Get your game on, Maguire! You spent all that time in the can and didn’t learn how to run a simple scam? I had to distract this creep with something he wanted more than kinky bondage sex. Maybe an X-rated fantasy featuring sex-starved reform school nymphets?
“You got any knives stuck up your sleeves, bad girl?” Norbert asked. “Wouldn’t want any nasty surprises while we were having our fun.” He began groping and prodding, running his hands along my thighs, lifting the waistband of my pants to peek inside, rifling through my pockets. Wanda Kronenwetter’s treasures tumbled out. Lipstick, band-aids, Easy-Pleasy condoms . . .
He ignored everything else, focusing goggle-eyed on the condoms. He ripped the package open and they spilled out like colorful coins. Norbert picked one out and studied it, turning it over in his stubby fingers. “Goddamn,” he breathed. “You really are a bad girl, Mazie. So rubbers come in neon now?”
Play along with this.
“Yeah. And they glow in the dark.”
He stared at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. “You got men in that prison with you?”
Treading a fine line here, Maguire. Make a slip and you’ll get more of Norbert
than you’d bargained for.
“Oh, those babies aren’t for guys.” I was trying to sound flirtatious, but my
tendons were being stretched like saltwater taffy and it was all I could do not to shriek. “They’re what bad girls use on each other. I’ll show you if you cut me down.”
“Nope. You’re stayin’ right there until the cops come.” Leering at me, he ripped the wrapper off a red condom. “Think I’ll just try one of these on for size. What do you bad girls do with ’em? Put ’em on a zucchini or something?” He gave a nasty laugh.
“You want to know what bad girls do in prison, Norbert? All kinds of naughty stuff. Kinky stuff.”
“Kinky?”
“Know what my cellmate’s nickname is?”
His eyes snapped to mine. He was getting into this.
“Tina the Tongue,” I said.
Norbert ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “What’s she look like?”
“She’s from Brazil. She’s a model for a Brazilian bikini wax company.”
“One of them dark Latin types?”
“She makes Jennifer Lopez look like a pork carcass.”
More beer and sausage fumes in my face, his breath more rapid now.
“Tina had her boobs done before she went to prison,” I said. “She’s a forty-four.”
“Forty-four inches?”
“D cup.”
“Oh, man.”
“She holds the prison record for boob fighting.”
“I never heard of that.”
He’d taken the bait. I gazed around the room, trying to scope things out without making it too obvious. The shed’s front door was closed, but not locked. Small, narrow windows stood above double sinks. There was a swinging door at the far end of the shed that probably led to the milking parlor. If I could just get a five-foot lead on Norbert, I was sure I could outrun him. Get me into a cornfield and I’d be home free.
Norbert was getting impatient. “Tell me about the booby fights.”
Licking my dry lips, I tried to guess what would light Norbert’s wick. “Well, Fridays are Fun Nights, see, so we all get naked.”
“Like, completely no clothes?”
“Not a stitch. Then the bigger girls become the horsies and the smaller girls climb onto the horsies’ shoulders. They’ve got to knock their opponents off their horsies, but their hands are tied behind their backs and they can only use their boobies.”
I didn’t know which twisted part of my subconscious this was coming from, but it was working like a porn video; Norbert looked like he was about to have a stroke.
“So finally, after everyone’s been knocked off their horsies and we’re all hot, sweaty, and panting, we lie down on these long tables and Tina gives us Brazilian waxes—”
“Is that where you drop candle wax on each other’s titties?”
“Uh, yeah.” Don’t get out much, do you, Norbert? “Then we all sit around—we’re still naked, remember?—and we smoke some primo weed—”
“You got dope in prison?”
“You can get anything in prison, Norbert. Anything.” I tried to make my voice sound sexy, but it just came out sounding like I had a case of the flu. “After that we take out our Easy-Pleasys—”
“You mean them candy-colored condoms?”
“Yes. And then we . . .” I let my voice trail off.
“You what?”
“Can’t talk,” I moaned. “My arms hurt too much.” Not an act.
