The Corruptions

by Vincent Zandri

  A stunning Tanya Rucker stood in front of the prison gates, her mic held steadily just beneath cleavage revealed by a light blue, silk button-down blouse.

  “The manhunt continues for two escaped murderers in the thick Adirondack forest while the small town of Dannemora remains on lockdown. With numerous law enforcement agencies continuing their vigilant, yet as of this moment, futile search for Reginald Moss and Derrick Sweet—a search personally spearheaded by the New York State Troopers and in particular, Trooper First Deputy Superintendent Vincent D’Amico—little in the way of progress has been made in the nearly four days since the convicts managed their daring, Hollywood-like escape. Moments ago, I spoke with D’Amico about his plans for upping his game against the convicts.”

  The broadcast shifted to a taped shot of D’Amico standing in an open field located by the side of the road. Opposite the road were the woods. There were several hunters standing on the shoulder of the road. They were dressed in camo, hunting rifles slung to their shoulders, several varieties of hunting dogs obediently standing or sitting by their side. It looked like a deer hunt about to commence in the middle of the summer.

  The lovely Tanya asked D’Amico why he felt it necessary to enlist the help of the local hunting population in the apprehension of the dangerous criminals especially when his support staff should be, in theory at least, so well trained in the art of criminal capture.

  “The deep woods are different animal than say a suburb or an urban environment,” he said, face stern, the brim on his gray Stetson pulled far down on his forehead, like he practiced the look in the mirror prior to the interview. “No one knows them like the local boys. They know every tree, every branch, every rock under which two snakes like Moss and Sweet can hide. It only makes sense we employ these fine men and women. It also makes sense to offer a substantial one hundred thousand dollar reward for the capture of said snakes, dead or alive. It’s common practice for soldiers to hire local scouts for the capture of hard-to-uncover enemy soldiers during wartime. And trust me, this is war.”

  He nodded, touched the brim of his hat like he were a diminutive Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, and walked away into the sun. The broadcast then switched back to the present and the journalist whose eyes peered directly into the camera. Peering directly at me. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking.

  “So what originally had been called a search that would end within twenty-four hours by our own governor, now drags on towards its fourth day. It remains to be seen if deputizing the local talent can prove the final remedy for curing this dangerous and volatile situation in and around the small but shocked upstate New York town of Dannemora. But for now, it seems the only remedy worth pursuing. This Tanya Rucker reporting live from the Clinton County Correctional Facility for Fox News 13.”

  “She’s married,” I said while I picked up the clicker from off the bed and turned the television off.

  “She not your type anyway,” Blood said. “She good looking and smart.” He crushed his now empty beer can in his hubcap-sized hand, made a three-point toss from the opposite side of the room to the metal waste basket situated beside the desk. A perfect toss. “Score,” he said. “All net, baby.”

  “Val wouldn’t like hearing you say that.” I consumed the rest of my beer, crushed the can, tossed it at the waste basket from a distance of five feet away, and whiffed miserably. “Why do I feel really white right now?” I whispered.

  “You right,” Blood went on. “Val is the exception. She a brown-eyed, long brunette-haired beauty, and she smart too. Which means it be about time you married her, you dope.”

  He spoke the truth, naturally. But I would never admit to it. Keeper, the lonely and the stubborn.

  “You know what happens when you get married, Blood?” I said, capping the camo tin, placing it back inside my bag.

  “No, what happens when you commit to someone who loves you without condition?” he said, capping his own camo tin, placing it into his own satchel. FYI: didn’t matter that Blood was dark-skinned. A healthy dose of camo provided him with even more stealth than he was born with.

  “Someone always gets hurt,” I said. “Someone’s always got to die first. Or get sick first. Or sick and tired. And I already been through that shit.”

  “It’s a long life that’s getting shorter by the minute,” he said. “You should share it with someone who cares. Val loves you. Don’t know why, but she does. You should stop being selfish and buy her a ring.”

  “You gotta be seeing one another for that to happen, and right now we’re not seeing one another.”

