The footfalls retreated, and as time crept by it became apparent that someone had called off the storm troopers. They must have reverted to plan B—seal off the corridors and gradually close in on me from all directions.
What could I do? Nothing, just stand there and wait for the inevitable. It became very quiet.
I almost jumped out of my skin. A voice was calling me, a small lyrical voice, one that I recognized. I cranked my head to the left and saw her standing next to an open doorway a few yards down the hall. Jane was beckoning to me.
C H A P T E R 30
“Jimmy, don’t be frightened. Come this way.”
I quickly scurried to her side. “Jane! I’ve been looking for you, but you found me.”
“Ariel told me you were here. Now look, there’s no time. Come this way, hurry. If they catch you, they will kill you.”
She turned and led me through the doorway, into another narrow passage, at the end of which was an opening that led to the yard outside of the building. Okay, I’d still be on the base, but at least they wouldn’t corner me in these hallways. I might have a chance in the yard. “This is where they let the dogs in at night,” she said.
“Dogs?”
“Guard dogs. They unleash them and the dogs roam the halls at night.”
“Why?”
“So the kids won’t leave their dorms after lockdown. Won’t wander in the halls and try to leave this place. That’s why they couldn’t turn the dogs loose on you. They’d go after the kids working in the building, too.” She pushed the door open. “The kennels are on the left, so you go right.”
I peered out into the yard. The sunlight was intense. Heat waves shimmered above the blacktop in the distance. I could see the kennel she was referring to, about a hundred feet to the left. A dozen or so Dobermans lolled in the heat, protected by an open front lean-to inside a wire mesh fence.
“Will you come with me?” I said to Jane. “If we can get to my truck…” I was about to tell her how I could ram the gate, and about the panic switch and how Sol would, somehow, help get us out of here, but she cut me off in mid sentence.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll catch you unless I draw them off. I’ll go and disturb the dogs. Their barking will bring the guards. Keep down and crawl to the right, around to the front of building. As soon as you hear the dogs, make a run for it. Maybe you’ll have a chance.”
“What about you? I can’t let you get caught helping me.”
“I’ll be gone by the time they get there. Don’t worry, they won’t see me.”
“Tell me about Robbie,” I said.
“He’s not here. They’ve taken him away. Now, hurry. Go!”
She took off running and glanced back once. Our eyes locked for a moment before she disappeared around the corner of the building.
I took a quick look in both directions and saw no guards, just a couple of teenage girls listlessly sweeping the yard. They seemed oblivious to what was going on.
I crept, crablike, along the length of the building, keeping below the line of barred windows lining the wall. When I reached the northwest corner, I stopped and peeked around the edge. The milk truck was still parked there, backed up to the loading dock, about fifty yards away, exactly where I had left it.
Half a dozen men milled around in front of it. They wore the same paramilitary uniforms as the gate guard, and each had an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. While I waited for the dogs to bark, I glanced back and noticed that I’d left a trail of blood droplets behind me. The wound still bled, but I was more concerned about being spotted than I was about the pain. One nice thing about having a bleeding gash in my side was that I didn’t notice the pain from my cracked ribs. If caught, I wondered if they’d mind giving me a couple of aspirins before they shot me.
Suddenly the dogs let loose, barking, snarling and making a general nuisance of themselves. The guards perked up, looked around in all directions, then—just as if they were all wired together—charged off toward the kennel in the opposite direction from where I was hunkered down. I sprang from my crouch and made a wild dash for the truck.
I calculated that it would take me six seconds to reach the truck. Five seconds into my race for it I heard a man shout, “Halt! Stop right there.” Then the sound of rapid gunfire filled the air, bullets dancing at my feet.
Without looking, I lunged for the truck and grabbed at the driver’s side door handle as I fell to the ground. The door flew open. The gunshots continued, bullets slamming into the passenger side.
The truck would offer only a modicum of protection. But now I had to get this big milk wagon started. Then I could ram the gate and drive this thing the hell outta here. I clambered into the cab, keeping my head down.
