The Boys from Santa Cruz (14 page)

I realize now that in a way, it would have been better if I
had
been convicted of something. At least then I’d have a lawyer and I could appeal. Instead, I’m serving life without parole and I can’t even argue my own case, because if they so much as suspect that I’ve got my marbles back, they’ll have me back under chemical restraint before you can say phenothiazine.

So come to think of it, yeah, maybe I am a little crazy by now. But can you blame me? I’m only twenty-five years old, but I’ve already been lied to and betrayed by everyone I’ve ever trusted, robbed of my freedom and robbed of my mind, then locked up for life in this shithole they call Meadows Road. And I don’t even know why.

My grandparents do, though. And thanks to some information one of the inmates gave me yesterday morning, I may get a chance to ask them about it any day now, face-to-face, live and in person.

And when I’ve finished discussing matters with Fred and Evelyn, there are a few other people I’d like to have a word or two with.

I know, I know, everybody says that living well is the best revenge. But for me, living well is probably an unrealistic goal, even if I do manage to make it out of here. So I guess I’m going to have to settle for second best: seeing every single one of the treacherous, backstabbing bastards on my list die slow and painful deaths, and maybe even sticking around long enough to watch the turkey vultures munch-munch-munching on their remains.

Thanks to a sudden April shower, there were only two patients in the little garden courtyard yesterday morning. There was me, wearing a raincoat over my pajamas and robe, carrying an umbrella, and shuffling along in the flat-footed walk I’d copied off the other chemically restrained droolers I saw every day. Then there was a tall, stooped old lunatic with luxurious sorcerer’s eyebrows, who was wearing a transparent poncho over a shapeless, egg-stained brown cardigan.

“Spitting out the old meds again, eh?” he said, when we were out of earshot of the whitecoat assigned to the garden, who had taken refuge on a bench under the eaves.

“Hibbing owza wha?” I replied in a drooler slur: the trick was to pretend your tongue was as thick as a sirloin steak.

“You can fool
them,
” he said, “but you can’t fool me. I’ve been here forever. I know where the bodies are buried.” He delivered the words in machine-gun bursts:
ratta-ta-tat.

Oh great, busted by a full-blown loony. I decided my best bet was to play along with him. “How’d I give myself away?”

“Aura. Your sulfur black has turned to primrose pink.”

“You can see auras?”

“I see everything. That’s why I’m here. Too much input, not enough filter. I used to think it was the antennas.” Pointing toward his upper molars. “Delusional behavior:
they
don’t need no stinkin’ antennas.”

“I’m C.R. myself,” I told him.

He nodded knowingly. “If I was you, sonny, I’d get the hell out of here. Before your next blood workup. Which will tell them you’ve been spitting out your meds. Which they’ll then start injecting.”

“But…but they took blood from me just the other day.”

“Then my advice to you is make like a banana and split. Decamp, posthaste before the results come back.”

“I can’t: I’m not a voluntary commit.”

“But you are on the third floor, right?” he said with a wink. Or it might have been a tic.

I nodded.

“Spend much time in the lounge?” A huge, dark, high-ceilinged room, oppressively overfurnished with high-backed leather chairs, carved oaken side tables, tasseled lamps, and sofas with deedle-ball trim. Even the television set, encased in a heavy walnut credenza, looked kind of Victorian.

“Of course.” What else was there to do? A guy can only take so many naps and so many walks.

“Ever looked behind the curtains?”

Dusty drapes of eggplant-colored velvet were drawn across the back wall; I’d never seen them opened. “No, but I saw the windows from the outside when they first brought me here. They’re all bricked up.”

“Windows? What windows? Forget the windows. Who said anything about windows?”

“Sorry.” The rain worsened; I angled the umbrella to shield him as well. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“Here’s the tale, boy. Once upon a time, I was lounging in the dayroom when the fire alarm went off. The whitecoat opened
the curtains. Voila, a fire door opened onto an enclosed stairwell. Shoo, shoo, down we went. One flight, two flights, three flights. Then the all clear. Shoo, shoo, back up we came. But there must have been an egress down there somewhere. Either that,” the old loon added confidentially, “or they were leading us to our deaths.”

