The Thousand Dollar Escape

by J. T. Brannan

  I wondered why, and the only reason I could think of was because he simply didn’t care.

  ‘What am I being charged with?’ I asked, instead of answering his question.

  Carson sighed and sat back in his own chair. ‘You’ve been charged with assaulting six Sand Springs law enforcement officers.’

  ‘There were only four,’ I said, ‘I had nothing to do with the other two.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the presumption is that the dog is yours, and you’re responsible for it. We got a warrant out for that little bastard too, by the way. Dangerous dog like that, my order is shoot to kill.’

  My muscles clenched involuntarily in anger, but I knew Kane was too smart to get caught; he’d survived for years against worse than anything this psycho could throw at him. But it still pissed me off.

  ‘But anyway,’ Carson continued, ‘we’ll get to all that other shit later. Right now, I want you to tell me how you know my wife.’

  ‘I don’t know her,’ I said.

  ‘You’re lying,’ Carson replied.

  ‘Your boys must have seen me come out of the other apartment,’ I argued. ‘I was just staying there, got woken up by the door getting kicked down across the hall; and when I saw a woman getting dragged out of her home, I went out to help her.’

  ‘It wasn’t her home,’ the chief told me.

  ‘Wherever it was,’ I conceded, ‘when you see four guys assaulting a lone woman, you do something about it.’

  ‘Unless,’ Carson said, ‘it’s none of your fucking business. Then you do what everyone else does, stay inside and lock your door.’

  ‘I’m not everyone else.’

  ‘So who are you, cowboy?’

  ‘John Doe, like you said.’

  The smile was back; I wasn’t sure if it was just for effect, or if he was actually enjoying the game. ‘Brave,’ he said again, nodding his head. ‘But John will do for now. It don’t much matter anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’ I answered before I could stop myself.

  The smile only widened. ‘Why don’t you let me worry about that?’ he replied. He settled back further into his chair, ‘So, John. How did you meet her? Cos I don’t buy the bullshit about you just happening to be in the right place at the right time.’

  ‘That bullshit is the truth.’

  Carson was out of his chair in the blink of an eye, grabbing and folding it and swinging it hard toward my head. I managed to raise my cuffed hands just in time, but the folded steel chair merely smashed through the barrier, losing only a small amount of speed before it collided with my skull.

  Once again I was knocked from my chair, this time dazed and barely conscious; and then I felt the chair hitting me again and again and again, over and over. I rolled into a ball to protect myself as best as I could, but the impacts were hard and the pain was severe.

  And then the beating ended as quickly as it had started. I waited for several moments, body still tensed involuntarily just in case he began again; but finally I risked looking up, and saw that Carson was sitting back in the steel chair, regarding me coolly.

  ‘Well,’ he said calmly, ‘are you gonna lie there all day, or are you gonna pick yourself up and sort yourself out?’

  Slowly, reluctantly, I got back to my feet, the chair still attached to my ankles; it was a struggle to pick up my chair and sit back down, but eventually I managed it.

  ‘Good,’ Carson said. ‘No more sass coming out of your mouth, anyway.’

  He was right; sass was out for now, at least until I’d recovered a little bit. My head hurt even worse than it had from the hangover that morning, and my body didn’t feel much better.

  ‘By the look of you, you’re used to pissin’ people off, I guess.’ He pointed to the mass of scar tissue that crisscrossed my naked body; mementos from other missions, another life. ‘Other folk have to teach you some lessons too, huh?’

  ‘I guess so,’ I answered.

  ‘Well, I suggest you start listenin’ a bit better, cos I don’t think you’ve learned shit.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I assured him.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘But now it’s time to get back to business. Seriously now, how do you know her?’

  I could see how this was going to play out – he’d keep asking me the same question, and beating me if the answer didn’t tally with what he wanted to hear. And perversely, what he wanted to hear was what he didn’t want to hear – that his wife has been running around on him.

  But I knew why he wanted to believe it; it was easier to accept his wife leaving him for another man than it was to admit the more likely fact that it was because she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore.

  The chauvinistic bastard probably also couldn’t conceive that she could have set up the whole new identity and apartment without a man to help her.

  And so I decided to play the game with him and see what would happen; it couldn’t be any worse than what was already happening, I figured.

  ‘I met her three months ago,’ I said at last, and watched for the chief’s reaction. But there wasn’t any, no emotion registering on his face whatsoever.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  This was a tricky one, given that I knew nothing about Samantha Carson whatsoever. Would she go to a gym? Have a job? Kids? I assumed that Don Carson wouldn’t let her work, or work-out – too many chances to meet people, and a control freak like him would never allow it. Kids were unlikely too – she would probably have gone on the run with them, rather than leave them at the mercy of a psychotic father.

  But she’d have to shop, right?

  ‘Grocery store,’ I said, after what I hoped hadn’t been too long of a pause.

  He nodded his head in thought. ‘Reasor’s?’ he asked, and I assumed it must be the name of a local store.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, not offering up any more information than I had to.

