The Thousand Dollar Escape

by J. T. Brannan

  Even Australia.

  Then a sound made both of our heads snap around, hearts leaping in our chests.

  No.

  It was the sound of a key being turned in the front door lock of our apartment.

  Chapter Five

  I couldn’t believe we’d been caught off guard like this. Why hadn’t I set up some sort of early warning system?

  Now we had no time to do anything. Hiding would be pointless, as our food was out on the table, our beds had been slept in, and they might even have already heard the television.

  Even Kane looked at me sheepishly, clearly embarrassed he had not heard them before.

  But what could he do? In a strange apartment building, all sounds were new; and if those sounds weren’t overtly threatening – like the sounds of boots running upstairs back in Ricci’s block – then he couldn’t really go growling and barking at every resident returning home or going out to work.

  But the fact that he’d not responded indicated that – whoever was at the door – it wasn’t a physically threatening situation.

  Which – along with the fact that they had a key – meant it was either the realtor, about to show a client around, or it was the owner, come to check up on things.

  I was moving down the short hallway that led from the lounge toward the front door before I’d even come up with a viable plan, gun in hand, instinctively realizing that – if we couldn’t hide – then we might as well confront the problem head-on.

  But at the last moment I darted left into the kitchen, before the door was half-open, and as I went, I gestured for Sam to drop to the floor, where she would be – momentarily at least – covered by the sofa.

  ‘This is a great place,’ I heard a male voice announce in the smooth, confident tones of the long-time salesman, ‘a really fantastic opportunity. Perfect for a young professional couple like yourselves. Spacious, so if you’re thinking of starting a family, you’re gonna love it, you’re gonna absolutely love it.’

  I heard the door close and watched as three people – a man in a crumpled linen suit and a young couple, maybe in their early twenties – passed the kitchen door, heading straight for the lounge. ‘We’ll start in the living room,’ the realtor said, ‘you can check out the great view you’ll have out of the window and –’

  He never got to finish the rest of the sentence, as I knocked him out with a blow to the back of his head with the butt of the pistol.

  I then turned the weapon toward the couple, who had turned to face me, incomprehension and then horror on their young faces as they stared at me, then the body on the floor, then the barrel of the gun, then back to me.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said, keeping my voice steady. ‘Back up into the living room.’

  They looked at me blankly, so I waved the gun toward the room behind them. ‘Go,’ I said, a bit more sharply. ‘Now.’

  They saw the intent in my eyes and started to back up, unwilling to turn around, perhaps scared I would shoot them in the back.

  ‘Get up,’ I told Sam as we entered the lounge, ‘get the tape from the bag.’

  The couple watched as Sam got up from behind the couch, then the girl noticed Kane waiting, patiently watching, in the corner.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped, as realization dawned, ‘you’re them, aren’t you? The ones on the TV, the –’

  ‘Honey,’ the guy whispered, ‘shut up, they’re gonna –’

  ‘We’re not gonna do a thing,’ I told him. ‘Just so long as you do exactly what I say, okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the guy said, ‘sure, yeah, whatever you say, just don’t hurt us, okay? Just please don’t hurt us. In fact, take me,’ he said, the idea just occurring to him, ‘but please leave her, leave her alone, don’t hurt her . . .’

  Sam had arrived with the tape, and I gestured at the guy. ‘Tape his mouth first,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Just promise you won’t –’

  But Sam cut him off with the silver duct tape, wrapping it over his mouth and around the back of his head.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘How did you know we were going to need tape?’ Sam asked, as she taped the girl’s mouth.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you always need tape in this line of work.’ I turned to the guy. ‘Put your hands behind your back,’ I told him, then watched as Sam secured his wrists behind him.

  ‘Forget I asked,’ Sam said, before looking at me earnestly. ‘You’re not going to hurt them, are you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not going to kill them, if that’s what you mean,’ I said. ‘If they try and fight us though, I can’t promise I won’t hurt them.’

  The girl put her hands behind her back, and Sam nodded her head as she taped them. ‘Fair enough,’ she conceded.

  ‘Tape the realtor next,’ I told her, then gestured with the handgun, first to the couple and then to the first bedroom. ‘You two,’ I said, ‘in there.’

  The couple, arms pinned behind them, moved awkwardly into the bedroom, and I instructed them to sit on the bed.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about this, but I’m going to have to ask you to lie down. But before you do, let me tell you what I’m going to do, and why I’m going to do it. I’m going to tape you to the bed, so that you can’t get up. I would just lock the door, but then you might draw attention to being locked in here by smashing one of the windows or something.

  ‘So I’m going to secure you to the bed, while we get out of here. In a few hours’ time, I’ll call the realtor’s office and let them know you’re here. The other guy will be on a bed in the other room, same story.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky, the guy’s office will wonder why he isn’t returning their calls and send someone out to investigate. But trust me,’ I said as reassuringly as I could, ‘I will make that call anyway. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’

  I made to leave the room, then turned back. ‘And as you might have seen, I’ve not kidnapped Mrs. Carson there. She’s trying to escape from her husband, only he’s the chief of police and it’s not as easy as you’d think. So don’t think too badly of us, okay?’

