The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  The roommate looked at Hobbs with wide eyes and shook his jowls as if the momentum could make the whole thing a bad dream. Hobbs knew that the roommate was going to scream before the fat man realized it himself. Hobbs rolled across his bed and staggered to his feet. The roommate sucked in air to scream. Hobbs got to him before he could let it out.

  Mr. Ray’s scrubs were too big for Hobbs. He cuffed the pants and tucked the shirt in as best he could. He tore his hospital gown in half and stuffed half into each of the nurse’s shoes. They were uncomfortable, but they stayed on his feet.

  Hobbs walked calmly past the nurses’ station without looking. The trick to doing something wrong and getting away with it was to do it as if you did it all the time. Hobbs flashed the card at the sensor and pushed through the doors into the elevator lobby. He pressed the button and looked around as though he were bored. Only then did he risk a glance at the nurses’ station. It was empty.

  In the parking lot, he found Mr. Ray’s car by walking around and clicking the key fob until he heard a chirp. It was a beat-up Pontiac Firebird with an aftermarket alarm system and a plastic scrotum and balls dangling from the rear bumper. Big nuts with nothing to back them up. Hobbs thought that summed up Mr. Ray’s life in a nutshell. And then he never thought of him again.

  The majority of the cars in the lot had North Carolina license plates on them. He had made it that far north? He was tougher than he’d thought. Tougher than he felt for sure. He really didn’t remember much of the end of it. Inside the car he checked Mr. Ray’s wallet and saw that his address was indeed in Charlotte, North Carolina. It had been years, nearly thirty, since he had been here. And he didn’t remember much about that either. Just a payroll job at a mill on the north end of town that he had bailed out of when it had gone wrong.

  He smiled. Maybe that job could come to something good after all these years. A plan began to take shape in his head. He felt weak, but good. He went through the glove box and checked under and behind the seats. No firearms. No cell phone. All clear. He had 120 dollars in cash from Mr. Ray’s wallet, and he figured he had until morning, if his luck held, before word was out on the Firebird.

  Cameras would make him leaving the nasty five-story Brutalist building he had just escaped from. Rest home? Hobbs snorted. He turned the engine and the headlights leapt across the badly kept lawn. That was a prison. A slow-motion death row with no appeals. Better to be hunted than to be caged.

  FOUR

  Detective Mazerick looked at the crime scene and couldn’t stop chuckling. The nursing home administrator hovered outside the door and shot Mazerick a dirty look every time he snickered, but Mazerick couldn’t stop himself. And why should he care about that dink? He didn’t know what it was like to be murder police. He especially didn’t know what it was like to have your partner catch it. Not from a shootout or cancer or any dramatic TV bullshit like that. Nope, just running a red light while drunk and getting T-boned by a Caddy.

  All well and good for Jimson, his troubles had come to an end. Mazerick was the one who was left behind, still holding down a full caseload, one man doing the work of two until a suitable replacement could be found. He was buried in the grind of a job that would burn people out with an ordinary caseload. So Mazerick took his yuks where he could get them. And this? This was funny.

  He chuckled again and heard the administrator sigh with exasperation. That made him chuckle some more. It was a grim sense of humor that kept you going in this job.

  He sucked his teeth and asked the uniformed cop at the door, “You ever hear of anybody breaking out of a rest home before?”

  The cop shook his head.

  “Can you blame him?” Mazerick asked.

  The cop shook his head again.

  “You ever want to make detective?” Mazerick asked. The uniform, a young kid with a shaved head, nodded. Of course he did. “Then step in here and help me talk this through.”

  The uniform asked, “What happened to your partner?”

  “See that, a natural detective—he had an accident. I just need somebody to talk at, so, you know…shut up. OK, so Mr. Doe, former occupant of this bed, is brought here in a coma, three weeks ago. Severely dehydrated, two gunshot wounds, a concussion, and injuries consistent with a”—here he flipped open the file and read—“vigorous physical beating.”

  “Who’d he piss off?” asked the uniform.

