Dynamite Road

by Andrew Klavan

  He had no words for it, no words. Just the things his flesh was driven to do to hers. The cries he needed to extract from her, the tears he needed. The tears. When he hurt her, when he made her cry, he wanted to catch those tears in a bottle, he wanted to inject her tears into his veins, he wanted to wander into high mountains and live on her hurt and tears until the end of days.

  He had tried, one time, that one time when he could no longer control himself, he had tried to tell her all of this. But he had no words. And she laughed at him. With that angel face he’d dreamed into existence and her red lips. Even crying, even bleeding, even naked and beaten at his feet, she laughed. Which only made it worse. Which only made him need to hurt her more and love her more. He stood in front of her, naked himself, humiliated in his need and his nakedness, and she laughed.

  Pomeroy had heard her. Pomeroy had been in the next room and had heard it all.

  And now here Pomeroy was. Cowering there at the back of his cell. The man called Ben Fry knew he would need no more than thirty seconds to extract the necessary information from him. To get what he needed and then destroy him and so destroy his memory of Julie’s laughter. Then the man called Ben Fry would be gone, on his way to finding her again, to having her again. This time, he would take her somewhere, somewhere away. This time, he would have her until it didn’t matter to him anymore, until he was fat and woozy and satiated with her pain. And then it would be over finally. She would be part of him again and the helpless humiliating naked desire would be over and done. Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds and he’d have everything he had come for.

  But as the sirens and alarms sounded all around him, all through the prison, everywhere, it began to dawn on the man called Ben Fry that thirty seconds was a lot more time than he had.

  Even as he stood there, steel security doors were beginning to slide shut, cutting off his retreat along the galleries. Guards were grabbing rifles and securing the perimeter. For all he knew, they had been tipped off to his identity, they were converging on him right that second. If he didn’t start to move—if he didn’t move now—he would miss his rendezvous with the chopper, miss the ropes that would be thrown down to him. He would miss his chance to escape and he would be caught in this place, this place of endless nothingness, forever. Forever and alone and with the image of her laughing face.

  He tore his gaze away from Pomeroy. He ran.

  The sirens were unbelievably loud. The noise seemed to expand inside his head, to shiver his thoughts to dust. He dashed past the priority watch control booth, overstepping the body of the security guard he’d murdered coming in. He turned the corner.

  And there they were, fifteen yards from him down an empty gallery: steel doors, sliding toward each other automatically.

  What was the gap between them? Five feet? Four? Less and less every second that he raced their way. The siren hammered at him and his mind reeled. And now too he heard the bump, felt the rumble of the Hellfires hitting home. He knew as he ran that this was it, this was everything. If he could make it through that narrowing gap there was a chance he could reach the chopper. If those doors closed…He knew how it would be. Stuck here with his mind stagnant and vulnerable. Desperately imagining his high calm tower while, slowly, slowly, day by day, those horrors that had scrabbled away from him like rats crept in on him again, began to devour him.

  The steel doors slid toward each other. The man called Ben Fry stretched like a racer. The siren…his panting breath…his pounding heart. The gap was small, already too small, it seemed, for him to fit through.

  But then he was there. Forcing himself between the two halves of the door. Pressured in between them. Certain for a second he’d be cut in half. And then squeezing through. His arm, then his hand trailing behind. Then all of him out, as he pulled free, stumbled to the ground. Lay on the ground watching the steel doors finally clang shut.

  The next explosion rocked the white corridor around him. Even with that deafening siren screaming, the man called Ben Fry could hear the falling debris. He was on his feet again. Running again. Turning another corner.

  And there, before him, just as he’d planned—the shattered wall. A hole opening onto the night, onto the yard, onto the free world beyond.

  The man called Ben Fry tripped, stumbled over the flaming rubble. He felt the open air touching his face. There was fire, madness, all round him. Blinding lights, deafening sirens. A tower fallen. Leaping flames. Men with guns, running to their positions, cutting off his escape. Machine guns in those towers that were still standing, sweeping the yard, looking for anyone, looking for him.

