The Thousand Dollar Escape

by J. T. Brannan

  There must have been a cordon put around the area at some stage, but I worked my way through it, the encroaching night working to my advantage, and eventually made my way to the Turner Turnpike. There had been flashing lights along the road that lit up the night, but I bided my time and finally risked crossing the highway on foot, waiting for a break in the traffic.

  I found myself in an industrial area, and soon managed to steal a light truck from the lot of Green Bay Packaging. Sitting down was a blessed relief from walking, but driving the truck was agony with my various injuries – the steering and the clutch were heavy, and every movement I made was like somebody was slashing me with razor blades while beating me with a hammer at the same time.

  But I gritted my teeth and drove south, worrying the whole way that I was going to get pulled over by the cops at any moment.

  There were no roadblocks that I saw though, and I supposed that they simply hadn’t had time to launch an operation of the magnitude required. Besides which, they assumed I was on foot, probably still in that neighborhood near the shopping mall. They were more likely going door to door to see if I was holed up somewhere in that rabbit warren of houses and industrial units.

  But I wanted to stay off the main roads, and so let the truck’s satellite navigation unit guide me. Following the lady’s instructions, I eventually crossed the Turner Turnpike via the bridge on West 81st Street South, then followed a variety of turns west and north, running along quiet country roads that ran roughly parallel to Oklahoma State Highway 97 going north to Sand Springs.

  I took the truck as far as Prattville, just south of Sand Springs, where I abandoned it in the deserted lot round the back of a discount tire store. I was just about ready to pass out by then, and my next stop was utterly vital to my ongoing survival – the nearby Walgreens pharmacy.

  It had closed at six that night, but that wasn’t an issue as it was going to be a covert visit – in other words, I was going to break in and steal a shitload of drugs.

  Even in my semi-delirious stupor, I was able to defeat the alarm system and get inside without anybody being the wiser, and I went through those medical cabinets with a vengeance. I taped up my ribs, re-bandaged by shoulder, cleaned up and disinfected the open wounds on my leg, then bandaged those up, then self-prescribed every painkiller I could find except morphine.

  To be fair, I could have consumed more, but I wanted to keep my wits about me and was willing to put up with a certain degree of discomfort in order to go through with the rest of my plan for that night.

  I used the office computer while I was there too, using online records and files to get a home address for Chief of Police Donald P. Carson.

  He might have taken Sam back to the station, and I’d check there first, but my gut instinct was that he would have taken her home. She was a victim in the eyes of the media, so why would he take her to the station? Home would be the logical choice.

  Feeling better, I left an I.O.U for four hundred and fifty-six dollars and eighty-four cents on the counter and left Walgreens, locking the doors and re-setting the alarm system behind me.

  Next, I hotwired a car from the Oklahoma Department of Transportation just over the road – knowing that nobody would notice it missing until the next morning – and proceeded north to Sand Springs.

  My first stop was the motel where I’d been staying before I’d been for that night out on the town with Ricci. To my surprise, there was no police presence there, and – still cautious – I slipped quietly into my room, to get my backpack and some useful supplies.

  I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised that nobody had found out where I was staying – police presence was being concentrated on the physical pursuit, and everything else would have been secondary to that. Sand Springs PD simply wouldn’t have had the personnel to perform the sort of wide-scale search that would have been needed.

  The priority would have been to find me and then – if they did find me – they wouldn’t have cared much where I’d been staying anyway. The only time that they’d have dedicated any resources into finding out where I’d been staying would have been if the pursuit had turned cold, and they needed clues to help find me.

  After leaving my motel, I carried on to the PD headquarters, where there had been a full-on media circus. I kept my distance, but I could see that Carson’s cruiser wasn’t parked there – which is what led me to lying in the shadows outside his home address at two o’clock in the morning.

  I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t even been two full days since this whole insane business had started. I’d heard those boots outside Ricci’s apartment at about six the morning before, and I’d probably seen more crazy shit in the last forty-four hours than most people see in a lifetime.

  As I stretched out my aching body, preparing to move, I wondered if I shouldn’t perhaps consider trying to live like those people.

  Things would be a lot safer that way.

  But at the end of the day, I knew that wasn’t who I was.

  I was the Thousand Dollar Man, and I rose from the shadows, ready to do what I was born to do.

  Chapter Two

  There was a media presence near the chief’s house too, but the cops had obviously set up a perimeter that they weren’t allowed to penetrate and – for the time being at least – they were respecting that.

  But there were cameras and reporters unnervingly close, and I was going to have to do this as covertly as possible if I was going to have any chance of getting Sam out of there.

  Luckily, I didn’t routinely carry guns – it wasn’t that I didn’t like them, only that the penalties for being caught with unlicensed forearms were a lot more severe – and therefore the weapons from my backpack were perfectly suited to this type of silent operation.

  Although I still hadn’t seen Sam, I knew that she must be in there. Carson’s cruiser was outside, and the presence of his special crew indicated he wanted some ‘alone time’ without being unduly disturbed.

  And if she was there, she was running out of time.

