The Girls He Adored

21

The commotion was building in the other holding cells as Max raced back into the cell block, unbuttoning his jumpsuit as he ran. Lee had done his job and slipped back into the darkness of their mind-now it was up to Max to get them to safety.

“Shut the fuck up,” he shouted breathlessly to the red- and orange-clad prisoners as he jumped over Twombley's body, which lay athwart Pender's, blocking the entrance to the holding cell. “I'll open the doors, but you gotta keep it down.” The last time he'd been here he had estimated, counting off the seconds in his mind, that no more than fifteen minutes ever elapsed between the arrival or departure of prisoner convoys with armed escorts. This meant he had only five minutes left, ten tops, to make good his escape.

Stripped down to his jail-issue underwear, he hauled Twombley's body off Pender and began undressing the deputy, while his mind worked frantically. An ordinary man, he knew, would simply walk out of the jail through the office door. In which case, when the alarms began to sound and the sirens to blare, that hypothetical ordinary man would find himself stranded within hailing distance of the jail, the courthouse, city hall, and the Salinas Municipal Police headquarters.

And what then would be the ordinary man's options? Run for it? Try to bluff his way through the cordon of security that would surely be thrown up, relying on a deputy sheriff's uniform for camouflage, when they already knew his face, and would realize soon enough that Twombley's uniform had been taken? Hotwire or hijack a car in that overpoliced neighborhood?

No doubt about it, thought Max, unbuckling Twombley's heavy belt and tightening it around his own slender midsection: an ordinary man, even if he'd managed to get out of the jail in the first place, would almost certainly be captured within minutes.

But Max was no ordinary man. He was extra ordinary, and possessed both the foresight to come up with an extraordinary solution and the courage to carry it out. Time, however, was in short supply. Max hurried out of the cell, giving Pender's body a wide berth so as not to step in the blood still pooling out around the head and risk leaving bloody footprints behind.

The other prisoners were crowding up against the bars, calling to him in both English and Spanish. Max tossed Deputy Twombley's handcuff key into the first holding cell on his way back into the office, then fumbled through the rest of the keys until he found one that opened the gun cabinet. He grabbed a Glock with a clip already inserted, slipped it into Twombley's holster, closed the locker again, then looked around for a telephone book. There was one on the desk; as he thumbed through it looking for the two addresses he needed, something began nagging at Max, something he'd left undone.

Unfortunately, there was no time to call on Mose. But it would come to one of them eventually-it always did, Max told himself as he located the panel that controlled the cell doors, flipped the three remaining knobs up into the yellow position, then cranked the wheel, opening the doors to the rest of the holding cells. Immediately a dozen or more prisoners, mostly orange-jumpsuited felons, elected to take early parole and began spreading out through the streets of the West Alisal neighborhood, exactly as Max had planned.

But Max was not among them. Instead, he turned back into the jail and used another of Twombley's keys to open the iron door leading from the holding cell corridor to the long-abandoned interior of the jail.

Inside, it was dark as a moonless night. Max locked the door behind him, then used Twombley's big cop flashlight to navigate his way past an obstacle course of loose wires and cables, jagged-edged water and sewage pipes, boulder-sized chunks of collapsed masonry, overturned furniture, shattered glass, rusting cell doors hanging crookedly from one hinge or fallen entirely and blocking the narrow aisles.

As he picked his way toward the interior staircase leading up to the second and third floors, Max could hear sirens going off all around him. He was in the process of congratulating himself on making the right decision when he realized what it was he'd left undone earlier: Pender, the FBI man-in all the hurry and commotion, he hadn't stopped to finish off Pender.

It wouldn't have taken but a moment or two, Max realized ruefully, knuckling himself on the forehead the way Miss Miller used to when he'd screwed up: Hello? Anybody home in there? He could have stomped Pender, strangled him silently, suffocated him-shit, he could have stood on Pender's throat while he was changing clothes with Twombley, and not lost a single goddamn second. Maxwell's adrenaline began flowing again-he broke out into a sweat.

Steady-steady now. This is not the time to panic. Max slowed his breathing, calmed himself, and began reasoning through the problem. In the first place, he didn't know for sure that Pender was still alive. Max didn't remember seeing him breathe-and he sure as shit wasn't moving.

In the second place, even if Pender had survived, after three whacks on the skull-three Lee whacks-his brains were probably so scrambled he'd be lucky if he could remember his own name.

And in the third place, even if Pender were both alive and compos mentis, there were no Lone Rangers in the FBI. Anything Pender knew, other agents almost certainly knew-and if they'd had any reason to connect him to Scorned Ridge, they'd have been up there digging a long time ago.

No harm, no foul, Max reassured himself-he hadn't put the system into any further jeopardy by failing to finish Pender off. Which meant all he had to do now was find a secure place inside the jail to hole up until the fuss around him died down.

So moving as quietly as he could in Twombley's leather-soled cop shoes, which were two sizes too large for him, Max made his way up to the second floor, where the cells were stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with court records in cardboard boxes. Alarmingly, the corners of the floor-level boxes had been chewed through by rats.

Max shuddered and backed away-he didn't care for rodents. Eventually he found a windowless isolation cell deep in the interior of the building. The door had been removed and was leaning against the wall; just inside the entrance the flashlight beam picked out the skeleton of a pigeon lying in the dust, undisturbed by rodents, skull and ribcage intact, the long bones of the wings, feathers still attached, fanned out in perfect deltas.

It was ideal for his purposes-if the rats hadn't come in here to eat a dead pigeon, they certainly wouldn't be bothering a live human. He could hear sirens in the street below, pounding footsteps, urgent voices. A Chinese fire drill, he chuckled. They seek him here, they seek him there.

Enormously pleased with himself, he switched off the flashlight and settled down with his back to the wall to wait them out. It was pitch-black; he literally couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Which didn't bother Max any-he wasn't afraid of the dark. He knew who was, though, and it occurred to Max that perhaps the time had come to teach Lyssy the Sissy a lesson, once and for all.