Magic Line (18 page)

FIFTEEN

M
onday night and Tuesday were easy – Robin was so pumped about the slick way he got away from the rescue squad that he hardly needed any sleep that first night. Same with food; he bought a couple of snacks out of a vending machine before he left the hospital and ate them while he strolled the first three floors of the parking garage, scoping out the darkest corners. He found the best vantage points that first night, too, places where he could see people coming from any direction. They were all bright places, though, so he could never pause in any of them for long. Traffic was brisk for the first few hours; drivers busy parking their cars or finding them. All he had to do was keep moving and nobody paid any attention to him.

After ten it slowed down, just night shift people going and coming, so he had less traffic to dodge but a greater risk of exposure to the few people he met. He spent some time sitting in his dark spots, then began to like the stairwell after he noticed how few others used it – even for one flight, people all took the elevator. It got pretty cold on the stairs after midnight, though, so he stole a tarp from the bed of a pickup. Wrapped up, he had a nice late-night snooze between third and fourth floors. Prison had taught him to sleep lightly and wake at any nearby sound.

That wasn't the only useful skill Robin had learned in the Arizona State Prison system. He had gone in there thoroughly schooled, he thought, by the street where he mostly grew up, and by his times in juvie and Pima County. But Wilmot Road showed him that what he had thought were his best assets – a slender, attractive figure, a smart mouth and a pretty face – were the worst possible combination to bring with you into state lockup.

He had always been a quick study and pain speeded up his learning curve. In a couple of months he had come to the stunning realization that he was likely to get out of Wilmot, if at all, with fewer teeth and a sexually transmitted disease.

He had been sitting in the dining room, just out of the infirmary for the second time and wondering if he had the guts to commit suicide, when a fortyish man with caramel skin and a graying Van Dyke had sat down beside him and said, ‘You just about ready to listen to reason?'

His name was Regis Boe. A lifer whose attorney had beaten the death sentence he had well and truly earned, he led a gang of the most fearsome badasses in Wilmot prison. Not the crazies, but the cold-eyed dealers, men who understood that life on the inside could be almost as good as life on the outside if you played it right. You had to know which ones to bribe and who had to be terrified instead. Then you lined up the pleasures you wanted and fixed it so somebody else paid for them.

He had decided to make Robin his new special boyfriend. His standard practice was to take his pick of the freshest young things that came in, let some of his boys break them in first and then present himself as the road to rescue. Robin had already been through the first part of the process and was as ready for a rescue as he needed to be. They could do it the easy way or the hard way, Regis explained, and Robin chose the easy way without even asking for specifics.

There were really no surprises, anyway. He became an adroit sex slave, skilled at giving pleasure. He never learned to enjoy any of it himself, so the anger of the forlorn, neglected child he had been, that in his teens had built him into a tricky thief and a mean bully, now became a raging hunger that fed on inflicting pain.

Regis felt his anger, saw how quick and bright Robin was, and put his martial arts teachers to work. He had plenty of amusements and enjoyed them all, but he was a true psychopath and now he began to enjoy watching his acolytes turn Robin into a lightning-fast fighting machine. There was plenty of exercise time allowed in Wilmot, and with good behavior – a joke in this context but once Robin was under Regis's wing he could pick his fights and the rules called his new silence good behavior – he could get extra time in the weight room and the yard. He took all the exercise time he could get and bulked up a little. Whenever Regis wanted somebody punished, Robin was his man.

It was Owen Chu, the tiny lifer who'd killed his wife for cheating – he made her watch him kill both their children first – who taught Robin how to control his breathing and pulse rate. Owen had days when he didn't make much sense, so most people didn't want to be around him. But Robin noticed how nimble and strong he was, so he ignored Owen's rants and got acquainted with his workout routines.

The breathing- and muscle-control exercises that Chu and the other martial arts guys taught him could be practiced in small spaces, even alone in his cell in the dark. He learned to take himself to the edge of unconsciousness, to achieve trance-like states in which his pulse rate dropped to near zero. He loved the feeling of control, especially after Chu said, ‘Forget all that crap about Hindu gods – you don't have to be a mystic to make this work.' A practical path to power, Chu called it. It was hard to see any path to power opening up for Chu, walled up in Wilmot, but Robin saw right away how he could use it.