  How could this have happened? How could they have known? There was no one alive who had the courage to betray him. Someone would have had to have figured it out, to have out-thought him, out-smarted him. It was impossible. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  The man called Ben Fry stood in the debris, staring into the night sky, searching for his only hope.

  He saw it. The chopper, the Apache. He saw its lights, hovering over the forest, not a mile away.

  “Come on! Come on!” he growled.

  It was early yet for the rendezvous. Everything was thrown off schedule. But he couldn’t just stand there, exposed like that. He started running forward. Running into the yard, into the spotlights. Risking the machine guns in the tower, risking the guns of the guards everywhere.

  The lights made him squint. The sirens pounded and pounded at him. The flames from the missiles leapt and crackled here and there, on every side. But the man called Ben Fry ran, his eyes raised upward, lifted to the Apache. He willed the craft to come forward, to make the rendezvous, to pull him out.

  The first missile was launched from the ground even as he ran. He watched in shock as its green-white trail spiraled upward over the black silhouette of the woods, lighting the treetops as it rose. The shot went past the helo, climbing into the night. A second crossed the trail of the first and also missed.

  The man called Ben Fry pulled up short. He saw the chopper start to turn, start to fly. Was it leaving him? Horrified, he watched as a third missile snaked up from the ground after it. This one slammed full force into the base of the Apache’s rotors. In the light of the explosion, he could see the mangled blades, like the crushed wings of an insect. Then the whole mechanism was blown apart.

  “No!” the killer shouted, his voice lost beneath the shrieking sirens.

  He froze, powerless. The Apache heeled over like a breached whale. It plummeted nose down into the forest. He could not hear the blast beyond the noise of the prison. But the ball of flame bellied out of the trees and turned the black sky red.

  The man called Ben Fry stood openmouthed and watched the helo die. The spotlights crisscrossed over him. The sound of the sirens filled his mind. From every direction, men with guns were running toward him. And yet everything seemed very still somehow, as if he stood on the edge of a limitless valley in which nothing lived or moved or changed but just went on and on forever.

  Seventy

  Nearly three hundred miles away, on the eighth floor of the concrete tower with the red mansard roof, in the office with the large arching windows and the midnight sounds of Market Street trailing up from below, Weiss shifted slowly in the shadows. When the phone rang again, he snapped it up quickly.

  “It’s over,” Ketchum growled.

  “Have they got him? Have they got him?” Weiss heard a streetcar pass below in the long silence that followed. Too long a silence. His heart went dark.

  “It’s still kind of chaos up there,” Ketchum told him finally. “They’re not sure how things shake out. I’m having a hard time getting anybody to tell me anything.”

  “You’re saying he got away? How the fuck could he get away?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know, Weiss. Okay. No one knows.”

  “Shit.”

  “He was wearing a CO’s uniform,” Ketchum pushed on. “He killed a guard, took the guy’s clothes. There’s a possibility h
e might’ve mingled with the rest of the guards in all the confusion. He could’ve slipped out somehow.” Weiss said nothing for a while and Ketchum added in his low angry voice, “Look, it’s not like he’s going anywhere. They’ve got dead guards up there, man. They’re angry. They’ve got dogs and helicopters combing the area for this asshole. You saw the place. It’s all trees and rocks and shit. Where the hell’s he gonna go?”

  “What about Pomeroy?” Weiss asked.

  “You saved him. You did it, Weiss. He’s scared as shit and shaken to his toes but Fry never touched him.”

  “He didn’t get any information out of him?”

  “Not a word. Whip swears he didn’t tell him a thing. The alarm went off just in time.”

  Weiss’s body rose and fell on a breath. That was something anyway. Maybe it was the main thing. Wherever the man called Ben Fry was, he didn’t know any more now than he did before. He didn’t know any more than Weiss did.

