“Really?”
“Uh-huh. You know what she said?”
“I couldn’t even imagine.”
“She said that she shouldn’t have abandoned you all those years ago when that policewoman showed her the tapes of you with another woman.”
“She told you about that?”
“Just about that she saw you with somebody. But she said that you were a good man and she knew it, but she was just so mad that it was like somebody else was there making her turn her back on you. She said that she was still mad, but now she knows that that shouldn’t have mattered and she should have had your back. She said that you guys should have worked it out and maybe you wouldn’t be in so much trouble today. I told her she should tell you all that when we got back, but she said that she never could, that it would be wrong for a married woman to say something like that to another man.”
“Whoa. Then why are you telling me?”
“Because usually when Mom doesn’t want you to know something she says not to tell. That’s how I knew she wanted you to know how she felt.”
The waitress brought our pizzas and salads, giving me a respite in which to think.
“So?” Aja asked when our server, whose chipped blue name tag read MARYANNE, had gone again.
“So what?”
“Are you gonna ask Mom to get back together?”
That was the perfect moment for me to do what I had come there for. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and came out with a small brown envelope made from tough plastic. The letter was sealed, and I handed it over to the person I loved the most in the world.
“What’s this?”
“If I am ever hurt or in big trouble I want you to open this and do what it says. Put it away somewhere safe, somewhere where neither your mother nor Coleman will find it.”
“I know a place,” Aja said with convincing certainty. “But what does it say?”
“You will probably never have to find out.”
I didn’t want her worrying, but three hundred thousand dollars of my bribe money would be in a safe-deposit box where only she and I were signatories.
“What about you and Mom?” she asked, putting the envelope in her purse.
“Aja-Denise, do you really want me and your mother under the same roof after all these years of fighting?”
I could see her imagining what that union would be like. After a moment her eyes opened wide and then she smiled.
“Never mind.”
38.
I met Mel at a diner called Clown’s Carnival four blocks away from the semisecret clinic. It was a few minutes past eight. I had on my fake facial hair just in case there was some errant CCTV feed lurking above.
Mel was all in black. I was too, under my bulky umber overcoat.
“Your layout of the place is a little out of date,” he told me after we’d greeted and I ordered coffee.
“Yeah? How’d you find that out?”
“Building permits. City has a website for all construction work. They weren’t hiding because the cops keep it on the down low like you said. They installed all kinds of security to keep people out up front, but the back of the building is the same as it always was.”
“There is no back of the building,” I said. “Treacher’s shares a back wall with Kershaw and Associates.”
“Au contraire,” the sophisticated demon argued. “There’s a two-foot space between the clinic and Kershaw, after the sixth floor. And most of the fancy security updates are on the ninth floor. There’s only one hospital bed up on that level. All we have to do is make it up there now, break into the floor, and then wait nearby until they bring our guy in. Once that happens, and we see how the guards are placed, we decide on how to get him out. Only thing I wanna know is if you’re willing to use deadly force.”
“You mean kill a cop?”
Mel didn’t even nod.
“No, man. This is about not murdering.”
“Okay. I got ya. I know how to spin it. But considering on how things might go, it could make it that much more difficult to get through.”
There was a side door to Kershaw and Associates. Mel had been in and out of the building over the past few days and had put together a plan for us to enter unnoticed. That particular side door had no camera on it, and he had fixed the lock so that it only appeared to work properly.
We made our way in and up to the eighth floor. There we jimmied the locks of the offices of Myer, Myer, and Goldfarb. I couldn’t tell by their walls or desks what business MM&G were in, but it didn’t much matter. The eighth stage of the Kershaw building was halfway between the eighth and ninth floors of the building that housed Treacher Admitting.
I had brought a go bag with all the tools a burglar might need. We had to completely remove the unused window that looked out onto the slender divide between the two buildings. I had two crowbars for that job. We wedged a metal chair between our window and Treacher’s wall. From there, one after another, we crawled up high enough to make it through the hospital room window. We had to break the lock, but Mel put it back together well enough that it looked okay if you didn’t inspect it too closely.
Then we used a half-chewed piece of gum to attach a tiny transmitter under the hospital bed and made our way back down to MM&G.
That was our time to wait.
We had a tiny speaker receiving a continuous feed from the transmitter in the room. When something happened there, we would hear it.
So for the next three hours we sat in darkness and silence.
It was a fairly simple plan. The note hidden in the tampon, printed in block letters culled from the Internet, told A Free Man that if he wanted to be free he should take the powder folded in a small cellophane envelope that accompanied the note, at any time between 11:00 at night and 2:00 in the morning. This would give him abdominal pains and a fever. He should call a guard at the first signs of these symptoms and that’s all he had to do.
We waited. I don’t believe either of us uttered a word in that time.