My getaway plan showed promise but had one tiny flaw: no ignition keys! I hadn’t taken them with me. They snatched them. Mabel was right; I never lock anything. Damn!
An old wheezy voice I recognized shouted out. His words cut like a knife. “Give it up, O’Brien. You’re surrounded. Take a look-see.”
Peering over the dash, I looked out through the front windshield. Yeah, it was Ben Moran. He stood, hands on his hips, in front of about a dozen soldiers. They had formed up into a semicircle in front of the truck. Their automatic weapons were on a dead aim for my head.
“Hands in the air, and climb out slow-like. Don’t bother looking under the seat. Your gun ain’t there. Move it!”
I thought of a line from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “I’m very brave generally, only today I happen to have a headache.” I was scared shitless.
My left hand inched to the dashboard. I flipped Sol’s panic switch.
C H A P T E R 31
“Time’s up! Get out of the truck, now!”
I opened the door slowly. Holding my arms high, I climbed down from the cab. As soon as my shoes hit the ground, the guards closed in. I stood in the middle of a tight ring of thugs, their AK-47s pointed at my gut.
Ben Moran, a malicious scowl on his face, cut his way through the guards. At his side dangled a .45 semi-auto, his finger hooked through the trigger guard. He carefully dropped it in the pocket of his bib coveralls. I figured it was the gun Sol wanted me to bring along for protection. The gun I shoved under the front seat of the truck.
The wind was right, and I could smell his stench. He smelled like evil, like the decay of a dead rat. “O’Brien, I want some information,” he said. “You play ball, and you won’t suffer.”
“Hey,” I said, lowering my arms. “I’m just helping a friend. The guy took sick and asked me to take his route.”
The back of Moran’s hand flew at my face. I blocked it with my forearm, and got a rifle barrel jabbed in my gut. I doubled over, and a guard pounded my back with the butt of his weapon. I yelled as I dropped to the tarmac.
Moran snarled, looking down at me. “You were warned, but you had to press on. Didn’t you?” His voice matched his face: ugly. “Straighten up, act like a man.”
I hunched up onto my knees, bent over like an animal with my hands planted on the blacktop. Nauseous and woozy, I shook my head as if the movement would cast out the pain and restore my vigor. It didn’t.
“You’re not so tough. Without that Jew bastard Silverman and his boys around you’re nothing.”
That’s me. Jimmy O’Brien, wimpy lawyer. Cracked ribs, a bleeding gash in my side—and I hollered when the guy whacked me with his gun. What a softy. But now, I was starting to get irked.
I stood, a little wobbly on my feet, and got right into his face. “Listen, you miserable excuse for a human piece of crap. I came out here to get my client. You murdered his mother, and then grabbed him at the courthouse. I want him back.”
“Is that so?”
“Where is he?”
“Now, you listen to me, you miserable excuse for a lawyer. First of all, I’d nothin’ to do with his ma’s death. Anyways, Robbie Farris came here of his own free will. H
e was a messed-up heathen just like you, and we taught him respect for the Lord; put the fear of God in that boy. That’s what we do around here. We redeem lost children.”
“Yeah? Well, he stabbed his professor twenty-seven times. Murdered him. So what does that say about your concentration camp redemption tactics?”
“Enough of this! Tell me what you think you know about me and our little gun club.”
“I’m not going to tell you squat.”
He slapped me across the face. I winced, but it didn’t hurt that much.
“Ah, hell, you don’t know nothin’, or you wouldn’t be snooping around like a damned fool all dressed up in a milkman’s outfit.” He turned to the guards. “Get Mr. O’Brien out of my sight. I don’t want to see him again.”
Moran started to walk away, but he stopped and came back.
Then he did something weird. He raised his hands high above his head. While looking at the sky he turned his body slowly in a circle and in a deep booming voice, chanted, “If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance unto mine enemies.” He stopped for a moment, and then, with eyes blazing, he rushed at me, shouting. “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh.”