Norbert was at war. His brain was telling him I was shining him on, but Captain Winkie was in control here, and Captain Winkie wanted what he wanted. Norbert hesitated, clearly torn, then abruptly turned and hurried out through the shed’s rear door. As the door swung open, I caught a glimpse of cattle stanchions on the other side. I’d been right; it was the milking parlor. Norbert was back a few seconds later, brandishing wire cutters.
He scowled at me. “No funny business now.”
I nodded to indicate that I’d behave.
Norbert snipped the wire attached to the pipe and I crashed to the floor. “I ain’t taking off those wires on your wrists,” he growled, jerking me upright.
I nearly cried with the sweet relief of being able to move my arms.
“Now show me.” Norbert’s voice was hoarse. “Show me what the bad girls do.”
This was going to take some doing, because I’d been ad-libbing the entire scenario. I hoped I lived long enough to tell Tina Sanchez, mother of three—who had a mustache, stretch marks, and definitely did not bikini-wax her woo-woo—how she’d been transformed into a Brazilian sex goddess.
I stalled, flexing my aching shoulders to get my circulation going, thinking furiously. What did Norbert want to hear?
Something nasty. “Well, first you fill the thing with water.”
Norbert wasn’t taking chances; he hauled me along with him over to the sinks. He held on to me with one hand while he turned on the tap with the other, but discovered that this didn’t work because he couldn’t jimmy the condom onto the spigot with just one hand.
“You do it,” he snarled.
“Can’t.” I held up my wired hands.
“Kee-rist. This better be good.” He let go of my arm and used both hands to wrap the condom’s opening around the water tap.
Casually I took a half step backward.
The condom filled, stretching out like a party balloon, the lurid red turning transparent pink. Norbert watched in a state of sexual frenzy, too preoccupied to notice what I saw through the window. A state patrol cruiser was silently pulling into his driveway.
“You’re doing great,” I encouraged Norbert, edging back a bit more, figuring I had about fifteen seconds before the cops waked in. “You’re using warm water, aren’t you?”
“Hell, no. You didn’t say it had to be warm.”
“Switch it over to hot.” My voice shook. Every part of my body shook.
The gushing water camouflaged the sound of the slamming car door. Now grotesquely distended, the condom resembled the world’s most unappetizing watermelon.
“So I’m thinking this thing works like a two-man saw,” said Norbert, breathing rapidly. It was going to be a race as to which burst first, the condom or Norbert. “One bad girl pushes while the other one pulls.”
Through the window, I watched the trooper stride toward the shed.
“Tie a knot in the end,” I told Norbert, taking another step backward.
Tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Norbert worked at the knot.
“Now squeeze it. Make it into a shape,” I coached.
“What shape?”
“What do you think, Norbert?” One and a half baby steps back. I tensed all my muscles.
“I get it,” he said, giggling. “Long enough for two bad girls.”
He squeezed the center of the condom. It exploded.
Norbert yelled in shock. The shed door banged open. The trooper burst in and spun toward Norbert, startled at the yell. Going into a crouch, he whipped out his gun and aimed it at Norbert.
I bolted toward the shed’s rear door and barreled into the barn’s milking parlor—empty now with the cows already milked. The room was dark after the brightness of the shed and I was temporarily blind, unable to find the door leading outside. Blundering around in the murk, I stumbled across a set of crude wooden steps. Behind me, the door banged open and Norbert detonated into the barn, the trooper right behind.
“Hold it!” yelled the trooper.
I practically levitated up the steps.
Norbert was across the barn in a flash, boiling up the stairs behind me, his head popping up out of the stairwell like an ugly rodent in a whack-a-mole game, water streaming from his hair and face. The instant my feet hit the second-floor deck, I heaved over the trap door, smashing the heavy planks down on Norbert’s greasy head. Take that, you stinking pervert!
Judging from the string of curses, Norbert had toppled onto the trooper. I didn’t inquire; I wove through the junkyard of prehistoric-looking mowers, reapers, and loaders on the second floor, trying to find a way out. There it was, just a couple of yards away—the floor-to-ceiling track doors at the far end of the barn.
