by Jake Logan
Slocum took a few minutes to find this stone, then pulled it out so he could peer into the next cell.
“Go on, give him a holler,” Doc said. “He ain’t got company in there. It takes time fer the warden to get in new inmates ’cuz a passel of residents been paroled.”
Slocum called out to José.
“Ah, the novio,” Valenzuela said, laughing. “You have come for me? Am I supposed to claw my way out or will you do the work for me?”
His attitude irritated Slocum, especially after spending five miserable days in a dark hole nestled up against the cell block’s foundations.
“If we can get out, there’s a way through the wall. It’ll take four of us.”
“Four?”
“We’ll need a pick or pry bar,” Slocum said.
“That is easy. I know where the tools are kept. When I go on work detail, I will hide a pick. The guards never check,” Valenzuela said. “When will we make this escape?”
Slocum mumbled. He hadn’t gotten that far yet in his planning. He didn’t even know how they were going to get free of their individual cells.
“Doc, the one with you, he knows where this hole is?”
“Murrieta does. He’ll be the fourth one.”
“Procipio Murrieta? You have fallen in with desperate company, hombre.”
“We can get with him tomorrow in the exercise yard,” Slocum said. He motioned Doc to silence when the man started hissing.
Then he looked over his shoulder and saw a guard staring at him, tapping his truncheon against his left palm in a slow, thoughtful way.
3
“What’s goin’ on?” the guard asked. He rattled the bars in the cell door with his truncheon.
“I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on,” Doc said, jumping to his feet and going to the cell door. He interposed himself between the guard and Slocum, who quickly replaced the stone from the wall. “He went buggy down in the hole. He’s talkin’ to the damned wall! I won’t put up with it. Gimme another roommate! I demand to talk to Warden Harriman. Get him the hell out of here. He might be dangerous!”
The guard laughed, shook his head, and moved on, never once looking back at Slocum or asking about the hole in the wall.
“He didn’t see the hole,” Slocum said, sitting back and heaving a deep sigh.
“He prob’ly did. But I gave him somethin’ else to think on. Always gets a laugh when I say it might be dangerous locked up with whoever’s in the cell.” Doc hung out the cell door and looked around the cell block, then he laughed. “This place is chock-full of dangerous gents, and most of’em are in guard’s uniforms.”
Slocum thanked his lucky stars that Doc understood the system and how to deal with the guards.
“You think Valenzuela next door knows where to find the tools we’ll need?” Doc asked.
“I’m more worried about Murrieta finding the hole through the outer wall,” Slocum admitted.
“You got a point, Jarvis—or whatever your name is. We’re gonna be hangin’ out there all exposed, no matter where the hole is. If it takes more ’n a few minutes to open it up, we’re gonna hang. Or wish they’d hang us since spendin’ the rest of our lives down below in that dark hell is worse than anything else they can do.”
Doc turned, flopped onto the pallet, tucked his hands under the back of his head, and stared up at the ceiling.
“Git some sleep. We’re gonna need it real soon.”
“Why’s that?” Slocum asked.
“You wouldn’t know, but it’ll be dark of the moon tomorrow night. If we don’t try it then, we got to wait another month.”
Slocum sucked in his breath as he stretched out on the hard pallet. He had lost all track of time being in solitary. He hoped that Conchita was still waiting for him and José’s pa hadn’t up and died.
Slocum, Murrieta, and Valenzuela huddled together near the wall. The warm sun beat down on them. The canvas prison uniform would have been uncomfortable, but Slocum was so glad to see the sun again he didn’t complain.
“Been working the far side of the yard, in the garden,” Valenzuela said. “I have hidden a pick there.” He hardly moved his lips as he spoke. He didn’t look at either Slocum or Murrieta and might have been doing nothing more than enjoying the sunlight.
“That is good,” Murrieta said. “It is near where the wall was patched.”
“How do we get out tonight?” Slocum asked.
Both men laughed at him.
“The one in the cell with you—Doc—he will show you. It is not so hard,” Valenzuela said. He sighed. “I would again see my lovely Conchita.”