  And with that, I called to the chief’s soon-to-be ex-wife. ‘Sam,’ I said, ‘bring the tape.’

  A few minutes later, all three of the unexpected visitors were secure, the couple in one bedroom, the realtor in the other.

  ‘Okay,’ Sam said, as Kane anxiously prowled the living room, ‘so now what the hell do we do?’

  It was a fair question – the intrusion of these three people meant that my original plan was FUBAR, as we used to say in the Rangers.

  Fucked up beyond all recognition.

  But it just went to show another truism from the military – that plans seldom survive contact with the enemy. We were just going to have to think on our feet.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ I said, thinking out loud.

  ‘Obviously,’ Sam said. ‘So where can we go?’

  ‘The realtor had a set of car keys . . .’ I said, my mind working at a thousand miles an hour.

  ‘Yeah?’ Sam said. ‘And?’

  ‘Get the scissors,’ I told her, abruptly turning for the bedrooms. ‘We need to untie them.’

  ‘What the hell for?’ Sam questioned.

  ‘We need their clothes.’

  Ten minutes later we were mobile, piloting the realtor’s two-year-old company BMW – Real Deal Realty emblazoned down each side – through the streets of downtown Tulsa.

  I was dressed in the realtor’s crumpled linen suit, while Sam – sitting in the back seat – wore the woman’s clothes, a modest white blouse, light cotton jacket and blue jeans.

  Just a real estate broker driving a client to her next property viewing.

  Kane was in the trunk, which he wasn’t keen on; but it hadn’t been the first time, and probably wouldn’t be the last.

  We had the people’s identification, and – although a close inspection would reveal the deception all too clea
rly – I thought it might be sufficient for a routine stop.

  It might not be, of course, which was why I also still had the handgun, placed between the bottom of my thigh and the car seat, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.

  ‘So where are we headed?’ Sam asked from the back seat.

  I turned to look at her, careful to keep one eye on the road ahead. ‘The honest answer?’ I asked her, and when she nodded her head, all I could do was shrug my shoulders apologetically. ‘The honest answer is that I have absolutely no idea.’

  Chapter Six

  To be fair, I did have an idea of sorts of where we were headed – but all it amounted to was ‘out of the downtown area’. Better than nothing, but I wasn’t sure it actually constituted a plan.

  When we had a place to stay, resting up there for a few days made sense; but after being forced to leave, what made sense now was to get the hell out of Dodge, as fast as we could.

  Daylight was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it made it easier to see our faces – which had been so liberally plastered over the news recently, and had probably made the morning papers – but on the other, it meant that downtown was jam-packed, the residential population of about five thousand swollen to more than forty thousand by workers, tourists and traveling business people. That many people crammed into less than two square miles would make finding us much harder for the police and sheriff’s office, who’d be trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  The car we were in was clean, and we looked nothing like the photographs that were in public circulation. But that wouldn’t last forever, and I wanted to risk moving while we could.

  Carson would undoubtedly have ordered the main routes out of downtown blocked since the discovery of that Toyota, but there must have been two dozen roads leading out from the inner dispersal loop that surrounded the area and it was inconceivable that there would be cops on every one of them.

  Making a break for it was a risk at this early stage in the game, but it was a risk worth taking.

  I took the BMW at a steady pace up North Main Street, heading north. It was an area of factories, and we passed a huge transport depot on our left, trucks lined up waiting to leave and enter through the massive chain-link gates.

  Up ahead, I could see the elevated section of Interstate 244 that provided the northern boundary of downtown Tulsa, and which I hoped to drive under, on our way out of the city.

  But even from this distance I could see the police patrol vehicles lying in wait and, without reacting too quickly – anxious not to appear suspicious – I turned the wheel, taking the sedan into the nearest parking lot as if that was what I had intended to do all along.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Sam asked from the back. ‘Why are we turning?’

  ‘Checkpoint on the road,’ I told her, looking ahead to see what our options were.

  ‘Do you think they saw us?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Not sure,’ I said, ‘but no reason to think they did. They can’t suspect every vehicle on the road.’ I wished I felt as confident as I sounded.

  We were in the parking lot of a construction site – the advertising hoardings on the fences described how they were building a new block of luxury condos here – and I breathed a sigh of relief; it certainly wouldn’t look out of place for a car bearing the sign for Real Deal Realty to be here.

  I pulled the car further in and traced my way between two dumper trucks which bordered the set of foundations being dug in the ground. Workers looked at the car but ignored it. I was, after all, just another realtor checking for future sales opportunities.

  ‘Look at what they’re doing,’ I told Sam, ‘like you’re a buyer checking out the site.’

  Sam did as I asked, and then I spotted a fence on the far side and trundled over toward it, passing a cement mixer and a set of mobile offices, and soon saw that there was a narrow gate. I directed the BMW toward it, and came out onto North Boston Avenue.

  There was another route north here under the I244, but the damn thing was blocked by another checkpoint.

  Damn, I thought. Had they actually put one on every road out of here?

  I turned south onto Boston, melting into the slow traffic there and once again trying my best not to attract attention.

