by Paul Bishop
I unfolded the plastic and, at one corner, I carefully bit free a quarter-inch tab. I then rolled the plastic lengthwise and peeled the tab back with my fingers. I now had what looked like a short straw with a quarter-inch tab sticking out sideways from one end. What I actually had was a crude handcuff key. I held it tightly in my right hand and inserted it into the lock on the left cuff.
The lock on a handcuff has a small pin sticking up in the middle of it. The hole in the center of my straw fit tightly over this, and the tab of the straw stuck down into the lower part of the keyhole where it belonged. I twisted my crude key. Nothing happened. I twisted it the other way. The cuff fell open.
I was dumbfounded. I sat with my arms up in the air staring at the left cuff swinging free beneath the still attached cuff around my right wrist. I changed hands with the plastic straw and tried to work the same magic on the right cuff. This time, though, no matter which way I twisted the straw, the cuff would not unlock. I kept trying, and then realized I was being an idiot. It didn't matter if the right cuff would come off or not. I was free from the pole. I could get out of my concrete womb.
I stood up and walked over to the door set in the angled wall. No key was needed on the inside. The door handle had a twist lock set in it. I put my ear to the door, but all I could hear was a faint swishing sound which I couldn't identify. I twisted the knob of the lock, then turned the door handle and pushed the door open.
I had no idea what to expect.
What I found was freedom. The door opened into the night and it was raining outside. Rain in Southern California. I stepped out into it and nothing had ever felt so good as standing naked in that darkness with the rain pouring down on me.
I looked around me. I was standing on the top of a huge concrete dam. Below me, on either side the of eight sluice gates, the dam sloped steeply down to the concrete basins of the control reservoirs. The empty reservoirs stretched away into the rainy darkness in either side. So, too, did a long concrete control channel which did have water in it. It was a surreal concrete world of phosphorus gray highlighted everywhere by the garish paint swirls of graffiti.
Behind me, set into another sloping concrete wall, was the little maintenance room that had been my prison. The maintenance room itself was attached to the back of the much larger dam-control building like a barnacle on the bottom of a boat. Half a mile away, the headlights of cars flowed down a freeway, their tires swishing in the accumulated water from the rain.
I quickly recognized where I was as the Sepulveda Dam, east of the Acropolis in the Sepulveda Basin. While running, Bekka and I had seen the dam shortly before Donovan's second attack, but we had turned away from it in the opposite direction.
I was sure the entire area around the dam was deserted. Bekka had told me that the dam was never used except in years of exceptionally heavy rainfall when the recreation areas in the basin were threatened with flood. I wondered if the rain now coming down was the precursor to a flood, or simply a shower which wouldn't even be remembered in the morning.
Knowing my location cheered me greatly. I knew I could get from the dam to safety without too much trouble. After all, if everything I'd heard about California was true, a naked man walking through the rain on a dark night shouldn't even be a cause for comment.
I started to wonder who would be the most surprised to see me.
Chapter 19
“You do look a sight," Ethan Kelso said when ^f he entered the small doughnut shop where I was JL. waiting for him. "Are you sure you didn't run off to join a religious cult and sell flowers at the airport while the rest of the world has been going crazy looking for you?"
"Your sense of humor is less appreciated than your prompt arrival," I told him. I was still shivering despite the oven warmth of the doughnut shop.
"You can't have one without the other," Kelso said. "Love me, love my warped sense of humor. It's a package deal."
"How about I like one and tolerate the other?"
"You drive a hard bargain for a man who I still say looks like a Hare Krishna reject."
Ethan's derisive comments about my appearance were justified. After my initial exaltation over being free had moderated, I had thought twice about traversing the landscape in my birthday suit. With an effort of will I had reentered my prison. I made sure to leave the door open behind me and grabbed one of my trusty blankets.