After lunch, I made my way to the lounge. Dressed in drab pajamas, a shapeless robe, and paper slippers, I took a seat at the chess table, and while moving the pieces aimlessly around the inlaid squares of walnut and maple, I discreetly surveyed the room’s inhabitants.

Standing in one corner, staring intently at something no one else could see, was Chuckles, the inmate whose bearing and behavior I had studiously observed and copied in order to perfect my ongoing imitation of a drugged-out drooler.

A few feet away from Chuckles, the saddest-looking man I’d ever seen rocked back and forth in a squeaky red leather armchair that was not made for rocking. Two more inmates, one man, one woman, were sitting together on an overstuffed sofa, watching soap operas on the antique TV, while in the far corner, a female lunatic was braiding a lanyard out of those shiny, linguine-shaped, vomity-smelling plastic strands they give you in occupational therapy.

As my eyes traveled around the big room, my glance inadvertently met that of the whitecoat sitting by the door, who had just looked up from his magazine. I let my eyes glaze over, then formed a spit bubble in my mouth and pushed it out onto my lower lip. The whitecoat’s interest faded instantly, and he broke off eye contact.

A few minutes later, when the lanyard braider, a middle-aged woman wearing a pleated skirt, drab blouse, and fingerless gloves, put down her basket and left the room, I glanced over at the whitecoat, who hadn’t seemed to notice. Nor did he look up from his magazine when she returned, which suggested to me that keeping track of comings and goings in the lounge might not be part of the man’s job description.

To test my theory, I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering in and out of the lounge at random intervals. Each time I left, I stayed away a few minutes longer, and each time I returned I sat in a different part of the room. When I was as sure as I could be that my absence would not be noted by the whitecoat, I returned to the chess table in the corner of the room, which was close enough to the curtains that I could smell the dust and see the faint, slightly lighter stripes where the old purple velvet had faded lengthwise along the pleats.

And there I waited, still as a mime, poised on the edge of my chair, until the lanyard lady broke into tears. When the whitecoat got up to see to her, I slipped behind the curtain and flattened myself against the wall.

There were scarcely eighteen inches of clearance between the wall and the back of the curtains. I sidled along until I reached a wide steel door with a safety-yellow sign above the breaker bar, barely readable in the dusty gloom:
EMERGENCY EXIT!!! TO BE LEFT UNLOCKED AT ALL HOURS!!!

I gave the bar a gentle shove. It opened with a click that sounded deafening to my ears, but apparently went unnoticed on the other side of the curtain.

Closing the door quietly behind me, I found myself at the top of an enclosed, dimly lighted stairwell with concrete walls and iron steps. Moving noiselessly in my paper slippers, I descended three flights to the basement, then followed a trail of Day-Glo orange chevrons and illuminated exit signs down a long corridor with cinder-block walls, passing storage rooms, file rooms, branching corridors, and a boiler room with a yellow hazard triangle marked
DANGER!!! NATURAL GAS!!! NO OPEN FLAMES!!!
on the door. Either the sign painter at Meadows Road was paid by the exclamation mark, I decided, or else they had some manic-phase bipolar making signs in occupational therapy.

The trail of chevrons and exit signs continued on for thirty or forty feet, ending at another steel-plated, breaker-barred door
marked
EMERGENCY EXIT!!! TO BE LEFT UNLOCKED AT ALL HOURS!!!
But on this door there was a second sign that read:
TO BE OPENED ONLY IN EVENT OF EMERGENCY!!! ALARM WILL SOUND!!!

Shit. I must have been crazy to let that old nutcase get my hopes up, I told myself as I began retracing my steps, following the yellow chevrons backward through the basement maze. There
was
no easy way out of here. The second that alarm went off, the whitecoats would be all over me.

But when I passed the boiler room on my way back, the warning signs stopped me dead in my tracks. Danger, natural gas, no open flames!!!! What if there were some way to create a diversion, to set off some kind of explosion
before
I opened the exit door? I asked myself. The whitecoats would be so busy dealing with that, they might not even notice the alarm, or maybe they’d decide that it was the explosion that had blown it open, or maybe the alarm wouldn’t even work. Whatever happened, at the very worst I’d have a running start on them.