  I lifted the AR-15 from off the bed, released the magazine, checked to make sure the .223 rounds were packed inside the illegal twenty-round mag the right way so that the piece wouldn’t jam at the wrong time. Not that there was ever a right time. Then I punched the magazine into the breach, cocked back the slide that forced a round into the chamber. Safety on, I placed the rifle strap around my shoulder, put on my skull cap, and then slipped my black ballistic gloves on my hands. The time to go hunting had arrived.

  “Now,” I said, “can we go before I tear up over all this love-gone-horribly-wrong talk?”

  Blood grabbed hold of his AR-15, pulled back the slide, thumbed the safety on.

  “Love stinks, Keeper,” he said. “But love is also a many splendored thing.”

  By the time they make it back to the bunker entry, they’ve left a blood trial that should be ripe sniffings for some bounty hungry redneck’s hunting dog. One of those great big black labs that drools all over your hand, or a hound that can’t stop marking his territory with a thick, hot, steaming, nuclear yellow stream of dog piss. So thinks a suffering Reginald Moss, while a one-handed Derrick Sweet removes the brush that hid the metal silo-like tower from prying eyes.

  “You gonna fuckin’ help me with this thing, Picasso? Or you gonna make me do all the dirty work while you sit there and bleed?”

  “My fucking leg is shattered. I’ve suffered a compound fracture. What exactly is it you’d like me to do, asshole?”

  “Your fucking leg is shattered? That’s it? That’s all you got to bitch about?” Holding out his injured hand. “My fucking thumb got cut off. It’s gone. That hand ain’t never gonna be right now.”

  Moss laughs. “So now you’re gonna have to jerk off with your other hand. But it’s okay ’cause it feels like another woman.”

  “Fuck you, Picasso. I should have taken off when I could. I’d be in Mexico by now, sitting on the beach with two healthy thumbs, one of them shoved up the ass of an eighteen-year-old brunette, brown-eyed, grande tetted senorita. But you just had to wait around for a couple of days until the coast was clear. You had to play it safe, and I was the stupid jerk who listened.”

  “You forget our contacts on the outside abandoned us. We got no choice but to hold up.”

  Sweet unlocks the padlock, lifts up on the latch on the square metal panel door with his good hand, pulls it open. There’s a metal ladder attached to the concrete wall that leads down into the shelter space.

  “Think you can make the decent down into the shelter, Picasso? ’Cause Lord knows I can’t carry your heavy ass.”

  “No. Fucking. Choice,” Moss grumbles.

  The big man shifts himself on his ass until he’s directly beside the opening, maneuvers his mangled leg into the round shaft and, at the same time, lets loose with a painful howl that must pierce the ears of every canine within a ten-mile radius. He sticks his good foot onto the fifth ladder rung down, while grabbing hold of the cylindrical metal shelter frame with both his hands. In that manner—working with this three operational limbs—he makes his way slowly down into the shelter, knowing with each inch descended, he is never going to see the light of day again. He might as well be cutting to the chase and entering hell while his heart still beats.

  Sweet is also down to three workable limbs. He enters into the shaft and manages to close the lid behind him while padlocking it from the insid
e. Does it by wrapping his bad arm around the top vertical ladder rung. The shelter secured, he makes his way down into the interior, his freedom-starved brain hungry for visions of a white-sanded Mexican beach, a topless tart on his arm, a perspiring bottle of Corona set on a wood table beside a mirror sweetened with half a dozen primo lines of El Chapo love powder.

  Both injured men spend the next few minutes fixing up their separate wounds as best they can with the first aid and medical supplies at hand. Moss applies a splint to his leg, wraps it tight with gauze and medical tape. He even locates a pair of crutches in one of the closets. Sweet does his best to stem the bleeding from his wound by applying two small butterfly clamps to the stub of a thumb, and then wrapping it with gauze and half a roll of white surgical tape. Although no one comes out and says it, both cons know deep down that if they don’t get proper medical treatment soon, they both face gangrene and death, possibly within seventy-two hours. But they choose not to talk about this. Better to live like old age is still a real possibility for them.

