“Hans,” Elsa said, and another of the assassins looked at her for orders. “You stay in here tonight and watch this one. If he tries to escape, you kill him. Understand? I’m giving you permission now, so you won’t have to ask again.”
“Yes, Professor,” Hans said.
To Bruno and Heinrich, she said, “You two, guard the compound. No sleep tonight. The airship will be here just after dawn. You can sleep once we’re on our way to Mexico.” She turned her attention to me then. “As for you, I’ll leave you to think whatever thoughts you want to occupy your last hours with. I think…I think you are too treacherous, Mr. Strait. I keep you alive now in case I need you as bait for your Carmelita, if she even comes. But then…” She shrugged. “You really don’t need to leave here. It was a mistake telling you as much as I did. You are too great a liability. I won’t suggest you sleep well, as I know you won’t. You’ll sleep forever soon enough.”
Then, addressing the three killers again, she spoke in German, and I picked up enough of what she was saying to surmise that she was going out to her car to get some sleep. She also told them the doors would be locked and that they would suffer if they disturbed her without a good reason. With one more haughty glance back at me, she waited for Heinrich and Bruno to leave; then she picked up Klaus Lang’s little book and Guillermo’s antenna-less phone and went out into the night as well.
I looked at Hans, and he looked back at me, a cruel smile on his lips.
He spoke to me in English, his accent very mild. “I could just kill you now, you know. Or in a little while. I will just tell Professor Schwartz that you broke free of your bonds and tried to escape. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re going to need a better story,” I said. “This wire is pretty tight. Elsa’s going to know you jumped the gun on killing me.”
“Why should she care?”
“You heard her. She might still need me in the morning.”
“Doubtful,” he said. Pulling a chair away from the table, he sat down across from me and said, “So, who is this woman the professor is procuring for us?” I suppose he couldn’t help the little leer that crossed his lips as he said it.
“Not anyone you’re going to want to try playing around with,” I said.
“You think I can’t handle her?”
“I know you can’t.”
He chuckled. “I think my brothers and I will be up to the challenge.”
I let that go, not wanting to engage him any further. What point would there be in it? Let him have his fantasy, I thought. The real world would be here with the sunrise. Maybe it would bring Carmelita, and maybe it wouldn’t. All I knew for certain was that more people were going to die before this was all over. I wanted some quiet to think and plan so I could increase the odds of not being numbered among the dead in a few more hours.
After a while, Hans got tired of staring at me. He gathered up the cards that Bruno and Elsa had been playing with earlier, shuffled them, and dealt himself a hand of Solitaire. At first, I watched him play, but when I saw him cheat the third time, I gave up and looked away, concentrating instead on the knotty boards that formed the cabin walls and letting myself wonder which big movie stars had been in this same spot twenty or thirty years earlier. Maybe Jeanette Landry had been saved by Sid LeBlanc, dressed as a Mountie and fighting off a group of extras dressed as outlaws before carrying the grateful ingenue off the set and back to her dressing room. Maybe Cosmo Beadle had been one of those outlaws, his ridiculous broom of a mustache being used for comic relief in all the mayhem. And now the place was old and falling apart, separated from its glory by time and weather and progress.
Time crawled by. In the dim light cast by the kerosene lamp, my eye was drawn to the cobwebs in the corners, and even though I told myself it was dangerous to be too distracted, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting to the thought of Sherise Pike sitting in front of her vanity, dark lines of ink contrasting with the white plains of her skin. It was the middle of the night now. Her club would be closed, her dances all finished. All the men who’d come into that club—what had they seen? And how did Sherise feel about being gawked at by all of them? Just fine, I imagined, the clever businesswoman counting all the bills before they went into her safe at the end of the night. And what had it cost her to get paid so well? Whatever the cost, I doubted it was self-respect. I pictured myself asking her about it, and letting my imagination conjure up her response helped the long, quiet minutes go by.
Letting my imagination run like that brought pangs of guilt, however. What did it mean that I was thinking of Sherise rather than Annabelle? It was Annabelle, after all, who I was trying to get back to by exploring other worlds with Guillermo’s help. I asked myself if these fantasies about Sherise meant there was a part of me that had given up on ever getting back to my world and the woman who might still be waiting there for me. But even as I asked this question, it was Sherise’s face that floated through my imagination rather than Annabelle’s.
Eventually, Hans gave up on his card game and turned the lantern down to its dimmest setting, bringing my rumination to an end. He stretched in his chair and then stood up. Giving me a menacing look, he said, “If you try something, I’ll hear. You’ll be dead before you know what happened.”
I believed him but said nothing, just watched as he crossed his arms on the table and then leaned forward to rest his forehead on the lousy pillow he’d just made. After maybe ten minutes, I heard his breathing grow loud and steady and assumed he was asleep. Knowing it might be a trick, and a cruel one at that, I kept still for several more minutes, watching his head, arms, and shoulders for any sign that he might actually be awake and lying in wait for me to make a move. If that was the case, I finally decided, then he was as good an actor as he was an assassin, as I was fully convinced that he was deeply involved in whatever killers dream about.
