by Jon Land
McCracken reached the staircase at 11:49. Timing was of the utmost importance now if he was to reach Johnny Wareagle ahead of the explosions, and a significant obstacle remained to be overcome: gaining entry to the second-floor area of the jail where Johnny was being held meant retracing his steps up the staircase and passing right through the building’s front area.
He mounted the steps quickly and used his keys to unlock the door. He fixed his cap lower over his forehead and slid outward. Not hesitating, he turned right and walked past the wall-less main room, which was busy with activity. Another stairway that would take him to the second level, where Johnny was being kept, lay straight ahead. The building’s ancient design did not allow for monitoring stations on every floor. There were just lines of claustrophobic cells with heavy wooden, windowless doors. Patrolling guards, yes, but no central station to bypass.
11:51…
McCracken rushed up the stairs and waited briefly at the top to see if a guard was patrolling the floor. The rattling clip-clop of boot heels alerted him to the presence of one before his eyes recorded the steady pace of the man heading his way on his pass. Blaine pressed his shoulders against the alcove wall and waited. When the guard had turned to go back the other way, he pounced. The man felt only a slight twinge in his neck before consciousness was stripped from him. Blaine headed on past the small room he had met Johnny in that afternoon to the cell where Wareagle was being held.
“This is your wake-up call, Indian,” he said, turning the key in the lock. “Time to rise and shine.”
McCracken pushed the heavy door open.
“Let’s get a move—”
But the cell was empty.
Johnny was gone.
Blaine fought against panic. The unexpected was nothing new to him. The problem in this case continued to be time.
11:53…
His fiery distraction would begin in seven minutes; if he didn’t have Wareagle in tow by that time, it would be for naught. Obviously Blaine’s presence here that afternoon had raised eyebrows among the jail’s officials. They would have moved Wareagle to a more secure location, probably under personal guard on the third floor, because that would create the greatest distance to cover in the event escape was attempted. With time his enemy, and his explosive distraction no longer enough to ensure success, Blaine needed something else, something more.
The cell doors around him held the answer. Blaine started at the cell next to Johnny’s old one and unlocked it with the keys lifted from the guard in the basement. He pounded on the door before thrusting it open, then moved onto the next one across the hall. He was working on the fifth door when the first of those inmates he’d freed emerged tentatively into the corridor. They regarded each other with confusion and took their first steps cautiously, as if still bound imperceptibly to their cells. But the bonds were quick to come off.
McCracken had opened over a dozen doors when the first complement of those he had freed surged by him. They kept their distance, unsure and skeptical of his motives. One stopped and smiled at him. Blaine smiled back and made his own way down the hall toward the group waiting.
11:57.
“Vamos,” he told them, followed by, “Adeus.”
“Muito obrigado,” one of them said.
Blaine flew up the stairs to the third floor and pressed himself against the side wall. He peered around the doorway to find a trio of guards standing rigid before a single cell at the very end of the corridor. He gazed at his watch.
11:58…The waiting was interminable, seconds passing like hours before his eyes.
Come on, he urged the freed prisoners on the level beneath him. Come on!
He heard the shouts and screams first, pouring up the stairwell from ground level. The wailing, old-fashioned bell alarm came next. He made himself wait a few seconds more, wanting to seize the moment when indecision and fear on the part of Johnny’s guards was at its peak.
Blaine moved an instant before his watch showed 11:59. He moved down the corridor—not charging but backpedaling fearfully—trembling gun aimed at nothing. Johnny’s guards, who had already been looking that way, drew their guns as well.
“This way!” Blaine screamed at them. “Hurry! They’re coming! We’re under attack!”
McCracken had stopped his surge twenty feet from the door, pressed up against the wall as if for cover. The alarm’s bells burned his ears, shouts and screams occasionally rising above them.
“Now!” Blaine yelled behind him.
Johnny’s guards came forward, slow at first but then in an all-out rush. Blaine lunged into the hall in front of their charge and leveled his pistol, combat-style, back toward the stairway. The guards accepted him in that instant, and an instant was all he needed.
Two charged to his left, and he went for those first, a forearm launched into the face of one while a kick found the groin of the other. The men crumpled as they stood, the final guard turning in time to see them hit the floor, but not in time to swing his gun toward the figure whirling at him in a blur. McCracken separated the three guards from their weapons—in case they came to faster than expected—and rushed toward the cell they’d been guarding.
Only thirty seconds remained until midnight when he pounded on the door.
“Guess who, Indian?” Blaine asked, already trying to work the first of his keys into the lock.
“Hello, Blainey.”
“Damn,” McCracken muttered when the final key failed to do the job. “Hold tight, Johnny.”
The door was too heavy and the lock too solid to shoot out. His only hope was that one of the guards he’d felled had the right key on his person. Blaine rushed back to the center of the corridor. The man he had kicked in the groin was twisting on the floor, only semiconscious. A single key dangled from his belt. McCracken reached down and snatched it.
Boom!…Boom!…Boom!
