The Cat, The Devil, The Last Escape

26

MORGAN PARTED FROM Quaker Lowe outside the prison office that was used by attorneys and their clients. Shaking hands with Lowe, he wanted to hug the man; they were both smiling as Lowe turned away toward the sally port. Morgan, double-timing to the mess hall, shouldered in among the stragglers looking for Lee. The kitchen staff was cleaning up the last of breakfast, the clanging of metal and crockery, the smell of overcooked food and soapy water. Lee sat at a table across the room where he’d pushed aside his empty plate. Morgan grabbed a plate, served himself from what was left in a few big pans, the eggs and pancakes limp and cold. Heading across among the empty tables, setting down his tray, he gave Lee a thumbs-up, “Falon’s in jail. Locked up tight.”

Lee let out a whoop that made the men in the kitchen turn and stare. “Hot damn! That’s what Lowe came out here for. To give you the news in person. Becky knows?”

“He called her at five this morning, said she laughed like a kid. Rome cops picked him up on the federal warrant. Lowe agrees with them, if Falon’s convicted in L.A., they’ll keep him out there, maybe at Terminal Island.”

Lee smiled. Morgan grinned back at Lee’s pleasure, which seemed to wipe away the years. But Lee’s eyes were bright with challenge, too. And that turned Morgan uneasy.

“He went over parts of the trial transcript again,” Morgan said, watching Lee. “Wanted to know if there was anything I’d forgotten, that might have seemed unimportant at the time. I couldn’t think of one detail.” Morgan made a face at the cold eggs but shoveled them in. “This has set him up, Lee. The guy really wants to burn Falon. I like him, he doesn’t act superior like the lawyers I’ve known. They come in the shop to get their car fixed, they want it yesterday and they know exactly what’s wrong with it, they want it done exactly the way they tell me, even when they’re dead wrong.”

“You couldn’t think of any new leads.” Lee said. “Anything he can move on.”

“Nothing.” Morgan stirred sugar into his coffee; at least the coffee was hot. “It’s the money that would fry him. If we knew where he hid the money.”

Lee was quiet, watching Morgan.

“He was good at hiding things,” Morgan said. “When we were kids, he knew places to stash car radios and batteries that I never thought of. He’d dig stuff out of the big flour bin in his mother’s kitchen or an old water heater lying in the lot next door, dig out all the stash we’d lifted so we could take it to the fence.”

Still, Lee said nothing. Morgan finished his breakfast; they returned their trays to the counter and moved out into the exercise yard. The morning’s rain had stopped. As they moved down the concrete walk, puddles splashed their shoes. “The bank money,” Morgan said, “he wouldn’t trust that to some water heater—or to Natalie, either. She lied for him, but that doesn’t mean he’d trust her with money. Falon’s opinion of women is on a level with hogs in a mud hole.”

“I wonder,” Lee said, “if he’s already retrieved the stash. He’s had plenty of time to split it up, hide it in half a dozen places or maybe in banks. Maybe the bureau didn’t find all the accounts. Maybe some small deposits, say, over in Kentucky and Alabama, accounts he might have already set up.”

“Lowe’s checking the banks in several states. That takes a while, when they’d be under false names. Harder still if he opened them some time ago, so they wouldn’t show up under new accounts.” Two joggers passed them moving swiftly, glancing at them without interest.

“If the feds haul him out to California,” Morgan said, “he won’t get his hands on the cash for some long time.” He looked up at the sky, the clouds dark and low above them. “Or maybe he buried it, maybe thought that was safer than banks. He knows the land around Rome real well.”

“And so do you,” Lee said.

“So? You think I can look for it, locked in this damn prison?”

“There might be a way,” Lee said. Over the last days, working in the steamy kitchen, he’d laid out a plan. Even now, with this new turn in Falon’s fate, Lowe’s try for an appeal could fail. If that happened, what Lee had in mind might be Morgan’s only shot at a new trial, his only chance at freedom.

Lee didn’t tell Morgan what he had in mind, he wanted Blake to think of it himself. He’d been working on Blake, planting the notion of escape, describing prison breaks he’d heard about, but then moving on to a colorful crime or a well-known inmate. Whether or not Blake knew what he was doing, the idea of escape was planted. Now, watching Morgan, Lee said, “What if we could find the money?”