  But before long, I saw a cruiser setting off after us, subtle at first but – when the driver realized the traffic between us was holding him up – the siren went on and I knew for sure that we were in trouble.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered under my breath as I checked the road ahead.

  ‘Colt,’ Sam said as she sat forward nervously in her seat, ‘what is it?’ Her head twitched. ‘Is that a siren?’ Then her head turned, and she gasped. ‘Oh no,’ she moaned helplessly. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘It’s gonna be okay,’ I tried to reassure her, but I was getting nervous too, as the traffic behind me started to pull over to let the cop car through.

  Observant sonsofbitches. After seeing me turn off rather than approach the checkpoint, they must have radioed the vehicle in to their colleagues – and when the next checkpoint over saw us pulling out and heading back in the opposite direction, alarm bells would have started ringing. It was possible they’d called Real Deal Realty, checked up on where their salesman should be; maybe the company had tried to call the realtor, had reported that he wasn’t answering his cell and couldn’t be located.

  But only a couple of minutes had passed between me making that turn, and the cop car putting its siren on. Would they have had time to do all that?

  I weighed it up, and decided it was possible, if they were switched on enough. I had no idea what Carson was promising these people, but it must have been something tempting. Normally you could drive a truckload of cannabis with the slogan ‘weed is good for you’ on the side through one of these checkpoints and the cops would miss it. We, on the other hand, seemed to be getting law enforcement’s undivided attention.

  As we reached an intersection, I spotted a large parking lot – hell, half of Tulsa seemed to be one great big parking lot – on the other side of the road, and directed the BMW into the traffic on East Archer Street, before cutting back right into the lot, collecting a ticket from the guy at the booth like I didn’t have a care in the world.

  The siren was still closing in on us – now joined by two more I thought, although I couldn’t tell from where – and Sam was starting to hyperventilate in the back seat, visions of being dragged back to her husband no doubt steamrolling through her mind.

  But I continued to steer the car calmly through the busy lot, aiming us toward the rear fence line. ‘Okay,’ I said to Sam, ‘we’ve got a situation here, but I need you to keep calm. Stay cool, okay?’ There was no reply from the back seat, just the sound of rapid, panicked breathing. ‘Okay?’ I asked more firmly.

  ‘O . . . Okay,’ Sam gasped. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘You keep cool, and do exactly as I say, and I might have a way out of this. I’m going to park the car soon,’ I continued, spotting a space opening up right at the back. ‘When I do, get out. And when you get out, do it calmly. Unhurried. Then I’m gonna open the trunk and let Kane out.’

  ‘And then what?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘And then we run like hell.’

  Chapter Seven

  There were two cruisers in the parking lot by the time I’d stopped the car, after reversing it into a space right at the back. They’d cut the sound, but the sirens still flashed blue across the lot.

  We got out casually, as the guy in the booth pointed out to the officers which way we’d gone; and still we moved casually as we moved to the trunk, even as the patrol cars raced through the lot toward us.

  I paused by the trunk, waiting.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sam cried. ‘Just let him out and let’s go! They’re almost here!’

  She was right, of course; time was of the essence, and we didn’t have a lot of it.

  But just a few more seconds . . . just
a few more seconds, if my hearing wasn’t tricking me.

  Then I saw what I was looking for, just as the cop cars rounded the corner toward us, and then my hand was hitting the release for the trunk, Kane leapt out – confirmation if any were needed that we were the people the police were after – and I turned to Sam and yelled, ‘Over the fence!’

  Kane went first, Sam and I following close on his trail as we leapt the low fence and hit the dirt embankment that led down to the rail tracks that I’d calculated – from the layout of the area – must have been there.

  There was a train coming on those tracks too, and it had been the sound of its great diesel engines that I’d been listening to, waiting for.

  ‘Colt!’ Sam shouted toward me as she stumbled down the embankment, and I took her by the wrist, pulling her across the first set of tracks with me even as the colossal locomotive barreled down the second set, which lay just twenty feet ahead of us now.

  We needed to clear it in time, and I pulled Sam harder, my legs working overtime as we sprinted together, breathless as we raced to get across the tracks before the train got there.

  ‘Stop!’ I heard the cops shouting from the lot behind us, voices faint over the tremendous roar of the oncoming train. ‘Stop or we’ll shoot!’

  A shot was fired, which I heard loud and clear just as the front of the locomotive emerged from under an elevated section of South Boston Avenue. Whether it was aimed at us or was merely a warning shot fired into the air, I never knew – for at that same moment we reached those second set of tracks and raced across them, the train bearing down on us so closely I could feel its heat.

  And then we were past it, safe on the other side where Kane was waiting for us, the bulk of the huge train now between us and our pursuers, cutting us off from them. For now, at least.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, taking off once more with Sam, heading left around a huge white stone building that bordered the tracks on the south side. The Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, I read on a sign as we ran past. It was a shame we couldn’t stop to have a look around; I was a bit of a jazz fan during my quieter moments. The Cole Porter tribute act looked tempting, but sticking around to watch it wouldn’t be the best bet in the world with what appeared to be the entire Oklahoma law enforcement brotherhood on our trail.