It’s a long shot, I know. And I may very well blow myself up in the process. But compared to the prospect of spending the rest of my life in this shithole, that doesn’t sound all that bad. So wish me luck, Pocket Pal: by this time tomorrow, I’ll either be free or I’ll be dead.

Pandemonium in the wake of a bank robbery interrupted. Alarm bells clamoring, sirens shrieking. On one side of the plywood and veneer tellers’ cages, hostages wept and prayed. On the other side, bodies lay motionless on the carpeted floor of the bank lobby, while a baby-faced young man in a blue FBI windbreaker shouted himself hoarse from the doorway. “You’re surrounded, give yourself up, come out with your hands on your heads,” and so on.

“Here we go again,” Special Agent E. L. Pender whispered to the man crouched next to him.

The man clapped Pender on the shoulder. “Courage,
mon ami,
nobody lives forever.”

They stood up. Pender crooked his arm around the smaller
man’s neck from behind, and together, in lockstep, they shuffled out from behind the counter and through the waist-high swinging gate into the lobby, where the other man ducked out of Pender’s grasp.

“Freeze,” shouted the kid in the blue windbreaker as Pender’s right hand moved toward the inside pocket of his rumpled plaid sport jacket; the other man, wearing respectable banker’s pinstripes, backed away obediently, his hands half-raised. Without hesitating, the baby-faced Bureau trainee dropped to a bent-kneed crouch and fired two rounds at Pender, who grabbed his chest with his free hand (the other was still inside his jacket), lowered himself carefully to the floor, and flopped over onto his side.

The trainee crossed the room holding his nine-millimeter automatic at the ready. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked the man in the suit, without taking his eyes off the recumbent Pender.

“Just fine. You, on the other hand, are in deep, deep shit.”

The trainee looked up from Pender and saw the man in pinstripes pointing a Glock .40 at his chest. “What—what’s going on?”

“Bang,” the man replied, rather than fire off a blank cartridge—everybody’s ears were still ringing from the earlier shots.

“Congratulations, son.” Pender hauled himself to his feet and flipped his leather badge case open to show the kid his DOJ shield. “You shot your inside man, then got yourself killed.”

He returned the badge case to the inside pocket of his sport coat, then reached down to offer a helping hand to a healthy-looking brunette corpse lying on the floor with her skirt rucked up high on her shapely thigh. All over the lobby, dead bodies were springing up and brushing themselves off, while freed hostages strolled out from behind the counter, discussing their performances in low, excited tones. (All the participants, save Pender, were professional or semiprofessional actors from a D.C. casting agency under contract to the FBI; having a real, if unlikely looking, special agent playing the undercover inside man,
it was believed, helped drive home the point of the exercise more forcefully.)

“Ed.” Mick Lawler, an instructor at the FBI Academy, bustled into the bank with his hand outstretched. “Thanks so much, I really appreciate your help.” He pumped Pender’s hand a few times, then turned to the crestfallen trainee, standing alone by the tellers’ cages, gun in hand. “Remember what we said about making assumptions, Mr. Kincheloe?”

After shaking hands all around, Pender exited the phony bank through the plywood front door and stepped out into the sunshine of Hogan’s Alley, the simulated small town constructed for training purposes on the grounds of the FBI Academy, which was located within the borders of the U.S. Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. He fired up a Marlboro as he strolled down the center of a deserted street lined with false-front stores, a street that ended disconcertingly as always, morphing into what might have been a rolling, landscaped college campus.

A meandering walkway bordered with flower beds climbed a grassy knoll to a recently completed minimalist office building with photographs of President William Jefferson Clinton and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh gracing the lobby wall. Pender stubbed out his cigarette in an urn filled with white sand and rode a silent elevator to the fourth floor, where the suite of offices housing the Liaison Support Unit was guarded by the fiercely protective Miss Pool.

“From your ex,” she announced, handing Pender an envelope.

“I trust you took the liberty of having it sniffed for explosive residue,” said Pender. The acrimonious divorce proceedings, initiated by Pam in August of ’85, while Pender was still out in California watching snuff videos, had been finalized on the first of May 1986—nine years ago yesterday—with Pam getting the house, the car, a monthly alimony check for the next five years, and Purvis the dog—she even got the goddamn dog.