“And your pa. Your sister said he could hang on until you got to him.”
“Ah, yes, his deathbed,” Valenzuela said. “You are a good man to do this for su novia.”
Slocum moved away without answering because a pair of guards began drifting in his direction. He wanted to keep as much distance between him and the blue-uniformed men as possible. The less he had to do with them, the better chance he had to stay out of solitary.
Then he saw the problem rising up in front of him and tried to veer away. Mick wasn’t having any of it.
“You!” the huge man bellowed. “I got a bone to pick with you!”
Slocum knew any confrontation with the enraged inmate would land them both in solitary again. He doubted Valenzuela and Murrieta would wait another month to escape now that he had gotten them together, matching the tool with a plugged way out through the wall.
A quick look around showed he was in big trouble. Three guards, including the sergeant with his ledger book tucked under his arm, were all homing in on him, hawks with the pigeon reflected in their eyes. Slocum saw no way of avoiding the angry inmate. He wasn’t afraid of Mick but was of being tossed into solitary again.
“I don’t want to fight,” Slocum said, but he would if it came to that. Better to knock this stupid son of a bitch down again and end up in solitary than to crawl. There’d be another chance for him to escape from San Quentin, though he had no idea when or what it would be.
There would be plenty of time to think up something if he had to waste away for a week or two in the dark, cold subterranean cell.
Slocum balled his fists, judged the distance as the bull of a man charged toward him, and then simply stared when Mick fell facedown in the dirt. His feet kicked feebly, and he tried to get to his hands and knees. He didn’t make it because Doc swung a rock he clutched in his hand again and caught Mick behind his ear a second time. Blood gushed from the double cuts.
“Take that! You can’t say a thing like that. You can’t insult me no way, no how!” Doc turned and held up the bloody rock as the guards swerved from circling Slocum and went to him.
“You know better ’n to hit a man from behind, Doc,” the sergeant said, flipping open the book. The guard scanned the pages, turning them quickly. He finally looked up. “It was last time you were in that you got into trouble. But it was for gambling. What happened, Doc? You want to spend the rest of your life behind these walls?”
“He cheated me, Sergeant Wilkinson,” Doc said, trying to kick a still unconscious Mick. The guards pulled him away. He began cursing and kicking, trying to get free to continue his assault on a man three times his weight and half again his height. As the guards took him away, Doc craned around, stared squarely at Slocum, and winked broadly.
“You old fool,” Slocum muttered under his breath. But he wasn’t going to pass up the chance Doc had given him.
Only he was in almost as big a mess as if he had been dragged off to solitary. Valenzuela had told him that Doc would help get him free that night so the four of them could escape. That there were three now wasn’t the problem. Doc’s knowledge of how to get free of the cell when the time came was.
Four guards picked up Mick and lugged him to solitary. Slocum heaved a sigh of relief at that. The ornery hunk of gristle would be out of his hair for a spell. With any kind of luck, Slocum would be on the other side of the t
owering prison walls by the time Mick got free.
He felt a touch of admiration for Doc, then knew the old geezer’s life would be shortened. Mick wasn’t the kind to let a sneak attack go unanswered.
The bell rang, warning him that exercise time was over. He walked deliberately toward the cell block, his mind racing. There had to be something he could do to get free that night. What skills did Doc have that he didn’t? What knowledge of the prison and its system? As he pushed through a door, scraping against another inmate whose sleeve had caught on a nail head protruding from the doorjamb, an idea came to him. He wasn’t sure that this was what Doc would have done, but it was all he could think of.
Every step of the way to his cell, Slocum worried at the cuff of his canvas uniform, pulling a thread free and rolling it up into a ball. Part of the canvas had come away. He added this to the ball and smeared dirt and grease from his fingers on the thread.
“Inside, Jarvis,” a guard said, shoving him forward when he hesitated.
“I can’t go in again. I can’t!”
The guard shoved again. Slocum caught himself against the edge of the door and jammed the ball of thread into the latch, hiding what he did with his body. Before the guard could use his truncheon to move him inside, Slocum swung around and stepped into the cell on his own. The door slammed shut, iron ringing from the force used by the guard to close it.