  I crept forward to the first cop car, my rules of engagement clear – if anyone got in my way, I would do everything in my power to stop them.

  I crept right up to the driver’s side door, crouched down under the window. I tapped the door, then tapped again, then waited until the driver inevitably wound down his window to take a look.

  At that point I rose up fast, jamming the butt of my extendable metal baton into the man’s temple, at the same time swinging a second baton round into the next man’s face. The passenger shuddered with the impact and tried to get his weapon out, but I moved too quickly, reaching in to give him the same treatment as his friend, the butt of the first baton right into his temple.

  With both men down, I cuffed them, gagged them and took one of their radios; and then I crept across the dark street toward car number two, parked even closer to the house.

  I did the same trick here, with only slight modification due to their slightly different positions in the car; the second guy dropped his gun and was bent over trying to pick it up, and therefore got his first baton strike over the top of his head instead of in his face.

  With the four cops looking after exterior security out of the way, it was time to work my way inside.

  Keeping to the shadows cast by walls, hedges and vehicles, I slowly edged my way onto the property, which was a two-story home of about fifteen hundred square feet, with a small and well-kept front yard and a larger lot out the back.

  With the lights on inside, I could see that there were two guys in the living room watching the TV, while the rest were in the kitchen playing cards. I’d been watching them for long enough to rule out anyone being in the bathroom, and adding another number to the chart.

  It was six men, not including the chief himself, and I recognized a couple of people that I’d fought with outside Ricci’s.

  I edged round to the kitchen window, low underneath the ledge, and listened to them chatting through the open
window.

  ‘Still haven’t heard shit for a while down there,’ one of the men said. ‘Do you think everything’s okay?’

  ‘Hell,’ another man said – maybe, I thought, the tough-looking guy with the mustache, ‘he’s had one helluva day, you know? He needs to blow off some steam.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said another, ‘the bitch has got it coming to her, right? But that gunshot – do you reckon he . . . you know. . .’

  ‘Killed her?’ said Mustache. ‘Nah, probably not. Not yet anyway, he wants to have his fun with her first. Probably just fucking with her.’

  The guys laughed, and I wanted to break in there immediately and kill them all.

  And what was that shit about a gunshot? Had he killed her? I remembered Carson’s ominous words about where he was going to put the barrel of his pistol, and I wondered if he’d gone through on that promise.

  I shook my head, clearing it, getting ready.

  It was quiet down there, the first guy had said, which indicated that Don Carson had her underneath the level of the kitchen, no doubt in some kind of basement; and the fact that they could presumably hear things before, meant that the entrance was very probably right there in the kitchen.

  But with the limited time I had, there was only one way to find out for sure.

  I was going in.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Guys,’ I said over the radio as I crouched in the bushes by the front door, ‘you better get out here, something weird’s going on.’

  ‘Say again,’ came a voice, ‘say again. What’s happening?’

  But already I could hear movement coming from inside, tables and chairs being moved to one side as people stood up and started to hurry for the door.

  ‘Quickly!’ I said. ‘I can’t – arrgghh!’

  I cut the transmission off and waited for the door to open.

  It happened only a second later, the big door almost wrenched off its hinges – but before the first man could get out I was already moving in, swinging my baton in an arc that took the first guy in the throat, before chopping down at the second, slamming the next baton straight into the top of his skull.

  I saw the others going for their guns and dropped the batons to the tiled hallway floor, hands darting to my pockets and withdrawing the blades which rested there.

  They were shaken, the wheel-shaped, spiked style of shuriken throwing star made infamous by Japan’s medieval ninja warriors – just one more set of goodies from my backpack’s bag of tricks.

  I flicked them up in the blink of an eye, beating the cops to the draw, and two men took the star-shaped blades in their heads and necks, one pair apiece.

  They fell in silence to the floor, and the mustached guy from outside Ricci’s was moving in toward me fast, another – much bigger – man joining him from the opposite side.

  I dodged the reach of the first man, drawing a balisong – a serpentine-bladed Filipino flick-knife – from another pocket and slashing across the midriff of the second with it.

  Blood spurted across the hallway floor, but he managed to grab my knife hand anyway; but I used that against him, turning him back into the path of the first man before pulling out a secondary knife with my other hand and jabbing it hard into his unprotected ribs, again and again, sure to puncture his lung and spleen.

  He let go of my wrist as he dropped to the ground, dead or dying, and then I saw that Mustache was halfway to the floor, where he was going to try and pick up one of the fallen handguns.

  I moved into him just as he managed to get a grip of the weapon and turn it toward me, slashing at the underside of his wrist with the balisong. He dropped the gun and yelled in pain, one gigantic hand gripping me by the throat as the other knocked the smaller knife from my hand.

  I jerked forward with the balisong, but his hand found my injured shoulder then, fingers biting deep into the wound and – even with all the painkillers I’d taken – my nervous system almost shut down with the sudden agony. I dropped the knife and didn’t even react when his forehead smashed forward into my face.

  And still he held onto me, one hand on my throat, the other on – in – my shoulder.

  I drove him backward into one of the walls, but he shook it off and turned me round, opening up the space for my next – and maybe final, if he kept that grip around my neck for any longer – move.

