveled hair, her nose ring, her eyebrow ring, the tattoo of Marilyn Manson on her shoulder---the whole sorority-girl-gone-wrong shtick---and I felt something cool move across my skin. She'd never had anything bad happen to her, didn't realize how ugly and how real a thing like this would turn out to be.

"You don't have a clue what you're getting into," I said. "You sit around up here in some coffeehouse in Atlanta with all your cynical hipster friends egging you on and you think, Hey, great, this'll be fun!" I shook my head. "I'm telling you, it ain't gonna be fun."

But she didn't listen. Lee-Lee's a sweet girl, but she never listens. Never ever. I've always been like her responsible big sister, the one who gives her good advice that she ignores. But then, I guess it's a family trait. Since when did I ever listen to anybody?

"So when's he scheduled to get the needle?" I said. "Sometime in the next couple years?"

"Uh..." Lee-Lee said. "Actually, next Friday."

I sighed loudly. "Germind?" I said. "This sicko's name is really Germind?"

"He goes by Dale. We can head down tonight."

"Tonight! Are you crazy?"

Lee-Lee smirked. "Tonight."

"No, Lee-Lee! Absolutely not."

"Oh, come on! Just for a day. Two at most."

"Lee-Lee," I said. "I've got a very big case I'm working on right now. If I go down there with you, all of a sudden you'll be convinced that this idiot got framed, that he's all innocent and everything. Next thing I know, I'll be wasting a week poking around down there in some jerkwater county full of inbred rednecks."

"Flournoy County is not that bad, Sunny!"

"Oh yes it is," I said. I drained the last of my beer. "Sorry, Lee-Lee. I can't."

Copyright © 2006 by Ruth Birmingham