The first explosions sounded just as he jammed the key into the lock on Johnny’s cell. The very structure of the building seemed to tremble, walls shedding dust. Blaine shoved the door open; Wareagle was standing in wait, his wrist and leg irons lying in pools on the floor behind him.
“I always figured Houdini was an Indian,” McCracken said over the shrilling alarm bell.
Boom!…Boom!…Boom!
The next series in the parking lot sounded just as they started down the corridor.
“The hellfire, Blainey.”
“Literally tonight, Indian. Gonna be plenty of pissed-off cops when the time comes to drive home.”
Between the explosions and alarm came the sounds of sporadic gunfire. A stand was being made by police against the scourge of escaping prisoners. Blaine signaled Johnny to stop when they reached the staircase. His eyes were glued to his watch.
“More, Blainey?”
“Just a little. Right about…now!”
On cue there was a final Boom! that was muffled like distant thunder. The lights around them flickered and died.
“Figured we could use a little bit of insurance,” Blaine explained, “so I wired the pole running the lines of juice into the building.”
In the darkness he could feel Johnny smile. “Take their eyes and you take their guns.”
“That’s the idea.”
They sped down the staircase and then descended the last stretch of the way toward the main floor. A dull haze of emergency lighting shone through the black. The loss of power had cut the alarm, and the only sounds were the shouts and screams coming from police struggling to regain control.
“Close your eyes, Indian.”
“Blainey?”
“One final surprise…”
McCracken’s hand emerged from his pocket with a phosphorus flare he had constructed that afternoon, plastic pipe tubing filled with three separate kinds of powder. He touched his lighter to the rawhide strip fuse and tossed it ahead, near the midway point between them and the door. The tubing struck the floor and rolled briefly before igniting in hot, lingering flashbulb-bright intens
ity. Men rubbed their eyes, opened them again to sight echoes of dazzling white.
Blaine and Johnny used the temporary freeze to rush through the main door. Outside, the parking lot was a shambles. Fragments of the cars Blaine had wired littered a pavement dominated by the flaming wrecks. The flames carved into the night and stole the cover of darkness away. Everywhere freed prisoners rushed for the fence.
“Time to get ourselves a taxi,” Blaine said as they lunged down the stairs leading from the entryway.
As if on cue, a series of police cars sped through the gate with sirens wailing. They slammed to a halt while Johnny and Blaine sought cover behind one of the vehicles untouched by the explosions. The idea occurred to them at the same time, and, without exchanging a single word or gesture, they moved for the car parked at the end of the new row once it was abandoned. By the time its previous occupants reached the jail, their car was screeching its way back out the gate.
“Next stop the Amazon, Indian, “Blaine said.
Chapter 5
PATTY HUNSECKER AWOKE with the wind. The vertical blinds drawn over her open windows flapped wildly, rattling together like change shaken inside a piggy bank. It was a hot wind, but throwing back the covers Patty found that she was freezing. Cold sweat matted her blouse to her flesh. The cuffs of her jeans had crept up her ankles and now cut tightly into her calves. She was shivering. The nightmare had come again, the bulk of it already lost to memory, with only the residue left behind:
A dark sedan crashing through the guardrail and plunging over the cliff. In the front seat the Hunsecker’s female Japanese house servant and her father’s business assistant, Shimada, flailing frantically with the wheel. In the back her father’s face glued against the window. Her father was waving at Patty.
Waving good-bye.
Patty climbed out of bed and nearly tripped on the boots discarded at its foot. She did not remember taking them off, did not remember giving herself up to sleep, either. She had been in the study earlier—her father’s study—lost in the pile of press clippings that littered the desk. Clippings accumulated over the past day and a half that had turned her grief to terror since the funeral on Friday, the day after a Thanksgiving that left her nothing to give thanks for.
“Thank you for seeing me on a Sunday,” she had told Captain Harold Banyan of the Los Angeles Police Department that afternoon.
“You said it was urgent, Miss Hunsecker. I knew your father. For what’s it worth, I thought he was a great man.”
“It may be worth a lot, Captain.”
It was then that Banyan noticed the manila envelope Patty was clutching beneath her arm. He had seen pictures of her in the stories that cluttered the news about Phillip Hunsecker’s tragic passing, but they did not do her justice. Her body was athletic and shapely, her skin bronzed, and her blond hair cut stylishly short.
“I’d like you to take a look at these,” Patty said as she unclasped the envelope and handed a small stack of photocopied press clippings across the desk to Banyan. “I’ve got more, but these are the most clear-cut.”
Banyan had begun fingering through them. “Clear-cut what, Miss Hunsecker?”
“Examples, Captain Banyan. My father isn’t the only one, Captain. In the past five days, nine men like him have been killed; three others have disappeared. Five of the nine perished in ‘accidents,’ as well.”
Banyan looked up from skimming the tear sheets. “By ‘like him,’ you mean…”
“Rich, powerful, influential. I spent most of yesterday in the library, going through out-of-town newspapers. I didn’t get through them all. There could be more.”
“More victims, you mean?”
Patty nodded.
“Then you’re suggesting…”
“That my father and the others were murdered, Captain Banyan. That the deaths are connected, part of a pattern, some sort of conspiracy.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Miss Hunsecker?”