  “But he’ll still go after her,” he said softly, as if to himself. “He’ll never stop hunting her until he finds her.”

  After that, for a moment, there was no sound in the office but the fading traffic noises from the street.

  Then Ketchum answered, “Tell you what, Weiss. My money says you find her first.”

  Weiss snorted softly. He set the phone down. He tilted back in his chair. He peered into the light from the computer—still the only light in the room. On the monitor, the beautiful woman with the red-gold hair was beckoning, beckoning, the video loop playing over and over. In her high-collared white lace, somehow prim and sexy at once, she bent forward slightly. Weiss watched her—her bottomless eyes, her dreamy, distant expression. Slowly, he leaned closer to her. The glow of the computer etched deep lines into his heavy, sagging, ugly features. He watched the beckoning woman for a long time.

  You find her first, he thought.

  And he reached out and touched her image, tenderly.

  Epilogue

  Weiss was still at his desk when I came in the next morning. Still staring at his computer. But he was reading an e-mail now. Bishop had sent it to him from a terminal at the California Highway Patrol’s Driscoll air barracks.

  Weiss. Glad to hear word reached you about the helo in time. I had to stay in woods to stop whack on Kathleen. Have to answer cop questions for a while due to bodies. See you in a day or two. JB.

  As Weiss read, his mouth curled up in an exceptionally goofy smile. Bishop had risked blowing his assignment to go back and get the girl. Weiss wasn’t exactly sure why, but he found this piece of news incredibly gratifying.

  And in fact, Bishop had not only retrieved Kathleen from the swamp, he’d also flown her out of the woods to safety. Hirschorn’s gunmen had stood guard over the runway for a while after Bishop’s escape as they’d been ordered. But as the night dragged on, they got bored and returned to camp to join Alex Wellman, who was anxiously watching for his employer’s return. Bishop and Kathleen, hiding in the nearby trees, saw their chance and made their way to the plane. Bishop got it started and took off. They reached Driscoll in one of the dark hours of morning.

  By that time, the first reports of the attack on North Wilderness were going out over TV and radio news. So when Bishop showed up at the California Highway Patrol’s chopper station near the airpark, the police were very interested to hear what he had to say. Bishop found the Dynamite Road on the sectional chart of the area and used it to lead the cops directly to the forest runway. Wellman and the remaining gunmen were in custody before the sun rose.

  Bishop had killed three people out there in the woods and Kathleen had killed another. This troubled the police—a little. They kept the two of them around town for questioning for a couple of days. Most of that time, Bishop and Kathleen spent together upstairs in the house he’d lived in. As events unfolded and the full story was revealed, it became pretty clear that the killings they’d committed had been done in self-defense. They were told they were free to go and that no charges would be filed.

  Bishop bid Kathleen a tearless farewell at the airpark. Then he mounted his Harley and rode off into the sunset.

  News continued to come out of North Wilderness for several weeks afterwards. By the final count, five corrections officers and one prisoner died in the attack on the SHU. The man called Ben Fry was suspected of killing three of them. The other three, including the prisoner in his cell, were killed by the Hellfires.

  Two other people also lost their lives that night: the pilot of the attacking Apache and the man in the helo’s gunner seat. It was another day or so before they were identified as Chris Wannamaker and Bernard Hirschorn.

  With his death, over time, the full extent of Hirschorn’s criminal organization began to become public. His stranglehold on the town of Driscoll was only a small part of it, it turned out. He was also responsible for a good deal of the trafficking in drugs, weapons and human beings throughout the Pacific Northwest. It was an organization built on murder—twenty-five murders at least, some of fairly high-level bad guys who had tried to stand in Hirschorn’s way. It remained Weiss’s belief that the Shadowman had been hired to commit many of these killings and that in doing so he had become the one man who could easily destroy Hirschorn’s business and Hirschorn himself. He knew where the bodies were buried so to speak, and Weiss thought he had used this leverage to convince Hirschorn to act on his behalf.