  ‘I knew I should have kept her out of that place,’ he said, shaking his head now as if blaming himself for the whole thing – and not because of the beatings he had given her, but because he had allowed her just that tiny bit of freedom. ‘Damn health food, hippy bastards. I shoulda known. Fucking carrot cake and asparagus, what should I have expected?’

  Finally, the head shaking stopped and he looked up at me. ‘So what happened?’

  I shrugged, looked down at the table as if I didn’t want to tell him, acting the role he had assigned for me. ‘I noticed her there, you know, a few times. Eventually we got talking.’

  Carson was back to nodding his head. ‘Worked your magic on her, did you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said, working on my story. He was convinced I was sleeping with her anyway, so me admitting as much wouldn’t so her any further harm. But I thought if I told him that her leaving him had been my idea, that she had resisted, that I’d tried hard to convince her, had forced her to leave him, then he might go easy on her.

  But who was I trying to kid? Maybe I’d be better off just trying to escape, try and take Samantha with me. I didn’t want to get us both shot though, and so I started to lay out my invented tale merely to gain some time until I could come up with a better strategy.

  It was all taken out of my hands moment later though, when – only the first few sentences into my little story – the emotion reentered Carson’s face and he leapt from the seat, one hand reaching across the table and grabbing the back of my head while the other went for his .40 Smith & Wesson.

  He pulled my head toward him with tremendous strength, pushing the barrel of the handgun between my lips, the cold metal scraping my gums until the blood flowed, threatening to break my teeth until my mouth opened and he fed the barrel in toward the back of my throat, making me gag on the hard steel.

  ‘You little fucker,’ he hissed, breath hot and close, ‘you damned sonofabitch, you’re gonna pay for what you’ve done, I’m gonna blow your fucking head clean off. You hear me, John? You fucking hear me? I’m gonna blow it clear off, then I’m gonna put this gun up Sam’s no-goo
d cunt and pull the fucking trigger, see how she likes that!’

  His eyes were close to mine, wide and crazed, and I could see the beads of sweat rolling down his face.

  The pain in my mouth and jaw was intense and I tried to adjust my position, but he just moved the gun to compensate for my movement and the pain remained, even worse now.

  ‘Stop that fucking squirming, boy,’ he whispered close to my ear, so close now I could smell each drop of sweat. ‘I know what you’re thinking, that I’ll never get away with it.’ He made a sound which I supposed must have been a laugh but which was more of a grunting snort. ‘Well John, I’ve been getting away with this shit for years. I’m the fucking law, and I’m all that counts down here. You’re just one more chump who’s gonna get what’s coming to him.’

  The eyes set hard, he cocked the hammer of the handgun, and I knew he wasn’t bluffing – he was about to blow my brains out all over the interview room’s whitewashed walls.

  Maybe, I thought on reflection, it hadn’t been wise to admit to seeing his wife.

  And then he pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Three

  There wasn’t time to waste on thinking, but luckily for me, my body was already reacting of its own accord, operating on a sheer instinctive level beyond conscious control.

  My cuffed hands came up lightning-fast, one thumb blocking the hammer of the weapon just as Carson pulled the trigger; and with no hammer to hit the firing pin, there was nothing to force the round out at twelve hundred feet per second to blow my skull and brain into a fine red mist.

  But that was only half the battle – the barrel of the gun was still in my mouth, my hands were cuffed, my legs were chained to my chair, and I was in a locked room in the jail of a police station.

  The situation was anything but good; but as my grandfather used to tell me, you had to play with the cards you were dealt. Fate never gave you any other choice.

  My body was already playing those cards, my cuffed hands wrenching the barrel painfully out of my mouth – thumb still blocking the hammer – and jerking Carson forward sharply over the table. As his face came toward me, I snapped the gun back in his direction, the hard metal smashing across his nose and breaking it with a spray of blood.

  As he fell back, his grip on the gun tightened and it pulled free of my grasp – and as my thumb left the hammer, it discharged, the powerful .40 caliber round passing high over my shoulder and burying itself in the wall behind me.

  Shit. That was all I needed - the supersonic crack of a gunshot that would bring the other cops running.

  But how many cops would there be? I didn’t know how many were on the PD payroll, but Sand Springs wasn’t that big a place, and it couldn’t be too many. Thirty? Forty? Operating in shifts, maybe twenty on now, some out on patrol; but that still left at least a dozen or so, which was more than enough.

  Carson was going to shoot me anyway though – did the other cops know that? Were they expecting the gunshot?

  But it was inconceivable that every officer was a bad apple – the force must have had some decent cops. Probably Carson would have shot me, then claimed that I’d attacked him and he’d reacted in self-defense. Some sort of technical problem with the CCTV as well, no doubt.

  These thoughts were flashing through my mind, and yet at the same time I registered nothing at all – just the physical sensations of the ongoing mêlée that was occurring right in the middle of the whitewashed interview room. It was a strange feeling – thinking but not thinking, aware yet not aware – and time distorted in such a way that all these semi-thoughts occurred in the same fraction of a second that it took me to push myself back into my chair and shove the table hard ahead of me.

  The opposite side of the table struck Carson straight in his gut and he doubled over with a grunt and dropped the Smith & Wesson to the tiled floor.

