‘It’s turning bad, kid,’ Cirillo yelled. ‘Pick it up, keep movin’.’
‘Can’t . .
‘Bullshit. Get your ass in gear or you’re gonna be nuthin’ but a puddle.’
‘Shit,’ was all Hatcher could manage. His fingertips were raw and bleeding and his toes ached as they had never ached before. His arms trembled with exertion. Sweat stung his eyes and tickled the corners of his mouth.
He was hanging on for dear life. The first drops of rain had begun to pelt Cirillo’s face and panic began to gnaw at him, too. But he couldn’t let the kid know that.
Cirillo was at the overhang, he reached up and slowly crawled the fingers of one hand toward the edge, stretching out as far as he could until he very cautiously reached around the edge and felt for a finger hold. His aching fingertips found a small trench. He dug at it, making sure it would hold him, then pushed himself up and out and swung free of the face of the wall. He hung there by one arm, staring down at the kid, who clung to the wall, pressing against it like a piece of moss.
Cirillo switched hands. Hanging with his right arm, he extended his left toward the kid.
‘C’mon, another six feet, I gotcha.’
Hatcher inched his way up, snatching a peek at Cirillo and then closing his eyes and feeling for another finger hold. Finally his head bumped the overhang. No place else to go.
‘Grab my hand, kid,’ Cirillo said.
Hatcher looked at him through terror-stricken eyes, stared at the fingertips wiggling an invitation to him.
‘Trust me,’ Cirillo said.
The kid had never trusted anyone before. He started to look back toward the ground.
‘Don’t — look down,’ Cirillo said quietly but sternly, and the kid closed his eyes and clung on for dear life.
‘Gimme your hand, kid,’ Cirillo ordered. Hatcher reached out very slowly, stretching toward the cop’s bulging arm. He felt Cirillo’s callused fingertips, felt his hand slide across his palm, felt the powerful fingers enclose his wrist.
‘Okay,’ said Cirillo, ‘swing free.’
‘What!’
‘Do it now, I can’t hang on here forever.’
The kid closed his eyes, swallowed, and freed his other hand. He was hanging in midair with nothing below him but space. Cirillo gritted his teeth and slowly lifted the kid’s dead weight.
‘Okay,’ Cirillo whispered, ‘hang around my neck.’
Hatcher reached up and wrapped his arms around Cirillo’s thick, bulging neck as the cop chinned himself on the ledge.
‘God Almighty,’ he whispered as Cirillo hauled himself over the lip of the ledge and rolled to safety. Hatcher lay on his face, his breath blowing little billows of dirt away from his mouth. His heart was beating so hard his teeth hurt. Then suddenly he started laughing hysterically.
‘Damn,’ he said, ‘we’re alive! We’re a-fuckin’ live!’
He had confronted and cheated death, a new and seductive experience for him.
‘I did it!’ the kid yelled at the forest and it echoed back:
I did it!’
‘Just remember, kid,’ Cirillo said. ‘Ya can’t quit in this life. Quit and yer dead. Ya take a job, ya do it. Ya don’t hold back nothin’, ya put it all on the line. Ya don’t leave yourself any outs.’
Hatcher turned to Cirillo. ‘Let’s do another one,’ he said eagerly.
And Cirillo had smiled.
‘We still gotta go back down,’ he answered quietly.
Yes, Hatcher thought, these old walls would be a piece of cake. Getting through the jungle, that was the tough part.
Then the rains came. The face of the prison became a slimy river of muck. The rainy days became rainy weeks and then months. With each passing day, climbing the wall became more treacherous. he drew rough maps on the floor, trying to remember directions and distances from the trip upriver. And finally he accepted the reality that without weapons or even a compass, without maps or any knowledge of the area, escape was suicidal. As the rains continued, the challenge slowly faded.
And so he imposed upon himself a daily regimen:
calisthenics to keep his muscles from atrophying; mental exercises to keep from going mad, although gradually madness and sanity became one.
To postpone insanity, he thought about the women he had known. Sometimes names eluded him and he associated them with events in his life. He tried to reconstruct his first high school romance — what was her name, Haley? He remembered touching her the first time, in the backseat darkness of Cirillo’s Chevy, groping, feeling her soft down and feeling her rise to his touch, moving his hand to her breasts, those soft buds just beginning to bloom. He was terrified, she was impassioned. But after the first time, their fervor approached insanity. They did it everywhere, in the darkness of the balcony of the town’s only movie house, rolled in blankets in the green Massachusetts forest, and once, late in the afternoon, in the girls’ locker room at the high school, abandoned for the day, the tin rattle of the locker door providing rhythmic cadence as they stood against it, thrashing in the agony of youthful passion.
Then he had gone off to the academy and she had fallen madly in love with the high school wrestling champ.
The loss of his innocence haunted his fevered memory as his mind wandered freely in time, back to the alleys of Boston, where Cirillo had nabbed him. Hatcher was a tough, crafty street orphan, and Cirillo a just-as-tough cop who had taken him in hand and changed his life forever. It had been Cirillo who had forced him to go to high school, challenged him not only to climb walls but to show his best, and finally arranged the appointment to Annapolis, where Harry Sloan had discovered him. Sloan. Hatcher’s torment was that he could no longer imagine life without that treacherous intrusion, could not remember the precise moment when he had traded truth for expediency, had traded light and beauty for the shadows of the shadow warrior, and in his desolation, Hatcher, like many men and women in less desperate conditions, futilely cried out to relive that moment and change his destiny.
At first, hate was all Hatcher had. Sitting in his box at night, he would imagine every conceivable kind of torture he could inflict on Harry Sloan. But as time passed he began to look elsewhere, to shift the blame to someone else. But in the end it always came back to the same thing. Sloan had betrayed him, had set him up and condemned him to a living death.
Cirillo had been Hatcher’s salvation, Sloan his destruction.
And yet the cord was difficult to break. Sloan had been more than a friend, he had been Hatcher’s mentor, had exposed Hatcher to experts in every conceivable field of lawful and unlawful endeavor, from lock-picking to murder, had taught him how to survive under the worst conditions. In a strange irony, Sloan had prepared him to survive Los Boxes.
Yes, Sloan had delivered his promises. His silver tongue promised adventure and romance, spiced with words like ‘patriot’ and ‘duty’ and ‘country’. Well, there had been plenty of both. There had been a lot of good times. Tokyo, Singapore, Manila.
Hong Kong and Bangkok.
He always thought of them together, remembering Cohen and the weekends when he would fly to Hong Kong from Bangkok just to get away from the hell of the river wars for a little while.
And the special suite he had at the Peninsula in Kowloon, shared only with Daphne.
God, Daphne. What a memory - Was she still alive? Was she still as beautiful as ever? Daffy, he had called her and it fit.
There was also Sam-Sam Sam and Joe Cockroach and the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the secret lair of the Chinese river pirates. And there was Tollie Fong, the triad assassin who had sworn a blood oath against Hatcher for killing his father, his uncle and four of his most trusted gangsters.
He could never go back to Hong Kong and Bangkok. Too many ghosts. Too many enemies. Too many unsaid good-byes.
And so Hatcher always thought of Sloan with mixed feelings. The bond between mentor and student was almost as primal as that between father and son. In his misery, his feelings toward Sloan wavered. One day he thought of Sloan with affection, the next he damned him to hell.