Just as I reached them, the doors rolled open with a thunderous boom. A uniformed county cop stood silhouetted there, blinking as his eyes acclimated to the gloom of the barn. Beside him a snarling German shepherd strained at its leash.
“She’s up here,” the cop yelled to someone behind him. “I got her!”
Behind me the trap door banged open and the state trooper emerged from the stairwell.
“I got her,” the trooper yelled.
In that split second of jurisdictional horn-locking, I darted behind a corn smut chucker and began tacking my way through the machinery. Norbert, frothing at the snout and apparently believing the reward applied whether I was dead or alive, pounded across the floor bellowing about how he was going to wring my weasely little neck. Some dumbbell fired his gun. Pigeons erupted from the rafters in great fluttering swarms, rats streaked across the floor, and I darted from machine to machine, vying with the rats for hiding places. Walkie-talkies blared, dogs barked, cops argued over who had command of the situation, and emergency vehicles, sirens screaming full blast, poured onto the property as though it were the site of a 747 crash.
I leaped onto Norbert’s grain escalator, a tall, narrow metal chute used to move heavy loads upward. It was angled at a steep but still-climbable pitch. While my pursuers hunted me below, I inched up the escalator, hoping nobody would think to look up. I was halfway up when my foot slipped and I crashed to my knees. The hollow metal rang like a steel drum. Every head in the barn jerked up.
I looked down. Norbert lumbered over to the escalator, snatched up the machine’s power cord, and plugged it into an extension cord. The escalator suddenly clattered to life, its cogged belt hauling me upward, Norbert cackling below.
“Come down, Mazie!” the trooper yelled.
Yeah, right. The escalator was carrying me up, up, up. Up to the barn’s rafters, three stories above the barn floor. And at the end of the escalator there was . . .
An open cargo door framing a square of bright blue sky.
Below, Norbert and the Smoky were wrestling over the extension cord, Norbert clutching it tightly in his grimy fists.
“Shoot the sonovabitch!” one of the cops growled. I hoped he meant Norbert. I was desperately trying to scoot back down the chute now, but the thing was cranking along at twenty-five miles an hour. I was five feet from the open cargo hatch . . . four . . . three . . . and then the escalator spat me over the edge.
Frantically I grabbed at the machine’s underlip with my wired hands. The steel slots kept turning, battering my knuckles. My legs thrashed into empty space. A pigeon nesting on the tackle block above the door observed me with beady pink eyes. Far below I could see the manure-caked cement of the cow yard. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and TV vans were all converging on the farm, people running every which way like ants pouring out of a stepped-on anthill.
My eyes swiveled back to the barnyard, with its mountain of manure. My fingers were starting to lose their grip on the escalator. Why was it I always seemed to wind up in high places with no place to go but down?
A cop must have rammed a cattle prod up Norbert’s ass, because the escalator abruptly stopped. I felt it vibrating as someone in hard-soled shoes clambered up. A man appeared in the cargo doorway. From my position I had a good view of his nostrils. We stared at each other for a long moment, then I said, “You’re Irving Katz.”
He nodded. In real life he was much better-looking than on TV. His eyes were so dark they were almost black. His mustache looked as though each hair had been clipped individually. He wore a button-down shirt, a tie with muted stripes, and an expensive-looking suit jacket feathered with hay chaff. He was as out of place crouched on a grain escalator as Norbert Lautenbacher would have looked on Macy’s mezzanine.
“You don’t look like a marshal,” I said.
The corners of his eyes crinkled. “You want I should wear a ten-gallon hat?”
My fingers slipped down a couple more inches. “You’re from New York?” I asked when my heart had resumed pumping blood.
“Busted.”
“How come you’re here?”
“In the wilds of Minnesota, you mean?”
Annoyance cut through my pangs of terror. We cheeseheads hate being confused with those lutefisk-eaters across the river.
“Wisconsin.”
He gave a potato-pohtahto shrug. “I pissed off the wrong people.”
This was probably the most bizarre conversation I’d had in my life. “What if you don’t catch me?”
