Corkscrew

by Ted Wood

  The blast resonated inside the metal cabinet, magnifying itself so it sounded like a grenade going off. Both women screamed, and behind me I heard a yell that tailed away as one of the bikers fell backward off the bridge. And then, on the other side, there were roars of rage and the sound of bikes revving up.

  "Drive," I shouted to Fred. "Go like hell for the station. Honk the horn as you approach and stay in the car till they come out for you."

  She started to speak but not to argue. She was scrambling past Sam into the driver's seat. "Go with Freda," I told Sam. "Go with Freda."

  "What about you?" Fred shouted, but I waved her away. "I'm fine. I'll take to the trees. They'll never catch me. Just go, please."

  She backed away and drove off, picking up speed at once, jolting over the ruts. I spun around to face the bridge. Two bikes were coming over, one on each side of the file cabinet that lay on its side in the center of the bridge, with a lone biker standing beside it, holding both hands over his face.

  I jumped up on the bridge and swung my pick handle, holding it by the center with both hands, standing on the balls of my feet, balanced to jump either way. My ears were still ringing from the blast, and I could hardly hear the motor sound and the roar of the bikers. Their headlights were pinning me like an insect, but I was lucky. They were staggered, one behind the other.

  The first one roared toward me, daring me to jump aside so the rider could follow the women in the car. He didn't want to hit me; he wanted me to jump. Only I didn't. I stood there for an endless heartbeat until he was on top of me. Then I stepped aside and cross-checked him with the stick, sending him sprawling one way while his bike went the other, clattering off the bridge and down the bank to the river below.

  Then the other one reached me, swerving to avoid the downed biker, crouched flat to the tank, trying to run by me on the edge of the bridge. I swung at him, overhanded, hitting him across the base of the helmet with a clang that forced his face down onto the handlebars and sent him spinning out of control, across the roadway and flat.

  Another biker was heading over the bridge, and I spun around to face him, knowing my luck was running out. One of them would pull a gun soon and stand off and plug me. I ducked and grabbed the gun from my sock and fired toward the approaching light, high and clear of him, warning him, only he didn't take the hint, his headlight growing bigger and bigger, filling my eyes. I lowered my aim, pointing eighteen inches below the light and fired, but he jinked, and my shot went wide. Then, as he was almost on top of me, my third bullet found the front tire, and he crashed onto the bridge next to the first man, who was trying to pull himself upright.

  I turned to cover the third man as he lay in the roadway. "Don't move or I'll shoot you."

  He swore, and I backed off the bridge, trying to cover all three of them, swinging the gun, waiting for another biker to come for me. One of them would make it, and then he would be free to chase the women down, to smash their windshield and force them off the road. I had to prevent that. I had to buy time, at any price.

  The one on the road was hissing at me. It sounded like swearing, and I ignored it until I heard one word repeated. The word was "Go."

  I left the others and stood over him, trying to make out his face in the reflected glare of the headlights of his toppled machine. He looked up at me and swore again, then hissed in a low voice, "Go, asshole, take the bike and go."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Now I saw who it was, Jas's friend, the guy who had reported me for brutality. And now he was urging me to get clear? My mind raced, trying to make sense of his offer. He hated me. He'd proved that. How could I believe him now? I was on a speeded-up plane of consciousness, the way you always get in combat. Everything around me was vivid, my thoughts were faster and sharper. When he hissed the second time, I found myself wondering if the bike was booby-trapped, whether he could blow me away as I climbed on and tried to escape. It was improbable, but nothing else I could think of made any sense. He owed me no favor, only vengeance.

  But I didn't hesitate for more than a second. I hadn't formed any plan beyond giving the women a head start in the car. By now they would be almost at the highway, just a couple of minutes from the police station. I could do more for them by acting as their outrider than I could by staying at the bridge waiting for whoever had the sawed-off shotgun to take a blast at me.