Slocum grabbed the bars and held on to keep the door from swinging back out. He had listened hard and knew what the guard didn’t. The thread had prevented the door from latching properly. The guard grunted and moved on to Valenzuela’s cell to be sure the door was secured. Slocum wrapped his arms around the bars and used his weight to hold the iron-barred door shut until the guards had left.
Carefully releasing his death grip, fearing he might have caused the door to lock in spite of the way he had jammed it, Slocum watched the door swing open a few inches. He caught it but held tight until a dark form moved in front of his cell.
“You are free?” Valenzuela pressed close. “I cannot open the door for you.”
Slocum let the cell door swing wide.
“Bueno,” Valenzuela said. “We are to meet Murrieta in the garden.”
“You sure the pickax is still there?”
Valenzuela shrugged eloquently.
“If it is not, we use our fingernails to claw through.”
“Can we do this with only three?”
“We must dig faster, perhaps not be so stealthy.” Valenzuela moved like a ghost past the cells. Slocum worried that a prisoner might see them and shout out an alarm. Two guards played cards at a table near the door leading out to the exercise yard. The guttering candle on the table between them hardly lit the table, much less the area where they slipped through shadows.
Slocum grabbed Valenzuela by the arm and pointed. Valenzuela shook his head and pointed to a doorway some distance from the card-playing guards. They reached the door without either guard noticing. Valenzuela rattled the door handle a few times, then sprung the flimsy lock. He slipped inside, Slocum pressing close behind.
“There. We go down,” Valenzuela said. “I have seen storage cellars. From there we can get out of this building.”
Slocum doubted it would be that easy, but to his surprise it was. They passed through the storage room, found a window leading up to ground level, and wiggled through it, coming out only a dozen yards from the inmates’ vegetable garden. The scent of growing things caused Slocum’s nostrils to flare. It had been too long since he’d had such earthy aroma in his nose. The musty, solitary cell had been suffocating in its closeness, and the larger cell with Doc had been hardly better.
The wind fitfully caused waist-high plants to sway gently. Slocum considered how he might take cover in the vegetation if a guard came by. The rows were far enough apart that he might be seen, but the dark of the moon gave added benefit to anyone trying not to be seen.
“There, up on the wall,” Valenzuela said, pointing.
Slocum saw a guard walking slowly by. His silhouette was indistinct, but he seemed to be carrying a rifle in the crook of his left arm. There was no way to tell what he was looking at, but he continued along the catwalk, turned a distant corner, and vanished from sight. Slocum let out a breath he hadn’t even known he was holding.
“Where’s the pick?”
“At the end of this row,” Valenzuela said. “Where is Murrieta?”
“Here,” came the soft voice.
Slocum jumped. He had not heard Procipio Murrieta come up behind them, and that worried him. He had thought he was alert. Murrieta might have moved like an Apache, but that was no excuse for Slocum to be such a greenhorn.
“See the dark spot on the wall? That is where they patched.”
Slocum made out the faint outline of a doorway. The stone wall had been breached here, probably with a gate intended for supplies to be taken to the prison kitchen nearby.
“They closed it a year ago to better watch what comes into the prison,” Murrieta said.
“And to keep prisoners from going out,” Slocum said. He moved like a shadow crossing another shadow and went to the wall. He pressed his fingers into the cold stone and felt the plaster seam marking the doorway outline. Valenzuela joined him, Murrieta right behind.
“Where is the fourth?” Murrieta asked.
Slocum shrugged off an explanation. He was more interested in getting the hell out of San Quentin. Once free, he became John Slocum again, and Jasper Jarvis was a thing of the past. For his part, it couldn’t happen soon enough.
His fingers found a bit of loose plaster. He tugged and a section came free. Beneath the plaster lay a thick stratum of concrete.