“You haven’t read the tear sheets. You just skimmed them. I made those copies for you. I’ve got another set. You can read them in detail and call me back when you’re finished. If you want, I can wait out in—”
“Miss Hun—Can I call you Patty?”
“I’ve been calling you captain,” she answered, trying for a smile.
“Patty, what led you to the library on this…search?”
“A feeling.”
“That’s all?”
Patty swallowed hard. “The skid marks at the scene of the accident. Something about them was all wrong. Something suggested that…”
“Go on.”
“Suggested that my father’s car was forced off the road.”
“Our forensics unit spent half a day on the scene and disagrees with that conclusion.”
“I’m well aware of that, Captain.”
Banyan smiled curtly at her. “Your specialty is the sea—the ocean—is it not?”
“It was.”
“Then I would say you were stepping out of line to make conclusions better reached—or not reached—by the police.”
“If I hadn’t found out about the others, I would accept that judgement.”
Again Banyan fingered through the tear sheets. “Yes. And was your father acquainted with any of these others?”
“I’m sure he met a few of them.”
“Any business dealings, political contacts?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And do you have any reason to believe that these same men bear any direct connection to one another?”
“Besides the obvious, no.”
“And just what is the obvious?”
“Their stature. The kind of influence they wielded.”
“That’s not a connection, Miss Hunsecker, it’s a fact. You’re trying to suggest to me that your father was a victim of some mammoth conspiracy. But there’s no evidence to support that conclusion.”
Banyan extended the tear sheets back across the desk. Patty’s hands stayed on her lap.
“Just read them, Captain, in detail. Call the investigating officers in some of the other cities. See if they have any suspicions. That’s all I ask.”
Banyan pulled the tear sheets back toward him and let them flop to his desk. “I’ll call you, Patty. Give me a few days.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
But Patty knew a few days weren’t going to make any difference, nor would a few weeks, or even a few months. Banyan wasn’t buying into the story; he probably wouldn’t make a single phone call. She walked out of the building feeling even more alone than she had while she stood with her younger brothers on either side of her at the funeral seventy-two hours before. She was responsible for them now; they were hers to raise and no one else’s.
Your specialty is the sea—the ocean—is it not?
It was, indeed, and, God, how she missed it now, as she closed the windows and locked them. She had come back one year before to bury her mother—who’d succumbed after a long battle with cancer Patty didn’t even know she was waging. The news of her mother’s death had reached Patty in the Biminis, where she had started work on a new project with a new boat, the Runaway II. The ocean was her one great love; she had foresaken all else for it. She had left her family, left college, left the family’s three Southern California houses to pursue a love that had been all-consuming.
She was so isolated that her family hadn’t even known how to reach her. If she hadn’t come back to port to resupply, Patty never would have known until her mother was long buried. She remembered the funeral, the sight of her two younger brothers, virtual strangers to her, held under either of her father’s arms, gazing at her with unquestioning love, in search of reassurance she could not give them. She resolved then to forsake her life on the sea and stay with them, be the sister they never really had now that their mother was gone. The ocean could go on without her, and maybe her brothers could, too. But the issue was one of need.
Her moth
er’s funeral had brought back sharp memories of how close she had once come to death herself. She had nearly perished with the first Runaway after she and it had been commandeered by a man Patty hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since. Standing there at her mother’s funeral, she had let herself imagine that Blaine McCracken was there by her side, offering comfort.
Of course, he wasn’t; they hadn’t even spoken since he had left her in a naval hospital on Guam six months before her mother’s funeral. Patty had not called her parents during her own two-week-long hospital stay. McCracken did, though, and they flew out, insisting she let them help pay to reoutfit her. Patty stubbornly argued she would rely on grants; only when the folly of this became obvious did she accept what she insisted had to be a loan.
It had been her father who convinced her to return to the sea after her mother’s funeral. They both had to get on with their lives, he told her, and she wouldn’t be doing herself any good lingering where she wouldn’t be happy. Her younger brothers were disappointed, but they understood. Besides, Shimada was there, and she was infinitely more capable of managing the household—as she had effectively done since Patty had been a child.
Shimada.
She had been born during World War II, in one of the Japanese internment camps in California. Touched by her story, Phillip Hunsecker had hired her as housekeeper and governess in 1970, when Patty was six. The relationship between the two of them had been strong from the very start. Shimada immediately christened Patty Hana-shan, which meant Flower. As Patty grew older, Shimada was drawn increasingly into Phillip Hunsecker’s business affairs, eventually becoming his administrative assistant in addition to her continuing duties in the household. When Patty’s mother had died, Shimada had been typically humble, willing even to miss the funeral so she could get the house in order for the many guests who would be coming after it was over.
Patty was in port when news of the accident had reached her, barely a week before. Details were sketchy at that point, and she found a glimmer of hope in that sketchiness. The glimmer was extinguished the instant she reached home. Both her father and Shimada had been killed instantly, their bodies burned beyond recognition. Her brothers were staying with friends. Patty realized how sad it was they were now orphans. With a chill she realized, she was, too.