Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  “Yes.”

  “I’m on the way,” Mattsson said.

  34

  Peck had been asleep in the farmhouse. There was no furniture in the place, but Hayk Simonian had brought in a foam pad, and Peck passed out on it, partly from exhaustion and partly from the drugs. He awoke in the dark and was disoriented: the first thing he recognized was the smell of the place, mostly dry rot, rodent shit, and dust, with a lingering stink from the tiny bathroom.

  None of the plumbing worked, but Simonian had used the toilet anyway. He’d later tried to flush it with a bucket of water, but the pipes were screwed up and he was only partially successful. The electricity still worked, but since they didn’t use the house for much, Hamlet Simonian had installed only one lightbulb, in the kitchen, leaving his fingerprints all over it, Peck assumed.

  Peck had dragged the foam pad into the mudroom, which still had functioning screens, because the house was too hot and the cross-ventilation from the open windows kept the Hayk Simonian stink at bay. In the dim light of the sixty-watt bulb, he pushed himself up, popped a Xanax, opened the door, took a step down, unzipped, and peed off the side of the back stoop.

  As he was doing that, he saw a crack of light to his left, at the barn. And a figure in the light: that fuckin’ Flowers, no question about it.

  Caught in midstream, he tried to get back inside the house without peeing on himself, and succeeded, mostly, except for one hand, but did pee all over the foam pad and in the doorway to the main part of the house. At that point, figuring he was near the end anyway, he finished peeing on the kitchen floor, wiped his hands on his pants, and got the rifle.

  Getting as close to the kitchen lightbulb as he could, without throwing shadows that might give him away, he carefully extracted the magazine from the bottom of the rifle, cursing himself for not loading it earlier, and began to fumble cartridges into the magazine. He didn’t know exactly how many rounds the magazine would hold, but he managed to press in eight or nine before he knocked the cartridge box off the kitchen counter, and the metallic cartridges hit the floor like a rain of steel bolts.

  That panicked him. He tried to shove the magazine into the rifle, but got it backward, couldn’t make it fit, realized what he was doing when he saw the pointed end of the top bullet aimed at his eye. He turned the magazine around and managed to seat it, and he worked the bolt to chamber a round.

  Two Xanax-calmed thoughts about Flowers: he had to go because he stood between Peck and his truck; he had to go because the barn was full of live tiger and dead tiger parts and, more troubling, fingerprints left by Winston Peck. The whole quarter-million-dollar dream was going down, but if he could kill Flowers, he could dump the gas cans in the barn and the house and burn them to the ground. That would take care of the prints and any DNA that might be around, as well as the man who had somehow tracked him here.

  If he could kill Flowers, he had a chance.

  —

  Virgil snuck back to the front of the barn to peek at the house, and when he did it, he saw a flicker in the light from the kitchen, and seconds later, the sound of metallic cartridges falling on the floor. He knew the sound because . . . he and his hunting buddy Johnson Johnson had dropped any number of metallic cartridges on the floor of any number of hunting cabins.

  The sound meant that somebody—probably Peck—was loading a gun, which meant that the gun wasn’t quite loaded. Virgil ran as softly as he could to the front of the house, because the kitchen, where the light was, was in the back. He took his gun out and climbed the sagging front porch steps. At the top, he tried to see through the glass rectangle in the front door, but it was dark inside, and he could see nothing. The porch boards creaked underfoot as he moved to the door, and Virgil hesitated, listened, then took another step forward.

  When he put his foot down, the porch board collapsed with a noisy clatter, and Virgil went through up to his right thigh. As he struggled to get out of the hole, the boards under his other foot began to crack, and he could go neither up nor down easily. He set his gun aside and tried to pull himself out of the hole with his hands, as if he’d fallen through lake ice.

  —

  Peck had stepped out on the urine-soaked back stoop, thinking that he might see Flowers either coming or going from the barn. He wasn’t confident of his combat skills, but he had little choice. Flowers had to go and the range would be short. He put the rifle up to his shoulder as he’d seen soldiers do on news broadcasts, wrapped his finger around the trigger, and waited.