But even though I didn’t chatter, my mind was filled with excitement, fear, and even some remorse.
I was not an extortionist-rapist even though I had had sex with the woman calling herself Nathali Malcolm. A Free Man was not a murderer even though he had shot and killed the two policemen who had betrayed their oaths and tried to murder him. We were both mostly innocent men slated to take the fall for the real criminals. We would never receive justice from law enforcement or the courts, and so the only thing that could be done was to take the law into our own hands.
This decision frightened me. Taking these steps brought me to a place I had never been, a place that I had always thought was wrong. And it was wrong. My demon friend and I were executing an honest-to-God prison break.
For a man with my history, that was just about as bad as you could get.
There were butterflies all through my body. I felt as if I were damned. But still I knew that this was the only course left open to me.
“Bring him in here!” a woman commanded over the small speaker on the desk between us.
The time was 1:57 a.m.
There were sounds of squeaky rubber wheels on the linoleum floor and the squealing of metal frames moving and sometimes bumping into other objects.
“Put him on the bed,” the woman said.
“Lift!” a man said.
Then we heard the less definable sounds of a body being hefted and moved, probably from a gurney to the bed.
“You don’t need to restrain him,” the woman complained. “He has a fever of one oh three.”
“Ma’am, this here is a convicted cop killer. As far as I’m concerned we could have let him die in his cell. But as long as he’s here he will be chained to this bed.”
There were more sounds and some conversation. Mel and I were on high alert. I no longer worried about right and wrong because it was a time for action.
“He has all the symptoms of appendicitis, but that’s not what I’m seein
g,” the woman said.
“Should we take him back?” a man I had not heard before asked.
“No,” the woman doctor said. “I want to observe him for twenty-four hours at least. If this is some kind of communicable infection I’d like to isolate it before it spreads through your jail.”
“You mean we could catch this?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like to see what happens.”
“Arkady,” the first man who spoke said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Set up outside this room and don’t go to sleep.”
“What about if it’s catching, Sergeant?” Arkady asked.
“That’s why God invented medical insurance.”
The doctor and the cops talked for a while more. Most of the police left. For the next twenty or thirty minutes we could hear someone, probably the doctor, moving around the room. And then, for thirty-four minutes, there was silence.
As quietly as he could Mel climbed out on our ladder-chair and lifted himself up to look through the hospital room window. Then he opened the window and climbed through. I followed as soundlessly as possible and clambered into the dark room.
We’d been wearing gloves since entering the Kershaw building. Before we crossed over to the clinic the first time we had donned dark ski masks.
A drawn and unconscious Free Man was chained to his hospital bed. His dreadlocks were tangled and there was a twist to his lips.
I had a bolt cutter and so used it on the restraint that chained Man to the bed frame. In the meanwhile Mel was fashioning a shoulder harness from thick rope that he intended to use to lower the unconscious Mr. Man from one building to the next.
I hefted the tangle-headed Man up into a seated position, and Mel began to loop the jury-rigged harness around the left shoulder.
That was when the door burst open and the light came on.
Time froze for a moment there. Officer Arkady had taken on too much what with opening the door and turning on the light. He probably heard something and thought it was Man trying to get out of his cuffs and so had not drawn his weapon. He did, however, reach for his piece when he saw us.
Mel was faster. The habitual offender swiveled to the right and fired five shots, which sounded like no more than pops. Arkady was hit in both legs and both arms. Then Mel rushed the faltering cop and hit him in the center of his forehead with the barrel of the gun.
The cop, who was portly of build, hit the floor like a dead bull and Mel was quick to use the man’s own handcuffs to restrain him. I thought that this was going a little overboard when I noticed there was no blood coming from Arkady’s extremities.
Mel noticed me looking and said, “Rubber bullets.”
Then he took a metal hypodermic from a pouch at his side and administered what I figured was some kind of knockout concoction.
While this was going on I ran out into the hall and located a wheelchair.
When I came back in my cohort asked, “What you plan to do with that?”
“No sentry. We could take the elevator.”
“What if they got cameras?”
“This place is for VIP clients. They don’t want electric eyes following them.”
Mel’s grin actually filled me with pride.
“I’ll go back down to Kershaw and take our stuff out of there,” he said. “You got those whiskers on so don’t have to wear no mask. Once you get out head west toward Broadway. I’ll grab the van and snag you on the way.”
It was the right plan, but I felt like a rat in a trap waiting for that elevator and then taking it down. Even when I made it to the delivery exit on the bottom floor, my heart was going at a triple rate. Mel had handed me his pistol, but that didn’t give me any solace. I’d spend the rest of my life in prison if I was captured. All of that said, there was a feeling of elation in my fast heart that I never had before…or since.
On the sidestreet sidewalk I began pushing the wheelchair. All of the clinic’s security was aimed at keeping unwanteds out. No one was expected to try to escape.