  “Whom, had to be multiple guys—the GSWs were already treated when he was picked up…behind a Dumpster behind a Bojangles on South Tryon.”

  “Who is a plural.”

  “What?” said Mazerick, looking up from the file.

  “Who or whom doesn’t make a difference.”

  “Seriously, you’re correcting my grammar? That’s just obnoxious. It’s not going to help you rise in the ranks, that’s for sure.” He turned back to the empty bed. “So our guy, who is evidently popular with a range of unknown persons, wakes up from his coma, takes a few days to get his legs under him. Then kills a nurse and escapes.”

  “What about the guy in the other bed?” the uniform asked.

  “I questioned him downstairs in the clinic. But it’s a pain in the ass to get information out of a guy with a broken jaw. Says he saw the guy kill the nurse, but other than that he doesn’t know anything. Except that Mr. Doe was the devil and he was most certainly going to hell.”

  “Why doesn’t Mr. Doe just walk out?” asked the uniform.

  “Good question, wrong question, but a good question. He doesn’t just walk out because they won’t let him. But the better question is, why doesn’t he just stay?”

  “What?”

  “Kick back, enjoy the Ensure, rest and heal. Why is he in such a hurry?”

  Mazerick looked at the room again to give the uniform time to figure it out.

  “Somebody was after him!” said the uniform.

  “That’s one,” said Mazerick. “What’s the other one?” This time Mazerick waited so long, he ran out of patience. So he answered his own question: “Or he was after somebody or something and was worried about running out of time.”

  “He could just be angry,” offered the uniform.

  Mazerick squinted and waggled his open hand from side to side. “Kinda weak.”

  “So who is this old boy?”

  “Yeah,” said Mazerick, “that’s the thing. Who is this guy? And right now we don’t know. And we’ve got no way of knowing. All we got is a stolen car maybe six hours old, some prints that don’t match anything, some pictures, and some shitty surveillance cam footage. Unless he’s stupid and we catch him, we may never know who he is or what he wants.”

  A female voice from the doorway said, “I know who he is.”

  Mazerick and the uniform turned to see a woman in a dark-blue suit. Mazerick immediately thought, Naughty librarian. And a split second after, he thought, There goes that sensitivity training the city paid for. Screw them, this lady was one of those suits who managed to turn the line between professional and sexy into a demilitarized zone—a place where you knew action should happen, but if it ever did, you just knew that shit would be going all the way wrong.

  Thick blond hair, white blouse straining to hold its contents in, dark-red nail polish, and, at the very end, the badge and ID wallet that read “FBI.” He tried not to let his biological reaction show; that was just a sure way to piss off a broad like this. And he had an overwhelming urge to try to make her happy.

  “Great,” said Mazerick, “but who are you?”

  “Special Agent Wellsley, FBI,” she said. Mazerick loved the way she pronounced all three syllables. F-B-I, her upper teeth pinning her lower lip as she enunciated the F.

  “FBI,” joked Mazerick. “You gonna take over this domestic rest home terrorist case? Snatch this nurse murder from my plate?”

  “Actually,” Agent Wellsley said, displaying a humility that Mazerick had not expected from an FBI agent, “I was hoping for a little cooperation.”

  “Yeah, sure,” sa
id Mazerick, “but by the time I’m done, we’ll probably have him in the bag. He’s a feeble old man, we got the car he’s driving, he doesn’t have any credit cards. He’s gonna leave a trail like he’s dropping glowing bread crumbs.”

  “I hope you’re right, Detective…”

  “Mazerick, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am?” asked Wellsley, playing at being offended.

  “Eh, sorry, I moved down here from New York a few years back, it just kinda rubbed off.”

  Agent Wellsley smiled. Mazerick liked it.

  FIVE

  Hobbs had started north on little more than instinct. When he saw signs for the interstate, he jumped on the superslab. It was forty-five minutes of drone and wind before he saw what he was looking for. It came in the form of a train station. At four forty-five in the morning he pulled into the Amtrak parking lot in Salisbury, North Carolina. He eased the Firebird into a spot in the back and killed the engine. There weren’t many lights in the lot, and back here the illumination came from a couple of old-fashioned frosted globe streetlights with a tree growing around them. Hobbs sat in the darkness until his eyes adjusted.