When he got out and started making his living on the street again, he was delighted to see that the speed and ruthlessness he had learned in prison gave him a great advantage over ordinary men. He went on practicing on the outside, improving his ability to always make the first kick or grab and follow at once with a second devastating blow while his opponent was still reeling.

And the day of the invasion, his ability to control his breathing and metabolism had given him the crucial edge. He congratulated himself on these skills now. The knowledge that he had put one over on the Tucson Police Department, fooled them in the house and caught them flat-footed in the rescue vehicle, warmed him through the long night in the parking garage, kept him dreaming that the big prize might still be his.

His tiny radio fit easily in the breast pocket of his fire department shirt. He felt pretty secure, strolling through the cars with the earbuds in – they made him look relaxed, he thought, and ensured that nobody would talk to him. All the local stations were broadcasting bulletins about the ‘multiple slayings in Midvale Park,' and ‘the lone survivor.' He imagined himself telling Regis, with a little wink, ‘That's how I knew I was still at large.'

They kept reporting a home invasion, and saying ‘multiple victims' but not how many – the police still weren't releasing details, like the fact that the home was a stash house. And they hadn't said a word about the money. Which meant what – they hadn't found it, or they had? Thinking about the money in somebody else's hands made his chest ache with anger. It was his; he had earned it!

The front part of the invasion had gone exactly as he planned – he knew Earl and Homer, those idiots, would buy his idea about a service van being the perfect cover, and if anything he'd expected the bald guy inside to be a little quicker with the Desert Eagle.
But hey, Rolly's jolly.
That used to be his thing to say in the olden days – three whole years ago, before he got busted. Rolly had been his gang name for a couple of years. It made Rolly very jolly now to know that all four of those bozos were dead. There was nobody left, now, to talk about the house on Spring Brook Drive. Except, just possibly, silly old Zeb.

The back of the house – his part – had been a huge, stellar success. He went over it again in his mind, proud of the bold way he went through the window, created one of his tiny pockets of time and got his Derringer into perfect position to fire one killing shot into the brain of the man with the Kalashnikov, who by the way was showing a lot of class himself planted in the doorway like that, fearlessly laying down a field of fire. Almost a shame to waste a guy like that.

The real clinker in the bunch of course had been Zeb, who as far as Robin could tell had never made it into the house at all. Infuriating, but not surprising. He had only ever needed Zeb to help with the window. After that, one way or another, Zeb was slated to get blown away – if the house guards didn't get him Robin would have to. You couldn't have a dickhead like Zeb around afterward, with his mouth and his yeah-buts.

The whole first night Robin kept waiting for one of the newscasters to report one man in custody. When nobody did he began to think the unthinkable – that Zeb, the stupid dork, must have succeeded in running away. That was better than Zeb in custody, telling everything he knew, but if he was still out there, he was one more thing Robin needed to take care of before he could run.

And, oh damn, he was so ready to run. He was going to get himself out to LA, where it was easy to become somebody else, and get some fake ID for a new name. Make some contacts there and in San Diego while he changed his appearance a little – maybe grow a beard? He'd been Richard and Rolly and Robin, and nobody had ever cared for any of those boys except to use and abuse. So now he would be somebody else and he would do the using and abusing. He'd have money, which bought time, and he would use the time to get a new identity and build a new face.

When the time was right his new self would come right back to Tucson, though. Arizona was still the best place for him, where he knew the best ways to cross the border, where to go to make deals. He didn't want to get into drug-smuggling itself, no point in bumping asses with the big cartels. He was going to become the go-to guy for all the adjunct services the drug trade required: the guns, cars, houses, and electronics. He hadn't worked out all the details yet but he knew the most important part – his new business would be built around the border; the gift that kept on giving, the magic line where the price went up.