“Let me,” Valenzuela said, shouldering Slocum aside. He swung the pick he had retrieved and sent a hunk flying from the plug. Slocum grabbed it and carried it to the garden, putting it in one row. Murrieta followed with a second piece, but the sound of Valenzuela working echoed like cannonade.
“Keep it down,” Slocum cautioned. He looked up at the walls but didn’t see the patrolling guard.
“Got to get through. We only have minutes before the ground patrol comes.”
Valenzuela worked furiously, prying loose even larger hunks of concrete for Murrieta and Slocum to lug off and hide. The sound of the pick point hitting wood caused Slocum to look around.
“Getting close,” Valenzuela said, panting from his exertion.
“I’ll take over,” Slocum offered. He took the pick from the man’s hands and applied his own expert strokes to the door, tearing out hunks of half-rotted wood. The other two men kept the area behind him free of betraying debris. The feel changed suddenly when the point of the pick penetrated to the far side of the door. Slocum put his foot against the wall and heaved. A section of door came free, letting a gust of air from the other side of the wall blast through.
Slocum inhaled deeply. The air was no different from that inside San Quentin’s walls, but it smelled sweeter than any perfume. It carried the scent of freedom.
Murrieta hissed, and Slocum heard the other two men rushing for cover in the garden. He turned and saw a guard round the far corner of the building holding most of the cells and head toward him. From the rhythmic sound of wood against flesh, he knew the guard slapped his truncheon against his palm the way he had seen San Francisco Specials do it as they patrolled the worst section of the Barbary Coast.
Slocum gripped the handle of the pickax and considered fighting the guard, then discarded the idea immediately. Any ruckus within the walls would draw attention. He took a step to follow Murrieta and Valenzuela into the dubious refuge provided by the garden plants, then stopped. He could never make it without being seen.
He pressed himself back into the cavity he had carved in the wooden door and felt it yield behind him. He dug his heels in and pushed as hard as he could. The hinges yielded although the door didn’t give way. He sucked in his gut and held his breath as the guard came closer. The man stopped, looked arou
nd, then worked to build himself a smoke. His face was momentarily illuminated in the flare of the lucifer lighting the tip of the cigarette. Slocum recognized the guard as the one who had peered into the cell when he had first talked with Valenzuela. He wasn’t as sharp as a whip, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t send Slocum and his two partners to the hell of solitary if he saw anything amiss.
The guard puffed contentedly on his cigarette, not moving.
Slocum continued to push hard against the door, hoping to get it open so he could reach the other side of the wall. The guard wasn’t armed so he couldn’t shoot Slocum if he had to run, but sounding the alarm would bring a swarm of guards Slocum wanted to avoid.
The guard finished his smoke, then walked toward Slocum. The guard stopped, shuffled his feet in the dirt as if noticing a hunk of concrete or something else out of the ordinary. He gave a slight shrug, as if realizing he couldn’t figure out what he had seen, then continued his patrol. Slocum remained flattened in the cavity in the wall. The moonless night worked in his favor and hid him enough so that the guard walked past.
It took another interminable minute before the guard reached the far end of the building, then turned and disappeared. Slocum wasted no time spinning around and hammering the pick against the hinges. They popped open within seconds. A swift kick sent the door tumbling away.
Both Valenzuela and Murrieta joined him.
“Well done, novio,” Valenzuela congratulated him. He laughed in a way that irrationally irritated Slocum. He didn’t like being reminded that Conchita considered him her lover, although it was true. “She will reward you well.”
“Silencio,” Murrieta said. He pushed them through the open doorway. “We must not betray ourselves now.”
Slocum agreed with the son of Joaquin Murrieta. The less said now, the better.
They had come out on the west side of the prison. San Francisco Bay lapped on the shoreline to their left, giving them a constant beacon so they wouldn’t be distracted from their escape and walk in circles. In the darkness Slocum knew this was a distinct possibility. The last thing he wanted was to end up where they had started. The only way off the outjut of land into the Bay was westward. Then they might swing around and get down to Tiburon and take the ferry across to Oakland. Better to go farther south still and find a way across the Golden Gate to San Francisco, if that ferry wasn’t running at night.