  He had to fight off the urge to sleep. He knew he sorely needed it. But he needed to make one more move before he could rest for a while. Still, he felt fatigue pulling him down. When one eye drooped, he snapped upright in his seat, asking himself, “You want to rest in jail?”

  He scanned the lot until he found something that would work. Four spots over, an ancient but well-loved pickup truck. Ancient, thought Hobbs. He remembered when that model was new. It was back when he was new. He reached up and clawed the plastic dome off the Firebird’s cabin light. Then he pulled out the bulb so he wouldn’t call attention to himself or ruin his night vision when he opened the door.

  He got out of the car and groaned with the effort of unfolding. He stepped into the landscaped median that separated the rows of parking spaces. He stood motionless in the shadows. The only thing he could hear in this town was his breathing. Then he heard the stoplight change on Main Street.

  He saw a light play across the storefronts on the far side of the street. Then he fell down. He had meant to kneel gently by one of the trees, but there was a pain and his leg gave out. He heard something crack and hoped it was just one of his old joints.

  It was bad to move fast. The eye is attracted to fast-moving things, especially in low light. Nothing for it now. So he lay on the ground and watched the police car glide past. Was it looking for something in particular? Couldn’t be. Sure they had to have him on cameras, but had they gotten the word out that fast? He was sixty miles away. They couldn’t have gotten the word out that fast. But, as Hobbs slowed and aged, there seemed to be no limit to how fast everything around him became.

  The police car disappeared at the far end of the street. Hobbs decided the cop was just bored and on a regular patrol.

  He got up slowly and it hurt. He limped to the old truck and tried the driver’s side door. Locked. Then he pressed his hand against the window and slid it down. Old truck meant old parts. Old parts meant that sometimes there was enough play in the window that it would slide down and give him the space to reach in and pull the door lock. But not this one. Then he tried the triangular little window at the front of the door, but it didn’t budge either.

  Hobbs worked his way around to the passenger side, stopping to feel the top of each tire and the well under the rear bumper. He came up empty, but then he tried the window trick on the passenger window and it slid down about three inches. He worked his hand and arm through the door, then pulled up on the lock mechanism. The door was well greased and opened without a sound. Somebody was going to miss this truck.

  He switched off the interior light and waited. He thought he heard something, so he pulled his head out of the pickup and listened for a long time. A sharp pain went through his skull, reminding him that he was tired, too tired. There wasn’t even wind. The air on this hot Southern night just hung in place and sweated.

  He leaned into the car and reached underneath the dash and made a sharp jerk. He came up with three wires. He squinted at them for a second, but couldn’t make out the colors. He stripped them, one at a time, with his teeth, making sure not to ground himself against any of the metal in the mostly metal cab. After everything he’d been through, there was no need to take twelve volts in the mouth. When he had them stripped, he cupped the overhead light and turned it back on. He needed only a sliver to see which wire was which.

  He slid in behind the wheel and closed the passenger side door behind him quietly. He wondered, wait for the cop to pass again, or chance it? Better to be active than passive. Besides, if he were that cop he’d be asleep somewhere by now.

  Before he touched the wires together, he felt around and found the manual choke knob. It wouldn’t need much on a hot night like tonight, but a little wouldn’t hurt. He pulled it out halfway. Then he twisted the red and the blue wires together. When he touched the black to them, the engine sputtered and tried to start. He gave it a little gas and the good old truck turned right over and purred.

  He dropped the column shift into place and eased it out of the lot. There was a lot of life left in this old truck, and for the first time since he’d woken up in that rest home, he felt some hope for the future.

  As he merged onto I-85 again, this time headed south, he flipped open the triangular window in the front of the door and let the air rush across him. He chuckled an evil, phlegmy, old-man chuckle. Yeah, he thought, a nap and a couple more good moves, and he’d be back on the right side of this thing.

