Inside Out wm-1

by John Ramsey Miller

  “For what magazine?”

  “Whoever will buy it.”

  “Is that so?” Clancy's expression was doubtful.

  Sean knew that she looked like a wacko who was running on desperation. “I was looking for a driver who would let me ride along for a few hundred miles. Share what the road is like with me. I mean, we all see trucks on the highways, but few of us know what a driver's life is like-your hopes and dreams and the long hours. And I was thinking that a female driver in a man's world was a great hook for a story.”

  “You think riding with a woman teamster is safer than with a man?”

  “I think I would be more comfortable with a woman.”

  Clancy's breakfast arrived. She began eating it, hunched over the plate proprietorially like a prisoner protecting it from other inmates. Smoke curled up from the cigarette in her left hand.

  “It's important to me,” Sean implored.

  Clancy spoke without looking up. “Where you been published before?”

  “All kinds of places.”

  “You're full of shit, Sally,” Clancy said, chortling. “Husband or a lover after you? Want my help, level with me.”

  “Husband,” Sean conceded, sensing this inadvertent change in tactic would seal the deal.

  “Here in Richmond?”

  Sean nodded. “He's a cop. His father's a judge.”

  “And you want to get away to where?”

  “Are you going near Charlotte?”

  “I can take ninety-five to eighty-five south. It runs right through Charlotte,” Clancy said without looking up. “Leaving in ten minutes.”

  “I'll just freshen up,” Sean said.

  There was a bank of pay phones on the wall near the bathrooms. Sean dialed a number and slipped quarters she had gotten from the cashier into the slot. She trembled involuntarily as the phone rang. She was ready to hang up after two rings, when an impatient voice answered. “Yeah, what?”

  As soon as Sean spoke, the silence on the other end was deafening. Sean was overwhelmed with the feeling that she had just made a very big mistake.

  Ten minutes later, Sean climbed up into the cab of a black Diamond Reo with a pair of dice painted on the door and strapped herself into the passenger seat.

  Clancy selected a CD and slipped it into the player. As the truck headed up onto the interstate, rich cello music filled the cab.

  “Yo-Yo Ma,” Clancy called out over the music. “He's Asian.”

  79

  As a rail-thin six-year-old, Winter Massey had clutched his mother's hand as a guide in khaki shorts led a long line of tourists deep into the earth. Bare bulbs lit the cavern walls. Their guide had explained that the cave was once solid rock and that dripping water had entered the cracks in it and had, over millions of years, cut out the tunnels they were walking through. Winter had been frightened by the stalactites, which looked like pointy teeth with saliva dripping from the tips. At some point during that tour, the guide had extinguished the lights.

  Winter came around and found himself in a place that was as dark as the cave in his memory, but the air was thick with dust from a recent explosion. There was a slight ringing in his ears not unlike what happened when he stood too close to a gun being fired without wearing proper ear protection. Beyond that ringing and somewhere close by, water dripped. And by tuning his ears past the water falling, he made out a persistent rumbling sound punctuated by a sharp scraping.

  Why is it so dark?

  Stay calm.

  Am I hurt?

  Broken bones?

  Torn ligaments?

  Broken neck?

  Winter fought to push back the worst imaginable thought, but it persisted and filled his entire mind like a noxious gas. He couldn't see! He fought to see something-anything. He was looking out at a totally blank slate-nothing but thoughts. I can't be blind. Please God, don't let me be trapped in darkness. A picture of Rush formed in his mind-a before-and-after image. This is what it was like to be blind. Suddenly, he knew that it was just dark. A sudden giddiness swept over him and pushed away the panic. He assumed that the bomb had dumped rubble over him. It was still night. He might be crushed to death if the floor above him didn't hold up, or smother or drown, but if there was light he would be able to see it.

  As he lay there, he gathered his thoughts and breathed slowly to calm himself and concentrate on surviving. Although he had obviously lived through it, he didn't remember the explosion, so he must have been unconscious. When he had seen the explosives in the refrigerator, he had bolted, running out into the service hall and jumping into the garbage chute. As he fell, he had slowed his decent by pressing the edges of his running shoe soles against the smooth metal sides like brakes.

