So since he was obviously going to be found guilty and sent to prison he at least wanted to be alive long enough to break out of the place. Receiving the death penalty probably wouldn’t give him enough time.
His second priority was a bit more challenging: Stanley would pay Stillman another ten thousand dollars plus give him unlimited access to Stanley’s assets in exchange for Stillman’s word that he would help facilitate Stanley’s prison escape at the appropriate time. Upon his acceptance, Stanley gave his word that his escape plan would in no way put Stillman at risk of being implicated in any way.
Eight years had come and gone and Stillman had earned his keep in spades, carrying out Stanley’s orders flawlessly. Stillman’s final act—the pièce de résistance that would seal the deal—should have been implemented by now. But Stanley wouldn’t be certain about that for another hour or so—after he’d made his break out of here. He felt confident that the crooked lawyer would not let him down.
Stanley looked over at the clock. Not much longer. He felt his heart race. What if something fucks this up? he thought. What would he do then? He had no answer. Nothing would fuck this up, he concluded and left it at that.
He heard the echo of approaching footsteps. Richards was coming. He hopped off the cot.
“Hey, Jenkins,” the guard greeted. “Duty time.”
“Wonderful,” Stanley replied unceremoniously.
Richards unlocked the cell door, held it open and Stanley stepped out. He glanced back at Darrell’s cot for a second, suddenly realizing that he would never see his cellmate again. He wouldn’t miss him—why should he? But he would never forget him.
Ciao, Darrell.
Richards led Stanley by the arm down the hall past the other cells in his unit. Stanley avoided looking to his left or right, preferring to keep his eyes trained straight ahead, where freedom awaited him.
Minutes later Richards unlocked the doors to the prison’s mess area and led Stanley inside. The guard escorted him across the hall to another set of doors and motioned him into the kitchen. Inside the massive place the prison cooks were busy preparing the evening slop.
“See you after your shift,” Richards said before leaving.
Stanley headed across the kitchen to a fat, sloppy man wearing a dirty apron who was filling an enormous pot with water.
“How’s it going, Monty?”
“About the same as always in this dump. Hold on a minute and I’ll let you in.”
Stanley stood by until Monty finished filling the pot and carried it over to the stove. He turned on the burner, wiped his hands on his apron then motioned for Stanley to follow him.
“There’s a big shipment coming any time now—mostly canned goods, cooking oil and flour. You and Doug are to cart it all into the main storage bay, sort it out and organize the shelves. But first you need to sweep the floor. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
The obese prison chef, if you could call him that, let Stanley in the warehouse and returned to the kitchen. Stanley glanced over toward the loading dock on his way to the storage bay. As he stepped inside and looked around for a broom, he felt a sudden wave of paranoia. If for some reason Jack Towner wasn’t driving the truck, he was screwed. The possibility of Towner’s supervisor pulling him off the prison delivery today and placing him on a different route could be the proverbial fly in the ointment. It was the one thing that neither Towner nor himself had any control over and would result in the complete failure of his escape plan. His next opportunity wouldn’t be for at least a couple more months and Stanley doubted he could wait that long before going crazy first.
He located the broom and began sweeping between the stacks of crates stacked two and three high throughout the enormous storage facility. It had taken him five years of sterling behavior to score this much sought-after gig. Before this, he’d had latrine duty which had been anything but a picnic. It had taken every ounce of self-control to do that job without complaining and prove himself worthy of a promotion to the powers that be. It had all paid off when he’d finally been told he’d earned the food service supply job for good behavior.
Fools that they were.
It was during this duty that he’d learned how things worked with regard to deliveries to the prison. He’d been able to chat with the various delivery men which eventually led up to his offer to Jack Towner. Through conversations with Towner, Stanley had gained the man’s trust and soon learned that the truck driver moonlighted as a drug dealer when he wasn’t working his regular job. Thinking he was the type who’d be interested in earning some serious cash the illegal way, Stanley told Towner he could name his price if he’d be willing to help Stanley blow this popsicle stand.