I didn’t know what to make of it. That is, until I thought about what he was saying: some kind of Bible quote, a passage that somehow justified capital punishment. My God, was the son-of-a-bitch going to have me executed?
“The Lord has spoken. Take him away.” Moran lumbered off, dusting his hands.
His words hung in the air, frozen, then shattered and fell to the ground when I realized that the madman was going to kill me.
I couldn’t die today.
With a strength that I didn’t know existed in my wounded body, I grabbed one guard and flung him to the ground, smashed another in the face, and stove off blows from the remaining guards. But they kept coming at me. The momentary adrenaline rush was waning fast. I had to hold up. I had to get free somehow.
I fought and struggled against my captors, but there were so many of them. Finally, it was over. My arms gave out and the last of my energy drained away. Two men grabbed me under my arms, holding me erect, while the rest formed up in two columns, one on each side of me. Cradling their guns across their chests, they started marching me away.
“We’ll take him to the back wall, drag him if we have to,” one of them said.
One guy poked me in the ribs with the muzzle of his gun, and I yelped.
“Hey buddy, don’t worry, your hurt will be gone in a few minutes.” The guards laughed.
“Yeah, we got a sure remedy for those nagging aches and pains.” They laughed some more.
I tried digging my feet into the hard surface, but the more I resisted, the harder they pulled on my arms. We were still in the front area of the camp, about fifty yards from the main gate. The guard indicated that the wall was in the rear. They’d have to carry me there. I wasn’t going to make it easy for them. I jabbed an elbow into the gut of the guard on my left. He flinched. I came across at him with a right fist to his jaw. It connected and he went down. A flurry of fists and rifle butts slammed into me, and I went limp. The world was turning white, and I knew I couldn’t hold on much longer. But, I kept at it, hanging in there by sheer determination. At one point I got my hands on a guard’s weapon and almost wrenched it away before he twisted it out of my grip. A rifle butt flashed past, then more fists, a club… The sky tilted. I started to drop. But I can’t. I have to get free, survive, resist and fight back…
I had to keep fighting. Oh, God…
A crash echoed across the grounds. The air vibrated with ear-cracking bursts of heavy-duty, military machine gun fire. A riot had erupted.
Shouts and curses from the guards next to me pounded in my ears. I looked up. Sol’s black armor-plated limo had crashed through the gate. The big limousine was roaring straight toward me, trailing a voluminous cloud of white smoke. The horrific gunfire was coming from the car.
Some guards dropped to the ground and covered their heads; others ran seeking protection from the blazing machine guns. I stood, dazed. It was funny, I didn’t see any slugs hitting the ground, and I knew Sol didn’t have any machine guns. The limo skidded to a stop right next to me. A door flew open. A hand reached out and yanked me into the back seat. We roared away in the smokescreen Sol had laid out. Three seconds later we were through the gate—the gate guard dropped his gun and ran for his life. Now we were out of the compound, racing toward Barstow on the dirt road that led into the base. The limo’s machine guns were still blasting away.
“Turn off those goddamn guns,” Sol hollered above the din to Cubby the driver.
The noise instantly stopped.
“It a tape recording, hooked up to a speaker system under the car,” Sol said. “The smoke’s real, though.” A huge grin surfaced on his face. I didn’t know if he was grinning because I was safe now, or because he had a chance to play with his tricked-out limo spy stuff.
“What took you so long?” I asked and managed a smile.
“Hey, we were having lunch in the car, waiting. When the beeper thing went off, I had a bottle of ’62 Mouton Rothschild open. I didn’t want to spill it. I had to re-cork it perfectly or it would’ve oxidized.”
“Yeah?” I said. “When James Bond rescued Ursula Andress from Dr. No, he didn’t give a damn about spilling a little wine.”
“Hey, buddy, you ain’t no Ursula Andress,” he said, and we all laughed. We laughed real hard, and the laughter helped the pain go away.
