CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sarah had spent her childhood reacting to the whims of a mother who was certifiably unqualified to make important decisions. Now that she was all grown up, the actors were different, but the script was still the same.
“I’m back in the hands of crazy people all over again. You’d think I’d be used to it.”
She asked Robert how his solo meeting with Archie Chatto had gone.
“Did you give him lots of spiritual guidance? According to the Chaplain, Archie’s attitude improved substantially since he talked to you last.” The prison minister had broken the news to Sarah that she wouldn’t be visiting Archie this time around.
“He wants to talk to the Roadman,” the Chaplain told her. Archie sent his apologies for Sarah’s inconvenience, but matters of the soul take precedence.
Matters of Archie’s soul made for a tense ride back to Oklahoma City. Sarah used the master control of her Subaru to roll up all the windows so Robert would be forced to listen to her complaints.
“I thought it was especially touching that he asked me to deposit fifty dollars in his commissary account, but I suppose a man can’t be expected to live on transcendental enlightenment.”
“Think of it as cover,” Robert said, fidgeting with the electrical control that up until now had allowed him access to the wind. “For the first time since he was incarcerated, Archie has money in his account, something to come back for.”
“Fifty dollars worth of canned soup, toothpaste, and chocolate bars.” Sarah didn’t think that was much incentive.
She lowered Robert’s window half an inch, shaping his behavior the same way B.F. Skinner rewarded pigeons for pecking buttons in the proper order.
“I told Archie all of our adventures.” The window lowered another
quarter of an inch.
“He was impressed with the way you broke me out of Flanders.” Another quarter inch of window sank into the door panel.
“And how you knocked Hashilli unconscious.” Robert waited, but the window didn’t move.
“Try harder.” Sarah drummed her fingers beside the automatic window control.
“He was interested in the spirit powder, the way it knocks out most people, but only made my voices go away. Something Hashilli and I have in common; for some reason, it doesn’t anesthetize us.” The window opened a full inch this time.
“Archie wanted to know all about Big Shorty. We’re his troops. That’s what he said.” The window eased open to the half way mark.
“He wants Big Shorty to be with us when he jumps to freedom. He says a man like that can be very useful.”
What Archie’s plan lacked in details, it more than made up for with hubris. Sarah opened the window all the way. Let Robert enjoy the wind. She had a lot to think about on the ride back to OKC.
“Prisoner jumps out of window. Co-conspirators catch him. What could be simpler than that?” Sarah turned on her car radio. She could barely hear the music over the wind.
No great loss. KROU, channel 105.7 played tunes from Paint Your Wagon. She listened to the last few refrains of Hand Me Down that Can of Beans, and turned the radio off when a moderately talented baritone sang They Call the Wind Mariah.
Damn. Maybe there was such a thing as magic?
Sarah said, “Tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., Archie Chatto is going to jump to his death, and there is no way on earth we’ll be able to save him.” Robert and Big Shorty were not ready to give up, but that was no surprise. Two thirds of Archie’s rescue crew was non compos mentis.
And the third member is a quitter, that’s what Sarah’s mother would have told her. When Marie Ferraro was in her manic phase, it was her considered opinion that anything conceived could also be achieved.
But not this. Judge Rakestraw’s courtroom overlooked a courtyard protected by two armed guards and a sturdy-looking security gate. There was no way to get in.
“If Archie is lucky,” she said, “he’ll be killed instantly.” Sarah had to admit that scenario didn’t sound lucky. Maybe Archie would reflect on that fifty-dollar commissary account and call the whole thing off at the last moment.
“Twenty years ago it would have been easy,” Big Shorty said. “Twenty years ago there would have been no guard station and no metal gate blocking the only outside access.”
“And movies cost a dollar, and airport travel was trouble free, and politicians were honest, and colored people knew their place.” Whoops. Sarah always went too far with hyperbole. “OK. Maybe politicians weren’t honest, but a lot of things have changed in twenty years.”
It did no good to wax nostalgic about jailbreaks in simpler times. Oklahomans became security-conscious after the Murrah Federal Building Bombing in 1995, and even more so after 9/11. Gates and guards were everywhere. If Archie’s escape team couldn’t get into the courtyard, they couldn’t catch the falling Apache.
Sarah suggested they consider a more traditional method of liberating prisoners of the justice system, something heroic, requiring exactly the correct proportions of gunpowder, bravery, and good fortune. Both Robert and Big Shorty agreed to give the matter careful consideration, even though it wasn’t quite crazy enough to work.
A metal detector, a bag-check X-ray system, and two plus-size guards in khaki security uniforms protected the front entrance to the court house—a lot like airport security but without the motivation. The guards tried their best not to gawk at Big Shorty as he lumbered through the metal detector. Even when he triggered the alarms, not one of them suggested wanding him or looking inside his stump pads.
“We could smuggle in a gun.” Sarah found it difficult to believe that she was the one suggesting an armed rescue from a secure building. So much for sanity.