Towner had immediately bulked at the offer, insisting that there wasn’t enough money on earth to get him to take that kind of risk. Then Stanley told Towner he had devised a plan whereby he could escape without anybody ever knowing he was involved. After Stanley described his plan, Towner was still skeptical and insisted that even if the plan to slip out of the warehouse worked, they would never get past the guards at the prison’s main gate. Every vehicle entering and leaving the prison was thoroughly inspected without fail.
Stanley had simply grinned and told the man he had that covered as well. After hearing the rest of the plan, Towner had to admit it could actually work after all and consented to the scheme. He named his price, Stanley told Ted Stillman to find a way to get Towner his cash advance and the deal was sealed.
Stanley had almost finished sweeping when Doug Morrison finally showed up.
“I see that you’re done sweeping.” He grinned.
“Yeah, where the fuck you been?”
“Just chattin’ with Monty.”
Stanley had realized on his first day of duty that the head cook and Doug Morrison were an item. It also became obvious that Morrison had seniority here and that Stanley would be doing most of the grunt work. Stanley didn’t mind being Morrison’s subordinate because it would make it easier for him to pitch his plan to Morrison in exchange for giving the man more time with his lover.
Morrison came over to Stanley and winked.
“We still on?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“Yeah,” Stanley replied.
Morrison grinned. “Gotta say I’m envious.”
“You could have joined me.”
“I know. I just don’t have the guts.”
They heard a buzz outside.
“There’s the truck,” Stanley announced.
“I’ll work outside like we planned.”
Stanley nodded. “Let’s go.”
Stanley led the way out to the loading dock and noticed that one of the guards was standing by. The beeping of the truck’s backup signal echoed off the walls as the Horizon Wholesale Foods truck backed into the bay. The guard gave a signal when the truck reached the dock and the driver turned off the engine. The garage door closed and the driver hopped out of the truck.
To Stanley’s relief, Jack Towner walked over to the guard and handed him his papers.
The guard looked the papers over and nodded. Towner unlocked the truck’s cargo door and hoisted it open. The guard took a look inside, handed the papers back to Towner and walked toward the kitchen door.
“How’s it going, guys?” Towner greeted the inmates.
“Good,” Stanley replied.
“Hear you brought a lot of shit today, Jack,” Morrison said.
Towner nodded. “Damn near a whole truck load.”
“I’ll go get the lift. You work the shelves, Stanley,” Morrison ordered.
“Okay.”
Stanley didn’t want to arouse any suspicion so he remained with Towner while Morrison went to get the forklift. As usual, the guard was keeping an eye on things but Stanley knew from experience he would eventually get bored and duck into the kitchen to kill some time while the truck was being unloaded.
“What you been up to, Jack?” Stanley said.
“Not mu
ch. Just working and watching the Browns get beat up. Lost again yesterday.”
“I heard. Still don’t understand how the fans can bear that kind of abuse every Sunday.”
“I hear ya. I’m startin’ to wonder the same thing myself.”
They both watched as Morrison came toward them driving a forklift.
“Talk to you later,” Stanley said to Towner before heading back to the storage bay. He swung the doors open so Morrison could haul the pallets in and dump them off in the center of the area. Stanley’s job was to remove the boxes and carry them over to where they belonged on the shelves. He resisted the urge to glance over to see if the guard had left before going in and waiting for Morrison to bring the first load in.
It hadn’t been easy talking Doug Morrison into going along with his plan and Stanley still wasn’t one hundred per cent positive he could trust him. As with anything of this nature, there was always the possibility of something screwing things up. It was for this reason that Stanley had always worked alone unless he absolutely had no choice but to involve others in anything he did. He trusted nobody completely—never had. He had to always feel that he was in control and involving others forced him to lose some of that control. He was incredibly intelligent, true. He was ingenious and had managed to do just about everything he’d ever set out to do his whole life with only a couple of exceptions. But getting out of prison on his own would have been virtually impossible.