  I stood the bike back on its wheels and clunked it into gear, remembering skills I had developed years before on a dirt bike my father had built for me out of scraps of metal and a mower engine. I was lucky. This one had the same kind of hand controls I had learned on, and I changed into a higher gear and raced out toward the highway.

  By the time I reached the highway, there was no sign of the car with the women in it, but behind me I could see the flicker of bike headlights coming through the trees on a curve in the road. I revved the engine as high as it would go, then changed up and jumped forward again, moving at close to eighty miles an hour, with tiny bugs beating against my face like a hail of sand, my eyes clenched almost shut, praying no insect would blind me.

  The highway is straight all the way to the Murphy's Harbour turnoff, and I could see the bikes behind me were gaining, second by second. I twisted the throttle tighter and hung on and hoped. The sign for the Harbour loomed up in my lights, and I wrenched down through two gears, bringing the bike down to forty miles an hour with a deceleration so abrupt it almost threw me over the handlebars. There was nobody on the Harbour road, and I leaned into the curve, staying in third gear for the quarter-mile run along the twisted road. Behind me the first biker was joined by a second, and they swung into the curve after me, shoulder to shoulder, like formation fliers. I took one hand off the control long enough to snap off a quick shot behind me, then stuffed the gun into my shirtfront and concentrated on riding, pulling around the last curve in time to see Freda and Mrs. Spenser diving out of the car and into the doorway of the police station.

  I rode right up to the door and shouted, "It's Bennett. Open up." Werner stepped out, carrying the shotgun, and the bikers saw him in their headlights and wheeled without stopping, hardly even slowing, and raced back down toward the highway.

  Werner lowered the gun. "Holy Mother! Where the hell did you score yourself that chopper?"

  "That's the amazing thing." I found myself laughing, all the tension of the last anxious hour shaking itself loose as I roared with laughter, bending at the waist and hooting, struggling for air. "I didn't have to. One of the bikers gave it to me."

  Werner took me by the arm. "Okay, guy, lighten up. Let's get inside."

  I walked in with him, bringing myself down from my high, going cold as I thought about Freda. Was she all right?

  She ran to me, throwing her arms around me. "Reid, you were marvelous."

  I held her close. "Are you all right? Did they harm you?"

  She shook her head. Her eyes were shining with tears. "I'm fine. I was scared. But I told them I was a news reporter. What a performance. They all wanted to impress me."

  Mrs. Spenser spoke then, her voice high and grating. "She was brilliant. She told them she was a news reporter, and she interviewed them, pretending to find out what they wanted, what they were really like."

  I kissed Fred, a quick brotherly kind of kiss, embarrassed to have so many people around us when I felt so filled with emotion. "Not just a pretty face, are you?"

  She squeezed my arm and winked at me, promising the world, later, and we let go of one another. "It worked for half an hour; then a couple of them started suggesting they should, well, they said 'party.' But one of them said no, this was business, we should be left alone until you'd delivered the cabinet. If you didn't, then the party could start."

  "What did he look like, this one? Was he the leader of the gang?"

  Fred and Mrs. Spenser looked at one another thoughtfully. "No, this one was around five foot nine, leaner than most of them, perhaps twenty-seven, blond hair. They called him Andy."

 
Andy. The guy who had been Jas's friend. The guy who had given me his bike, maybe saved my life. And he was a biker?

  Kennedy said it first. "Doesn't sound like the way those guys generally act."

  "Nah." Werner nodded. "Nah, that's not bikers for you." He was about to add something but looked at the two women and closed his mouth like a trap. I knew what he was thinking, the standard male notion of what bikers would do to helpless women, and in my mind I thanked him for not saying it. These women had been through enough.

  I took the conversation away from their terror, talking to the detectives. "You two guys were going home before we were rudely interrupted. If Mrs. Spenser doesn't object, why don't you take her with you to the nearest OPP post and get her safely off to Toronto."

  Werner stretched and yawned. "Good idea. That all right with you, ma'am?"

