Escape Clause

26

There was something terribly wrong with the air conditioner in Hamlet Simonian’s car. The stench rolling out of the vents was so bad that Peck had to turn it off and roll the car windows down, as he motored east out of St. Paul to the farmhouse. Sweat began running in rivulets out of his hair and down his face, back, and chest.

By the time he pulled into the barnyard and got out, he was gasping for fresh air.

The farmhouse itself was barely functional and parts of it had actually been stripped out by vandals, but in the basement, there were at least a hundred Ball jars, once used for canning. He went down the basement stairs, batting face-sticking spiderwebs out of his way, and got the biggest jar he could see that also had a lid. The jar looked to be quart-sized, and old and delicate.

Out in the barn, Katya hissed at him like an alley cat-a really huge alley cat. Peck ignored her. When the tiger processing was complete, Peck and the Simonians had planned to fill the house and barn with corrugated cardboard moving boxes, douse them with gasoline, and burn the buildings to the ground.

The cardboard would guarantee a fast hot fire that would obliterate any sign of the stolen tigers, and Peck guessed that the fire-which would clearly be arson and which he didn’t care about-would be blamed on the absentee owner.

Nice and tidy.

In preparing for that, they had collected four five-gallon cans of gasoline. He popped the top on one of the cans and filled the Ball jar to the top, put the lid on, and screwed the top down. Hayk Simonian’s cotton-canvas butcher’s apron still hung from a nail in the wall, and Peck cut off a thick strip of it, and wrapped it around the jar, creating an efficient Molotov cocktail.

With that done, he killed the barn lights and went back to the car, took it around the Cities exactly at the speed limit, and from the southwest corner of the metro area, turned it south down Highway 169 toward Mankato.

Toward Virgil’s house.

–

His thinking was simple: he needed a day, or perhaps two, to finish as much as he was now planning to do with Katya. Most of Artur had come out of the dryer and needed to be run through the meat grinder, but that would only take a few hours at the most. He could do the work much more efficiently if he could get Flowers off his back. If Flowers’s house burned, he suspected Flowers would be off his back, at least for long enough, looking for the people who’d first beat up his girlfriend and now had tried to burn down his house. Once Peck had burned the farmhouse and barn, and the processed tigers were on their way to California, Flowers could suck on it.

Peck had a vision of himself sitting in a rocking chair, smiling at Flowers, saying, “No, no, no, no, no…” He’d have to get a rocking chair.

The heat in the car became insufferable. He turned the air conditioner back on and suffered the stink. It actually smelled, Peck thought, like Simonian had taken a dump on the engine. But why would anybody…?

Ten minutes after making the turn down Highway 169, the chemical remnants of the Xanax came back to bite him in the ass and he found the driver’s-side tires running off the left edge of the highway. The bumping shook him awake and he jerked the car back into its own lane. The sudden change of direction knocked the jar of gasoline over. The seal wasn’t quite tight, and gas started leaking into the car’s backseat carpet.

As soon as Peck smelled it, he reached behind the seat and managed to get it upright, but the fumes were added to the residual stink of whatever was contaminating the air conditioner. He began to gag and finally turned the air conditioner off and rolled the windows down again. He drove stupidly into the night, and farther on, he wasn’t sure how much, he crossed the Minnesota River, and about fifty large yellow-gutted insects splatted across the windshield, and a few whizzed past his ear into the backseat, where they spattered on the inside of the back windows.

Hunched over the steering wheel, barely able to see, Peck muttered, “A nightmare. A fuckin’ nightmare.”

The drive seemed to go on forever, but didn’t. He pulled into an all-night gas station in St. Peter, wiped off the windshield, and sped away without going inside; being able to see made things better. An hour and a half after he left the barn, he drove slowly and quietly into Mankato.

The Xanax-free space in the back of his head began hinting that his whole plan was insane, but the Xanax-saturated part ignored it.

Peck had drawn a quick sketch of the location of Flowers’s house on a legal pad before he left his own home, but in the dark, he missed a few turns and had to go back a couple of times-and once saw a Mankato patrol car cross a street ahead of him.

“Not good for morale, Winston,” he muttered. “Not good.”

–

When he finally got onto Flowers’s street, he found it to be narrow and moon-shadowed by trees arcing over the blacktop. Pretty in the daytime, dark as tar in the night. A lot of the houses either had no numbers, or no numbers that could be seen in the dark. One white house had a bright yellow porch light on outside, and he could see that the idiot owners had painted the house numbers white. How could anybody see them?

The first set of numbers he could see suggested he was two blocks from Flowers’s place. He idled on down that way, through two stop signs, saw a number that suggested he’d passed Flowers’s, went on another block, did a careful U-turn, and came back. He had a choice of three houses: one of them had to be Flowers’s, but they were all dark.

The first house looked to be too high on the numbers list. The middle one had an attached garage and he remembered from the firebomb newspaper story that Flowers’s garage had been the target of the bomber. The next house down the street had a detached garage, and why would anyone bomb a detached garage if they were targeting the owner?

Logic had spoken: had to be the middle one.

Peck was sweating even more heavily now, fear adding pressure to the heat, all of it still ameliorated by the residual Xanax in his brain. Do it, or not?

The residual Xanax won.

He fumbled the jar out of the backseat, unscrewed the top enough to leak some gasoline onto the apron rag, made sure he had his Bic lighter, left the car running, got out, ran across the yard to the side of the house-ran so he wouldn’t have a chance to change his mind-fired the Bic lighter into the rag, which ignited with a low-running yellow flame, and heaved the jar through a side window.

There was an instantaneous mushroom of fire inside the house and he ran back to the car and took off, turning the first corner he came to.

Now he was exultant. “Did it, did it,” he said aloud. “People sometimes meet guys like Winston Peck the Sixth, and they say, ‘I didn’t think he could do it, I guess I just didn’t know.’ Yeah, you just didn’t know, you asshole…”

An hour and a half later, still talking to himself about the bombing, and after another encounter with the yellow-gutted bugs crossing back over the Minnesota River, he found a parking spot six blocks from his house in St. Paul, and did a reentry that was exactly the opposite of his exit.

Once in the house, he peeled off the ski mask and went into the bathroom to wash his face. There, he caught sight of himself in the mirror: he’d never seen anything like it. Winston Peck the doctor had been replaced by Winston Peck the terrorist-attack survivor.

His thinning hair, soaked with sweat and dirt, stood away from his head like the Cowardly Lion’s in The Wizard of Oz. His face was a fiery red, and a rash had broken out across his nose and cheeks. His mouth hung open, and he really couldn’t seem to keep it closed.

He stood in a cool shower for five minutes, dried off, collapsed naked on his bed, but his mind was still screaming. He lay rigid for three minutes, maybe five minutes, his brain rerunning the gasoline explosion, then crawled out of bed and found the tube of Xanax.

“Just one more,” he said to himself. He popped two, on second thought, and went back to the bed and was out before he had time to pull a sheet over himself.