“Can’t you take a cab over?” The voice was distant, noncommittal.
“No,” he said, “I can’t. I’m in trouble.”
“I’ll be right over.” There was a click, and Alexander put the phone back on the hook. He wiped his prints off it and then walked out of the back exit into the parking lot. He could hear more sirens on the highway, and a police ’copter roared overhead, sliding down toward the wrecked truck. It was only a matter of time, now, he realized, whether BJ got to him before the police did.
Harvey Alexander knew Chicago, at least suburban Chicago, fairly well, having spent three of his Christmas vacations here during his West Point days, courting his now ex-wife, Betty Jean Wright. From her apartment to this part of Wahanakee Drive was about twenty minutes, he estimated, if the driver was in a hurry. He hoped the police would start searching the buildings before throwing up road blocks. That might give him time enough.
If they blocked the roads it would be bad, but it seemed more likely that the people at Kelley would make a thorough search inside the hospital before assuming that he had gotten through their foolproof security system.
He smiled wryly to himself. Amazing how natural it was for a man who developed a security system to assume it was foolproof.
Still, the Kelley would certainly notify the police and the DIA about him as soon as they heard of the wrecked truck. And he didn’t want to get BJ in trouble with the police and DIA, smashed-up marriage or no.
He remembered another parking lot behind the old Oak Park Country Club. Back in ’94, he had been a third-year man at the Point, captain of the chess and judo teams, and lie had very matter-of-factly started to change a flat tire on her father’s new Electro two-wheeler which they had borrowed for the dance. He hadn’t understood the techniques for capsizing the car by cranking the gyro around, and had tried to topple it with a borrowed jack. After much muttered profanity and sweat he wound up with one end of the car high in the air and began straining to make it fall over on one side so he could get at the wheel. BJ doubled over and screamed with laughter, and the Competition, a physicist from Chicago U., offered carefully baited suggestions in his sarcastic midwestern drawl.
He didn’t remember the exact move and countermove, but somehow BJ had talked the Competition into changing the tire, with accompanying lecture on the scientific method and the principles of gyro mechanics, while they quietly climbed into the Competition’s British four-wheeler and drove off. They ran the car out of gas somewhere along Lake Michigan at four AM, and hitched a ride back on a milk truck, coming up the front walk toward the anxious parents and sulking Competition at six-thirty, and squelching all criticism and admonitions by announcing their engagement.
He graduated from the Point the next year, three months early because of the crash, and he and BJ got married the next day in the barbed-wire-enclosed Church of the Redeemer in New York against the advice of parents, relatives, and their own common sense.
The crash . . . dirty, stinking, bloody crash . . . that knocked the whole world face first into the dirt, knocked their marriage around, too. He saw BJ twice in the first three years. The second time, when he had the two weeks leave they had planned on for ten months, he was ordered back on active duty the second day and sent to China because of the sudden Yangtze truce. BJ blew up then and told him she was sick of it. He blamed her parents, and told her she was selfish and childish and a lot of other stupid, angry things, and left.
When he came back from China two and a half years later, she told him she was divorcing him. The Competition, quickly switching his field of work from physics to sociology, along with the more agile of the intelligensia of the country, had fallen into a cushy, high-stability-rating job in DEPCO, the new Department of Economic and Psychological Control that had taken over the shattered government while he was in China. The Competition had been most attentive, and convincing. BJ married him as soon as the divorce papers came through.
When Alexander saw her some eight years later, on his way through Chicago to Mexico, he learned that the second marriage had folded too. Of course any marriage lasting over five years in those days was a minor miracle, but BJ was bitter and disappointed about it. They got drunk together for old time’s sake, but she was all walled off by then, and there was nothing between them any more.
Now he shivered in the cold night air, and wished he had stolen the guard’s underclothes as well as his coveralls. At least six sirens had come screaming up Wahanakee Drive before he heard the crunch of gravel at the parking lot entrance. He ducked down low behind a jack-balanced Hydro 22. The car, a Volta sports model, kept inching along on its single wheel, headlight on dim. He saw BJ had left the top down and the dashboard lights on so he would recognize her. Over on the highway he could see the search parties beginning to fan out through the grass and weeds along the drainage ditch, flashlights winking.
He waited until the Volta was almost past him, then tossed a handful of gravel against the plastic side.
“Harvey?” The Volta stopped.
“Right here.” He glanced carefully around, and climbed in the car, rocking it slightly on its single wheel.
“What’s this about your being in trouble?”
“I’ll tell you later. Do you know how to get out of here without running into any police roadblocks?”
“Are all those cars after you?”
“I don’t know. I think so. See, they’re searching the ditches.”
“There was a truck on its side down there,” BJ said. “They didn’t stop me, but I had to go very slowly, and I think the olficer routing traffic was looking into the cars as they went by”
“Well,” Alexander said, “maybe I’d better get out and take my chances. You could get into a lot of trouble if you were caught with me.”
“Don’t be silly.” She looked at him in the ill-fitting coveralls and laughed. “What’s it all about? What have you done?”
“I just broke out of the George Kelley Hospital, for one tiling.”
BJ stopped laughing. “Out of the Kelley? But that’s . . .” She looked again at the blue coveralls with K stamped into I lie plastic. “Okay,” she said, and headed the car out of the parking lot. “Hold on.”
Alexander sat silently, watching her drive as she rolled through the Kingston development, drove across the sidewalk, wove through a Playschool playground and finally onto a golf course. It was one of the new ones with plastic grass that would not wear out or divot, with plastic weeds and trees, the whole thing a curious but ineffective camouflage for the huge meat-processing plant buried beneath it. When they came off the golf course, she turned south onto an old-fashioned road, obviously built in the days of four-wheeled cars, and stepped the Volta up to about ninety. A moment or two later they merged into traffic on one of the new speedways, where the Volta could cruise along at 200 with the rest of the traffic.
“This way will take a little longer,” she said, “but they’d have to get out a state-wide alarm to cut us off now.” She set the car on automatic, letting the photosight follow the white lane strip, and turned to face him.
“Now what’s all this about? What did they have you in the Kelley for?”
“Recoop,” Alexander said.
“You? For recoop? My God, Harvey.”
He told her about the Geiger alert at Wildwood, and how the suddenly-appearing DIA unit suspected him of being involved in the theft, and put him under polygraph. She let him talk until the whole story was out. All the bitterness burst out suddenly, and he talked for quite a while before he had boiled off enough rage to stop talking.