  Her voice was still a growl. "What about those men? What are you going to do to them?"

  "We're going to get a complaint sworn out, by you and by this other lady; then we'll issue a warrant for their arrest and we'll put them away, but all of that can wait until you've had some rest," he said.

  Fred added her support. "That would be best, Mrs. Spenser. You need to sleep. They'll put you in a hotel in Toronto, and you can do the rest in the morning."

  She was going to say something else, but Kennedy took over, his voice soothing. "This has been the worst day of your life, ma'am. Don't worry, we're going to arrest those men and find out who did the other things that've happened, but you've gotta rest."

  At last she nodded, moving her head as if she were running on batteries and they were getting low. "Tomorrow," she said.

  "What about you, Reid?" Werner asked.

  "Tomorrow is soon enough," I said. Fred had come back against me and put her arm around my waist the way a little girl might have done, hugging me for warmth and gladness that her horror was over. "Why don't you two head home and I'll see you in the morning. Bring reinforcements."

  "Good." Kennedy nodded. "Let's go." He smiled at Mrs. Spenser and ushered her ahead of him, through the front door. Werner lingered behind. To Fred he said, "You're one hell of a lady. That was quick thinking, what you did."

  "I played a reporter once," Fred said. She was smiling an enormous stage smile, so bright it frightened me. I knew how close she was to cracking.

  Kennedy shook his head. "All the same, that was quick thinking. You oughta get a goddamn Oscar."

  "I've got my reward," she said, and her smile dwindled. "I kept us safe."

  Kennedy grinned and patted her on the shoulder. Then he looked at me, and I knew why he had stopped in the first place. "That Andy guy is no biker. Is he the guy you took the bike off?"

  "Yeah. I think he's a ringer, maybe an undercover man."

  "Could be," Werner said. "It would account for why the brass was dead set against our moving on them."

  "Sometimes you have to go against orders," I said, and he nodded, then went slowly to the door. "We'll take it up with the biker squad in the morning. Right now I'm not worth the powder to blow me to hell. See ya."

  "See you tomorrow," I said, and Fred beamed and nodded good-bye.

  He left, and the uniformed man came forward to the counter. "What's going to happen about those women out back?"

  "They've phoned for a ride. Make them comfortable out the front here and sit tight. Some guy will come and get them."

  "Okay. You going home now?"

  "Yes." I put my arm around Fred. "We sure as hell are. See you in the morning."

  He raised his hand and smiled at Freda, and we turned away, with Sam tagging anxiously behind Freda. We got to the door, and I looked down at him and grinned. "How about you give me my dog back?"

  "Good boy, Sam. Go with Reid," she said, and he wagged his tail and sat in front of me. I stooped to fuss him, rubbing his head and telling him he was a good boy. Fred laughed. "I don't know why I clutter up your life when you can get this kind of devotion from Sam."

  "It's not the same," I assured her, nodding to the OPP man and opening the door.

  We drove home in my car, Sam sitting in the back, through the middle of the sleeping town, with its very few streetlights burning, and up the road beside the lake to my place. Fred did not speak. She held on to my right hand, hard. I squeezed it and said nothing.

  When we reached my driveway, I stopped the car and wound down the window so that Sam could get out. "Seek," I told him, and he jumped out and circled the house, nose to the ground.

  Fred took my hand and pulled me close to her, kissing me softly on the lips. "You're a crazy bastard, Reid Bennett, but I want you to know I'm grateful for what you did."

  "Standard procedure with damsels in distress," I said. "Just don't make a habit of being abducted by bikers. It puts a lot of stress on a meaningful relationship."

  "Is that what we've got?" she asked gently.

  "I sure as hell hope so," I told her, and we kissed again.

  After about a minute Sam came back to the car. I opened the door. "Okay, we're all clear."

  I stooped down to pat Sam. "You can sleep in the kitchen tonight," I promised him.

  Fred got out and closed her door with a quiet clunk. "I'm tired enough that I could do the same thing." She yawned. "Are all your days this busy?"

