Tim Green - Exact Revenge

“I… couldn’t.”

Lester shakes his head and sits down on the edge of his bunk, laughing softly, but crying at the same time.

“You’re a prince, kid,” he says, looking up. “Like my own.”

“They tried to move me,” I say. My own eyes are watering. “I was gone. E block, but the cell wasn’t ready. They said you were going to die.”

“They wish,” he says. “The state would love to have my bunk, but I’m tougher than that.”

“Are you all right?”

Lester swats his hand in the air and says, “A minor episode. I’ll outlive the doctor. Happens all the time. Sit.”

I sit down next to him, and Lester claps my right hand between both of his.

“Tonight,” he says, in a whisper, “we go. We’ll make it this time.”

“My God, Lester,” I say. “I mean, I was gone. Do you get it? They moved me out. Then some bug named Garden Hose decides he won’t leave the cell…”

“I don’t know about God, kid,” Lester says, “but destiny… That’s another story. And what you’ve done… The loyalty?

“We still need to split up when we get out,” Lester says, “but not for long.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about unimaginable wealth,” Lester says, shaking my hand in his, his eyes glittering at me. “I’m talking about sharing it with you, kid. I… I didn’t know before. Even after all we’ve been through. Money does things to people, and we’ll be on the outside. Things will be different.”

Lester’s eyes turn glassy and he looks across the cell as if he were peering out over the ocean. He tells me about an old Adirondack lodge built by Thomas Durant on Lake Kora, a place that burned to the ground at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lester bought the only standing building, a guest cottage, in 1964.

“You can only get there by water and it has a cobblestone foundation like a fortress,” he says. “Dry as dust. Perfect temperature. Fifty degrees in the middle of summer or the dead of winter.

“I turned it into a huge vault,” Lester says. “Brought a locksmith up from Baltimore and two boilermakers from Peoria. The floor is these two-inch-thick oak planks, and with the hardware, you’d have to use dynamite to get it open.”

“What’s in it?” I ask.

Lester lowers his voice and leans toward me. His big eyes blink and he peers hard through the gloom.

“Almost everything I ever stole,” he says. “I was going to live modestly and work for twenty years. Then I was going to sell it all and retire to New Zealand. I still will, but I don’t need all that. Put together, by now it’s got to be worth close to a billion.”

“A billion?” I say. “As in nine zeros?”

“There was a trainload of stuff from the Louvre that Hitler was having shipped from Paris to Berlin. It never made it,” Lester says. “I spent over ten years stealing it and now I’m giving half of it to you…”

“What can you do with it?” I ask.

“Sell it,” Lester says with a shrug.

“To who?”

“Sotheby’s,” he says. “Christie’s. I’ll call the director of fine arts. Happens all the time. He’ll be outraged, but in about a week I’ll get a call back from someone who’ll just happen to be looking for what I’ve got.”

Lester tells me the exact location of the cottage and how to get into the vault. There are two bank vault tumblers. The combination is derived by assigning a numeric value to each of the letters in his son’s name-Seth Cole-and subtracting them from fifty for the first descending to forty-three for the last.

“Not that anything’s happening to me, kid,” he says, showing me those crooked teeth, “but, who knows? Maybe only one of us gets away, and if it’s you, I don’t want you going hungry.”

My face is warm and I put my other hand on top of his and begin to stammer, not knowing what to say.

“If you want to do something,” he says, nodding his head as if he can read my thoughts, “promise me this: that you’ll use this treasure for yourself. Go. Start a new life. Leave the past alone, kid. Let it die.”

I go rigid.

Lester cocks his head just a tick to one side, as if he’s heard a small noise. He looks at me for quite a while before he sighs and says, “No, I guess not.

“It’s all right,” he says, patting my hands. “I love you like my Seth. It’s unconditional, and so is this gift. You do with it what you want. That’s not for me to decide.”

I tell him what I think, but it comes out in a mutter.

“What?” he says.

“You said destiny,” I say. “It’s my destiny, Lester. It just is.”

When night comes, we climb back down into the tunnel. After only a few minutes, the dirt becomes damp. A slow trickle begins to run back down the pipe. My throat grows tight as I imagine the water bursting in and washing us backward into the cistern. It grows to a steady flow, but rises no more than five inches.

It takes me less than an hour to dig through the last layer of soggy silt. I can hear the river’s song and feel the cool air rushing in. In anticipation, Lester puts out his waning bulb, but a large stone is wedged into the opening. Try as I might, I cannot push it aside with my hands and the claw hammer does me no good.

Lester and I crawl back down the length of the overflow pipe, then worm our way back, feet first. I roll splashing onto my stomach and wedge my frame against the walls of the wooden pipe. Then, with all my might, I press my legs against the stone. It moves half an inch at a time, but it moves.

The stone scratches against its sandy bed. I hear Lester’s low chuckle bubbling toward me from deeper in the pipe. My heart swells and my legs burn, and in less than two minutes I’ve shoved that rock aside enough for us to squirm out.

I don’t stop to enjoy it. I don’t see the stars or the towers or the vertical plane of the wall aglow and stretching up into the night. Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the darkness around me and I slide over the rocks and into the swift water of a deep pool.

I am free.

I SWIM ACROSS THE CURRENT, not down. This is the plan. They will look for us downstream. They will close off all the roads around the city and squeeze it until they find us. No one has escaped Auburn since the new wall was constructed back in the thirties. Hell will be raised.

It requires great effort to swim through the current. When I feel the rocky riverbed beneath my feet I turn to look at Lester. Water slips past me, but not without a strong steady shove. I see now that Lester is flailing. The sound of splashing rises above the steady hiss of water over stone, and my eyes go up to the tower. It stares down like a dull monolithic eye in its bed of stars. The shadow of the guard is nowhere to be seen. The other towers too-there are three in all-are blind.

Lester is almost to me. I stretch out my arms, digging in at the same time with my heels to keep from being swept back into the pool. Lester is four feet from me when he cries out and goes under.

I dive and bump heads with him. We swirl in the water. I have his waist and I scissor-kick my legs until they’re numb. My feet hit the riverbed and the darkness is destroyed by white light. The scream of sirens breaks the night. Bullets zip past, humming like angry bees. The water is shin-deep now and Lester is on my back. I run for the railroad bridge.

The thud of a bullet striking him knocks me facedown into the water, but I scramble up without letting go. I slosh upstream, desperate for the cover of a bridge. Two feet from its protective shadow, another bullet strikes Lester, knocking us both forward and down. This time, my elbow strikes a rock and Lester rolls off my back.

His eyes stare up at the underbelly of the bridge. His mouth hangs open, spilling blood. There is yelling above and the strident ringing of alarms.