“What can you do with it?” I ask.
“Sell it,” Lester says with a shrug.
“To who?”
“Sotheby’s,” he says. “Christie’s. I’ll call the director of fine arts. Happens all the time. He’ll be outraged, but in about a week I’ll get a call back from someone who’ll just happen to be looking for what I’ve got.”
Lester tells me the exact location of the cottage and how to get into the vault. There are two bank vault tumblers. The combination is derived by assigning a numeric value to each of the letters in his son’s name-Seth Cole-and subtracting them from fifty for the first descending to forty-three for the last.
“Not that anything’s happening to me, kid,” he says, showing me those crooked teeth, “but, who knows? Maybe only one of us gets away, and if it’s you, I don’t want you going hungry.”
My face is warm and I put my other hand on top of his and begin to stammer, not knowing what to say.
“If you want to do something,” he says, nodding his head as if he can read my thoughts, “promise me this: that you’ll use this treasure for yourself. Go. Start a new life. Leave the past alone, kid. Let it die.”
I go rigid.
Lester cocks his head just a tick to one side, as if he’s heard a small noise. He looks at me for quite a while before he sighs and says, “No, I guess not.
“It’s all right,” he says, patting my hands. “I love you like my Seth. It’s unconditional, and so is this gift. You do with it what you want. That’s not for me to decide.”
I tell him what I think, but it comes out in a mutter.
“What?” he says.
“You said destiny,” I say. “It’s my destiny, Lester. It just is.”
When night comes, we climb back down into the tunnel. After only a few minutes, the dirt becomes damp. A slow trickle begins to run back down the pipe. My throat grows tight as I imagine the water bursting in and washing us backward into the cistern. It grows to a steady flow, but rises no more than five inches.
It takes me less than an hour to dig through the last layer of soggy silt. I can hear the river’s song and feel the cool air rushing in. In anticipation, Lester puts out his waning bulb, but a large stone is wedged into the opening. Try as I might, I cannot push it aside with my hands and the claw hammer does me no good.
Lester and I crawl back down the length of the overflow pipe, then worm our way back, feet first. I roll splashing onto my stomach and wedge my frame against the walls of the wooden pipe. Then, with all my might, I press my legs against the stone. It moves half an inch at a time, but it moves.
The stone scratches against its sandy bed. I hear Lester’s low chuckle bubbling toward me from deeper in the pipe. My heart swells and my legs burn, and in less than two minutes I’ve shoved that rock aside enough for us to squirm out.
I don’t stop to enjoy it. I don’t see the stars or the towers or the vertical plane of the wall aglow and stretching up into the night. Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the darkness around me and I slide over the rocks and into the swift water of a deep pool.
I am free.
27
I SWIM ACROSS THE CURRENT, not down. This is the plan. They will look for us downstream. They will close off all the roads around the city and squeeze it until they find us. No one has escaped Auburn since the new wall was constructed back in the thirties. Hell will be raised.
It requires great effort to swim through the current. When I feel the rocky riverbed beneath my feet I turn to look at Lester. Water slips past me, but not without a strong steady shove. I see now that Lester is flailing. The sound of splashing rises above the steady hiss of water over stone, and my eyes go up to the tower. It stares down like a dull monolithic eye in its bed of stars. The shadow of the guard is nowhere to be seen. The other towers too-there are three in all-are blind.
Lester is almost to me. I stretch out my arms, digging in at the same time with my heels to keep from being swept back into the pool. Lester is four feet from me when he cries out and goes under.
I dive and bump heads with him. We swirl in the water. I have his waist and I scissor-kick my legs until they’re numb. My feet hit the riverbed and the darkness is destroyed by white light. The scream of sirens breaks the night. Bullets zip past, humming like angry bees. The water is shin-deep now and Lester is on my back. I run for the railroad bridge.
The thud of a bullet striking him knocks me facedown into the water, but I scramble up without letting go. I slosh upstream, desperate for the cover of a bridge. Two feet from its protective shadow, another bullet strikes Lester, knocking us both forward and down. This time, my elbow strikes a rock and Lester rolls off my back.
His eyes stare up at the underbelly of the bridge. His mouth hangs open, spilling blood. There is yelling above and the strident ringing of alarms.
“Lester!” I shout, lifting him.
I see now, even in the shadows, that the last bullet struck the back of his head. Blood and matter spill from his skull. I retch and drop his body. Frantically, I search around me. On the upstream side of the rail bridge, someone has dumped a bag of garbage and it lies wedged between two great stones. I strip the shirt from my back without unbuttoning it and jam the black bag of garbage inside.
I tie the sleeve of my shirt to Lester’s wrist, then I wade toward the deep flow. When I’m close to the middle, I shove Lester’s body and the floating bag into the stiffest part of the current. They swirl and shoot downstream. They are pushed out of the shadows and into the beam of the spotlights. The lights stay with Lester and my shirt. There is more shouting. Bullets rain down, breaking the water’s surface, striking Lester’s dead body and the garbage as they rise and fall in the current, spinning madly down along the wall. I return to the bank and move with stealth up under the road bridge.
Shots and yells echo up the riverbed. I leave the cover of the bridge and find myself in a thick tangle of vegetation. Above me is Curley’s Restaurant, and I can hear the people spilling out onto the bridge to see what has happened. I keep sloshing upstream. Vertical concrete embankments replace the undergrowth where the river bends through the middle of downtown. I stay close to the shadow of the wall where the water is below my knees.
Up to the left is a stately old brick building with a white cupola. Black-and-white police cars are lined up along the rail that overlooks the river. The police station. The dark shapes of men are jogging out. Red and blue lights spin and tires squeal as they back out and head for the prison. I am almost to the next bridge when I see one figure approach the rail with a flashlight.
A wide drainpipe opens in the wall and I throw myself inside. A moment later, a beam of light sweeps past the mouth of the pipe. I can feel the hammer of my heart between my ears. I wait another minute, then creep toward the edge. The figure is gone and so is the light. I slip out and wade as quietly as I can upstream. When I reach the darkness of the next bridge, I start to run.
I pass under two more bridges and under the shadow of a stainless steel diner with a red neon sign, then the shambles of some tenement apartments before the concrete wall ends and the shadowy overgrowth of bushes and trees crowds the riverbed. The river widens and the going is easy for a time. Stars wink from above and they give the rippled water a pale glow. As I step carefully between the rocks, my ears are filled with a hissing that soon grows into a roar.
I round a bend and see the misty white sheet of water spilling over a dam. There are darkened brick buildings above harnessing the water flow and turning it into electricity. I leave the water for a rocky service road that climbs the right side of the bank up to the top of the dam. Two streetlights give off a blue glow. The pool above the dam is still and black and I stare around, breathing hard. There are a handful of houses with amber light spilling from random crooked windows. A string of laundry hangs in the backyard of the one closest to me and a small dock juts out into the still pool. Moored to it is a small aluminum skiff with an outboard motor.