Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“What’s this?”

“If I am ever hurt or in big trouble I want you to open this and do what it says. Put it away somewhere safe, somewhere where neither your mother nor Coleman will find it.”

“I know a place,” Aja said with convincing certainty. “But what does it say?”

“You will probably never have to find out.”

I didn’t want her worrying, but three hundred thousand dollars of my bribe money would be in a safe-deposit box where only she and I were signatories.

“What about you and Mom?” she asked, putting the envelope in her purse.

“Aja-Denise, do you really want me and your mother under the same roof after all these years of fighting?”

I could see her imagining what that union would be like. After a moment her eyes opened wide and then she smiled.

“Never mind.”

I met Mel at a diner called Clown’s Carnival four blocks away from the semisecret clinic. It was a few minutes past eight. I had on my fake facial hair just in case there was some errant CCTV feed lurking above.

Mel was all in black. I was too, under my bulky umber overcoat.

“Your layout of the place is a little out of date,” he told me after we’d greeted and I ordered coffee.

“Yeah? How’d you find that out?”

“Building permits. City has a website for all construction work. They weren’t hiding because the cops keep it on the down low like you said. They installed all kinds of security to keep people out up front, but the back of the building is the same as it always was.”

“There is no back of the building,” I said. “Treacher’s shares a back wall with Kershaw and Associates.”

“Au contraire,” the sophisticated demon argued. “There’s a two-foot space between the clinic and Kershaw, after the sixth floor. And most of the fancy security updates are on the ninth floor. There’s only one hospital bed up on that level. All we have to do is make it up there now, break into the floor, and then wait nearby until they bring our guy in. Once that happens, and we see how the guards are placed, we decide on how to get him out. Only thing I wanna know is if you’re willing to use deadly force.”

“You mean kill a cop?”

Mel didn’t even nod.

“No, man. This is about not murdering.”

“Okay. I got ya. I know how to spin it. But considering on how things might go, it could make it that much more difficult to get through.”

There was a side door to Kershaw and Associates. Mel had been in and out of the building over the past few days and had put together a plan for us to enter unnoticed. That particular side door had no camera on it, and he had fixed the lock so that it only appeared to work properly.

We made our way in and up to the eighth floor. There we jimmied the locks of the offices of Myer, Myer, and Goldfarb. I couldn’t tell by their walls or desks what business MM&G were in, but it didn’t much matter. The eighth stage of the Kershaw building was halfway between the eighth and ninth floors of the building that housed Treacher Admitting.

I had brought a go bag with all the tools a burglar might need. We had to completely remove the unused window that looked out onto the slender divide between the two buildings. I had two crowbars for that job. We wedged a metal chair between our window and Treacher’s wall. From there, one after another, we crawled up high enough to make it through the hospital room window. We had to break the lock, but Mel put it back together well enough that it looked okay if you didn’t inspect it too closely.

Then we used a half-chewed piece of gum to attach a tiny transmitter under the hospital bed and made our way back down to MM&G.

That was our time to wait.

We had a tiny speaker receiving a continuous feed from the transmitter in the room. When something happened there, we would hear it.

So for the next three hours we sat in darkness and silence.

It was a fairly simple plan. The note hidden in the tampon, printed in block letters culled from the Internet, told A Free Man that if he wanted to be free he should take the powder folded in a small cellophane envelope that accompanied the note, at any time between 11:00 at night and 2:00 in the morning. This would give him abdominal pains and a fever. He should call a guard at the first signs of these symptoms and that’s all he had to do.

We waited. I don’t believe either of us uttered a word in that time.

But even though I didn’t chatter, my mind was filled with excitement, fear, and even some remorse.

I was not an extortionist-rapist even though I had had sex with the woman calling herself Nathali Malcolm. A Free Man was not a murderer even though he had shot and killed the two policemen who had betrayed their oaths and tried to murder him. We were both mostly innocent men slated to take the fall for the real criminals. We would never receive justice from law enforcement or the courts, and so the only thing that could be done was to take the law into our own hands.

This decision frightened me. Taking these steps brought me to a place I had never been, a place that I had always thought was wrong. And it was wrong. My demon friend and I were executing an honest-to-God prison break.

For a man with my history, that was just about as bad as you could get.

There were butterflies all through my body. I felt as if I were damned. But still I knew that this was the only course left open to me.

“Bring him in here!” a woman commanded over the small speaker on the desk between us.

The time was 1:57 a.m.

There were sounds of squeaky rubber wheels on the linoleum floor and the squealing of metal frames moving and sometimes bumping into other objects.

“Put him on the bed,” the woman said.

“Lift!” a man said.

Then we heard the less definable sounds of a body being hefted and moved, probably from a gurney to the bed.

“You don’t need to restrain him,” the woman complained. “He has a fever of one oh three.”

“Ma’am, this here is a convicted cop killer. As far as I’m concerned we could have let him die in his cell. But as long as he’s here he will be chained to this bed.”

There were more sounds and some conversation. Mel and I were on high alert. I no longer worried about right and wrong because it was a time for action.

“He has all the symptoms of appendicitis, but that’s not what I’m seeing,” the woman said.

“Should we take him back?” a man I had not heard before asked.

“No,” the woman doctor said. “I want to observe him for twenty-four hours at least. If this is some kind of communicable infection I’d like to isolate it before it spreads through your jail.”

“You mean we could catch this?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to see what happens.”

“Arkady,” the first man who spoke said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Set up outside this room and don’t go to sleep.”

“What about if it’s catching, Sergeant?” Arkady asked.

“That’s why God invented medical insurance.”

The doctor and the cops talked for a while more. Most of the police left. For the next twenty or thirty minutes we could hear someone, probably the doctor, moving around the room. And then, for thirty-four minutes, there was silence.

As quietly as he could Mel climbed out on our ladder-chair and lifted himself up to look through the hospital room window. Then he opened the window and climbed through. I followed as soundlessly as possible and clambered into the dark room.

We’d been wearing gloves since entering the Kershaw building. Before we crossed over to the clinic the first time we had donned dark ski masks.

A drawn and unconscious Free Man was chained to his hospital bed. His dreadlocks were tangled and there was a twist to his lips.