The Man Who Cheated Death (Vincent Hardare)

by James Swain

  “Can I have something to drink?”

  “Only if you say please.”

  “Please.”

  He put a can of soda to her lips. Jan downed it in one gulp. She’d never tasted anything more delicious in her life.

  “That should keep you alive for a little while,” he said. “I’m granting you a temporary reprieve, but the sentence remains the same.”

  He made a feeble effort to laugh and instead started to cry again, his shoulders visibly shaking. It was impossible, yet Jan actually found herself feeling sorry for him.

  “Let me help you, Eugene.”

  “No!”

  “Please. Untie me from this chair. You’re a sick man; you need a doctor. I’ll help you find a good one.”

  “Nobody can help me. I have a worm in my brain. Now give me your husband’s cell phone number.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because he wants me to contact him. I’m not stupid. Now, give it to me.”

  Jan recited her husband’s cell number from memory. Death repeated it to her, then gathered up his things and left the apartment. She felt herself shudder as he locked the door behind him.

  Chapter 26

  Watts

  Hardare and his daughter returned to their hotel to find a grim-faced Wondero and his partner waiting in the lobby.

  “I guess you saw the news,” Hardare said.

  “We sure did,” Wondero said.

  The detectives rode upstairs with them to their suite. Crystal hugged her father, then went to her bedroom and shut the door. Wondero jabbed his finger into Hardare’s chest.

  “Do you have any idea what kind of harm you’ve caused? I should arrest you for obstructing a homicide investigation.”

  “What did I do?” Hardare said.

  “Just forget about your wife for a minute, and try to imagine the man who kidnapped her. Eugene Osbourne is certifiably insane. Do you think bringing back his dead mother is going to have a settling effect? What if he goes on a rampage?”

  “Remember Son of Sam, the serial killer in New York?” Rittenbaugh chimed in. “When he got arrested, the police found an Uzi submachine gun in his apartment. He was going to drive out to Long Island and shoot up a discotheque filled with people.”

  Hardare had already played out those scenarios, and decided it was worth the risk, if it meant saving Jan.

  “Are you guys staying?” he asked.

  “You’re damn straight we’re staying,” Wondero replied.

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  Hardare retreated to his bedroom and shut the door. Taking out his cell phone, he placed it on the dresser and waited for Death to call.

  An hour passed. He killed time staring into the hills at the stilt houses with their Chinese restaurant architecture and above ground swimming pools. What did it feel like living in a home that millions of people probably looked at every day? Like a fish in a bowl, or a king on a throne? He supposed it depended on your point of view.

  His attention was drawn to an animal prowling on the deck of house. It was a coyote with a mottled brown coat and ears pointing up like a pair of antenna. It was hard to believe that a wild animal could stay alive in such a hostile environment. It said a lot for wits and cunning, and the desire to survive.

  His cell phone chirped. He snatched it off the dresser and stared at the face. Caller Unknown.

  He took the phone into the bathroom before answering.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Mr. Magico,” Death said.

  Hardare felt the flesh rise on his arms.

  “You dredged up many bad memories,” Death went on, “but you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “You hurt me, I hurt you.”

  “I think this little chapter should come to a close. Agreed?”

  Death did not sound the same. The séance had affected him.

  “That depends upon the terms.”

  “Simple enough. I give you back your wife, and you leave town. I think that would make us both happy.”

  Hardare’s face burned at the prospect of seeing Jan again. “Let her go, and we’ll leave by tomorrow.”

  “Is that a promise?” Death said.

  “Yes. My wife is worth everything to me.”

  “Promise not to bring the police along?”

  “No police.”

  “I’ll kill her if you do.”

  “No police. Now tell me where she is.”

  “Your wife is residing on the top floor of an apartment house in a lovely section of town called Watts. The address is 10943 Carver Street.”

  Hardare scribbled the address on a notepad with the hotel’s fancy insignia.

  “I’d hurry if I were you. The building is filled with rats.”

  The line went dead. Hardare went to the door of his room, and cracked it open. The detectives were parked in the living room. He called Crystal’s cell, heard her pick up.

  “I need you to create a diversion so I can leave,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” his daughter asked.

  “To save Jan.”

  “One diversion, coming right up.”

  There were times when having an actress in the family was an asset. Moments later, Crystal came out of the bedroom and walked past the detectives. Slapping her hand against her forehead, she let out a moan, and collapsed to the floor.

  They rushed to her aid. Hardare slipped out of his bedroom and left the suite without either man being the wiser.