“That’s all the proof Lowe would need, he could get him back in court.” Morgan looked hard at Lee. “If somehow I could get my hands on Falon before they ship him off . . . Get him alone and make him spill where he hid it . . .”

“How would you do that? Even if you broke out, he’s locked up.” Lee kicked at a pebble. “And by tomorrow or the next day, he’ll be gone. On his way to the West Coast.” He visualized Falon belly-chained in a DC-3 between a couple of deputy marshals. He hoped they were hard-nosed bastards; he wished Falon a miserable flight.

“If he’s acquitted of the land scam,” Morgan said, “he’ll come back for the money. If I could get out of here, I could watch him and follow him.”

“Slim chance he’ll walk, if the feds are this hot to convict him.”

“I want to get the bastard, Lee. Make him talk, make him tell where the money is. If I could get out, get my hands on him . . .”

Lee looked hard at Morgan. “You think you could take down Falon?”

Morgan looked uncertain. Lee said, “Together we could. We could hurt him bad enough so he’d tell whatever we want.” And, watching Morgan, he knew Blake had grabbed the bait.

But what lay ahead would take all the planning, all the wiliness and strength the two of them had. Lee tried not to think how dangerous it was. His agenda wasn’t only crazy, it was pushing suicide.

“You sure they’d put him in Terminal Island?” Morgan said.

“That’s the closest to L.A. Why go to the expense of bringing him back here?”

“If there was a way to get transferred out there, if I could get into T.I. with him, I swear I’d beat the truth out of him.”

“Well, sure, if you could get out there,” Lee said. “The prison system does that all the time. You just tell your counselor you’re unhappy here, that you’d like the California climate better, he’ll put in for a transfer and you’ll be on your way.”

They moved over as four more joggers surged by, stinking of sweat. Morgan had taken the bait real well. “If he’s sent to T.I.,” he said stubbornly, “and I could get out there, I’d have a chance at him. I had no chance after the bank robbery. When I came to, groggy from the drugs, I was already on my way to jail. But now, if I could break out somehow, get out to California . . .”

“Then what? You camp on the doorstep of T.I. waiting for Falon to be released? Wait there how many years for him to walk out the prison door, then you nail him?”

“I have to do something. Becky and Sammie and I have our whole lives ahead of us. I don’t want to watch from behind this damned wall as Sammie grows up. I want my life back.”

Lee waited.

“If he is convicted, if he does do his time out there, there has to be some way I can get into the joint.” Morgan looked helplessly at Lee. “I know it’s impossible, but . . . Maybe I could get out through the train gate, where that guy got crushed. Maybe I could do a better job of it than he did.”

“And what if you screw up? End up crushed, like him?”

Morgan slowed, looked at Lee a long time. “In here, I might as well be dead. In here, I’m nothing to Becky and Sammie. I can’t work to support them, can’t hold them and love them except in public at the exact place and time of day the prison says I can.”

They had circled the exercise yard, had started around again when Morgan said, “If I did find a way to break out, if I got all the way out there, they wouldn’t ship me back right away? I am a federal prisoner, wouldn’t they hold me, maybe right there in T.I. for a few days, while they did the paperwork?”

Lee looked hard at Morgan. “They might not ship you back at all. It would be cheaper to keep you there.” He shrugged. “Maybe T.I. Why not?”

“Then how do I do it? How do I get out, avoid the feds long enough to hop a freight or hitchhike, get on out to L.A.?”

Lee glanced up at the wall.

“I sure can’t go over that baby,” Morgan said, laughing sourly. “Thirty, forty feet. And the guards. Even if there was a way over, I wouldn’t last two seconds, with those rifles trained on me.”

“Maybe,” Lee said. “Maybe there’s a way. Come on,” he said, heading across the big yard.

Sitting with their backs to the concrete barrier, Lee laid out the plan. He showed Morgan the dimples in the concrete. He watched Morgan glance up, as Lee himself had done, looking toward the towers that couldn’t be seen from that position. He watched Morgan’s expression change to disbelief and then to excitement, and Lee’s own blood surged. They could do this. They could get out of there, in a way that no one had ever done, before.

Maybe something was pushing him, maybe not. This was what he meant to do and to hell with his short sentence. Beside him, Morgan began to smile. “Sammie was right,” he said.

“Right about what?”

“That you’d come here to Atlanta and save me,” Morgan said. “That you’d get me out of this cage.”