Saving Jason (15 page)

T
he door was thrown shut and the truck was again enclosed in darkness. I realized that I had been holding my breath for an impossible length of time and I gasped in air like a drowning man.

“You okay?” It was Aimee.

“Wh-wh-what? Yes. I’m okay,” I said.

“He didn’t cut you, did he?”

How could she sound so strong? She had been moaning moments before. Seemingly in pain and only semiconscious.

“No. No. I’m okay.”

“I thought he was going to cut your eye out. So I created a diversion.”

She had taken a beating and risked her life. A thank-you would have been inadequate. “I owe you.”

“Who’s this ‘cousin’?” she said.

“No clue.”

“Neither do I.”

I heard her moving and then felt a hand on my ankle.

“Is that you?” she said.

“I would certainly hope so,” I said.

We both found this insanely funny and a chuckle built into a burst of full-throated laughter. When we passed hysteria on the laugh chart, Aimee began to hiccup. I wiped away tears composed of three parts fear and one part relief that we were both still alive.

“What next?” I said.

“I think we’ve got at most two hours, and most likely at least one before they make their—
hic!
—move. Damn! How do you—
hic!
—get rid of hiccups?”

“Something about drinking water while standing on your head. I think.”

“Well, that’s not happening.”

“Or a big scare.”

There was a pause followed by more peals of laughter. She stopped first and began to take long, controlled breaths.

“Oh, that’s good. I think that did it. I’m better.”

“Then tell me why we’ve got an hour.”

“Or more. Scott isn’t the boss—we just saw that, right? This cousin is really in charge. Or at least, Scott’s not the sole boss. But he’s not going to be the one to dirty his hands putting us down, either.
Hic!
Oh, damn! He’s got plenty of muscle to handle those kinds of chores.”

“Agreed. Hold your breath and count to one hundred.”

“I’m fine. Really. That was the last one. So Scott needs an alibi. He needs to go to someplace where he’ll be recognized and surrounded by people who will vouch for him. Believably.”

“I can see it.”

“
Hic!
Damn! On the other hand, they can’t leave us here for too much longer.”

“Because as long as we’re alive, we’re a risk.”

“A big risk. Though we seem to be well contained for now.”

“Well, we’re going to change that,” I said.

W
e were ready for them when they returned. And they were almost ready for us.

The door was wrenched open so hard it slammed back against the outside of the truck and a blinding white light stabbed into the darkness, seeking us. But we had each taken up position on opposing sides of the doorway. When the light hit me, I lunged forward and stopped abruptly, drawing the first one up the steps to grab me. It was the caveman. Of course.

Aimee hit him behind the ear with the lantern battery and he went down to his knees. He wasn’t coming up again right away. The weasel was behind him, holding a big spotlight. He swung it around to highlight Aimee, and I saw a Taser in his other hand. She saw it, too, and rushed straight into him. He fired and there was an immediate crackle as he pumped fifty thousand volts into her stomach. She went down and began to jerk like a landed fish. Gino was coming up the steps behind the weasel, gun at the ready. If I let him get all the way up, we were finished. And if there were more thugs behind him, my best course of action would be to lie down and play dead.

I grew up in my father’s bar. A friendly local gin mill in College Point, Queens. Most of the regulars knew one another and maintained a camaraderie that tended to smooth rather than ruffle feathers. But every once in a long while, someone would need to be ejected. Pop’s technique was to come out from behind the bar via the kitchen so he’d be behind the bellicose drinker. He’d grab the poor slob by the back of the belt with one hand and the back of the neck with the other and propel him out onto the street. Once he got him outside, he’d give one last push, then come back in and lock the door. If they insisted upon
making a fuss, he would then call the local precinct and let the cops handle the drunk. He told me, “You put your hands on another man and anything can happen.” The keys to success were surprise and speed, not strength or agility. “Once you get the guy moving, don’t stop until you’re in the clear.”