C H A P T E R 32
The long thin stretch of concrete spooled out in front of us as we drove through the sun-baked desert heading back to Downey. The Deacon patched my gunshot wound using a serious first aid kit, which I figured was de rigueur on all spy limos. I declined the proffered shot of morphine.
I quickly took Sol through my ordeal and described the base layout, the bunkhouse, the maze of locked cubicles, and how Jane had helped in my escape effort. I also told him what she’d said about the kids being kept locked in their rooms at night and about Robbie not being on the base, that they’d taken him away. We agreed that we were back at square one when it came to finding Robbie, but now we knew for sure that Moran was the head honcho at the Rattlesnake Lake base and was heavily involved in exploiting vulnerable teenagers. We figured he worked with unsuspecting church groups that sent the troubled or abandoned kids to his so-called “Christian redemption center.” His motives for this escaped us, but we knew his intentions regarding the teens were more than just saving their souls.
Neither of us mentioned what a huge failure the day had been.
I glanced at Sol, who sat quietly with a chilled gin martini in his hand. “Sol, this whole affair borders on the absurd. A religious nut in cahoots with a gang of neo-Nazi thugs imprisoning teenaged kids in the middle of the Mojave Desert.”
“Aw, Jimmy,” he said, and took a small sip of his drink. “Realism and absurdity are often similar in the lives of overzealous true believers, but Moran is more than that. He’s a smart son-of-a-bitch, and he’s got some kind of scheme working. But now we’ve forced his hand. Moran is not going to sit on his ass while you run around looking for Robbie. He’s gonna act. You can bet on it. We’ve gotta come up with a new approach.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about it, my boy. We’ll think of something.”
I thought about the dairy truck still backed up to the dock, riddled with bullets. “Van Hoek is going to be pissed,” I said.
“Who gives a damn about the truck? Van Hoek will send somebody to get it.” Sol paused, then added ominously, “But I am concerned about the gun.”
“Steve at Mathew’s Gun Shop always gave me a good deal when I was a cop. I’ll get you a new one.”
“Damn it, that’s not the point. The bad guys have the gun now. It’s not registered, can’t be traced, but I’m trying to
remember if you handled it.”
I stared out the window, silently watching the Joshua Trees that grew by the thousands out on the bleak wasteland drifting by. The Mormons named the species Joshua because they thought the cactus mimicked the Old Testament prophet waving them, with upraised branches, on toward the Promised Land. They gestured at me now, but they weren’t guiding me to any Promised Land. They waved and laughed. You’re an idiot, Jimmy. First that ridiculous milkman routine and now the gun with your fingerprints all over it. Shimmering in the desert heat, a vivid image formed. Ben Moran came to life holding Sol’s .45 by the trigger guard. I knew for a fact I hadn’t seen or heard the last of him or the last of the gun that he’d dropped into the pocket of his bib overalls.
Earlier, as the Deacon tended my wounds, Sol had insisted that when we get back to Downey he was going to have a doctor check me out. I told him I’d be fine, that I was tired of doctors. I just needed some rest.
“No way,” he said. “Forget about the bruises, but the bullet wound… you could get an infection. I would’ve stopped at the emergency room in Barstow, but the doc there would have reported it to the police, and from what you tell me, the chief is involved up to his fat ass with Moran and the Rattlesnake Gun and Torture Club.” He paused, lit a cigar, and continued: “I’m taking you to my guy, a doc who owes me. He won’t report a thing.”
“Sol, maybe it’s time we turn it all over to the state police,” I said.
“Are you crazy? You’re still not off the hook for Hazel Farris’ murder. Nobody would believe you. Besides what do we have? The FBI cleared the gun club. It would be your word against the chief of police. And besides, how long do you think Jane would live if the word got out about a police investigation? Let’s wait until we have absolute proof. Then somehow we’ll take them down.”
JO02 - The Brimstone Murders Page 18
