by Sean Black
“To meet.”
“Where?”
“You headed back to Los Angeles?”
“Yeah, I just got onto the 405.”
“You alone or with the nigger?”
The N-bomb startled him almost as much as Miller’s murder. Then he remembered who he was talking to. “Ty’s with me.” There was no upside to lying. If they’d been watching the meeting with Miller, which was a nailed-on certainty, they would know he was with Tyrone.
“Sorry, I meant to say ‘African-American’,” the voice cut in.
“I’m sure you did.”
“Slip of the tongue.”
“So? I take it you didn’t just call to say hi.”
The voice at the other end of the line chuckled. It was a distinctive laugh with a phlegmy rasp at the end. Almost certainly a smoker’s. He noted that small detail in case he needed it later.
“Nope. You ready for the good news, Lock?”
“Go ahead.”
“We’re at the beginning of the end. We’re ready to deal.”
Across from him Ty’s eyebrows shifted up a fraction. He wasn’t about to get excited. Not yet.
“So what do you want from me?” Lock asked.
“I said the beginning of the end, not the end. We’ll get to that. First, the ground rules. Any of them are breached and she dies. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Excellent. So, first off, I’m going to send you a set of GPS coordinates. Plug them into whatever system you use, in-car navigation, Google Maps, whatever, and head there now. When you’re there, we’ll give you the next instructions. You have twenty-five minutes. A second over the time we’ve given you, and she’s gone.”
The voice disappeared back into the electronic ether. A second later a text pinged. He handed the cell phone to Ty, who opened the text: 37.0900N-120.1498W
The rental didn’t come with a navigation system. That was an additional option he had declined. He did his best not to use satellite navigation systems while travelling. His reasoning was double-pronged. First, they were essentially surveillance systems that you operated to keep tabs on your own movements, and could be compromised. Second, and more fundamentally, they made you lazy.
He’d always figured that at some point, sooner or later, he’d need to go back to good old-fashioned map and compass. It was no bad thing to keep those old-school skills sharp for when he needed them. However, with a time limit, this wasn’t one of those occasions.
He motioned for Ty to pull up Google Maps.
Ty plugged the coordinates into the app. He held the phone up for him to see, a wry grin on his face. “Either they have a sense of humor or we’re going to need a ladder and a lot of luck.”
Lock took the phone and immediately hoped it was the former. They had to be messing with him. If they weren’t, Carmen was as good as dead.
The coordinates were in the middle of the California State Prison for Women at Chowchilla. Most famous occupant since one of Charlie Manson’s girls had died a few years back? Freya Vaden a.k.a. Chance a.k.a. (according to Miller) the White Queen.
He checked the time-to-destination that the Google Maps route planner provided. Its estimate, allowing for traffic, was thirty-two minutes.
A minute had almost ticked since the phone call. They had twenty-four minutes and twenty-two seconds remaining.
44
Bito’s heavy paws thudding down the corridor roused Carmen from what had been a fractured sleep. She would doze off only for her mind to flash images of her attempted escape into her mind’s eye. The splatter of blood on the inside of the windshield. The odor of meat from the dog’s mouth. The desperate screams of the woman driver.
One or all of these would snap her awake. Her eyes would open. She would look up to the ceiling, remember the restraints cinched tight around her ankles and wrists as she went to move. Then, the worst part. Her realization that this was a nightmare she’d lived through. A nightmare for which she had been responsible.
If she hadn’t tried to escape, that woman would be alive. Her mind was racing, asking questions to which she didn’t want to know the answers. Had the dog attacked like that before? Had it killed someone previously? Did it have a taste for human flesh?
She’d heard somewhere that that was what happened with man-eating sharks. They had no natural inclination to attack humans. But if they did, they got a taste for them. After that people were prey. Was it the same with other animals?
In the corridor outside, she heard Bito being called away. A door slammed.
A few seconds later, more steps. A person. She didn’t know which sound scared her more.
The door opened. She closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. Someone came in. She could feel their presence above her.
“Wakey, wakey, Princess!”
A callused hand raked against her cheek. She opened her eyes.
Her captor. No mask. Any pretense of concealing his identity dispensed with.
“We’re moving,” he told her. “Oh, and if you try to run again, if I even think you’re going to run, it’s chow time for the hound. Nod if you understand.”
Trembling, Carmen moved her head as she’d been asked to.
45
Lock leaned on the horn as they inched up to the bumper of a slow-moving station wagon that had decided to camp out in the fast lane. Finally, it scooted over, and he could hit the gas. In the passenger seat, Ty was hunched over the cell phone, checking for any live updates about traffic delays that might require them to reroute.
“It’s going to be close, but we’re good,” Ty assured him.
He scanned the road ahead. Highways like this one, long and straight, were beloved of Highway Patrol cops looking to raise some revenue. The last thing they needed was to be pulled over. Even if he refused to do so, a pursuit would likely prove equally catastrophic ‒ especially given their current destination.
