“You gripe about every job, Maph, but you’ve never quit on me before. What’s your problem? You don’t like Novak’s politics?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about politics, but I’ve been stuck in a few jails. Never had no fun in one and I don’t like workin’ in this one, neither. I got three days’ wages and a hundred and fifty bucks gas money comin’, Danny. You either get it up or I’ll kick your ass for you.”
Rochon was dead serious. His shaggy hair was hanging in his bloodshot eyes. He was hung over, hurtin’, and ready to take it out on somebody. The last time Shea’d tangled with him, the police had to break it up and Shea was sore for a month. Which is why he couldn’t believe it when Puck took a nine-pound sledgehammer from the tool rack and tossed it to Rochon.
“You’re dead right, Maph. I got no use for jails, either. So why don’t we bust this one up?”
“Bust it up?” Rochon echoed, hefting the sledge suspiciously, still glowering at Shea.
“See that photograph next to Red Max? The one with those cops standing around that hole, looking stupid? They had a famous jailbreak here. Red Max’s buddies tunneled in and broke him out. Afterward, the cops poured a new concrete floor in the basement to cover it up. How about you bust that sucker open all over again? Let some air into this dump. Sound like fun, big fella?”
“Yeah, maybe it does at that.” Rochon nodded slowly. “Last time they locked me up, I coulda used a hammer like this. Okay, Puck. I’ll bust open that tunnel for you. I’ll bust Danny up some other day.” Saluting Shea with the sledge, he turned and stalked out.
“What the hell was that?” Shea demanded, turning on Puck. “He was primed to stomp me into dog meat and you toss him a nine-pound hammer?”
“C’mon, Danny, Maph’s a surly sumbitch, but he’s not crazy enough to use a sledge on you. Besides, he can whip you any day of the week. He doesn’t need a hammer to do it.”
“Then why give him one?”
“Because your best chance against a hardhead like Maph is to clock him before he knows he’s in a fight. While he’s deciding whether to use that sledge or not, you sucker punch him two, three times. Put his lights out.”
“Assuming I was smart enough to figure that out,” Shea sighed.
“Also assuming you could hit Maph hard enough to put him down.”
“You’re an evil old man, Puck.”
“Thank you, sir. But I didn’t get this old bein’ stupid, Danny. You’d best keep a weather eye on Rochon. Maph’s a mean drunk and meaner sober. Draws trouble like flies to a roadkill.”
And Puck was right again. As usual.
That afternoon, Shea walked into his office to find Maph Rochon sitting in his chair, his work boots up on the drafting table. “What are you doing in here?”
“Waitin’ for you, boss man. What do you want me to do next?”
“You can’t be finished with that tunnel already.”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Then why aren’t you on it?”
“Ain’t no tunnel to be on, Danny,” Maph said blandly. “Never was, neither.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I busted through the concrete floor like Puck told me, found the original hole into the storm drain. It’s a thirty-incher, plenty big enough to shinny through for the first ten feet or so, then it opens out into a crawl space in the subbasement. And that’s the problem.”
“What problem?”
“This old building’s sitting on forty-foot walnut timbers, Danny, twenty inches thick at mid-bole. They rest on the bedrock. Solid granite. The drain’s cut wide to pass under them beams, but it’s only six inches deep and there’s a grille across it to keep the rats out. It’s original, Danny. Made of the same bars they used to build the cells, set in stone, rusted nearly solid. You’d need an acetylene torch to cut it and even then the hole’s too small to pass a man through. Nothing much bigger than a mouse ever went in or out of that tunnel. I double-checked the pictures to make sure there was no mistake. There ain’t. The hole they dug in that cell floor was a shuck, a tunnel to nowhere. That up-yours finger spray-painted on the wall wasn’t a joke on those cops. It was their joke on the rest of us.”
“Show me,” Shea said.
Sara Jacoby emerged from the tunnel shaken and pale as a ghost, her Karan suit covered with grime. “There has to be some mistake. Could Novak have gotten out some other way?”
“I’ve gone over the blueprints, Miss Jacoby,” Shea said. “They show exactly what Maph found. This old barn was built in eighteen eighty-seven, overbuilt actually, to support two water tanks on the roof, a thousand gallons each. There was no running water in those days, so every municipal building had their own supply. You see these lines on the drawing? They’re walnut logs, two and a half tons apiece, braced on bedrock. No way under them, no way around. The tunnel in this photograph never went anywhere. It couldn’t. It was a photo op, nothing more.”
“But there are pictures of a policeman crawling out of the far end... My God,” she said softly, as the full weight of understanding settled in. “They were all in on it, weren’t they? They had to be. But how could they cover a thing like this up?”
“With shovels,” Puck said. “Same way they faked the tunnel. Dug it out, took a few pictures, then filled it in again. Topped it off with concrete.”
“But why?” Sara demanded. “Max Novak was the most famous prisoner they’d ever had. Why would they stage a phony escape?”
“I can think of one reason, but you won’t like it,” Puck said. “Back in the Days of Rage, protesters weren’t the only ones who ran off the rails. Guardsmen killed four kids at Kent State and forty civilians during the Detroit riots. Five years earlier, Mississippi cops handed three civil-rights workers over to the KKK. They ended up dead in a swamp. Could be there’s a real ugly reason nobody’s seen Red Max Novak lately.”
“But what are we going to do? If we tell Sheriff Doyle about this, he’ll declare it a crime scene, tape it off, and shut down the project. Which is what he wants to do anyway.”
Shea shrugged. “It’s your project, your call. Do you want us to cover it up again?”
“Damn it,” Sara said softly, shaking her head. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”
“I knew no good would come of this,” Sheriff Martin Doyle said sourly. “Frickin’ yuppie city council and their New Age ideas.” They were in Doyle’s office in the new Port Martin Civic Center, a flashy modern construct of glass and concrete that held the sheriff’s department, fire department, and city offices, and had no soul at all.
“The city council didn’t lose that prisoner,” Puck pointed out. “Your old pal Sheriff Kowalski did. Or did he?”
“What are you saying? You think old Tom Kowalski whacked Max Novak, then staged the escape to cover it up?”
“We have no idea what happened,” Sara said quickly. “That’s why we’re here. We do know that Novak definitely didn’t crawl out through that tunnel, though. So the question is, why would the police fake his escape? If it wasn’t to cover up Novak’s murder, then what did happen?”
“I... don’t know anything I could swear to, you understand,” Doyle said, “but I did hear a story once. Last year, after the council voted to build the memorial, I ran into old Sheriff Kowalski at the Town Pub. It was only a few weeks before he died and he was half in the bag that night. And bitter. He told me he’d kicked Novak loose for the sake of the town, and later, the same punks he’d saved turned on him like a pack of rats. And now they were going to put up a damn shrine to the murderer who wrecked his life.”
“What did he mean, for the sake of the town?” Shea asked.