“Close your eyes, Indian.”
“Blainey?”
“One final surprise…”
McCracken’s hand emerged from his pocket with a phosphorus flare he had constructed that afternoon, plastic pipe tubing filled with three separate kinds of powder. He touched his lighter to the rawhide strip fuse and tossed it ahead, near the midway point between them and the door. The tubing struck the floor and rolled briefly before igniting in hot, lingering flashbulb-bright intensity. Men rubbed their eyes, opened them again to sight echoes of dazzling white.
Blaine and Johnny used the temporary freeze to rush through the main door. Outside, the parking lot was a shambles. Fragments of the cars Blaine had wired littered a pavement dominated by the flaming wrecks. The flames carved into the night and stole the cover of darkness away. Everywhere freed prisoners rushed for the fence.
“Time to get ourselves a taxi,” Blaine said as they lunged down the stairs leading from the entryway.
As if on cue, a series of police cars sped through the gate with sirens wailing. They slammed to a halt while Johnny and Blaine sought cover behind one of the vehicles untouched by the explosions. The idea occurred to them at the same time, and, without exchanging a single word or gesture, they moved for the car parked at the end of the new row once it was abandoned. By the time its previous occupants reached the jail, their car was screeching its way back out the gate.
“Next stop the Amazon, Indian, “Blaine said.
Chapter 5
Patty Hunsecker awoke with the wind. The vertical blinds drawn over her open windows flapped wildly, rattling together like change shaken inside a piggy bank. It was a hot wind, but throwing back the covers Patty found that she was freezing. Cold sweat matted her blouse to her flesh. The cuffs of her jeans had crept up her ankles and now cut tightly into her calves. She was shivering. The nightmare had come again, the bulk of it already lost to memory, with only the residue left behind:
A dark sedan crashing through the guardrail and plunging over the cliff. In the front seat the Hunsecker’s female Japanese house servant and her father’s business assistant, Shimada, flailing frantically with the wheel. In the back her father’s face glued against the window. Her father was waving at Patty.
Waving good-bye.
Patty climbed out of bed and nearly tripped on the boots discarded at its foot. She did not remember taking them off, did not remember giving herself up to sleep, either. She had been in the study earlier — her father’s study — lost in the pile of press clippings that littered the desk. Clippings accumulated over the past day and a half that had turned her grief to terror since the funeral on Friday, the day after a Thanksgiving that left her nothing to give thanks for.
“Thank you for seeing me on a Sunday,” she had told Captain Harold Banyan of the Los Angeles Police Department that afternoon.
“You said it was urgent, Miss Hunsecker. I knew your father. For what’s it worth, I thought he was a great man.”
“It may be worth a lot, Captain.”
It was then that Banyan noticed the manila envelope Patty was clutching beneath her arm. He had seen pictures of her in the stories that cluttered the news about Phillip Hunsecker’s tragic passing, but they did not do her justice. Her body was athletic and shapely, her skin bronzed, and her blond hair cut stylishly short.
“I’d like you to take a look at these,” Patty said as she unclasped the envelope and handed a small stack of photocopied press clippings across the desk to Banyan. “I’ve got more, but these are the most clear-cut.”
Banyan had begun fingering through them. “Clear-cut what, Miss Hunsecker?”
“Examples, Captain Banyan. My father isn’t the only one, Captain. In the past five days, nine men like him have been killed; three others have disappeared. Five of the nine perished in ‘accidents,’ as well.”
Banyan looked up from skimming the tear sheets. “By ‘like him,’ you mean…”
“Rich, powerful, influential. I spent most of yesterday in the library, going through out-of-town newspapers. I didn’t get through them all. There could be more.”
“More victims, you mean?”
Patty nodded.
“Then you’re suggesting…”
“That my father and the others were murdered, Captain Banyan. That the deaths are connected, part of a pattern, some sort of conspiracy.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Miss Hunsecker?”
“You haven’t read the tear sheets. You just skimmed them. I made those copies for you. I’ve got another set. You can read them in detail and call me back when you’re finished. If you want, I can wait out in—”
“Miss Hun — Can I call you Patty?”
“I’ve been calling you captain,” she answered, trying for a smile.
“Patty, what led you to the library on this…search?”
“A feeling.”
“That’s all?”
Patty swallowed hard. “The skid marks at the scene of the accident. Something about them was all wrong. Something suggested that…”
“Go on.”
“Suggested that my father’s car was forced off the road.”
“Our forensics unit spent half a day on the scene and disagrees with that conclusion.”
“I’m well aware of that, Captain.”
Banyan smiled curtly at her. “Your specialty is the sea — the ocean — is it not?”
“It was.”
“Then I would say you were stepping out of line to make conclusions better reached — or not reached — by the police.”
“If I hadn’t found out about the others, I would accept that judgement.”
Again Banyan fingered through the tear sheets. “Yes. And was your father acquainted with any of these others?”
“I’m sure he met a few of them.”
“Any business dealings, political contacts?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And do you have any reason to believe that these same men bear any direct connection to one another?”
“Besides the obvious, no.”
“And just what is the obvious?”
“Their stature. The kind of influence they wielded.”
“That’s not a connection, Miss Hunsecker, it’s a fact. You’re trying to suggest to me that your father was a victim of some mammoth conspiracy. But there’s no evidence to support that conclusion.”
Banyan extended the tear sheets back across the desk. Patty’s hands stayed on her lap.
“Just read them, Captain, in detail. Call the investigating officers in some of the other cities. See if they have any suspicions. That’s all I ask.”
Banyan pulled the tear sheets back toward him and let them flop to his desk. “I’ll call you, Patty. Give me a few days.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
But Patty knew a few days weren’t going to make any difference, nor would a few weeks, or even a few months. Banyan wasn’t buying into the story; he probably wouldn’t make a single phone call. She walked out of the building feeling even more alone than she had while she stood with her younger brothers on either side of her at the funeral seventy-two hours before. She was responsible for them now; they were hers to raise and no one else’s.
Your specialty is the sea — the ocean — is it not?
It was, indeed, and, God, how she missed it now, as she closed the windows and locked them. She had come back one year before to bury her mother — who’d succumbed after a long battle with cancer Patty didn’t even know she was waging. The news of her mother’s death had reached Patty in the Biminis, where she had started work on a new project with a new boat, the Runaway II. The ocean was her one great love; she had foresaken all else for it. She had left her family, left college, left the family’s three Southern California houses to pursue a love that had been all-consuming.