The weasel hunched his shoulders as soon as he felt my hand on his neck. It was a natural reaction, but it did nothing to release my grip. And it helped to get him slightly off balance. I grabbed his belt and lifted. He came up onto his toes and swung the spotlight wildly, trying to get at me. He held on to the Taser, and as I ran him to the door and tossed him down onto Gino, the wires popped out of Aimee’s stomach and followed the weasel. He and Gino tumbled down the few steps, landing with the weasel on top. The spotlight smashed, which actually made it easier to see, rather than the opposite, as the twilight of the few wall lights made dimly lit pools surrounded by areas of near total darkness.

I turned and lifted Aimee to her feet. There was no time to see whether she was capable of action. I simply grabbed her arm and pulled her. She staggered past me and dropped through the doorway. I heard a man’s scream followed by a gunshot.

There was no choice. The only exit, the only possible escape, was out that door. I ran for it.

A huge hand grabbed at me, managing to snag the back of my suit as I went by. The Cro-Magnon was back in action, if in a limited way. I leapt out the door and the jacket ripped up the back and I fell, spinning as I did, leaving half of my suit in the man’s grasp.

I landed on a squirming mass of struggling arms and legs. Aimee was on top, but if Gino had been able to extricate himself from underneath the weasel, he would have been able to take her apart. She wasn’t fighting so much as thrashing. She was still half dazed.

I rolled to my feet and kicked at where I thought Gino’s head was. I clipped the weasel instead and he screamed again. The gun was on the ground in front of me and I kicked at it, sending it skidding out of the light.

When I turned back, Aimee was up and running. By instinct or accident, she was heading deeper into the lines of parked trucks. She wasn’t moving fast and she reeled like a kitten in a windstorm, but she was moving. I followed.

A Taser delivers a high-voltage, low-amperage charge. It works best from a distance of four or five feet because the two points need to be far enough apart to allow the current to arc. Aimee had been right on top of the weasel when he shot her. She’d been stunned, but she was recovering quickly. She ducked between two big semi cabs and out of the light.

There was a roar like an enraged bear behind me. I looked back over my shoulder. The big guy had charged down the stairs and was coming on fast. The weasel was up and moving my way. Gino was on his feet, bent over, searching for the gun. I dodged between the next two trucks and kept running.

The lack of overhead light helped us and hindered them. It wouldn’t be long before one of them—my bet was on Gino—would figure this out and head for the electric panel. Once those big strips of fluorescents were turned on, we’d be easy to trap. We had a narrow window to squeeze through.

I looked around wildly, trying to orient myself. They would expect us to head for the main doors—the largest and most obvious exit. If we headed the other way, we would have to cross the whole open expanse of the area that I had thought was the chop shop. But there was a small door there beyond the work tables. I tried to weigh odds, but there were too many unknowns.

A voice hissed at me. “Down here.” Aimee’s head was poking out from under a long flatbed truck. I threw myself on the ground and rolled under with her. She ducked back into the darkness and I stayed with her.

“I hope you know what comes next,” she whispered.

“Shh.” Large lumbering legs passed just feet from where we hid. The caveman. He kept going down the line of trucks, only bothering
to look underneath when there was a light nearby. He sped through the truly dark splotches. I risked peeking my head out and watched him make the turn at the end of the row. “Come on. We go.”

I took her hand so that we wouldn’t be separated. We dodged among the trucks, avoiding all of the brightest puddles of light. The big man and the weasel were calling out to each other as they searched the area behind us, reporting to Gino as they cleared a section. They were approaching the main door. We were at the other end of the garage. The old riding rink was in front of us and only a few rays of reflected light ran this deep into the building. I could see the hulks of partially rebuilt trucks in the center of the space, but only as massive shadows of black upon black.

“You holding up?” I asked.

“I’m good,” she said.

“Stay close. Not much farther.”