  And heard Virgil fall through the porch floor.

  He knew exactly what had happened, because he’d almost gone through himself. If Flowers had fallen through, he’d be at least temporarily discombobulated, and Peck might shoot him from the range of six feet.

  He turned and ran down the side of the house, looked under the porch railing, saw Virgil on his hands and knees. Virgil saw him at exactly the same moment and Peck pushed the gun through the railing directly at Virgil’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  The trigger didn’t move and Peck’s brain froze. Virgil saw that, knew what had happened—Peck’s gun’s safety was on, but it could be off again in a quarter second—and launched himself at the front door, smashed it open and rolled inside. Straight ahead was a stairway leading to a second floor and a hallway that led to the kitchen. If he took the hallway, he’d be silhouetted in the thin kitchen light.

  He took the stairs.

  —

  Peck wasn’t as quick on the uptake as Flowers, but realized in the next second that the gun’s safety was on. He thumbed it off and ran around to the porch stairs in time to see Flowers topping the stairs inside, and fired a single shot, wildly off-target; a plume of plaster dust exploded from the ceiling of the second-floor landing, two feet above and three feet to the right of Flowers’s head.

  He saw Flowers launch himself into a bedroom. That bedroom was a dead end: he worked the bolt on the rifle, chambering another round, climbed the porch steps, careful now . . . and kicked Flowers’s pistol. He had an idea of what it was, because Flowers had been clambering out of the hole in the porch with both hands open and hadn’t had time to scoop it up before crashing through the door.

  Peck picked up the pistol, thinking it would be handier in an up-close fight, though he knew almost nothing about handguns. He tried to find a safety, failed, and pulled the trigger instead. He’d been holding the gun nearly upright when he did that, not expecting it to go off, and when it did, the recoil not only wrenched his hand backward, but he nearly shot himself in the nose. Additionally, something hit his left eye, like a piece of sand, but a hot, burning piece of sand, and his eye shut of its own accord. When he tried to open it, it flooded with tears.

  Worse, when the pistol went off, he’d been so startled he’d dropped it, and it had fallen through the hole in the deck of the porch. He was back to the rifle and half-blinded. He shouted up the stairs, “Hey, Flowers . . . lose your gun?”

  Flowers yelled back, “Can’t talk now, I’m on my cell phone, telling my partner exactly where you’re at and everything that’s happened tonight. You’re fuckin’ toast, asshole. Better give it up or you’re gonna die here.”

  Peck pointed the gun at the bedroom door—he could see only an edge of it from the bottom of the stairs—and pulled the trigger, worked the bolt, pointed it again, and pulled the trigger again. His eye hurt like hell, but when he wiped it with his shirtsleeve, the tearing seemed to have stopped, and he got some vision back in that eye.

  He worked the bolt again, climbed halfway up the stairs, and fired another shot through the wall of the bedroom.

  —

  Virgil was lying on the floor under the bedroom window. As long as Peck stayed down the stairs, it’d be hard to get a slug to him. If he came up the stairs, Virgil had a major problem: the bedroom wasn’t much bigger than a modern closet and Peck could stand back and blow holes in it al
l night long, depending on how much ammo he had. Sooner or later, Virgil would get hit.

  And the third shot, because of its angle through the wall, seemed to Virgil to come from the stairway, not from the bottom floor.

  He had to move.

  —

  He waited, waited, and Peck shouted, “Gotcha, Flowers,” and Virgil yelled back, “I don’t believe you do,” and when the fourth shot came through the wall, knowing that Peck would have to work the bolt, he stood up and kicked the rotten double-hung window right out of its frame. He struggled through the window, exposed now, afraid Peck would run down the stairs and catch him, but another shot came through the wall, missing him by three feet. Virgil hung for a moment from the window ledge, looking down in the dark.

  Couldn’t see anything at the bottom, but figured his feet were no more than six or seven feet off the ground.

