”Why are you so interested in my personal hygiene?” Johnny Wayne said. ”Does it offend you?”

”Nah,” I said, ”I was just curious.”

His disdain for me was palpable. With each visit I could sense it growing like metastasizing cancer, but I didn’t care. I disliked him as intensely as he disliked me. He’d lied to me dozens of times. He’d run me and my investigator all over East Tennessee following false leads and locating bogus witnesses. He whined constantly.

”So now that we have those incredibly important matters out of the way,” Johnny Wayne said, ”explain this deal, as you so eloquently put it, one more time.”

”It’s simple,” I said. ”A moron could understand it.”

”Are you insinuating that I’m a moron?”

Answering the question truthfully would have served no useful purpose, so I ignored it.

”The deal is, you plead guilty to first-degree murder. You agree to a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. You give up your right to appeal. In exchange, you get to live. No needle for Johnny Wayne. That’s it, sweet and simple.”

He snorted. ”Doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me.”

”Depends on your point of view.”

”Meaning?”

”It depends on whether you want to spend the rest of your life in the general prison population where you can at least get a blow job once in a while or spend the next fifteen years in isolation on death row, then die by lethal injection.”

”But I’m innocent.”

”Of course you are. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.”

”All circumstantial. Or lies.”

”What about the cell phone records that match exactly with the statements Clive and Derek gave the police? The calls they say you made to check on them while they were on their way up here to kill Laura, and while they were on their way back.”