But even though I didn’t chatter, my mind was filled with excitement, fear, and even some remorse.
I was not an extortionist-rapist even though I had had sex with the woman calling herself Nathali Malcolm. A Free Man was not a murderer even though he had shot and killed the two policemen who had betrayed their oaths and tried to murder him. We were both mostly innocent men slated to take the fall for the real criminals. We would never receive justice from law enforcement or the courts, and so the only thing that could be done was to take the law into our own hands.
This decision frightened me. Taking these steps brought me to a place I had never been, a place that I had always thought was wrong. And it was wrong. My demon friend and I were executing an honest-to-God prison break.
For a man with my history, that was just about as bad as you could get.
There were butterflies all through my body. I felt as if I were damned. But still I knew that this was the only course left open to me.
“Bring him in here!” a woman commanded over the small speaker on the desk between us.
The time was 1:57 a.m.
There were sounds of squeaky rubber wheels on the linoleum floor and the squealing of metal frames moving and sometimes bumping into other objects.
“Put him on the bed,” the woman said.
“Lift!” a man said.
Then we heard the less definable sounds of a body being hefted and moved, probably from a gurney to the bed.
“You don’t need to restrain him,” the woman complained. “He has a fever of one oh three.”
“Ma’am, this here is a convicted cop killer. As far as I’m concerned we could have let him die in his cell. But as long as he’s here he will be chained to this bed.”
There were more sounds and some conversation. Mel and I were on high alert. I no longer worried about right and wrong because it was a time for action.
“He has all the symptoms of appendicitis, but that’s not what I’m seeing,” the woman said.
“Should we take him back?” a man I had not heard before asked.
“No,” the woman doctor said. “I want to observe him for twenty-four hours at least. If this is some kind of communicable infection I’d like to isolate it before it spreads through your jail.”
“You mean we could catch this?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like to see what happens.”
“Arkady,” the first man who spoke said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Set up outside this room and don’t go to sleep.”
“What about if it’s catching, Sergeant?” Arkady asked.
“That’s why God invented medical insurance.”
The doctor and the cops talked for a while more. Most of the police left. For the next twenty or thirty minutes we could hear someone, probably the doctor, moving around the room. And then, for thirty-four minutes, there was silence.
As quietly as he could Mel climbed out on our ladder-chair and lifted himself up to look through the hospital room window. Then he opened the window and climbed through. I followed as soundlessly as possible and clambered into the dark room.
We’d been wearing gloves since entering the Kershaw building. Before we crossed over to the clinic the first time we had donned dark ski masks.
A drawn and unconscious Free Man was chained to his hospital bed. His dreadlocks were tangled and there was a twist to his lips.
I had a bolt cutter and so used it on the restraint that chained Man to the bed frame. In the meanwhile Mel was fashioning a shoulder harness from thick rope that he intended to use to lower the unconscious Mr. Man from one building to the next.
I hefted the tangle-headed Man up into a seated position, and Mel began to loop the jury-rigged harness around the left shoulder.
That was when the door burst open and the light came on.
Time froze for a moment there. Officer Arkady had taken on too much what with opening the door and turning on the light. He probably heard something and thought it was Man trying to get out of his cuffs and so had not drawn his weapon. He did, however, reach for his piece when he saw us.
Mel was faster. The habitual offender swiveled to the right and fired five shots, which sounded like no more than pops. Arkady was hit in both legs and both arms. Then Mel rushed the faltering cop and hit him in the center of his forehead with the barrel of the gun.
The cop, who was portly of build, hit the floor like a dead bull and Mel was quick to use the man’s own handcuffs to restrain him. I thought that this was going a little overboard when I noticed there was no blood coming from Arkady’s extremities.
Mel noticed me looking and said, “Rubber bullets.”
Then he took a metal hypodermic from a pouch at his side and administered what I figured was some kind of knockout concoction.
While this was going on I ran out into the hall and located a wheelchair.
When I came back in my cohort asked, “What you plan to do with that?”
“No sentry. We could take the elevator.”
“What if they got cameras?”
“This place is for VIP clients. They don’t want electric eyes following them.”
Mel’s grin actually filled me with pride.
“I’ll go back down to Kershaw and take our stuff out of there,” he said. “You got those whiskers on so don’t have to wear no mask. Once you get out head west toward Broadway. I’ll grab the van and snag you on the way.”
It was the right plan, but I felt like a rat in a trap waiting for that elevator and then taking it down. Even when I made it to the delivery exit on the bottom floor, my heart was going at a triple rate. Mel had handed me his pistol, but that didn’t give me any solace. I’d spend the rest of my life in prison if I was captured. All of that said, there was a feeling of elation in my fast heart that I never had before…or since.
On the sidestreet sidewalk I began pushing the wheelchair. All of the clinic’s security was aimed at keeping unwanteds out. No one was expected to try to escape.
Even though Man was sedated when we found him, Melquarth had given him a shot of his tranquilizer.
“You had two hypodermics?” I asked.
“I got a gun with real bullets too. Same reason you brought along those crowbars, to get the job done.”
We had strapped the thin, long-haired Man with restraints that the chair provided. I looked down through his dreadlocks. His dark brown skin could have been mine. The handsome slant of his face might have belonged to a radical historian college professor.
It was cold outside; I could see that in the mist from my breath. But I didn’t feel it. Up ahead I saw the red and blue flashes of a police car. These passed by the intersection of Broadway and Maiden Lane.
“Hey!” Mel called.
He’d pulled to the curb just behind me. His van was middle green and there was a sign on the side that read HOBART AND SONS CONSTRUCTION.
We left the wheelchair at the curb and lay Man’s inert form on a mattress on the floor.
I sat back there with him while Mel drove.
We made it through the Holland Tunnel to Jersey City and then took 95 to 78 past Newark International and on, twenty miles or so past Elizabeth, arriving at a private airport. I spent most of that time making sure Man didn’t bounce around too much.
The elation was flaring inside me. I had done something, something real. This meant more to me than anything other than the birth of my daughter.
We were allowed in by a security guard at the gate to the airfield. He was a short white guy with a huge face.
“Who are you?” he asked Mel, the driver.
“Lansman,” my friend said. It was the code name I gave to my grandmother’s billionaire boyfriend.
“Your pilot is already here.”
The pilot was a tall, very handsome Hispanic man who told us to call him Jack. The three of us carried Man into the small jet and strapped him into yet another chair.
My only interaction with A Free Man was with his unconscious body. It was as if, I suppose, I was his dream. An apparition that he’d never remember but that changed his life.
“I know Jack here,” Mel said to me while the pilot made ready at the controls. “I’ll go down with him to Panama City and make sure your boy’s settled in.”