  "No, I arranged all this to make you feel wanted."

  She shivered and hugged herself, rubbing her bare arms with her hands, and I realized how scared she still was. "Let's go in," she said.

  We went inside and turned on the lights, and I poured us both a brandy and then gave Sam an extra meal, kibble with an egg on it. I don't do it often, but I wanted to reward him. Then I opened all the connecting doors on the ground floor of the house and told him, "Keep." It meant nobody could get in without our knowing it, and I had my pistol with me. We were safe from the bikers for the time being. I didn't expect them to return that night, anyway, but I wondered how long their memories would be and when, if ever, I could stop worrying about them coming back to get revenge for this evening's work.

  Fred went ahead of me up the stairs while I got my spare box of .38 shells from the drawer in the kitchen and reloaded my gun and the leather pouch of six spares I carry. On impulse I took the box with me upstairs.

  Fred had undressed without the light, and she was already in bed. I left the light out, knowing that there was nobody outside drawing a bead on it but too jangled to take any chances at all. I even left my gun in its holster and hung the belt over the bedpost where I could reach it in a moment if I heard a noise downstairs.

  I got into bed, and Freda turned toward me, her arms going around me. "Hold me, Reid," she whispered, and suddenly she was weeping, doing her best not to shake, trying not to let me know how scared she had been.

  I held her and kissed her wet eyes, and she snuffled and stopped crying and after a little while went limp in my arms. I let go of her and lay with her gentle breathing warm against my skin. And I marveled at her toughness and thanked whatever forces of coincidence had brought her back into my life after a year away. The hell with her other romance. I owed the guy a debt for screwing up and setting her free to come looking for me again.

  I couldn't sleep. The day's activities played themselves back through my mind, and I fitted them together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to see what the design was. First, the boy's death. Or had the trashing of the Corbett house been first? Had the boy wandered into it and been killed? And if so, why the trashing? And why the murder? And where did his stepfather fit in? And what was in the cabinet in his house in Toronto that a gang of bikers would want? And who had stolen it? And what did Corbett's grandson have to do with it all?

  That piece perplexed me. An effete boy, known to both murder victims and to the bikers and related to the man whose house had been trashed. I knew he was the key, but I couldn't find the lock he fitted.

  I was still puzzling in the darkest time of the night when sleep crept up on me.

  It was only moments
later, I thought, that Sam's bark jolted me awake. It was his working bark. Someone was near the house. Fred sat up, and I patted her shoulder and whispered, "It's likely a raccoon outside on the garbage can. Go back to sleep."

  She mumbled and lay down again, and I slipped into my pants, pulled my gun from the holster, and edged downstairs. Sam was barking against one of the side windows in the living room, and I stood behind him, looking out at the dimness outside. I could see a figure against the glass, reaching up with one hand over the face, peering in, ignoring Sam. Whoever it was, he was either deaf or bold if Sam didn't scare him. I tiptoed away in the darkness and opened the rear door, then hissed at Sam and he bounded to me. "Seek," I told him, and he ran around the house and went into his fighting bark. I paused to switch on the outside light, then ran after him, around the corner of the house, and found him pinning someone against the wall. As I approached, the figure turned, and in the half-light, shielded by the corner of the house, I could see that it was Corbett's grandson, Reg Waters.

  I called Sam off and told him, "Seek," to set him searching the rest of the area while I grabbed the kid and pulled him toward the house. "Who's with you?"

  "Nobody," he jabbered. "Nobody, honest. I came on my own. They don't know I got away."

  "Got away? Don't give me that. You're one of the gang."

  "No, I'm not, honestly. I'm not. I run with them sometimes, but I'm not one of them." His voice was light and breathless, frightened. I gave him another tug, and he came without resisting into the back door of the house. I switched on the hall light and looked at him. His face was puffy with mosquito bites, and there was a scratch down one cheek, and his blond hair had twigs caught in it. He had run through the bush.