McCracken reached the staircase at 11:49. Timing was of the utmost importance now if he was to reach Johnny Wareagle ahead of the explosions, and a significant obstacle remained to be overcome: gaining entry to the second-floor area of the jail where Johnny was being held meant retracing his steps up the staircase and passing right through the building’s front area.
He mounted the steps quickly and used his keys to unlock the door. He fixed his cap lower over his forehead and slid outward. Not hesitating, he turned right and walked past the wall-less main room, which was busy with activity. Another stairway that would take him to the second level, where Johnny was being kept, lay straight ahead. The building’s ancient design did not allow for monitoring stations on every floor. There were just lines of claustrophobic cells with heavy wooden, windowless doors. Patrolling guards, yes, but no central station to bypass.
11:51…
McCracken rushed up the stairs and waited briefly at the top to see if a guard was patrolling the floor. The rattling clip-clop of boot heels alerted him to the presence of one before his eyes recorded the steady pace of the man heading his way on his pass. Blaine pressed his shoulders against the alcove wall and waited. When the guard had turned to go back the other way, he pounced. The man felt only a slight twinge in his neck before consciousness was stripped from him. Blaine headed on past the small room he had met Johnny in that afternoon to the cell where Wareagle was being held.
“This is your wake-up call, Indian,” he said, turning the key in the lock. “Time to rise and shine.”
McCracken pushed the heavy door open.
“Let’s get a move—”
But the cell was empty.
Johnny was gone.
Blaine fought against panic. The unexpected was nothing new to him. The problem in this case continued to be time.
11:53…
His fiery distraction would begin in seven minutes; if he didn’t have Wareagle in tow by that time, it would be for naught. Obviously Blaine’s presence here that afternoon had raised eyebrows among the jail’s officials. They would have moved Wareagle to a more secure location, probably under personal guard on the third floor, because that would create the greatest distance to cover in the event escape was attempted. With time his enemy, and his explosive distraction no longer enough to ensure success, Blaine needed something else, something more.
The cell doors around him held the answer. Blaine started at the cell next to Johnny’s old one and unlocked it with the keys lifted from the guard in the basement. He pounded on the door before thrusting it open, then moved onto the next one across the hall. He was working on the fifth door when the first of those inmates he’d freed emerged tentatively into the corridor. They regarded each other with confusion and took their first steps cautiously, as if still bound imperceptibly to their cells. But the bonds were quick to come off.
McCracken had opened over a dozen doors when the first complement of those he had freed surged by him. They kept their distance, unsure and skeptical of his motives. One stopped and smiled at him. Blaine smiled back and made his own way down the hall toward the group waiting.
11:57.
“Vamos,” he told them, followed by, “Adeus.”
“Muito obrigado,” one of them said.
Blaine flew up the stairs to the third floor and pressed himself against the side wall. He peered around the doorway to find a trio of guards standing rigid before a single cell at the very end of the corridor. He gazed at his watch.
11:58…The waiting was interminable, seconds passing like hours before his eyes.
Come on, he urged the freed prisoners on the level beneath him. Come on!
He heard the shouts and screams first, pouring up the stairwell from ground level. The wailing, old-fashioned bell alarm came next. He made himself wait a few seconds more, wanting to seize the moment when indecision and fear on the part of Johnny’s guards was at its peak.
Blaine moved an instant before his watch showed 11:59. He moved down the corridor — not charging but backpedaling fearfully — trembling gun aimed at nothing. Johnny’s guards, who had already been looking that way, drew their guns as well.
“This way!” Blaine screamed at them. “Hurry! They’re coming! We’re under attack!”
McCracken had stopped his surge twenty feet from the door, pressed up against the wall as if for cover. The alarm’s bells burned his ears, shouts and screams occasionally rising above them.
“Now!” Blaine yelled behind him.
Johnny’s guards came forward, slow at first but then in an all-out rush. Blaine lunged into the hall in front of their charge and leveled his pistol, combat-style, back toward the stairway. The guards accepted him in that instant, and an instant was all he needed.
Two charged to his left, and he went for those first, a forearm launched into the face of one while a kick found the groin of the other. The men crumpled as they stood, the final guard turning in time to see them hit the floor, but not in time to swing his gun toward the figure whirling at him in a blur. McCracken separated the three guards from their weapons — in case they came to faster than expected — and rushed toward the cell they’d been guarding.
Only thirty seconds remained until midnight when he pounded on the door.
“Guess who, Indian?” Blaine asked, already trying to work the first of his keys into the lock.
“Hello, Blainey.”
“Damn,” McCracken muttered when the final key failed to do the job. “Hold tight, Johnny.”
The door was too heavy and the lock too solid to shoot out. His only hope was that one of the guards he’d felled had the right key on his person. Blaine rushed back to the center of the corridor. The man he had kicked in the groin was twisting on the floor, only semiconscious. A single key dangled from his belt. McCracken reached down and snatched it.
Boom!..Boom!..Boom!
The first explosions sounded just as he jammed the key into the lock on Johnny’s cell. The very structure of the building seemed to tremble, walls shedding dust. Blaine shoved the door open; Wareagle was standing in wait, his wrist and leg irons lying in pools on the floor behind him.
“I always figured Houdini was an Indian,” McCracken said over the shrilling alarm bell.
Boom!…Boom!..Boom!
The next series in the parking lot sounded just as they started down the corridor.
“The hellfire, Blainey.”
“Literally tonight, Indian. Gonna be plenty of pissed-off cops when the time comes to drive home.”
Between the explosions and alarm came the sounds of sporadic gunfire. A stand was being made by police against the scourge of escaping prisoners. Blaine signaled Johnny to stop when they reached the staircase. His eyes were glued to his watch.
“More, Blainey?”
“Just a little. Right about…now!”
On cue there was a final Boom! that was muffled like distant thunder. The lights around them flickered and died.
“Figured we could use a little bit of insurance,” Blaine explained, “so I wired the pole running the lines of juice into the building.”
In the darkness he could feel Johnny smile. “Take their eyes and you take their guns.”
“That’s the idea.”
They sped down the staircase and then descended the last stretch of the way toward the main floor. A dull haze of emergency lighting shone through the black. The loss of power had cut the alarm, and the only sounds were the shouts and screams coming from police struggling to regain control.