With the aid of a snapped knife blade I 'd found on the shelf with all the various pots and cans, I cut a rough hole in the center of the blanket. I slipped the resultant fashion statement over my head like a poncho. If I had been able to reach the knife blade while I was attached to the pole, I could have saved my mouth a whole lot of grief. But you have to work with what you've got. While I was attached to the pole, I hadn't even known the knife blade existed. Score another point for existentialism.
Finding more work for the broken knife blade, I'd hacked a strip of cloth free from the second blanket and used it as a sash to secure the first blanket around my waist. I thought the style of my garb was reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in his early spaghetti westerns when he wore a poncho with panache. Ethan obviously felt I looked closer to a casting call hopeful for the role of Jesus. He was probably right.
Once I was sartorially acceptable, I'd bugged out of the concrete maintenance room, locking and closing the door behind me. Without further hesitation, I had made my way across the dam toward Burbank Boulevard.
The rain outside was continuing to course down and it immediately began to soak into my blanket. I didn't care as much about getting wet as I did about the rain turning the steep bank which led up to the roadway into a muddy quagmire. Twice I slipped when I was only halfway up and slid back to the bottom. On the third try, though, I scrambled clear and started the long trudge down the sidewalk to find a phone. Cars slipped by me down the boulevard, but nobody stopped to offer me a lift. I can't say I blamed them.
The Acropolis was full of bright lights and the parking lot was about half filled with cars. One of Caitlin's or Nina's other teams must have had a game going on. However, I avoided entering the sports complex, as I wanted to keep my freedom a secret for a while longer.
By this time the rain had washed off some of the mud I'd picked up while climbing the bank, but my poor, pale, soft, English feet were paying the price of their barefoot adventure. Limping on as best I could, I eventually made it to the corner of Burbank and Balboa where Bekka and I had started our training run in what seemed like an age ago. I remembered that kitty-corner to our starting point was a small shopping complex. I shuffled across the street against the lights to see if I could find shelter and a phone there.
The complex housed a half dozen small shops, with a row of offices above them, and a large medical building. Everything was closed for the night except for a tiny convenience market and the doughnut shop. Hot smells of pastry wafted through the raindrops. Back in my concrete prison, I'd ignored my hunger pangs by sheer dint of will. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until the aroma of fresh doughnuts penetrated my sniffer. My stomach did flip-flops, and my salivary glands started to work overtime.
Inside the doughnut shop a lone man was working in the heat of the back room. He was a Pakistani with a slight build, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and a flour-covered apron tied around his waist. He came out to the counter when a bell rang to announce my entrance. After one glance at me, though, the look in his eyes changed from friendly to wary. I noticed he was wearing a name tag with Singe emblazoned on it.
"I know I look like a weirdo," I said. "But I'm not." I couldn't have been too convincing because there was no change of expression on Singe's face. I could see him checking out my eye patch and the handcuffs which still dangled from my right wrist.
"Please, I need help," I tried again. "Can I use your phone to call the police?" I didn't want the police to come, I wanted them to contact Ethan for me, but that was too complicated to explain right then. I needed to gain this man's confidence. "I'm not going to hurt you.
I just want to use the phone and then I'll wait outside for the police to come. Please."
Singe continued to stare at me. Then, for whatever reason was valid in his own mind, he decided to help me. He showed me the phone and I called the West Valley station desk. I impressed upon the officer who answered the importance of getting a message to Ethan and asked him to use Ethan's pager to get him to call me back at the doughnut shop. I was surprised when I didn't get an argument and after I'd hung up, I wondered if he would actually do as I asked.
Singe had gone back to preparing doughnuts and he didn't comment when I stayed waiting by the phone. Twice he came out to serve customers, and twice he went back to his baking without asking me to leave. Finally, the phone rang, and I grabbed it off the receiver. Singe looked up at me. The call might have been for him, but I was too on edge to care. However, it was Ethan on the other end of the line.