  The racially ignited riots that had engulfed the ghetto of Watts in 1965 had left deep, ugly scars in the landscape which the passage of time had still not healed. Boarded up storefronts and deserted apartment houses, their yards trashed with garbage and the shells of abandoned, burned out cars, had left a blight so complete that the area resembled a third world nation, and Hardare found it hard to believe that it had taken only fifteen minutes to drive here from his hotel.

  Hardare read the street signs as he drove. At the intersection of Century Boulevard and South Graham Avenue he stopped at a railroad crossing to let the southbound Blue Line rumble by, and saw young men on the corner giving him ugly stares.

  He parked on Carver Street and got out. The building where his wife was being held hostage was a skeletal five-story apartment house being prepared for demolition. A crane with a wrecking ball sat in a nearby lot.

  He found the opening in the fence. A piece of paper was stuck in the wire, and he pulled it free. It was a note.

  YOUR WIFES IN #556

  Hardare entered the abandoned apartment and climbed the stairwell, hearing clay crack pipes crunch beneath his heels. The apartment had no electricity, the only light in the stairwell caused by holes in the walls. On the different floors he heard the sounds of drug deals going down. It made him sick to think that Jan was being kept here.

  He came to the fifth floor and followed the numbers on the doors until he found #556. The door had a brand new padlock on it. Kneeling, he took out his wallet and removed his lock picks, and went to work opening the door.

  His hands shook like someone with palsy. What if he was too late, and Jan was dead? Could he truly stand to see her lifeless body, to talk to it and not have it talk back? Was that the last picture he wanted lodged in his memory for the rest of his life?

  He was afraid — afraid of losing her, afraid he already had — when the padlock audibly clicked open. He swallowed his fear and pushed open the door.

  “Hello?” a familiar voice said.

  He stepped into the barren apartment, and found his wife bound to a chair in the living room.

  “Guess who.”

  He cried while untying her. Jan cried as well.

  “Did I ever tell you how wonderful it is being married to a wizard,” she said, hugging him as she got up.

  “Did he hurt you?” Hardare asked.

  “No. But I think you hurt him.”

  Hardare’s eyes fell on the fully-clothed female skeleton hanging by her wrists from the ceiling.<
br />
  “Oh, my God, who’s she?”

  “One of the unlucky ones. Let’s get out of here.”

  Hardare heard the noisy grinding of gears. Spinning around, he saw a concrete wrecking ball burst through the wall, sweeping the skeleton girl and the chair across the room in a tangled mass, the concussion knocking them both to the floor. Pulverized brick and plaster showered down, making it impossible to see.

  He got up, and pulled Jan to her feet. The wrecking ball hit again, this time a few yards above their heads. Hardare covered his head with his arms, certain that Death knew exactly where they were in the building.

  They ran into the hallway and down the stairs. The walls were beginning to collapse around them, and Hardare grabbed his wife’s hand, and looked into his eyes. He should have been scared, only he wasn’t. He’d gotten the thing he wanted most. If he was going to die, at least he’d be with the woman he loved.

  Chapter 27

  Buried Alive

  Death had found a new friend, the wrecking ball machine, courtesy of the Amarillo Brothers Construction Company. To hell with guns and big knives; here was the true weapon of choice, capable of knocking down tall buildings with a few well placed whacks.

  The building started to crumble. He kept at it, unconcerned about the two people inside. With each direct hit, the ground around him shook, letting him experience the profound aftershock of his own devastation. Picking up the bullhorn lying on the floor, he held it to his lips.

  “Having fun in there?” he shouted.

  He kept one eye on the front door. He had made sure the other exits were locked from the outside. Hardare and his bride had only one avenue of escape, and it was through that door.

  “Anybody home?” he shouted.

  He grasped the lever that activated the wrecking ball and made it swing forward. He hesitated, eyes searching for the uneven bricks on the building’s side which outlined the stairwell’s location, then decided to aim at the first floor, and see if he could make the building come down.

  “Eugene! Over here!”

  The voice jolted him. Hardare stood in a window on the second floor, waving his arms. Death spun the cumbersome wheel and made the crane tilt upward.

  “Lights out!” he yelled into the bullhorn.

  “Too slow!” Hardare yelled back.

  As Death began to pull the lever, he blinked in disbelief. Hardare was no longer in the window, but now stood at another apartment window, over twenty feet away.

  “Come on, you hairless freak!”

  Clapping his hands, Hardare melted from view. A split-second later the magician reappeared in the first window.

  “Fuck me,” Death said, no longer believing his eyes.

  The words carried over the bullhorn.

  “That’s right, fuck you,” Hardare called back.