  Winter had never carried a lighter or matches, because he had never been a smoker. He had grown up resenting the odor his father's cigarettes had left in the Massey home, his nicotine-stained fingers. The sight of that sullen stranger in his underwear at the kitchen table, bleary-eyed, drink in hand, and enveloped in a cloud of smoke was one that continued to haunt him.

  “Winter, you son of a bitch, you're alive,” he said, pleased by the sound of his own voice.

  He was flat on his back on an uneven surface. He felt pain but couldn't tell what part of his head hurt. He moved his fingers first, raising then lowering them. His wrists were sore but not broken, and his elbows and shoulders seemed fine. He moved his toes, ankles, and knees. He was in the building's basement lying on rolls of carpet padding or soundproofing material, which probably cushioned his landing and saved his life.

  Sitting up made his head swim. There was a bump on the back of his head, but it was dry, so he wasn't bleeding. The air was thick with dust, so he pulled the folded bandana from his back pocket, opened it, and held it to his nose as a filter. It'll make you less sad, he remembered Rush saying.

  Unable to see his watch, he had no idea how long he had been unconscious. This is what it is like to be blind. Since he was stuck in absolute darkness, he would have to make do with his remaining four senses.

  Since the garbage chute was in the right rear of the building, at the far end from the elevator, he assumed that he was a good eighty feet from a street in some unknown city.

  The slight ringing in his ears diminished as he concentrated on the low rumbling and scraping sounds. Standing was impossible in the dark, so he turned over slowly to his hands and knees and prepared to crawl to find the closest wall and follow it toward the sounds. He folded the bandana into a triangle and tied it behind his head to make a dust mask.

  The dozens of rolls rested tightly against each other. “Okay, Massey,” he said, “don't run headlong into anything. All you need is a rusty nail in your head.” He crept forward, stretching out his left hand and waving the air like a man painting horizontal and vertical strokes on a wall. He slipped off the rolls and onto the concrete floor beneath them. He moved chunks of brick and wood aside as he went. His fingers found a brick wall and, using both hands, he discovered the mouth of the garbage chute, now choked shut with rubble. With the wall as a guide, he could concentrate on making his way toward where he hoped the rescuers were working.

  As he moved carefully, the noise indeed grew louder. He made slow progress, keeping his left shoulder next to the wall to maintain his equilibrium while feeling with his right hand for obstacles. He stopped when he found what felt like a four-inch cast-iron waste pipe before going on.

  He had moved a few feet from the pipe, when the rumbling diminished in stages-telling him that more than one piece of heavy machinery was involved in clearing rubble. The machines stopped altogether, leaving only the sound of dripping water. The emergency workers have stopped! Are they giving up? They might hear him if he could make enough noise. He had no idea how long the lull would last. He had to make noise. With a sense of urgency growing inside him, he groped his way back to the vertical waste pipe. Now, before the machines started up again, he needed something to beat against the cast iron. Without an alternativ
e, he pulled the antique Walther out of his coat pocket and began hammering the gun against the pipe. “S”

  DOT-DOT-DOT / “O” DASH-DASH-DASH / “S” DOT-DOT-DOT… DOT-DOT-DOT / DASH-DASH-DASH / DOT-DOT-DOT. He yelled out when he heard answering metallic bangs.

  The rumbling began anew and the scraping grew louder. Winter slipped the compact gun back into his jacket pocket. Without being able to see and no way to know what was above him, he sat with his back against the brick wall to wait in the darkness.

  The noise of dozer blades clearing the street grew steadily louder until the door to the sidewalk-level service elevator was peeled back. When Winter saw a vertical sliver of light, vague as a neon tube through a thick fog, he wanted to cry out in relief but was afraid that even the slightest sound from his lips would cause the entire structure to cave in. He followed the light bar to its origin-a crack between a pair of steel doors. After locating the lever, he pulled the heavy doors open. Light blasted him and more dust billowed into his basement tomb. Winter stepped into the lift's rubble-coated floor to the shouts of men that were just silhouettes above him. He reached up, hands grabbed his, and he was jerked up out of the lift pit straight into a tortured landscape.