I quickly explained where I was and that I wanted Ethan to come and get me. I'm sure he was busting with curiosity, but, good cop that he was, Ethan didn't bother asking questions. He knew he'd get all the answers he needed when he picked me up. He told me to put Singe on the phone. I called Singe away from his baking and he took the receiver from me. He listened for a minute, mumbled something into the phone, listened again, said, "Okay," and then hung up.
Singe turned to me with a smile on his face. "Come sit down, Howard," he told me.
"Howard?" I asked.
Singe ignored my question and guided me by my arm to a small table near the doughnut display case. "Your policeman friend. He said to give you as many of my best doughnuts as you wanted. And coffee. Lots of coffee." Singe began piling a plate full of goodies.
My stomach convinced me not to question him further. The doughnuts were delicious, and the coffee was strong and hot. I was still shivering, but I was on the road to recovery. Singe hovered around me like a mother hen. I couldn't think for the life of me what Ethan could have told him to gain this kind of response.
I didn't want to break the spell of Singe's cooperation by asking him what day it was. Instead, I plucked a discarded newspaper off of another table and looked at the date. If the paper was current, then today was Tuesday. Tuesday night to be precise. I'd been imprisoned since Sunday!
Fortunately, I'd picked up the sports section of the paper. In between bites of doughnut, I flipped through it quickly and located an article previewing the upcoming AISL semifinals. In a sidebar article there was a discussion about the lack of police progress in the murder of Seattle goalkeeper, Tom Sweet, as well as the fact that the Ravens' goalkeeper, your truly, had done a disappearing act. The murder of Maddox was also rehashed, along with speculation about the incidents that was much more sensational than factual.
Ethan finally arrived and after greeting me, he held up a wait-a-second finger. He walked to the back room where Singe was busy baking. I saw Singe nodding his head and smiling happily when Ethan handed him something.
When we were in Ethan's car, I asked him about it.
"I told him on the phone that you were Howard Hughes."
"Howard Hughes? But he's been dead for years."
"Yeah. I told him you had faked your death, had a facelift, and were running around loose in the area."
"And he believed you?"
"No. But he did bite when I told him I'd give him a hundred-dollar bill if he treated you right until I arrived."
I started to laugh and then suddenly I felt like I was going to cry. Whether the emotion was from relief or exhaustion, I didn't know. I put my head back on the seat and closed my eye. It was all too much.
The next thing I knew, Ethan was shaking my shoulder to bring me out of a dreamless sleep. It was still dark outside, and the air was filled with a salty tang. The rain had turned to a heavy mist. Through the windshield of the car, I could see the masts of docked boats bobbing as the water beneath the boats moved with the storm.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"The Santa Monica Bay Marina. I live on a boat here. Fortunately for you, my domestic arrangements are currently in a cohabitive state. And since there is only room for me on the boat, the cohabitating is taking place elsewhere."
"Does all of that gobbledygook mean I can lie low here until I decide what to do next?"
"Only if you tell me what the hell is going on, and why you don't want anyone to know where you are. You've got one little lady ready to move heaven and earth to find you."
"Bekka?"
"If you have to ask then you don't have as many smarts as I gave you credit for."
I felt my stomach flip-flop when I thought of Bekka being worried about me. I knew that if the situation had been reversed, I would have been taking apart the town to find her. I had never had a woman care about me in that fashion, and it was a warm and glorious feeling to know that one did.
"I'll let her know very soon. Before the game tomorrow," I said. "But right now, I need time to think and time to recover."
In the darkness, I saw the vague motion of Ethan nodding his head. "Come on, then," he said. "Let's get you aboard and you can tell Uncle Ethan all about it."
Ethan's boat was a thirty-two-foot Hammond sloop called the Corrienearn. Through the darkness and the heavily misting rain, I could see its design lines were low and sleek. Even at its stationary dock it exuded a feeling of free-flying movement, a racehorse waiting for the gate to burst open.
The interior of the main cabin was immaculately tidy and fitted with teak paneling and fixtures.