  A movement caught Death’s eye. Jan had run out the front door of the apartment house, and was heading for the street. They had tricked him, and like a fool, he’d fallen for it. It only made his desire to kill Hardare that much stronger.

  He aimed the ball at the arches by the front door. He couldn’t tell if they were real, or fake, and decided to find out, taking them down with one fell swoop of the ball.

  The ground around him shook. Half of the first floor had caved in, the building now sagging under its own weight. He had hit a main support.

  The apartment house began to groan. Death jumped out of the cab to watch its demise. The collapse began at the building’s center, the floors falling in upon each other, spitting black and gray spirals of dust hundreds of feet into the air, the accumulating weight causing a great roar as the bottom floors flattened out and turned the five-story structure into a gigantic pile of rubble and jagged steel in a matter of seconds.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Magico,” he said.

  As he sprinted down to the bottom floor, Hardare saw the front entrance to the apartment cave in, and his chances for survival diminish. Spinning around, he ran to the rear of the dying building, looking for another way out.

  But there was none. The windows were boarded shut, the back door padlocked from the outside. His lock picks did him little good if he didn’t have a keyhole to stick them in.

  He retreated to the stairwell, thinking he might still be able to go up, find a hole in a wall that had crumbled, and make a jump for it. The apartment house emitted a sickening groan. Looking up, he saw a gigantic crack split the ceiling apart. He felt his knees grow weak and his spirits fail; there was no place left to run, no last-second miracles to pull out of his back pocket. He was done.

  Half the ceiling came down, missing him by a few feet. He teetered backwards into a wall and tried to stay upright. He felt a board in the wall spring open, and stuck his hand into it. It was a laundry chute. Having no other place to turn, he dove headfirst down the narrow, pitch black shaft.

  It was a tight, harrowing ride. A concrete wall met him at its end, and he felt a stabbing pain in his forehead, then an odd sense of nirvana, as if he were floating on the crest of a blackened wave. After a while, the moldy stench of rotted laundry brought him up from the depths, and he managed to open his eyes, and still see nothing.

  He heard his cell phone ringing in his pocket. He pulled it out. Caller ID said Unknown.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “Oh my god, you’re alive!” Jan said elatedly.

  “Alive and kicking. Where are you?”

  “I’m standing outside with a couple of policemen. They called the excavation company to come dig you out.”

  “That’s great. Tell the excavation guys I’m trapped in the basement.” He paused. “Any sign of Osbourne?”

  “No. He escaped.”

  The laundry room had begun to vibrate. Above him came a deafening pounding, and he imagined the different floors crashing in, one atop the other, not unlike the footage of condemned buildings being imploded that TV news programs found so appealing.

  “Got to go,” he said.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He folded his phone and stuck it in his pocket. A rumbling sound was coming from the laundry chute. All at once he realized what it was: falling debris. Using the palms of his hands, he felt his way across the wall and quickly found the mouth of the chute, the debris gushing out like running water. Balling up a moldy sheet, he stuffed it into the chute as tightly as possible.

  It didn’t work. The chute spit up its plug, and a wave of new debris sent an invisible, toxic cloud across the room, the dirt rising around his waist like quicksand.

  He began to climb, his feet slipping and sliding. Two steps up, one step back, trying desperately not to fall. Finally the rock slide stopped, the laundry room almost filled. Lying on the tip of the pile, he felt around with his hands, trying to picture in his mind how much space, and breathing time, was left. There were two feet clear above his head, and an arm’s length to either side. About the size of two coffins, he thought.

  He tried to guess how long it would take an excavation team to dig him out. At least an hour, he decided. There wasn’t nearly enough air in the laundry room for him to survive.

  He lay in the darkness and tried not to panic. If he’d learned anything as an escape artist, it was that there was always a way out, even if the method was not always apparent. Houdini had figured that out early in his career, and escaped from situations that no one before or since had managed to do.

  Many of Houdini’s escapes had never been fully explained. One was called “Buried Alive.” Put in a coffin and lowered into a grave, his uncle had stayed underground for an hour, a baffling feat considering a normal coffin held two minutes of air.

  Hardare had assumed that his uncle a hidden oxygen inside the coffin. That belief had later been shattered when he’d read an entry in Houdini’s diary describing how the escape worked.

  “When I go under,” Houdini wrote, “I am awake but not conscious. I float on the edge of what is real, and some removed area of the i
magination. The sensation is what I suppose the French call surreal. It is strange, and often frightening.

  “The secret is simple. I drop my heart beat, breathe as little as possible, and put myself into a trance. How this works is something I do not profess to understand.