  He let go, hit the stone edging of an ancient flower bed with both feet, the pain lancing through both ankles and up past his knees as he fell down. He’d sprained both ankles, he thought: goddamn cowboy boots. He got to his feet and tried to run away, but he heard the bedroom door smash open—Peck must’ve heard him kicking the window out—and he started juking back and forth as he ran toward the nearest cover, which was the barn. He was ten feet away, waiting for the impact of the bullet tearing through his back, when Peck fired and the bullet . . . missed.

  But it was close enough to hear it go by, an actual zing sound that was unmistakable if you’d heard it before.

  Virgil hit the barn door like a linebacker and sprawled inside, in the bright light, rolled out of the line of fire as another bullet smashed through the rebounding door. Virgil rolled over next to it and kicked it shut.

  And here he was, no gun, his ankles screaming at him.

  Beside a door that was as good as a target, in the basement of a building with no other door and no windows. One good thing: the walls were made of stone, so Peck wouldn’t be knocking holes in it.

  He looked for something he could use to block the door, which opened inward, but nothing seemed likely to be heavy enough: there was a table, but it was made from a sheet of four-by-eight plywood laid over sawhorses. He limped over to one of the dryers, but it probably didn’t weigh more than twenty pounds.

  And he had no time. Peck was coming.

  His best chance, he decided, would be to try to take the guy in the dark. There were three bright lights overhead, and Virgil grabbed a knife off the plywood table and stabbed the first bulb, smashing it, smashed the second one, and as he was about to smash the third one, noticed an unremarked-upon feature of the whole tiger-cleaning lash-up.

  There, he said to himself, is an interesting possibility.

  He smashed the third light and in the sudden impenetrable darkness, fished his cell phone out of his pocket, punched the recall button for Mattsson, and clutching the knife in one hand, crawled into the vacant tiger cage left behind when the Simonians dragged out the dead Artur.

  Mattsson answered the phone and said, “I’m on the way . . .”

  “Listen!” Virgil said. “I’m in deep trouble. I’m trapped in the barn in back and Peck is coming for me with a rifle. I lost my gun . . .”

  —

  Peck was crossing the barnyard with his best Airborne Ranger combat-killer simulation, his rifle at his shoulder, one round visually confirmed in the chamber, the safety off, ready to go.

  As he got closer, he could hear somebody talking inside the barn, and not, he thought, from right behind the door. Sounded farther away than that. He tiptoed up to the barn door and listened.

  Flowers was saying, “Don’t let him quit. If he gets me, kill him. He’s got that rifle, you’ll have every chance in the world, and nobody will question it. Kill the motherfucker.”

  Peck was quite calm about it, hearing his own death sentence. It was apparent that Flowers had given up on some level, but on another level, was making sure that Peck would pay.

  Peck started to tear up again: that wasn’t fair. He’d won. He’d beaten Flowers fair and square, and now Flowers was ratting him out to the world?

  He didn’t burst into the barn to stop it, though. Instead, he pushed the door open a quarter inch and put his good right eye to it. Everything inside was dark, except the cell phone, and as he watched, he could see the reflection off Flowers’s face.

  There was no kind of tricky thing going on, like with the cell phone being in the back of the barn, while Flowers hid behind the door. He kept his eye to the door, fished out his own cell phone, brought it up, and turned on the flashlight app. He pushed the door open with his foot, aimed the rifle at Flowers, and stepped inside in the dark.

  He said, in his best Airborne Ranger combat-killer voice, “You’re all done.”

  Flowers’s cell phone light went out as Flowers apparently dropped it facedown in the dirt. That didn’t help him, though, as Peck aimed his own cell phone light at the back of the barn and stepped out across the barn floor. Flowers, he realized, had hidden himself in Artur’s cage.

  Flowers said, from across the barn floor, “I still don’t think so.”

  “Know what I’m going to do?” Peck asked. “I’m gonna dump twenty gallons of gasoline on—”

  Flowers interrupted: “You know what I already did?”

  Peck couldn’t help himself. “What?”

  “I let the other tiger out.”