Even though Man was sedated when we found him, Melquarth had given him a shot of his tranquilizer.
“You had two hypodermics?” I asked.
“I got a gun with real bullets too. Same reason you brought along those crowbars, to get the job done.”
We had strapped the thin, long-haired Man with restraints that the chair provided. I looked down through his dreadlocks. His dark brown skin could have been mine. The handsome slant of his face might have belonged to a radical historian college professor.
It was cold outside; I could see that in the mist from my breath. But I didn’t feel it. Up ahead I saw the red and blue flashes of a police car. These passed by the intersection of Broadway and Maiden Lane.
“Hey!” Mel called.
He’d pulled to the curb just behind me. His van was middle green and there was a sign on the side that read HOBART AND SONS CONSTRUCTION.
We left the wheelchair at the curb and lay Man’s inert form on a mattress on the floor.
I sat back there with him while Mel drove.
We made it through the Holland Tunnel to Jersey City and then took 95 to 78 past Newark International and on, twenty miles or so past Elizabeth, arriving at a private airport. I spent most of that time making sure Man didn’t bounce around too much.
The elation was flaring inside me. I had done something, something real. This meant more to me than anything other than the birth of my daughter.
We were allowed in by a security guard at the gate to the airfield. He was a short white guy with a huge face.
“Who are you?” he asked Mel, the driver.
“Lansman,” my friend said. It was the code name I gave to my grandmother’s billionaire boyfriend.
“Your pilot is already here.”
The pilot was a tall, very handsome Hispanic man who told us to call him Jack. The three of us carried Man into the small jet and strapped him into yet another chair.
My only interaction with A Free Man was with his unconscious body. It was as if, I suppose, I was his dream. An apparition that he’d never remember but that changed his life.
“I know Jack here,” Mel said to me while the pilot made ready at the controls. “I’ll go down with him to Panama City and make sure your boy’s settled in.”
“I should go with you.”
“You been talking to people about this guy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That means you should be living your normal everyday life in case anybody wants to look at you. Also we need to get this van away from where your friend’s airplane is to keep you out of that. I mean, we don’t know if maybe somebody saw us drive away. Don’t worry, Joe. I didn’t go through all this to trick you now.”
He was right. And I really didn’t want to go away just then.
“You brought my duffel bag down from that office?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He rummaged around the back and gave it to me.
I pulled out the leather satchel that Teegs had given me.
“There’s one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in here. Twenty-five is to cover your costs. After you pay the pilot the rest is for Man.”
Mel took the satchel and smiled.
“You see that, Joe? A man like Mr. Man here is one’a my people. And there you are on the other side of the wall doing what’s right.”
“You better get outta here before we start kissin’ or somethin’.”
I parked the van in the long-term section of an automated underground parking lot. I had a hat and my whiskers and hope in my heart that there was no camera to see my disguise. Then I took the train from Newark back to Manhattan and the A train, which ran local after 10:00 p.m., to High Street in Brooklyn.
39.
I got to bed by noon and slept for nineteen hours without even getting up to urinate.
In the early morning I read all about the daring prison escape. Stuart Braun had set up seven visitors for his client. The man’s wife, th
ree doctors, Willa Portman of course, Stuart himself, and a Catholic priest for prayer. All were questioned. None were held. The investigation would go on for decades, if I was lucky. Even if Willa told about the package we gave her she had no proof of what was in it. Our note told Man to destroy and discard the note and packaging after taking his powder.
I should have been afraid, but there was nothing but joy for me that morning.
In the following days Aja came back to work. The only thing she said was that she knew what happened and we never had to talk about it.
On Friday Mel dropped by and gave me a small memory chip.
“I gave him what money there was,” Mel said. “He recorded a message for his wife. I watched it and heard what he had to say. He didn’t mention a thing that would get him or us in trouble.” He took a slip of paper from a pocket and handed it to me. “Here’s his mother-in-law’s address. Print out a note that says ‘For Honey Mama and Lil Sugar,’ and she will make sure it gets there.”
Later that day the buzzer to my apartment sounded.
“Yeah?” I said into the intercom.
“It’s Gladstone.”
I hesitated but then decided that whatever my ex-friend had to say I should hear him out.
We were sitting at my table-desk drinking Irish whiskey that Gladstone brought.
After some small talk he said, “I hear that they made a settlement with you.”
“Maybe.”
“That guy Teegs is a trip, right?”
“Why are you here, Glad?”
“I know you feel like I sold you out, Joe, but the way I look at it I saved your life. I couldn’t have stopped them from doing something. I tried to tell them to pay you off then, but they said they couldn’t take the chance.”
“They were probably right,” I said. “Back then I was blue all the way to the core.”
Down the River unto the Sea Page 24