  SIX

  It took Mazerick and Wellsley less than twenty-four hours to find the dead nurse’s Firebird. By the time the two of them were looking through the video surveillance footage from the Amtrak station in Salisbury, North Carolina, Wellsley had learned more about Detective Mazerick than she had ever wanted to know.

  She had had to tell him about her partner. Not the whole truth about Barry, of course. But enough to explain why she was in a rental car. Why she was on “administrative leave.” Why she didn’t have the full might of the FBI behind her. She put tears in her eyes when she told him the part about working the case on her own because she needed to redeem herself. Because she needed to make it right for her dead partner.

  The flabby fuck ate it up with a spoon. Jesus Christ, thought Wellsley, between the time “Sleeping Beauty” had been written and the present day, not a damn thing had changed. Not one damn thing. She didn’t let the anger show. And wasn’t that the best kind of feminism—making all this bullshit work for you? She wasn’t going to waste too much time thinking about it. There was more at stake here than some transplanted prick from New York.

  She knew everything she needed to know about Mazerick when he picked her up in the hotel lobby. At the rest home he had been wearing a wedding ring. As they headed north, he wasn’t. The guy had no idea he was a caricature of himself. Means to an end, she kept telling herself, he’s a means to an end.

  They set up in a back office of the train station, where the security footage was located. On the monitor they had playback—agonizingly slow even at double speed—of the main lobby camera. A tech with a ratty neck beard was copying the video surveillance drives to a laptop.

  “So,” said Mazerick, managing to piss her off with a single syllable, “first train was seven forty-three, northbound Carolinian. Nobody matching his description bought a ticket. I got techs watching the footage, but I’m betting he didn’t get on the train. So why was he here?”

  “Do we have footage of the parking lot?”

  “Not IR, too dark to see anything,” said the shaggy tech.

  “What about the afternoon before?”

  “What do you mean, the afternoon before? You mean before he escaped?” asked Mazerick.

  “Yes,” said Wellsley. “Can you bring it up?”

  The tech shrugged. Of course he could bring it up. Was he not an elder of the neck beard tribe? One of the elite whom
computers feared and recognized as their master? A few keystrokes and a window popped up. On the screen they saw a parking lot shimmering in the heat of a July day. A yellow dog, tongue hanging out, trotted from one shadow to another, knowing enough not to directly cross the expanse of blacktop.

  “Pause it,” said Wellsley, her voice stern. She looked at the frozen image for a moment.

  “You know that dog?” Mazerick joked.

  She left the room.

  “Where’s she going?” Mazerick asked the neck beard. The tech answered with a jowly shrug. “She’s pretty hot, though, right?” Mazerick asked.

  Without looking up the neck beard said, “She’s gonna put your nuts in a vise.”

  “Rowr,” said Mazerick.

  “That’s not a good thing,” the neck beard muttered. He turned his attention back to the computers. He liked them better anyway. They were productive and reasonable.

  Wellsley came back into the room and scrutinized the picture again.

  “Special Agent,” said Mazerick, “would you mind clueing the rest of us mere mortals in?”

  She pointed to an old powder-blue F-100 pickup truck on the screen. “I think he stole that truck.”

  “Hey, don’t touch the screen,” the tech said, defensive of his equipment.

  “I want you to watch the footage for the truck. Tell me when somebody drives it off.”

  “So he drove all the way up here, to a train station, to steal a truck?” asked Mazerick.

  “That’s right. Long-term airport parking lots used to be the best place for this kind of thing. Vehicles won’t be reported stolen for a while. He’s buying time.”

  “Well, at least now we know he’s headed north,” said Mazerick.

  SEVEN

  He parked the truck behind a church and slept for a while. By nine thirty the heat of the day woke him. He was dry and hungry and his joints didn’t want to move.

  He stopped at an old convenience store and got coffee, water, a map, and a vile-tasting microwaved breakfast sandwich. It was a mom-and-pop place in a bad neighborhood. It had once sold gas, but the pumps had been removed. The place did a brisk trade in lottery tickets and the holy trinity of the convenience store: condoms, smokes, and beer.