  Peck momentarily froze, or most of him did. His hair didn’t: it stood up all over his body. Mouth open, Xanax totally failing, Peck turned the cell phone light to his right and saw two amber coals glowing in the dark.

  Close. Getting closer.

  —

  What Virgil had seen before he smashed out the last light was the two simple snap-shackles that locked the chain-link farm gates of the tiger cages. They were secure enough—a tiger wasn’t going to figure them out—but they were also easy enough to undo. If he knelt inside of the empty cage, he could reach over the half-closed door of that cage and unshackle Katya’s door.

  He did that, in the light of his cell phone, and pulled his own door shut, and shackled it just to be sure the cat couldn’t somehow get in.

  Katya didn’t move right away, but when she did, it was all at once, the big golden orange-and-black cat rolling to her feet, nosing out through the open door.

  The barn door opened inward, so Virgil thought the cat probably couldn’t get out of the barn on her own; but if he could get Peck inside, without getting shot himself . . .

  Peck did like to talk. Would probably want to claim victory.

  —

  Now Peck’s cell phone flipped up in the air as he tried to bring his rifle around but he was way, way too late.

  Katya hit him like a furry cannonball and Virgil put his hands to his ears and closed his eyes, not willing to witness the rest of it, even in the dim light of a cell phone. Thankfully, the screaming ended with a loud crunching of skull bones.

  Then Katya roared.

  A full-bore, full-throated, Siberian forest, after-the-kill roar, and some atavistic gene in Virgil’s personal gene pool sat up and screamed, “Run, dummy.”

  He couldn’t. He sat and listened to Katya make a dug-dug-dug sound. A moment later, she started dragging Peck’s body back to her lair. She had trouble getting the body across the gate stop-bar on the floor, but managed after tossing her head for a moment or two, settled in the far corner, and after giving Virgil an appraising look, went back to work on Peck.

  Virgil eased his cage door open, one inch, two inches, ready to slam it back in place. At six inches, he reached one arm out, and managed to hook Katya’s cage door and pull it shut. Katya stopped chewing, gave him another look, and went back to Peck.

  Still kneeling behind his own door, Virgil got a snap shackle back in place on Katya’s cage, then pushed his own cage door farther open and got the second
shackle on.

  He turned back into his cage and picked up the phone; Mattsson was shouting at him.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Where’s Peck?”

  “He’s uh . . . uh, Peck’s at dinner.”

  35

  When Mattsson turned her truck into the barnyard, her headlights played across Virgil, who was sitting in the barnyard in the dirt, his legs out in front of him, talking on his cell phone to Jon Duncan.

  She hopped out of her truck and heard him say, “We need everybody out here—Crime Scene, medical examiner, the zoo people, and tell the zoo people to bring a tranquilizer gun. We’ve got to get that tiger out of its cage before she eats the rest of Peck.”

  Virgil clicked off the phone as she trotted over to him and asked, “What happened?”

  “That’s a little hard to explain,” Virgil said. “It got really complicated.”

  “Why are you sitting in the dirt like that?” she asked.

  “I sprained both my ankles when I jumped out of a second-story window.”

  “What?” She turned to look at the farmhouse, where in the reflected headlights of her truck, she could see a window frame dangling from a few nails on the second floor.

  “I told you, it was confusing,” Virgil said. “Help me up. I need to find my gun.”

  “What happened to your gun?”

  “Well, see . . . I fell through the floor of the front porch . . .”

  Mattsson supported him with an arm around his waist, and he put one of his arms around her shoulders, as they limped over to the front porch. On the way, he gave her the whole sequence from the time he arrived at the farm, until he managed to lock Katya back in her cage with Peck’s body.

  “If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t believe it. With you, I think, ‘Yeah, probably,’” she said. At the porch, they didn’t see a gun and Virgil said, “Peck must have picked it up. He never fired it, though.”

  They worked carefully around the hole in the porch deck and stepped inside the house. There was no pistol in the entry and Mattsson climbed the stairs to the second floor and returned empty-handed.