  When the patching up is finally finished, Sweet faces his partner.

  “So what now?” he says. “We stay here until the food runs out and we got no choice but to eat each other?”

  “We need to gear up. Gather weapons and ammo, just like that last stand on the bridge in Private Ryan,” Moss says. He hobbles to the table set in the center of the room. “Somebody’s gonna come for us, and when they do, it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  “How they gonna get to us? It’s a bomb shelter. We’re locked inside this underground tin can.”

  “Trust me, they’ll find a way in. And when they do, we’re gonna have to shoot our way out of it or die.”

  Sweet shakes his head, goes to the cabinet on the far wall, opens it. That’s where he finds the two riot shotguns, plus two M16s, several varieties of sidearms and at least a thousand rounds of two or three different calibers. He starts with shotguns, handing one of them off to Moss. He then hands off an M16 and a 9mm sidearm to go with the one he was already packing when they walked away from the shelter earlier, thinking they’d never have to step back inside it again. He distributes the ammo and the various magazines. For a time they sit there, wounds throbbing, contemplating the empty magazines. Until Moss begins loading the first magazine while the one-handed Sweet looks on in relative silence. When everything is locked and loaded, they sit there listening to one another breathing. Hating one another. Wishing one another dead.

  “Got any cigarettes left?” Moss says.

  “Smoked the last this morning. Didn’t think we’d be coming back here.”

  Moss nods, his heart beating in time to the throbbing in his foot and leg. When the sound of a boot sole pouncing on top of the metal hatch reverberates throughout the underground shelter, Moss grabs hold of the shotgun, pumps the action, forcing a shell into the chamber.

  “This is it,” he says, swallowing. “This is where the Germans take the bridge, kill Tom Hanks and poor misunderstood Tommy Sizemore. The fucking Nazis kill us all.”

  That’s when Sweet runs to the toilet and pukes.

  We parked my Toyota 4Runner in a patch of woods only a few feet from the old abandoned rail bed. I made sure to park it behind some thick brush so that D’Amico’s men might miss it altogether should they pass it by. But I also made sure that it wasn’t parked all that far from where I felt fairly certain we would find the two fugitives. We would need it for transporting them back up to Albany and to my employer’s doorstep at the Governor’s Mansion on Eagle Street. The less distance required to drag them through the woods, the better.

  The rail bed was overgrown with weeds and brush. Some of the railroad ties were either missing or rotted out. The rails were rusty in spots and, on occasion, non-existent, as if somebody hack-sawed a five-foot section here, a three-foot section there, for their own use to sell off for scrap. We walked swiftly, but not so fast we’d miss the marker that Joyce Mathews placed conspicuously for the two cons. Whatever that marker turned out to be. Gene said Sweet and Moss would recognize it when they came to it, so why shouldn’t we recognize it too? But that might be wishful thinking.

  We carried the AR-15s rather than utilize the shoulder straps, like we were on patrol in Viet Nam or Afghanistan, not saying anything, not needing to speak, needing instead to concentrate on the task at hand, knowing that at any moment a vigilant Moss and Sweet could ambush us. A not too far-fetched situation considering the desperation the two men must have felt by then.

  A couple more minutes passed before I spotted the red kerchief tied to the tree branch. Raising up my right hand to signal stop, I faced the old oak tree.

  “Whaddaya think, Blood?” I said, voice low, tone soft.

  “Look like a marker to me,” he said. “But then, what do I know?”

  “What does your gut say?”

  “Half my gut say D’Amico and his men passed by this very rag a hundred and one times already,” he said. “But the other half of my gut says D’Amico got his head up his ass and that’s the marker we looking for. That what the gut say.”

  “Mine too.”

  I pulled out Maude’s smartphone, typed in art slut in the area required, and then went to the picture gallery. I found the map that contained the X and tried to get my bearings. Enlarging the photo, I held the phone in the palm of my hand so that Blood could get a good look also.