Though the space was mostly open, there was plenty of clutter stacked on the dirt floor. We had to edge forward, sliding one foot ahead of the other, but we were making it. More than halfway to the far wall, I caught sight of a flash of light on glass. There were four small panes of glass in the upper half of the door. It was straight in front of us, only another twenty feet or so to go.

That’s when the lights came on. One of the gang had finally reached the electrical panel and thrown the switch. But it wasn’t the main panel that controlled the long strips of fluorescents, nor the meager low-watt wall lights. The big glaring floods over our head all came on at once. We were standing, lit as clearly as in an operating room, in the middle of an expanse with nowhere to hide. Like cockroaches caught in the middle of the kitchen floor when the light comes on, we did exactly what they do. We scurried for the nearest bit of cover.

A massive engine block hung by chains from an overhead winch and we dashed behind it. A gunshot sounded and a bullet ricocheted off the side. The huge piece of machinery rang like a wounded bell.

Gino had found his gun.

I looked over my shoulder. The door was less than ten feet away. If we stayed where we were, Gino could just walk up and shoot us. We had to take the chance.

“Ready?” I said.

Aimee looked back.

“Suppose it’s locked?”

I laughed. “Then we’re really screwed.”

She didn’t find that nearly as funny as I did.

It should have worked. A handgun is notoriously inaccurate beyond ten feet. Even professionals who practice shooting often tend to spray bullets during the heat of a firefight, depending upon noise, ricochets, and quantity of ammunition rather than a well-placed solo shot. It was because of this that police departments had moved away from the five- or six-shot revolver to the larger magazine semiautomatics like the Glock. I had learned all this by watching an old
Law & Order
rerun many years earlier.

I moved first, dashing out in an arc, away from Aimee and what I thought was the safer course of a straight run for the door. I hoped to draw fire away from her. I hit the door shoulder-first, surprised at the lack of resistance. I fell through the opening, rolled up onto my feet, and turned to look for Aimee. She was right behind me, one foot still inside, when another shot sounded. Her face contorted, but she kept on coming.

“Go!” she yelled.

The night was both starless and moonless. The field was almost as dark as the inside of the ice truck. But my eyes adjusted quickly. I couldn’t see much, but I knew which way to go. I took her hand again and we ran.

W
e dashed across the road and into the field. At that moment, the choice between taking our chances on being ignored by a herd of bison or dying at the hands of those three stooges was a layup.

“Just keep moving,” I said. I would tell her about the local wildlife when we had more leisure.

The ground was rough, rutted and cracked, and surprisingly dry for that early in the season. The grass was uneven, cropped by the herd to a few inches in places, tall and already tasseled in others. Aimee was tiring, I could feel it. I needed a good-sized patch of long grass. We would be invisible on such a night.

A floodlight came on over the door to the building, but we were well outside its reach. It wouldn’t help our pursuers at all, reducing their night vision rather than revealing their prey, but the dim light that far out in the field was just enough to navigate by.

The grass rose almost to my waist. That was the spot. I ran another two steps and dropped, pulling Aimee down with me. We lay facing back the way we’d come and parted the grass directly in front of us.

“Not a sound,” I whispered. “We’ll wait here and see what they do.”

The floodlight placed our pursuers on a stage. Gino came out the door first, then turned to call to the others. They stepped out through the doorway a minute later. The three men conferred. Then they walked to the edge of the pool of light, taking turns looking in various directions, as though they were afraid to step off into the darkness. The big man was holding a blood-soaked rag to the back of his head. I hoped he was in a lot of pain.

Aimee shook me and held a finger over her mouth in the universally recognized signal for silence. I had been chuckling softly and
hadn’t even noticed until she told me to stop. She was breathing heavily, almost panting, but doing her best to stifle any sound.

“Are you all right?” I whispered.

She shook her head.

“What?” I asked.

“I think I’m in shock,” she said.

I could barely hear her. I leaned in closer.

“In shock?” I said, seeking clarity. Shock from what?

“I’m shot.” She reached around and touched her back. “And I’m bleeding.” She showed me her hand. In the dim, grainy light, the blood on her fingers looked black—but it looked like blood.