“Look around,” Big Shorty said. He didn’t have to point out the armed guards and uniformed police who populated the first floor of the building. “They might be too polite to search me, but they would shoot us all without hesitation. It’s more politically correct.”
Big Shorty was right, of course. In addition to the surfeit of guards on the first floor, there would be bailiffs and maybe sheriff’s deputies in the courtroom. Then there were the unbelievably slow elevators, which could probably be immobilized from a remote location. If everything went incredibly well, Robert, Sarah, and Archie might be able to fight their way down three double flights of stairs. It was impossible to imagine Big Shorty keeping up on such a literally unlevel playing field, and, aside from Archie, he was the only one among them who might willingly fire a weapon.
Courtroom 334 was a long rectangular enclosure with a podium at the north end, a jury box on the eastern wall, and a seating area for the public that might have been copied from a country church. Two ornate wooden doors were symmetrically-placed behind the podium. Golden letters identified one as the entry to “Judge’s Chambers.” Sarah supposed the other doorway led to the jury deliberation room.
Robert pointed out the round institutional-style clock mounted opposite the podium so the judge could keep track of time.
“That’s the clock Archie will use to time his jump.” He made Sarah synchronize her watch with the courtroom timepiece as if the success of the plan depended on precision timing. There were seven windows overlooking the courtyard and Archie had selected the central one as the site of his self-defenestration. Just as he had promised, none of the windows was equipped with bars.
“No need for bars.” Robert leaned out a window and spat a tear-shaped blob of saliva into the courtyard airspace. The escape team watched it fall forty feet and splatter on the pavement. A jumper would suffer the same fate. He would break both legs at the very least, even if he should be lucky enough to miss the rectangular metal trash containers that lined the courtyard’s interior walls.
Big Shorty pointed to the doors connecting the courtyard space to the interior of the building.
“Steel panels with bolts into steel frames,” he said. “Take a bulldozer to knock them down.”
> Even if the doors were left unlocked, Sarah realized, opening them would trigger alarms. Things looked bad for Archie Chatto. If Marie’s lover managed to jump through one of the unbarred windows of courtroom 334, he would fall to his death expecting to be saved by a mysterious plan developed by his recently-acquired spiritual adviser.
Sarah wondered how long it would take Archie to face reality.
Two seconds at most.
It couldn’t take much longer than that, not falling at thirty-two feet per second squared.
Sarah should never have doubted the ability of an Apache to recruit allies capable of helping him perfect an impossible plan.
“I have an idea.” Robert raced out the main entrance of the court house and hurried across a busy street into an open green space landscaped with a red, white, and blue fiberglass buffalo and a number of uncomfortable concrete benches.
Sarah followed from a distance, maintaining a pace Big Shorty could match. She resisted the temptation to take the big short black man’s hand and lead him across the street. They waited for the light and crossed with a deliberate dignified pace that wasn’t nearly fast enough to satisfy Robert.
“Quickly, quickly!” He waved them toward him like a traffic cop. “The wind is blowing stronger than it has all day.”
“What’s the wind got to do with your plan?” Sarah suspected she and Robert had significantly different planning styles.
“We stand together in this open space and sing,” he told her, as if it were as logical as arithmetic. “The song is quite simple.” He whistled a few bars and then sang with a voice as clear and sweet as an Irish tenor’s.
“Away out here they have a name for rain and wind and fire.”
Big Shorty joined in after the second stanza and harmonized with a rich baritone that would have been equally at home in gospel music or classical opera. He took his work-worn gardener’s hat off of his head and laid it on the ground with its sweat-stained interior aimed at the sky.
“Call it camouflage,” Shorty stage-whispered to Sarah between verses.
“This is a plan?”
The song overwhelmed Sarah’s question. Robert pointed to tree limbs that gyrated in the wind like the batons of a team of conductors. He made a broad gesture indicating the litter that blew in a circle around the fiberglass buffalo. The wind modified the song, boosting the volume and the tone, making the high notes higher, and adding a timbre to the base notes that vibrated in the chests of passersby. People dropped loose change and dollar bills into Big Shorty’s hat, and the wind did not disturb the proceeds.
“Really . . . .” Sarah raised her voice to a mild shout, but the wind pushed some of her words to the curb and carried others into the sky so that even to her own ears, she seemed to be speaking gibberish. She cupped her hands around her mouth and prepared to shout at her maximum volume. That would have been enough to override the effects of the wind, if a nine by eleven pamphlet had not struck her in the face.
“What is it?” Robert stopped singing as soon as the paper found its mark. He lifted the pamphlet from her face with the care an archeologist might give the Dead Sea Scrolls. The wind stopped blowing while he read the page.
Sarah and Big Shorty asked, “What does it say?” simultaneously.
“I think this is the answer to our problems,” Robert told them. “Tomorrow is big trash day in Mesta Park. That’s not too far from here, I think.”
“How does big trash day solve our problems?” Sarah asked, even though she was afraid to hear the answer.
“That depends,” Robert said. “Can you drive a garbage truck?”
Owl Dreams Page 27