“So what do you think the game is?” he asked Ty, as he tried to push every ounce of speed out of the rental while bitterly regretting not pressing the cops to release his Audi. Unlike the rental, it was engineered for the German Autobahn and, as such, was perfectly suited to devouring highway miles.
“The hell if I know. They can’t expect us to roll on up there and ask the warden if he would mind releasing his number-one prisoner into our custody so she can have a white power reunion with her fan club.”
He wasn’t so sure. While the men who had taken Carmen had skills to match their readiness to deploy extreme levels of violence, they also seemed chaotic. What had gone down at the office when all this had begun had told him that much. They could have retreated and circled back round for Carmen. Instead they had chosen a much higher-risk strategy that had exposed them to greater risk of death or capture. As a group they were a weird mix of tactical and reckless.
Maybe it all connected back to what Miller had told them. Command had turned a blind eye to their affiliations because of their willingness, maybe even eagerness, to take on missions that verged on the suicidal. You went on enough high-risk missions and survived, it was easy to succumb to your ego, to believe that you were somehow different. That you were impervious to failure.
But if that was the case, and they wanted them to go spring Chance from jail, did they think he was in the same category? Or was their presence at the Chowchilla intended as either a distraction or just a plain suicide mission, with Ty and Lock as the guys going over the top?
They could second-guess all they wanted. But the answer lay five miles up ahead.
“Okay, next exit. Two miles,” Ty informed him.
The rental was already flat out. He had his foot so hard to the floor that he was worried about the pedal snagging on the carpet and getting stuck. “Time?” he asked.
“Enough. Just keep rolling.”
“That wasn’t what I asked you, Ty.”
“Seven minutes,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation.
“Damn.” He slammed a palm i
nto the top of the steering wheel. They were five miles away, but in two of those they’d be leaving the highway and hitting surface streets where the pace would be slower.
“Look, Ryan, we do what we can. For all we know Carmen’s already—”
He pulled himself up without finishing. Lock could guess how the sentence ended. His jaw tightened. He flashed on Carmen’s face, then Carrie’s. That was what made this different. The echo of old grief.
Was that why they’d done what they had? Because they knew it would push him into a world of torment that went way beyond simply putting a bullet in his back?
If he was Freya Vaden and wanted revenge, what better way was there?
Shaking his head, he tried to refocus. This wasn’t a time to get lost in those thoughts. Dead or alive, he’d have plenty of time to muse about revenge and its motivations later on. Right now he had to assume Carmen was still breathing until they knew different.
He looked at Ty as they bore down on the exit ramp. “Let’s just go with what you said before.”
Ty seemed puzzled. “What was that?”
“Keep rolling.”
46
They pulled into the main public parking lot outside the prison with a minute to spare. They were still some distance from the precise coordinates they’d been given. Those lay on the other side of the razor-wire-topped outer and inner electrified perimeter fences, which were also peppered with guard towers.
With no opportunity to prepare, even if Ty and he had been willing to fight their way inside to get to Freya, a minute wouldn’t have been close to enough time. He switched off the engine and exchanged a “Now what?” look with Ty.
On cue, the cell phone lit up with an incoming call. Ty was still holding it and passed it to him.
“We’re here,” he said.
“Where?”
“Outside in the jail’s parking lot. The coordinates you sent are on the other side of the wire.”
He braced himself for the reaction. When it came, it wasn’t what he had expected.
“Yeah, that was his little joke,” said the voice.
“What now?”
“Locate the main entrance and exit points. He’ll text you the next destination in ten minutes. There’s a gate about a half-mile down on the south-west corner. Right next to the SHU. You might want to pay special attention to that one.”
“Wait, why do you want us to—?”
The call terminated before he could finish. The cogs in his brain were busy turning. Things were dropping into place. There was only reason they’d be looking at entrance and exit points.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked Ty.
“Yep.”
“What do you reckon?”
“We should go check out that gate.”
* * *
Lock could have guessed the next location before the coordinates finally pinged up on his phone. He waited for Ty to tap them into Google Maps and confirm his suspicions. He held up the screen for him to take a look.
This was one time that being right gave him no real comfort. He threw the rental car back into gear, and they peeled away from the prison, heading back toward the freeway.
47
They drove south-west on CA-99 until they hit the city of Madera, although the word “city” was a rather grand designation for a place with seventy thousand inhabitants. The coordinates took them directly to the newly built Madera Courthouse. They parked three blocks away and got out. He tugged a ball cap down low over his eyes and Ty pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt as they walked back to the building, which fronted onto a carefully landscaped open plaza.
Skirting the plaza, they began looking for the entrance to the holding area. It didn’t take long to find it on the north-eastern side. A ramp led down into an underground parking area. From there a bank of elevators would take people back up into the court building. There was also a stairwell.