My plan collapsed. I had thought that if we could make the fence and get to the road, we’d be able to walk to the highway in less than an hour. The L.I.E. was patrolled enough that a cop would find us in minutes once we got there. And as the road to the highway was straight as the path of a bullet and bordered by dense woods, we would have plenty of warning if a vehicle came after us, and plenty of places to hide along the route. Now I needed to get Aimee to help immediately. I needed a vehicle and a way of exiting the gate. Chances of coming upon either in short order looked to be impossible. If she didn’t die of shock, she would simply fade away with loss of blood. Without help, she would deteriorate quickly.

I checked on Gino. He and the others were still gathered under the light. He had pulled out a cell phone and was engaged in what I guessed was an intense and unpleasant conversation. Reporting to the front office on his failure to murder us.

They were blocking our other avenue of escape. Riskier, but faster, and more direct. The building was filled with vehicles, some big enough to breach the gate if I could get enough momentum going on that dirt drive. There were at least two or three big Mack trucks that would turn those gates into kindling and scrap metal. I didn’t know much about driving a Mack truck, but I thought once I got it rolling, matters would pretty much take care of themselves.

“What are you thinking?” Aimee whispered.

“I think I heard something.” We were both still and silent. There it was again.

The sound was a deep cough. Real terror returned. Less than ten feet from us, a bull bison rolled up onto its feet and coughed a third time. I looked at Aimee to warn her and saw that she had already taken in the new threat. Her eyes were wide and losing focus. Terror and loss of blood had turned her face pasty white.

“I meant to tell you,” I whispered.

I reviewed what I knew about American bison. There were a few that lived at the Bronx Zoo. The Kid found them fascinating. I had read the guidebook to him a half-dozen times. Unfortunately, there had been no succinct advice on how to survive an encounter in the middle of the night while on the animal’s home turf. I did know that the bulls kept away from the herd except during mating times. The cows were all either about to calve or were already being followed by little ones. So it probably wasn’t mating season. A relief, as I did not want to find that I was between a bull buffalo and the object of his affection.

We could be surrounded by resting buffalo or steps away from the only one for a quarter mile. They didn’t sleep much, I remembered, so if the beast had just awoken there was little hope of its nodding out again anytime soon.

Somewhere behind us, another twenty yards or so into the dark, there was the electric fence. If we could get past it, the way I had the first time I had been caught out there, we would be safe. Safe from this horned battering ram on four legs. It began grazing. It looked peaceful, almost docile, but I had seen the transformation once before.

I gestured
Follow me
and rose to a low squat. Aimee tried the same and staggered and fell. This time, she whimpered when she went down. Shock was wearing off and soon she would be feeling the pain. I had to get her to move.

The bull coughed again. I risked a look in its direction. It had stopped grazing and was watching us. Trying to determine whether we were a
threat or not. Bison had few predators in the wild—wolves and bears mostly—but humans made the list. I reached down and helped Aimee to her feet. I moved very slowly. The beast blinked but otherwise did not move.

“Can you walk?” I said, speaking as quietly as I could.

“Yes,” she said without much conviction.

Looking back toward the light was disconcerting. Gino and the two thugs were easy to see. The bison was now framed in light, a dark silhouette. Yet when I turned and looked ahead toward the fence—and the electrified wire—I could only see for a few feet. I felt that they must be able to see us since we could see them so clearly. But they couldn’t. My senses told me one thing, but the brain knew better.

“I’m going to carry you,” I said. I stood in front of her and draped her arms over my shoulders. I bent and took her weight on my back, then rose and lifted her off the ground. I didn’t yet have a plan, but escape seemed to be our best chance to survive.

I stumbled through the grass. Aimee wasn’t heavy, but she wasn’t able to help me, either. I could not imagine how I was going to get her over the fence, traverse the forest, and do it all in time to save her life. So I stopped thinking about it and just kept moving. Her feet dragged behind me. I stopped and hitched her higher and she gasped in sudden pain.