  “That’s the railroad bed,” I said. Tapping the picture with my index finger. “I’d say we’re standing right about here.”

  He nodded. “If you right, we only a couple hundred feet away from where X marks the spot.”

  “Safety’s off,” I said, thumbing the safety into its vertical firing position.

  “Safety’s off,” Blood repeated.

  We stepped into the woods, and with the semi-automatic rifle barrels aimed for whatever might come our way, we proceeded to punch our way through the thick brush, step by careful step. It was slow going at first, but eventually the woods thinned out. A few long beats passed before we broke through the brush entirely and came upon small clearing that measured maybe ten feet by ten feet.

  Blood and I stopped in our tracks.

  Positioned on the forest floor before us was a cylindrical solid metal door that led to some sort of underground space. And standing atop the metal door, his rifle barrel staring us in our respective faces, was a hunter and his dog.

  Turned out, the hunter didn’t hunt alone. Emerging from the thick patch of woods behind him, a second hunter stared us down with the business end of his rifle.

  “You,” said the first hunter, “drop your weapons.”

  “You asking or telling?” I said, my pulse pounding in my temples, mouth dry.

  He was a short man sporting a round beer gut that looked like he’d swallowed a basketball. Middle aged. Dressed in camo from head to toe. His dog, a hound, was standing foursquare, just a hint of growl boiling from behind its white teeth. I knew all it would take was a simple, “Sic ’em,” and the pooch would be on me in a New York millisecond. Hunter number two was taller, thinner, also sporting camo. He had a cancer beard that immediately reminded me of a character out of the 1970s classic film Deliverance.

  “You heard the man,” he said, his voice high-pitched and nervous. “Drop your weapon. Same goes for the spook.”

  The dreaded S word.

  I considered Blood a man of calm and coolness. Therein lie his beauty. He was also a man of great principle and moral aptitude. I knew that the use of the S word would spark something in him that, if left to fester, would cause him to explode. And that explosion would not be a good thing for these two local yokels.

  “I’m going to say this once,” I said, shouldering my AR-15. “First of all, we both want the same thing. The capture of those two cons. Second, if you use a disparaging term like that once more, I will shoot you both in the face and gladly face consequences later. Am I understood?”

  Short Beer Gut began to tremble now. He was obviously way in over h
is head.

  “You just wanna take our reward money,” he said. “That money is ours. We ain’t got jobs and we aims to take it all.”

  Tall Cancer Beard drew back the bolt on his weapon, then pushed it forward. A single deadly round now locked and loaded.

  “What we have here,” he said in an anxious high-pitched voice, “is a Mexically stand-off. Only with a spook and his white, creamy assed, butt buddy.” He spit some black tobacco juice and shifted the index finger on his shooting hand inside the trigger guard so that it rested on the trigger.

  That was when Blood took off for the woods, as swiftly as a mountain lion seeking out its prey.

  The two men turned their heads, one way and then the other. They never expected Blood to run like that. Never expected anything but the upper hand.

  “Where’d he go?” barked Tall Cancer Beard. “Where’d the spook run off to?”

  “How the hell do I know? I got my hands full with this one.” Then, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat, “Say, you two ain’t cops, are you? We never thought to ask them if they’s cops.”

  Tall Cancer Beard opened his mouth as if to speak, but before he could get a word out, Blood burst through the woods on the opposite side of the clearing, fighting knife gripped in his hand.

  Eight-inch titanium blade pressed against Tall Cancer Beard’s neck, Blood demanded he drop his rifle.

  He did it. No questions posed.

  Short Beer Gut turned, aimed his rifle for Blood.

  I triggered a round from the AR-15 at his booted feet. He screamed and his dog ran off. Man’s best friend. ’Til the going got tough.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he yelped, dropping his rifle.

  Eyes shifting to Tall Cancer Beard, I could see a wet stain forming on his midsection. The stain grew bigger and bigger with each passing second.

  “Now,” Blood said. “Both you two hillbilly racists strip down.”