  I let my body give backwards, and – feeling his balance go forward – he reacted instinctively by pulling back himself; and as he did so, I entwined my leg into his with o uchi gari, the major inner reaping throw from judo, and pulled back with that leg even as my body crashed forward into his.

  The resulting pendulum-like action took the man over onto the ground, and – as he panicked and tried to save his fall – both hands left my body.

  I let my bodyweight land on him, knocking the air out of his lungs and maybe breaking a rib or two, then planted a head-butt into his face before rolling off and grabbing for the small knife that lay nearby.

  But he recovered more quickly than I expected, and grabbed the balisong as he stood up opposite me, a grin across his bloody face.

  ‘Looks like mine’s bigger than yours,’ he said happily, twirling the blade about in front of him. ‘Time for payback for what you did this morning.’

  ‘It’s not the size that matters,’ I reminded him as he swung the balisong toward my throat, trapping the arm at the elbow with one hand while thrusting hard upward with my own knife, stabbing into his exposed armpit.

  ‘It’s how you use it,’ I continued, leaving the small knife sticking out of his body as I stripped the balisong out of his hand in the blink of eye, drawing it fast across his throat before jamming it up under his chin, serpentine blade passing through his jaw, tongue and the roof of his mouth before the hilt hit the chin too, point of the blade buried nearly high enough to tickle the guy’s brain.

  His eyes crossed as the blood from his throat pulsed out over me, then they closed and he fell to the ground, dead.

  There was movement from the first pair by the door, and I picked up a baton and gave them both the good news again, knocking them back into unconsciousness.

  I sighed, trying to ignore the pain that was starting to race once more through my entire body.

  The first stage was over with now, all cops down with the minimum of noise, although hardly the minimum of effort. If I’d been fully fit, it might have been different – faster, more clinical, and decidedly less painful, for me at least.

  But there wasn’t time for excuses – now it was phase two of the plan.

  Find the basement door, get down there, and save Samantha Carson from her husband once and for all.

  Chapter Four

  I was worried about noise before – the reason I’d not taken the cops’ guns from the cars outside – but now I was at the final step, I threw caution to the wind and approached the basement door with a pistol in each hand.

  It was in the kitchen like I’d thought, a narrow wooden door around the back of the massive fridge-freezer that couldn’t be seen from outside the house.

  I tested the handle, and the door opened freely.

  I took a deep breath, and entered the lion’s den.

  There were lights at the bottom, but – worryingly – no sounds at all.

  My pulse increased as I wondered if the guy upstairs had been right, if Carson had shot her already; and if so, if he was just down here filled with bad vibes, dark thoughts, and a loaded pistol.

  I was careful going down those stairs, but they opened up to the basement in a way that would show my legs to Carson long before I would be able to see him; and that wasn’t a winning strategy in anybody’s book.

  And so – before I got to the point where my feet and legs would be seen – I decided to change my approach. Instead of creeping in slowly, I would attack hard and fast.

  So I did, leaping down the stairs two at a time, reaching the bottom while processing all the visual information I could and jumping across the room as bull
ets tore at the staircase behind me.

  I hit the floor and rolled, coming up into a crouch with my twin guns aimed at the firer, finger halfway down on the trigger.

  But the shooter wasn’t Don Carson.

  It was Sam, and we both realized who we were about to shoot at the same time; she stopped firing, and I let my finger relax on the trigger. The look on her face went from one of abject fear to one of relief, and I was pretty sure that mine might well have done the same.

  But what had happened here?

  And that’s when I saw Donald P. Carson, chief of the Sand Springs Police Department, spread-eagled on the basement floor, face down in a fetid mass of blood, shit and piss.

  Sam ran to me, gun down as she embraced me, and I hugged her right back, arms tight around her.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked softly.

  ‘You were right,’ she breathed. ‘I already knew everything I needed to know.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t have to be afraid.’ She smiled, tears coming at the same time. ‘I really didn’t.’

  I relaxed my hold on her and moved away, toward her husband, thinking that maybe – just maybe – I knew what she might have done.

  I put my hands on his waist and shoulder and rolled Carson onto his back, the blood leaking out of him as I did so.

  I immediately saw the gunshot wound to his torso, a clean neat hole right in the middle of his uniformed chest.

  The piss and shit would have come when he was shot, his body losing control of its functions as he died. Natural, but unpleasant as hell.

  But I also saw his face, which I knew Sam must have destroyed with her own hands; the skin was scratched, an ear was missing, and both eyes were bloody, one almost half gone from the socket.

  ‘He started to hit me,’ Sam said, ‘as soon as we got down here, slapped me around and put this gun inside me, told me he was going to pull the trigger.’ She shrugged, face blank. ‘Then I remembered what you said, that all I needed was rage, and at that moment that’s exactly what I had – pure, hot, terrifying rage – and I raked my fingernails down his face, he pulled the gun out but I barely even realized, just dug my thumbs into the corners of his eyes like you said, tried to turn them to the outside, almost got one all the way out, and I bit down on his ear, and that came off easy.’