“Hang in there,” I said. “Not much farther.” I had no idea how far it was to safety, but I would not admit it to her or to myself.

A large dark shadow passed a few yards ahead of me. It took me long seconds to realize that it was another bison. Another solitary bull. It was peacefully grazing and ignored us. I paused to let it go by.

But the animal stopped suddenly and raised its head, sniffing the air. A breath of wind had carried our scent to it. I froze. The beast swung its head around—it was spooked. It lowered its head toward me and began a series of short hops, meant to frighten me into retreat. It frightened me, but there wasn’t much I could do about retreating with Aimee on my back. I stepped sideways, and it huffed loudly and
continued its dance. The sound of its distress and aggression had become impossibly loud in the otherwise silent field.

I risked a look back over my shoulder. Gino was arguing with one of the men and pointing in our general direction. The situation was easy enough to read. I was afraid to move, but more afraid to stand still. I had no choice; I had to keep moving. I headed for the fence again, slowly and steadily. No sudden movements. No threatening actions.

The blond-wood posts, eight or ten feet tall, began to appear, like ghostly signposts, ahead and slightly to my right. I had been walking in a tangent, approaching the fence, but not by the most direct route. I made the adjustment.

A moment later, I pulled up and stopped. There was another bison curled on the ground directly in front of me. Another few steps and I would have stepped on it. I looked back. The agitated male wasn’t following, but he hadn’t given up. He was watching and occasionally stamping or coughing a warning. But around him, two other shapes appeared. I had carried Aimee right through the group of bachelor males. Five of them were all around us. The reason for Gino’s reluctance to follow us out into the dark field was now apparent. We were surrounded by painful death. Stealth and subtlety weren’t going to help us. I hitched Aimee higher again and moved quickly around the sleeping bull, taking long strides.

The fence was suddenly much closer and I stopped again. Somewhere in front of me was a single thick strand of electrified wire, with enough of a charge to stun a bull bison. Enough to kill a stumbling human and the woman on his back. I closed my eyes and counted to ten. When I reopened them, my night vision was stronger. I inched along. My peripheral vision caught the faint glint first. We were there.

“I’m going to put you down and pull you underneath the fence. Just stay low and you’ll be fine.”

She murmured something. I couldn’t understand her words, but I didn’t need to. She was conscious and capable of following instructions.

I eased her to the ground, not daring to look back, then I slipped
under the wire and reached back for her hands. Though I tried to be gentle, the pressure on her wound must have been dreadful. She gasped once, but held back any further sound as I pulled her across the intervening space. And then I had her. We were both between the tall outer fence and the electrified wire. I stopped and took stock of our situation. And came near to despair.

We were safe from attack by bison, but we were no closer to escape. Aimee couldn’t climb the outer fence, and I couldn’t carry her over. She was still bleeding and it was too dark for me to determine how serious her wound might be. I looked back. The three men had disappeared. They weren’t in the field. I wasn’t reassured. I knew they hadn’t given up.

“We’re going to be okay now,” I said. Maybe she believed me, though to my ears I did not sound at all convincing. “Stay here. I’ve got to reconnoiter.”

I rose up and, running in a bent crouch, made my way along the fence, looking for any break, any possible spot where we could get through without having to climb over. It was futile. The fencing was in excellent shape.

The bison didn’t like my movements. They couldn’t easily see me; I was nothing but a dark shadow flitting along on the far side of the wire. But they could smell both me and the scent of fresh blood in the damp air. They all began to stamp and huff. They sounded like a cross between a chorus of bullfrogs and Roger in the morning. From across the fields, the herd of females and calves picked up the agitation of the young bulls and began to reply with plaintive lowing. Then there was the sound of the alpha male, somewhere in the same direction, roaring. It wasn’t anything like a lion’s roar really, but it communicated all the same information. The boss was there and in charge.