Thinking that way, keeping a positive outlook as long as he could and controlling his breathing whenever anger threatened to swamp him, he handled Tuesday and Tuesday night very well. Trips for more supplies were risky: eating and drinking required more trips to a bathroom, so despite his restless need to break up the boredom he resisted hunger and thirst as much as he could. It helped that after two nights and a day he could hardly stand the sight of vending machine food.

He had a bad moment when he noticed a nurses' aide watching him thoughtfully and realized she looked familiar to him, too – yellow braid, always parked on the second floor. He scooted up a stairwell, got in the darkest corner on Three and used his breathing to zone out for a while. When he came out of that trance he toured Children's Hospital till he found a set of scrubs to change into. They served him well till he was almost ready to leave. By then he had located a set of lockers that yielded a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that were a loose fit, good to hide things under.

So he was surviving very well, but he needed to get out of this parking garage, get his money and go. The hold-up was that he had never been able to determine, listening to the radio, if the detectives were still working on the house on Spring Brook Drive. Little dribbles of information kept leaking out – it was definitely four bodies now, and they were seeking, always seeking, the escapee from the rescue vehicle and ‘another person of interest.' Had Zeb been spotted running away? Who else could it be?

On Wednesday afternoon, the newscasts reported the release of new information from the Tucson Police Department. The multiple shootings on Spring Brook Drive were revealed as ‘a drug-related crime.' The home was a stash house and the investigation had yielded a ‘high-value seizure' of the house: SUV, drugs . . . and oh, God, money . . . upwards of a quarter of a million dollars in money, they said, and drugs with an estimated street value of about the same amount.

Robin didn't hear the value of the drugs because he had pulled the earbuds out of his ears and was crouched in the darkest of his dark places with his head between his knees, practicing the rapid breathing Owen had taught him to ward off nausea.

Those dirty bastards had his money! For a few minutes his brain wouldn't do any useful work at all – it was too busy building a wall of denial:
It can't be can't be can't be.

A small, sneaky part of his mind, a remnant from his childhood, kept trying to claw its way back to yesterday and try for a do-over.

He was still Robin Brady, though, so even in his agony he heard footsteps coming closer to his part of the ramp and realized he had to get up and move. Moving got his synapses firing and soon he was thinking as he trotted up the empty stairwell to the next level,
They didn't say anything about the skim
. Of course this was young reporters writing news stories transmitted to them by dorky cops who thought like eagle scouts. They probably wouldn't think to look for the skim . . .
I bet I can still get that part of the money.
OK, it was a lot less money than he'd planned to have, but it was still a lot more than he had right now.

Robin knew he could only boost one car in this location. After that, cops would be all over this garage with dogs and technicians. When he snatched his wheels, he had to be ready to grab the money and go. He'd even picked the car he wanted – a last year's Taurus with Michelin tires, that a young doc, kind of a babe actually, parked on Three every morning before she hustled her cute little butt into Children's Hospital for the nine-to-six shift. A white sedan that looked like every third car in Tucson, and she kept plenty of gas in the tank – he'd been watching it, was beginning to like it a lot. He'd have nine hours in it before she even came out and found it missing – by then he could have driven it to Yuma, switched it for something else in a parking lot, and gone on his way.

Every hour of Wednesday and Wednesday night felt like three – sometimes he was sure his watch had stopped. Newscasts about the slayings on Spring Brook Drive were getting shorter and harder to find – Tucson was moving on. He used his breathing to keep himself quiet until Thursday morning, when he knew if he ate another cardboard sandwich he'd kill somebody. This was it – his day to run.

He watched the sun coming up. Feeling his pulse beat, knowing this was his day at last. But 8:45 came, then 9:00, and his Taurus didn't show. The cute little doc was late to work. Or could it be her day off ? No way to know. He jittered between the two possible alternates he had picked, not sure which steering column would be easier to crack. And then, oh, hot shit, here she was, squealing the brakes on the corners, wheeling into her spot. Grabbed her kit, slammed the door and ran across the ramp, swearing under her breath.