“They won’t bring her down here,” he said, as they started back up the ramp for the street.
“How come?”
“Look at the clearance. Way too low for anything much taller than a standard size SUV.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Ty said. “She’s a special case. They won’t be shipping her in on a bus with a bunch of other inmates.”
He had a point.
* * *
They completed their tour of the courthouse exterior and made their way back to the car. There was no way to access the inside at this time of night, and it wasn’t worth making an attempt. If they were going to be called upon to do what he thought they were, static interior locations were not the way to go, given the likely security presence around Freya Vaden.
There were a number of good reasons why inmate escapes that relied upon outside assistance most commonly took place while the object of the escape attempt was in transit. Static locations such as prisons and courts had layers of security in place. You had to get in and then get out ‒ with the inmate. That took time, and time, the ticking clock, was your greatest enemy.
The passage of time allowed a counter-reaction, and for existing procedures to be put in place: roadblocks; search parties; alerts to law enforcement and the general public. Even if you did manage the escape, by the time you hit the road, you would already have triggered a pursuit. Helicopters were a prized form of transport for that very reason, but every prison had wires in place to stop them landing on their yards.
Inmate-mounted escapes were different. Properly designed, they could build in a period between the escape and its discovery that offered a window for flight.
The nature of an escape impacted heavily on the next component: evasion, or getting far enough away to avoid recapture, was the real determining factor. Getting away from custody was the part people focused on, the part that often required cunning, guile and imagination. But it was only the first half of the story. Ultimately what counted wasn’t getting free. It was staying free.
With all that pinballing around his head, Lock and Ty sat in the rental car and waited for the next call. Five minutes went by. Then ten. Then a half-hour.
Was the silence planned? Another device designed to throw them off balance after the frantic pace of the last few hours? Or was there a problem at their end?
Here lay the inherent power of a kidnapper. The control of information and contact. They could call him, but he had no way of reaching them. Communication was a one-way street.
“You think he’s gonna call back or was that it for tonight?” Ty said.
“Either way, let’s start making tracks back to LA.”
Ty didn’t respond. Something was clearly weighing on his mind.
“Problem?” Lock asked him.
He grimaced. There was, but he didn’t want to say it for whatever reason.
“Ty, my mind-reading skills aren’t what they used to be. What is it?”
He was waiting for something insightful or profound. Maybe Ty had spotted a crucial weak link in the court security or come up with a way they could work round what they both guessed the kidnappers had in mind.
“Ty?” he prompted.
“Dude, I really need to eat something. Can we stop off someplace on the way back?”
48
A half-hour later, with Ty’s stomach rumbling so loudly that Lock was afraid he wouldn’t hear the next call from the kidnappers, they pulled in at the Black Bear Diner near Tulare. He wasn’t sure, when it came to Ty, that the diner would live up to its promise to “Come hungry, and leave satisfied.” Ty definitely had the hungry part covered, but it would take a lot of food for his partner to leave even close to satisfied. But the place was clean, the staff friendly, and the menu no-nonsense.
“I’m going to hit the head,” he told Ty. “Order me some coffee and . . .” he did a quick scan of the menu “. . . the turkey plate.”
Ty’s head was already buried in the menu. “You got it.”
He made for the restroom, as Ty flagged down a waitress and began to re
el off items from the menu. Before Lock hit the door, he heard the waitress ask, confused, if other people would be joining them.
“Can’t a man be hungry?” responded Ty.
In the restroom, Lock pushed open the door of the nearest stall, closed it behind him and threw up. His stomach lurched a few more times and then he was done. He flushed, walked out and cleaned himself up. Behind him a stall door opened and an elderly man walked out. He stood beside Lock as he washed his hands. His eyes kept darting in Lock’s direction. He was building up to saying something. “Rough day?” he asked eventually.
Lock walked past him to the hand-dryer. “Something like that.” As he hit the door on the way back out, his cell phone rang. He walked to the end of the corridor to get some privacy before he answered. “Lock.”
“What did you think?”
It was the kidnapper.
“About?”
“The courthouse. More workable than the prison, right?”
“Neither,” he told him.
He chuckled. “Good answer. I knew you’d be the right man for the job.”
“Anything else?”
“You have coordinates coming in. When you receive them you’ll have twenty minutes to get there. Previous rules apply so don’t be late.”
“I’d like to speak with Carmen.”
Silence.
He heard the man’s phone being set down. A few moments later a woman said, “Ryan?”
His throat tightened at the sound of her voice. Part of him now regretted asking to speak to her. He wanted to know she was alive, but hearing her voice made it all very real. It summoned emotions he couldn’t afford. Not if he was to do what was needed to make sure she kept breathing. Right now he needed to be calm, and detached.
“Carmen, listen, everything’s going to be okay. Just do what they ask, and I’m going to take care of the rest.”