  I knocked the table out of the way and threw myself – still attached to the chair – across the space between me and the chief, tackling him to the ground. The impact of the takedown knocked the air from him and I capitalized on the situation by crawling up his body and slamming both fists down onto his dazed, upturned face time and time again until he was barely conscious.

  I could hear the commotion at the door now, people gathered outside, rattling the handle and trying to get in; it wouldn’t be long before they found the right key and crossed the threshold, armed and dangerous.

  I rolled off the chief’s body and grabbed the handgun, seriously wondering whether to unload in the sick bastard’s face; but with the limited timeframe I had, I decided that the last thing I needed was to still be chained to a chair when the boys in blue broke through the door.

  And so I aimed the pistol at the chains and fired at point blank range, the gunshot deafening at such close quarters but doing its job of severing one of the bonds; a second shot took care of the next and I was free from the chair just as the door burst open and four uniforms rushed in, powerful guns in nervous hands – never a good combination.

  Having no idea whether these were dirty cops or decent, and unwilling to take them out without knowing for sure, I understood that there was only one thing I could do.

  Bending back down to the chief, I scooped up his heavy body – no easy feat given that Carson was now a pure dead weight – and put the gun to his head, holding him as a shield between me and the other cops.

  ‘Let him go!’ shouted one of the men. ‘Right now!’

  ‘Back off! I’ll blow his fucking brains out!’ I shouted in return, trying to make them think I was willing to do just that.

  And it might have helped that I was willing to do just that.

  The cops – three men, one woman – were obviously struggling to know what to do, and I capitalized on their confusion.

  ‘Get in here,’ I ordered them in my best drill instructor voice, ‘now!’

  When they failed to move quickly enough I fired a warning shot at the ceiling, ignoring the little drizzle of plaster that floated down from the hole. ‘Fucking move it!’ I encouraged them, and sure enough they started to move, guns still up but unsure where to aim.

  But they were nervous, and the situation was dangerous in the extreme; if one of those cops got too excited and let a round off, there was a good chance I could wind up dead.

  Before long, however, they were in the room without another shot being fired, and I skirted the group while carrying the groggy figure of the chief. It was awkward to carry him and hold the gun to his head at the same time with my hands still cuffed, but I was just about managing it.

  ‘Over by the table,’ I ordered as we headed for the door, careful to keep Carson’s body between me and them. ‘And drop those fucking guns!’

  The four cops moved as one, drifting toward the table while reluctantly lowering their pistols.

  ‘You’re not going to get away with this,’ the woman said. ‘You’re never going to get out of here.’

  I was at the door now, and shrugged my shoulders. ‘Maybe I won’t,’ I allowed. ‘But I’ve got to try, right?’

  And with that, I took a quick look into the corridor to check that it was empty, then pulled the chief out of the room with me and slammed the door, securing it with the keys that had been left in the lock.

  So you’re out, I said to myself as I scanned left and right. Great.

  Now what?

  Chapter Four

  The ‘now what’ came only moments later, as two more armed cops rounded the left hand corner.

  I instinctively aimed the handgun in their direction and pinned them down with a couple of shots, aiming high but close enough to make them feel the effort was genuine.

  Keeping the chief held up next to me was starting to become a real pain in the ass with my wrists cuffed together. I could see the keys hanging from his belt, but didn’t have the time to use them. For a moment I seriously considered just letting him go and taking my chances by myself, but I knew it would be insane to give up my only insurance.

>   And so I clung onto his collar awkwardly with one hand while placing the pistol back to his head with the other as I considered my options.

  The trouble was, I didn’t want to escape alone; I was determined to take Mrs. Samantha Carson with me.

  The seconds were ticking by, and I could only imagine what was going on around that corner. The two cops would have sounded the alarm, recruited backup; maybe they were sending a secondary party around the other way to enclose us on both sides.

  Then it hit me – Don Carson was a dirty cop, he’d told me as much himself. He’d been getting away with it for years, he’d said.

  I wouldn’t shoot an honest cop.

  But a dirty one?

  What was I even waiting for?

  On the one hand, I could help her escape, aid her in going on the run in the hope of finding a better life somewhere out of the reach of her abusive husband.

  Or I could shoot the fucker now, and give her an instant divorce.

  But I’d thought about it for too long, and – as my grandfather also liked to say – procrastination is the thief of time.

  Which meant that Don Carson had woken up and smashed me in the balls with the bottom of his fist, knocking the air out of my lungs with the combined shock of pain and surprise.

  Carson – presumably only happy to beat up on women or people who were chained up – took his chance and fled, wrenching free of my grip and running as fast as he could down the corridor in the same direction as the two other cops I’d fired at.

  By the time I’d recovered and raised the Smith & Wesson after him, he was gone.

  Shit.

  With Carson round the corner, whoever else was round there would know they had a legitimate, unprotected target now available to them and I immediately dropped into a low crouch and backed up to the wall, to make myself as small a target as I could.

  I spotted it then, as I was waiting for the first gunmen to appear, and fired without hesitation.

  The .40 caliber round broke the glass of the fire alarm case across the hall, and a second later the shrill, high-pitched ringing was reverberating loudly round the corridors.