"This must have cost you a fortune," I said in admiration.
"And on a cop's salary, too," Ethan replied. The note in his voice was cynical, and I looked sideways at him.
He caught my glance and shrugged his shoulders. "The department's Internal Affairs division took me to task over the boat. An officer can pay a half a million dollars for a house or pick up a fancy car and nobody questions him, but when you start getting into fancy boats everybody assumes you're on the take." He shrugged again. "This boat is my home. It is the one luxury in my life. I drive a five-year-old Honda and pay my bills on time, but I still had to account for every last penny I put up for the Corrienearn."
"Do I detect a trace of bitterness?"
"No. You detect a whole manure-load full. Now, if you think we've had enough foreplay, quit teasing and get on with the main act. Where the hell have you been since Sunday afternoon?"
I was dog tired. Fatigue was washing over me in drowning waves, but I took a deep breath and began to relive my tale.
At noon the next day, I stepped out onto the deck of the Corrienearn and stared up into the beautiful sunshine. Everything was clean and fresh and there wasn't a trace of the rain from the night before. The news reporter I'd just listened to on the radio had promised more rain for the early evening hours, but the Southern California weather gods appeared to be conspiring to make him into a liar.
After I'd finished telling Ethan my story the night before, I'd drunk my fill of water and wolfed down a steak and baked potato whipped up in the galley. I'd then slept for twelve solid hours. I had no recollection of going to sleep, and no idea when Ethan had left the boat. When I awoke, however, there was a note from him saying he'd be by to pick me up about one o'clock.
My body was rested, but it still felt jangly and uncoordinated. It was as if the muscles in my arms and legs had turned into old rubber bands that were no longer able to fully contract when released. My bones were acting like they were all disconnected. I rummaged around in Ethan's clothes locker and commandeered a pair of nylon running shorts and a ragged T-shirt. I needed to sweat and get the natural lubricants in my joints flowing again.
Barefoot, I hopped onto the dock and began to jog out of the marina and down to the beach about a half a mile away.
I took it easy to start, stretching everything out slowly and listening to my internal rhythms.
I have no idea how people jog or run with radios plugged into their ears. They can't possibly hear what their body has to say to t
hem, and they are still bound by the mundane, pressurized, world of civilization. The radio keeps them a prisoner. They are moving, but they aren't running. They are still tethered to the earth.
Running is a savage and primal experience. It removes the conscious mind from the body and allows the body to become in-sync with the nature of being. It is the purest form of human movement, and in the wake of its purity it brings serenity. A battery-powered hip-hop rap throbbing through your brain while you plod one foot down in front of the other isn't going to bring you to a higher level of consciousness.
When I hit the beach, I lengthened my stride and picked up speed along the water's edge. My feet began to tingle from slapping on the sand, but the cold ocean water periodically rushed soothingly around them. It was the wrong time of year for sun worshippers, but a few die-hard surfers were riding the chop, and a smattering of beach people walked or frolicked as I passed.
Two wet, shaggy dogs joined me when I was about two miles into the run. They looked well fed, but ownerless, and seemed to enjoy having someone to follow. I felt like the leader of the pack, and that thought brought Archer and the Hardbirds to mind. As humans we like to think we are different from animals, but we are not. We are simply a more evolved species that quickly reverts to kind when needs must. The traits of all animals can be found within the various examples of the human form. Archer and the Hardbirds were just the human equivalent of hyenas.
I turned around at the pylons that supported the Santa Monica Pier. The carnival atmosphere above me on the pier itself acted like a Greek chorus to my actions—laughing and reveling at my problems while looking for a way to complicate them. The dogs barked at me, but kept going, not understanding why I would want to return the way I came.
Halfway home, I felt my body suddenly clicked into rhythm. Sweat was streaming out of my pores, and I felt my movements become smooth and effortless. I picked up my pace again and found a full reserve of energy.