One of Stanley’s strong points was his ability to manipulate people. He knew how to anticipate what made people tick. Take Morrison for example. Knowing that he and Monty the cook were screwing each other, Stanley figured he could get in Morrison’s good graces by offering to cover for them whenever an opportunity for a tryst arose. Many were the times the lovers had sneaked into the bay for a quickie while Stanley kept a lookout for the guards. Suffice to say, Morrison felt indebted to Stanley and was happy to give him something in return.
Morrison suddenly entered the bay with a pallet of boxes on the lift. He came over to where Stanley was standing, lowered the forks until the pallet came to rest on the floor, backed out and headed back to the loading dock. Stanley removed one of the heavy boxes containing gallon-size cans of green beans and carried it over to the veggie area. He tore open the cardboard box with his bare hands—using a utility knife was out of the question in this place—and began stacking the cans on the shelves one at a time. He repeated the process with the remaining items on the pallet as Morrison continued dropping off more supplies.
When Morrison was making his fourth trip, he winked at Stanley. This meant that the guard had gone into the kitchen. Stanley waited until Morrison dropped off the pallet then followed him into the loading area. Jack Towner was bringing out a stack of boxes from the back of the truck with a hand cart when Stanley arrived at the dock. Towner nodded at Stanley on his way over to the rest of the shipment. Now was the time to make his move.
After a quick glance over toward the kitchen door, Stanley dashed into the truck and headed directly over to the right hand corner. As expected, there was a narrow space between the stack of boxes and the wall of the truck. He turned sideways and slipped through the space into a two square foot area concealed by the boxes he’d just squeezed past. Beside the space sat a cardboard box the size of refrigerator strapped to an adjacent stack of boxes. He ducked down and took hold of the tall box by slipping his fingers in under the corners. Feeling nothing but air on the other side, he pulled out on the side of the cardboard box and was able to lift it upward since the two corner seams had been cleanly cut away beforehand. He continued pulling until a crease formed in the cardboard, creating a three-foot flap. He ducked in under the flap, entered the empty box and replaced the flap to its original position.
He was in! Now all he had to do was wait.
There were still at least another half dozen pallets of supplies for Morrison to transport into the bay and in a few minutes the guard would return from the kitchen when it looked like Towner had unloaded the entire shipment. When the guard reappeared, he would assume that Stanley was still inside the bay unloading the boxes and putting everything on the shelves.
Stanley stood quietly and strained to hear what was being said on the dock. All he heard were the muffled engine sounds of the forklift. Although he was hidden, he felt vulnerable and as much as he hated to admit it, terrified that his escape was going to fail somewhere along the way. There were no guarantees that he wouldn’t be missed before Towner pulled the truck out of here. The guard could decide this time to do a quick scan of the storage bay just for the hell of it. Or he may decide to inspect the remaining contents of the truck, particularly the tall box that looked out of place. Hell, Morrison could decide to blow the whistle on him at the last minute just to be a prick, for all he knew.
And then there were the scores of things that could happen after Towner pulled away, providing he got that far. The greatest risk in his plan was getting past inspection at the main gate. He had flat out lied to Towner. He hadn’t bribed the guard on duty to do a cursory inspection of the truck instead of a thorough one. He’d known that Towner wanted reassurance that he wouldn’t get nailed at the gate so Stanley had fabricated a lie. Truth was, there was a fairly good chance that the gate guard would discover him hiding in this box and that would be the end.
But the bottom line was that Stanley was willing to take the risk of getting caught because he knew that the worse that could happen for his offense would be a bunch of time in solitary and the loss of this gig. It’s not like they could tack any more years to his life sentence or decide to execute him. The system protected inmates’ rights to some degree—even if they were convicted murderers, which had a certain amount of irony.