First, I tried moving my arms. My wrists were firmly bound together, but the length of wire that held them to the back of the chair had some give, so I could move my arms side to side about an inch and all the way to the back of the chair, maybe four or five inches. The only other parts of me bound to the chair were my ankles, and these, too, were tightly fastened to a chair leg each with no wiggle room at all. My best hope at this point, I thought, lay in moving my arms as much as I could and hoping that the wire would fatigue. I didn’t know what good that would do me, as my wrists would still be tied together, but it would be a start.
As I started inching my arms to the left and right, pulling at the wire as much as my wrists could stand, I noticed something else: the chair was rickety. The whole back moved as I pulled my arms side to side. When I thought of how old this chair was and how it had likely never been meant to be anything more than a prop, this made complete sense. It was practically a miracle that it hadn’t already fallen apart under my weight.
The question was: what to do with this information? If I pushed against the chair back and snapped it free from the seat, the sound of the breaking wood would be enough to wake my guardian. The same would be true if I took a chance on trying to stand up, expecting the wood to snap against the strain my average muscles would put on it. I was left with little more than the knowledge that I could probably, and pretty easily, break the chair and walk out of here with pieces of splintery old wood still wired to my arms and legs. As long as Hans was asleep across from me, however, I wouldn’t get very far.
So, I waited.
Fortunately, I had been placed in such a way that I could look out the window, which is what I did for the next couple of hours. If Bruno and Heinrich were really patrolling the property as Elsa had ordered them to, I never saw any sign of them crossing in front of the window. Instead, I looked for signs of the coming dawn and told myself that if it looked like things were beginning to lighten up outside, I would have no choice other than to take my chances with Hans and hope that I could break free of the chair in a way quiet enough to keep him from stirring.
It could have been an hour later, and it could have been four when Hans finally stirred from his spot across the table from me. Without a clock on the wall or the ability to look at my watch, I had no real idea. If pressed, though, I would have said that it was maybe four in the morning when Hans raised his head and gave me a bleary look.
“Not dead yet?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t want to leave without thanking my host,” I said.
He grunted a response and pushed himself away from the table. “Got to piss,” he said as he got up and stepped over Edward’s body. At the door, he paused, looked back at me, and said, “Don’t go anywhere.”
“You have my word of honor,” I said.
Then he was out the door, pulling it closed behind him.
I listened to his retreating footsteps, wondering how far he would go to relieve himself. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on listening, worrying that I would hear the sound of his stream hitting the dirt near the cabin. I heard nothing of the kind, though, and figured that he must either be going farther away to take care of business or that he had seen one of his brother-selves on patrol and was taking a moment to speak with him in the darkness.
In either case, I could expect him back at any moment, so I took my chance and tried to stand up. The chair didn’t break as easily as I had imagined. In fact, it put up a pretty good fight after the initial moments where it gave against my weight. The top of the chair’s back digging into my shoulder blades and the bottom edge of the chair pushing into the backs of my legs, I felt certain that my plan was never going to work.
And then the chairback snapped at the base, pieces of wood clattering to the floor. I was standing up, a piece of wood still wired to each of my legs and one more dangling from the wires that held my wrists together. The rest of the chair lay in ruins on the floor.
I stood perfectly still for just a second, listening for the sound of returning footsteps. Then I stepped over Edward’s body, just as Hans had done. Instead of following him out the door, however, I paused and looked down at the dead chauffeur. His eyes were still open and his mouth hung slack, the chin extended disturbingly far.
“Sorry, Edward,” I said. Then, still trying to listen for footsteps outside, I took a chance at squatting down beside the body. It was difficult to do with my wrists bound together, but I was able to feel the opening of his front pants pocket. Extending my fingers as much as I could, I felt for the dead man’s car keys, imagining the rough edge of a key rubbing at the wire on my wrists and eventually breaking it. I found nothing, though.
Knowing I was pushing my luck, I scooted to the other side of the body and repeated the same move, willing my fingers to find something metallic in the material and trying not to think about the dead flesh on the other side of the cloth. When I touched something hard and smooth, I almost let out a shout of surprise. Seconds later, I had the dead man’s keyring in my hand and I was struggling to my feet.
I went to the door and peered out. There was no sign of Hans or any of the other assassins. In the road between the old buildings, I saw the car Edward had driven through the darkness—a low slung black number that had probably set Cosmo Beadle back a hefty sum. For a moment, I thought about trying to get my wrists around my feet so I could have my hands in front of me and possibly drive the car out of Gold Rush Gulch with my wrists still bound together. Knowing I’d never been that flexible, though, I decided not to try it. Instead, I ran off into the darkness, hoping not to come across one of the assassins on patrol.
I had gone maybe a hundred yards when I realized I was going the wrong way, heading away from rather than toward the grove of oak trees where I’d hidden the flight pack. Stopping to check my surroundings and look for signs of pursuit, I changed directions, making a wide arc around the cluster of buildings and trying to move as silently as possible through the wild grasses that had grown up around the old movie set. I had almost made it to the trees when I heard a shout from the buildings behind me.