  The sun's first rays were illuminating the fronts of the buildings across the street, which stood open and exposed like the backs of dollhouses. Herman's building looked like a candle that had burned down to the third floor. In the way of charges and sudden pressure change, the adjoining buildings had shaped the force upward or outward through the thinner walls at the front and rear.

  Soot-faced firemen strapped Winter on a stretcher and, while he protested that he was perfectly all right, they muscled him over the piles of rubble. They handed the litter to a crowd of EMS technicians and cops. He knew by the insignia tags on the uniforms that he was in New York City.

  After the cot was lifted into an ambulance, a man in a suit climbed in and cuffed Winter's right wrist to the stretcher's rail. “FBI. Just until we straighten out who you are and what you were doing in there.” The agent pulled the Walther out of Winter's jacket pocket, examined it, then dropped it into his own coat pocket.

  “You have to call the United States Marshals office and get Chief Marshal Richard Shapiro. I have to talk to him now.”

  “Before I call anybody, you've got some questions to answer.”

  “It's a matter of life and death. I'm United States Deputy Marshal Winter Massey.”

  “Where's your badge?”

  “I don't know.” He assumed that it was inside the building, a bauble left by Fifteen to be found by the people clearing the wreckage of a building that had headquartered Russian mercenaries who had been careless with their explosives.

  “I didn't realize the Marshals Service was issuing World War Two weapons to deputy marshals,” the FBI agent said.

  “If you don't believe I'm who I say, call Supervising Agent, Fred Archer.”

  Winter knew the agent would contact Fred Archer long before he did Richard Shapiro.

  80

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  With steady determination, a young man in a wheelchair rolled himself up the sandstone ramp, turning the wheels of the chair with his hands, that rose to the front doors of the Federal Building in Charlotte, North Carolina. Lint spotted the young man's watch cap; the left collar of his windbreaker pointed up. Dark jeans stopped well short of his new tennis shoes on the footrests, their toes pointing toward each other. Barely any of the people coming or going from the building noticed the struggling young man, aside from quick sidelong glances.

  Four court security guards wearing navy-blue blazers manned the metal detectors. The closest COURTSEC guard guided the wheelchair and its occupant around the side so it wouldn't set off the alarm. Kneeling, she inspected the chair and searched its occupant as he rocked in his seat, pressing his tongue against his jaw and craning his neck trying to watch her.

  “Sir, you don't have any weapons on you, do you?” the guard asked, pronouncing each word slowly.

  “Nooooo, ma'aaaam,” he said, with great effort. He blinked owlishly, the thick lenses enlarging his eyes grotesquely. He lifted his closed fist from the wheel, and it quivered as he wiped his nose.

  “Okay,” the guard said patiently. “Where are you headed?”

  “Oooo… essss… marshooos's… offeeese?”

  “United States Marshals' office, hon?”

  He nodded.

  “That's a restricted floor. I'll have to call up and then someone will come down.”

  The woman lifted a receiver. “Who do you want to see?” she asked.

  “Winnnnnntah Maaaaas-sssey.”

  “Winter Massey?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your name?”

  “Waaaa… Warrrrrrd F… F… Feeeeel… da.” He shifted violently in the chair.

  “A Mr. Ward Field is here to see Deputy Massey,” the guard said, keeping her eyes on the visitor as she spoke. “I'll tell him that someone will be down to see him in a minute.” She replaced the receiver, rolled the chair to the elevator door, and went back to the metal detectors.

  When the door opened, a man in his fifties with a handlebar mustache stepped out from the cab and took the grips of the chair. “I'm Chief Deputy Hank Trammel, Mr. Field. I'll show you upstairs.”

  As soon as the chair cleared the doors, Trammel pushed the button. As the door closed he pulled his pistol and held it against his leg, aimed down. Above the second floor, he pressed the button and stopped the cab. “Okay, pal. Who the hell are you?”