But Stanley wasn’t totally throwing his fate to the wind. He had learned through the prison grapevine that one of the guards was known to be a bit lax at his job on occasion, depending on his mood at a given time. This guard, Thomas Dunfee, had been at the prison nearly forty years and was about to retire. And he had a bit of an attitude, Stanley had learned. Dunfee was pissed that his pension had been drastically reduced recently by the state retirement system in order to trim the budget. Had he known this was going to happen Dunfee would have retired ten years ago and gotten a fair shake. Instead, he’d stayed on at this dump and was now being royally screwed in return for his loyalty. He was so salty he probably had considered nuking the place after he was gone.
So would it come as any great surprise if Dunfee was a little less efficient in his job nowadays with that reality hanging over his head? Stanley was banking on those odds. He’d done some research and discovered that Dunfee was scheduled to work the gate on this shift. If there truly was a God, the surly guard would wave Towner’s truck through the gate.
Stanley continued mulling over his plan until he suddenly realized he hadn’t heard the forklift for a while. Had Morrison finished all of the hauling already? If so, Stanley could be toast. It could mean that the guard was taking longer than usual to send Towner on his way.
Suddenly he heard the squeaking of the truck’s cargo door being closed. When it slammed shut, Stanley let out an audible sigh of relief. They were on their way!
Moments later he heard the truck’s engine turn over and start up. When Towner put it into gear Stanley felt himself pitch backward and nearly fall over as Towner pulled away. He drove a very short distance and stopped, just as Stanley heard the warehouse door opening. The truck lurched forward again and pulled out of the bay.
As the truck headed toward the main gate, Stanley debated whether to get out and have a quick look at the box to see if it had listed noticeably when he’d been thrown forward. If it looked out of place, Dunfee might decide to take a look and blow Stanley’s cover. He knew it would take approximately three minutes for Towner to reach the gate, which would give him enough time.
He was about to push out on the box flap but suddenly changed his mind. He could actually make matters worse trying to get ou
t of this box and run the risk of mangling it even more than it already was. He would just have to take his chances.
Stanley felt sweat forming on his brow, suddenly aware of how warm it was getting inside the box. Amazing how much heat the body could put out when excited, he thought with a wry grin. Soon he would be able to chuck this hotbox and feel the cool air of freedom instead.
The time it took to reach the guard station seemed much shorter than he’d anticipated as the truck slowed down and came to a stop. It remained still for several minutes, making Stanley wonder what in the hell the delay was. Suddenly, the truck lurched forward a short distance and stopped again. It occurred to him that there must be a line of vehicles waiting to be checked. This was good because Dunfee’s patience would only be getting shorter the more work he had to do.
The truck pulled forward and stopped again. Stanley could hear muffled voices outside. He wondered what was being said as he stood there mopping his brow. Suddenly he heard the screeching sound of the truck door being thrown open and his heart nearly burst through his chest. He held his breath when he heard Jack Towner’s voice as clear as day.
“That’s all stuff for my next stop. Just canned goods mostly and a few crates of cereal.”
“What’s in that tall box?” a voice said.
“Oh, that’s one of those display kiosks they have to promote a new product. I believe it’s some Frito-Lay kit.”
“It’s not on this list.”
“They never list shit like that since it’s not actually merchandise,” Towner said.
“I see. Okay, you can shut the door.”
As the door slammed shut, Stanley’s relief was immense.
Moments later, the truck pulled away from the gate with gusto. Only one major hurdle to go, Stanley thought. He estimated that he had maybe fifteen or twenty minutes max before someone realized he was missing. The guards would immediately sound the alarm and total chaos would ensue as the search began for Stanley Jenkins. It wouldn’t take a genius to assume that he’d left on the delivery truck so an APB would be issued within a matter of minutes. Before long, every law enforcement agency within a hundred-mile radius would be on the lookout for a white Horizon Wholesale Foods delivery truck carrying an escaped convict serving a life sentence for murder.
The May Day Murders Sequel Page 4