“Then they’ll send me somewhere worse. Maybe Idaho, to nail guys with twelve-year-old wives.” He levered himself farther out the window, extending his hand until it nearly grazed my knuckles.
“Don’t!” Was this guy nuts? He was going to overbalance, kill himself, and ruin his expensive suit. “You’ll fall.”
“Nah. I’m braced. Come on, Mazie—grab my hand. I’m tougher than those cowboy marshals. I won’t let you drop.”
I looked up into the licorice eyes. “I didn’t kill my husband.”
He looked back at me, unsmiling, then, as though channeling Marshal Gerard in The Fugitive, said, “I don’t care.”
His fingers wiggled invitingly, inches above my own, like worms on a fishing line. All I had to do was bite. Not far away, some enterprising firefighter was backing a hook and ladder truck in my direction. I was willing to bet there was a four-story extension ladder on that truck.
You’ll never take me alive, copper.
I’ve always wanted to say that.
I didn’t have the breath left to say it, though. I simply released my hold on the elevator, flailed my arms and legs, and soared into space.
Escape tip #9:
You can’t go wrong with basic black.
Accessorize with white.
I landed in a pile of poop, a mini-mountain of cow manure and straw bedding ten feet tall and twenty feet long. I could see now why Norbert wanted a new manure spreader.
Cow manure has a lot of uses. Applied to fields, it grows crops. Burned, it’s a mosquito repellent, although I personally planned to stick to OFF. But the best thing about manure? It’s soft enough to break a human’s fall from a height of four stories. I knew this because my brothers had once dared me to jump onto our farm’s manure pile from the cargo door of our barn. Of course I did it. I burped cow poop for a week.
Another advantage of manure? It’s a natural lubricant; I was able to wriggle out of the wire binding in seconds. I corkscrewed myself out of the muck, rump-skied down the hill, heaved myself to my feet, and took off running.
Stunned by my suici
de leap, the law enforcement people just stood there, jaws agape. This gave me a heartbeat’s head start, but within seconds they were hard on my heels—cops and yelping dogs and reporters and camera crews—everyone yelling contradictory orders and getting in one another’s way.
Galloping over a rise, I blundered straight into the Lautenbacher cow herd. They were Holstein cows—the black-and-white spotted ones that star on all the Wisconsin postcards. Holsteins are big and bulky, but unless they have a newborn calf or their teats are pulled too hard they’re shy and gentle.
There must have been thirty or forty Holsteins in this herd. I threaded my way between the cows, who were standing companionably in the shade of an elm tree, chewing their cuds or just staring aimlessly into space with their pretty, long-lashed eyes, thinking their cow thoughts. Cows like things to be quiet and predictable. This would be a cow’s ideal week:
Monday: Eat alfalfa, poop, stare into space.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday—same as Monday.
Now the circus had come to town. Cops and dogs and people with big, scary-looking cameras were hurtling over the rise. Cows don’t like surprises. Cows don’t like strangers. And cows really, really don’t like dogs.
The dogs had broken loose from their trainers and were dashing around, forgetting they were supposed to be capturing a wanted fugitive, and going berzerko on the poor Holsteins, barking and snapping at them. The panicked cows stampeded, their big, heavy-veined udders swinging as they bowled over cops, trampled expensive TV equipment, and lashed out at the irksome dogs with their surprisingly powerful hind legs.
I risked a glance over my shoulder. Katz was barreling through the herd, zigzagging around cows like a wide receiver eluding tacklers. He was in shape; he looked like a guy who ran every day; he was catching up. But he was dressed wrong for a rundown in his slick-soled shoes; he slipped on a cow pie and went down hard.
In my manure-smeared white shirt and black pants, I blended into the Holstein herd like a chocolate chip into a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Screened by a trio of bellowing heifers, I crashed through a thorny hedge and found myself in a field. Sunflowers this time, splashing up a hillside in a carpet of waving golden heads. Bleeding from wire gouges and thorn scratches, I belly-crawled through the sunflowers, smearing the roots with blood and manure. Mazie Maguire, the Amazing Human Fertilizer! Emerging at last from the sunflowers, I paused to consider my next move.
The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam Page 7