  The young man in the wheelchair kept his wrists on the tires, but his twisted fists relaxed and the bent fingers straightened. “My name is Sean Devlin.”

  “The hell it is. Sean Devlin is a woman.”

  “I'm her.”

  He reached over with his free hand and placed it on her right breast, hidden under the loose-fitting jacket. He pulled his hand away like he'd touched a hot stove.

  She reached up and removed her thick glasses and the watch cap, altering her appearance dramatically. Her slicked-back hair was black.

  “I'm a friend of Winter's. He'll tell you.”

  “Put your hands behind your back,” he ordered. “I'm going to cuff you until I can find out if you are who you say you are. There are people looking high and low for Sean Devlin. If you're lying to me, you're going to stay in a holding cell for a very long time.”

  Keeping the gun in his right hand, Trammel used the other to take out handcuffs and to cuff Sean's wrists behind her. He put his gun away, replaced the cap on her head, and released the cab, which rose to the third floor. When the elevator door opened, he spun the chair around, pushed it out, and rolled it down a wide hallway.

  “Is this really necessary? I am Sean Devlin and I came in here under my own steam,” she insisted.

  “Disguised and using a false name, Ms. Devlin.”

  “I knew Winter would recognize the name Ward Field. The disguise is for my own protection. I'm not a criminal,” Sean said, exasperated.

  Trammel stopped at a steel door with a UNITED STATES MARSHALS SERVICE sign on it. He punched a code into a keypad, then opened the door and pushed her chair into a wide hallway. Sean caught flashes of curious faces as he whisked her past an open door. She was rolled through the corner of a large, open space, where a young deputy sat at one of the ten desks.

  No sign of Winter anywhere.

  Trammel pushed Sean through a door and closed it behind them. He maneuvered the chair around a small conference table on the left, past a couch on the right, and parked her in front of his desk. He sat on the edge and, with crossed arms, stared down at her.

  “Will you please uncuff me now?”

  “It's policy to cuff felons while they're in here. Did you come here to turn yourself in to Deputy Massey?”

  “Turn myself in? For what?” Sean hadn't broken any laws, unless escaping a surveillance team was against the law.

  “The FBI issued a felony warrant
for your arrest for the murder of five people last night at the Hotel Grand in Richmond, Virginia.”

  Sean's mind froze with the sudden realization that the authorities were blaming her for the deaths in Richmond. The hired killers chasing her weren't her only problem-at that moment not even her worst problem. It had never occurred to her that the cops would blame her, the intended victim, for any of the deaths.

  Realizing that Trammel was still speaking to her, she tuned him back in. “… interpret your actions as turning yourself in. Every little bit helps.”

  “But I didn't kill anyone,” she protested. She knew she had missed hitting both of the women who had been firing at her.

  “Killing two U.S. deputy fugitive recovery marshals is a federal crime, and the state of Virginia will charge you for the murders of the three civilians. There's also interstate flight to avoid prosecution.” Trammel picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and held it out for her to see. There was an identikit sketch of her as she had appeared when she had been staying at the hotel. It said that she was being sought for questioning in five homicides and interstate flight to avoid prosecution, just like he'd said.

  “Interstate flight to escape execution,” Sean said crisply. God, where is Winter? “How can they accuse me of this?”

  “This says you are armed and should be considered dangerous. You armed?”

  “I was fully searched at the door. Don't you have faith in the abilities of your security guards? If I were you, I wouldn't, because I'm sitting on an empty gun,” she said, lifting her buttock to expose the weapon.

  Trammel put the flyer down and, using two fingers to pinch and lift the weapon by the checkered grips, walked around the desk holding the Smith amp; Wesson out like something poisonous. He opened the chamber and ejected the spent cartridges, then dropped the. 38 onto a manila envelope. He sat down behind the desk and studied Sean from across the cluttered surface. “Did you use this gun in Richmond last night?”

  “In self-defense. Look, Winter will understand. He'll believe me. Let me talk to him.”