That was when I stumbled and dropped Edward’s keys.
Damn! I shouted in my mind while keeping my mouth closed. I had almost gone to the ground when I stumbled but somehow managed to regain my footing even without being able to use my arms for balance. The keys did hit the ground, though, and I spun around, looking for their glint in the moonlight. Not too far away, I could hear voices speaking in German, and the sound put me back in the war, just as if I really had been sent off to an alternate world again. I felt like I was trying to get away from a holed-up squad of Nazi fighters in the middle of some German village, the dark of night being my only weapon, and I wanted to run.
But I couldn’t. If I ran now, without a weapon or a plan, I’d get caught. I was sure of it. Seconds earlier, I’d had both a weapon and a plan, and I wasn’t about to let both of them go so easily.
Edging back the way I’d just come, I squatted down, leaning forward and trying to spot the glint of metal in the feeble moonlight. At the same time, I forced myself to look up every few seconds, scanning the silhouette of Gold Rush Gulch so that I might detect a sign of pursuit.
I could still hear shouting in German, but only men’s voices. And then I heard a woman’s. Elsa sounded livid. She shrieked curse words in German at the Klauses and then aimed a few more at me. This made me smile. Even if they caught me, it still felt good to know I’d pulled the devil’s tail one more time before being removed from his playground.
A few seconds later, I thought I spotted the keys in the grass. Leaning forward to get a good look, I saw something else, something I couldn’t have known was there with the keys held behind my back as I’d run away from the buildings. Edward Ross hadn’t just had keys on his ring; he’d a little pocket knife as well. I imagined the blade was no longer than two inches, the kind of thing the dead man might have used to clean his nails during idle moments. It was practically useless as a weapon, but it was something, and it was more than Elsa and the assassins thought I had.
As quickly as I could, I pivoted and reached blindly for the keys in the grass behind my back. I hated doing this because it also meant that my back was to the Germans, and I almost changed tack, ready to scoot forward and feel around behind myself while turning my face toward the buildings. But then my hand landed on the keyring, and I was back on my feet again, now running towards the oak trees with the keyring much more firmly in my grasp.
I made it to the trees without being spotted and then worked my way through the bushes that grew around the trunks, going as quietly as I could but still causing the inevitable rustling of branches. During my earlier flight, I had surmised that the strip of vegetation must follow a stream, and now I heard water running not far away. To get to it, I needed to navigate a hillside that was steeper than I liked. Still, I thought it would be best to get as far away from Gold Rush Gulch as I could, and I was counting on the sound of the water masking any noises I might make as I tried working myself free from the wire.
Almost falling twice, I made it to edge of the stream, and there I sat with my back to the water and my face to the hillside I’d just clambered down. Fully expecting to hear one of the killers come stumbling through the brush, I opened the little pocket knife and started rubbing its blade against any part of the wire my restrained hands could reach.
It wasn’t easy going, as the angle I was using to slice at the wire wasn’t at all convenient or comfortable Also, I stopped rubbing the blade more than once out of paranoia that I heard someone coming. That was the problem with being by the stream—while it masked any sounds I might make from those who were looking for me, it also deadened my ability to hear anyone coming up on me.
By the time the little knife broke through the wire, the darkness of the night had begun to fade. I cursed the pace at which I’d freed myself but still felt glad that I’d done it without having any of the Nazis come stumbling down the bank to find me. Now I closed the knife and set the keyring on a rock before setting to work at unwinding the wire from around my wrists. This, too, wasn
’t easy, as I had to stretch and strain my fingers to move the cut ends around my wrists, but the more I worked the looser the bindings became, and before too much longer my wrists were free.
I rubbed them luxuriously for several seconds before turning my attention to the much easier task of removing the wire from my legs now that I had two free hands to do it with. Considering the value of the pieces of broken chair as weapons for a moment, I decided to discard them and took the pocket knife off the keyring instead. Then, dropping Edward’s keys and knife into my pocket, I started up the little hill.
When I reached the edge of the oak grove, I took shelter behind a wide trunk and scanned the area around me. Gold Rush Gulch looked unimpressive in the gathering dawn, a pathetic little cluster of dilapidated buildings with a fancy car parked in the middle of them and another—Elsa’s—backed up to one of the façades. At first, I saw no sign of the Germans, but then I saw Elsa getting out of her car. She put her fingers to her lips, and a few seconds later, a shrill whistle reached my ears across the open space.
Then I saw one of the assassins emerge from the line of oak trees about twenty yards away. My heart started racing as I realized how close he’d been to coming across me, and my paranoia spiked as I imagined one of the others coming upon me from behind. A few seconds later, however, I caught sight of another young version of Klaus Lang approaching Elsa from the other side of the little valley that the movie set had been built in the middle of. Then the third one came out from among the buildings.
I watched the killers converge on Elsa’s car. That was when I realized that all four were looking to the sky. From where I stood, if I looked in the same direction, all I saw were leaves. Even so, I wasn’t about to risk detection to get a better look; I knew what the four of them were watching.
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 21