  Anyway, on the basis of testimony from Alex Wellman, local and federal authorities were able to close down much of Hirschorn’s network from Driscoll clear up to the Canadian border. Which—as a comical sidelight—made a hero out of Ray Grambling: the honest FBO owner who’d hired detectives to investigate what Hirschorn was doing with his planes. The detectives themselves refused to be interviewed at any length and so the press quickly lost interest in them.

  Whip Pomeroy killed himself. Weiss, being Weiss, had known that he would. He’d tried to get the prison to put the man on suicide watch. He’d tried to get in to talk to him again. But officials at North Wilderness were furious with the detective for going over their heads to alert the governor about the incoming Apache. The fact that he’d turned out to be right only made the matter worse. So they didn’t listen and, about ten days after the attack, Pomeroy chewed through his wrists and bled to death in his cell. He just couldn’t stand the suspense anymore, Weiss thought. He knew—he believed with all his heart—that if he stayed alive, the killer was sure to come back.

  As for him—the killer, the man called Ben Fry—he vanished without a trace. Search parties, choppers and dogs crisscrossed the wilderness surrounding the prison for two weeks but couldn’t come up with a single sign of him. His mug shot appeared in newspapers, on TV, but no one had seen him anywhere. After a while, the authorities began telling the media that the escapee was almost surely dead, lost in the forest or maybe drowned trying to make his way along the coast. What they neglected to mention was the fact that, the more they studied the records, the more they began to understand that there had never been a man called Ben Fry at all. His identity, his fingerprints, even his face on closer study, seemed to have been a construct, a fake. But no matter. Their story—that he was dead—became the official version of things. Most reporters seemed satisfied with it.

  With one exception. Jeff Bloom, the guy from the Chronicle, the guy who’d done the original stories about the Shadowman after the South Bay Massacre. Jeff claimed to have a secret source who said Ben Fry was the Shadowman himself, or at least was believed to be by the people who knew him. He wrote an article describing the entire incident at the prison as one chapter in a kind of twisted love story, a killer’s attempt to reclaim the woman who had captured his unspeakable heart.

  The Chronicle editors didn’t believe that one for a second. The article never ran.

  And so that appeared to be the end of it. But there was one other incident that seems to me worth describing. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it’s part of this narrative or not.

&n
bsp; A few weeks after the attack on the prison, an early heat wave hit San Francisco. Temperatures rose over a hundred for three days running. Men stooped as they walked to work as if they were shriveling into the pavement. Women went disconcertingly bare and their skin glistened.

  Then, one midnight when the heat lay on top of us like a dead horse, when it seemed as if there would be no relief from it forever, the blessed fog came in. It rolled down street after street like some kind of heavenly cavalry that stirred up a cooling dust with its silent hooves. As streetlamps and building facades vanished underneath it, the temperature dropped thirty degrees, just like that, on the instant.

  “Thank God,” said the whore in Weiss’s apartment. She stood at the open window in her underwear. She let the chill air blow in over her. She held back the hair of her red wig with both hands to expose her features to it. “Thank God.”

  Weiss sat in the easy chair in the bay, holding a scotch glass in place on the chair’s arm. He smiled faintly at the girl, only faintly. He was ready for her to go.

  But then, when she was gone, Weiss grew despondent, as he often did when these trysts of his were over. He lifted the Macallan’s bottle from the floor beside him. He refilled his glass. Another hooker with another red wig. It made him feel low and dirty somehow.

  He sat alone, sipped his scotch. Set it down. The billowing fog lay hard by the windowpanes. The people in the street below were merely shadows. The cars passed in smears of dull yellow light. He started to raise his glass to his lips again.

  And he stopped, his hand half-lifted. A violent shudder went through him. All at once, a clammy sweat began to collect on the back of his neck just under his shirt collar. He felt cold, as if he had come down with a fever.