Flashback (49 page)

Having reached the dwarf-sized door to her office, Anna ushered Teddy inside, then turned to the gunman. Daylight was about gone. Just enough gray showed at the windows fronting the casemate to see him in silhouette.

The self-satisfied smirk on his face came more from imagination than observation, but still she wanted to wipe it off with an axe. "I can't believe what a patsy you are," she said, filling her voice with as much acid amusement as she could. "A thousand bucks. Coyotes out of Tijuana get more than that. Haven't been smuggling long, I take it." She laughed. In her ears it sounded hollow, fake, but Perry seemed properly challenged.

"We're getting a hell of a lot more than..." he stopped and shook his head as if awakening from a daydream. Though she couldn't see his face, Anna guessed he was shaking off the euphoria of drinking in Teddy's tears and remembered who he was, what he was supposed to be accomplishing. Perry and Butch had an agenda of their own, and neither nationalism nor altruism formed a part of it.

Perry raised his automatic and she thought he was going to shoot her where she stood. Instead he put his right palm in the middle of her chest and shoved. She fell backward into Teddy, and they both tumbled to the floor. The office door slammed and Perry yelled, "Come out and you die."

Short and to the point, Anna thought as she extricated herself from the other woman. From the inner office she could hear the murmur of voices and hoped she'd caused at least a small rift in the solidarity of the conspirators. Her office was dark, only the feeblest of grainy light weeping in through the firing slit and the narrow dirty window the NPS had cemented within. Working by feel, Anna fished the key from her pocket and removed the handcuffs, then helped Teddy to her feet and seated her in the one chair.

Teddy said nothing and was as compliant as a puppet while Anna arranged her arms and legs. In the top left drawer of the desk was a bottle of Tylenol. Anna fumbled it out and swallowed two dry. Swallowing pills was ever an ordeal, and she gagged and gulped, hoping it would be worth it, that the drug would alleviate some of the crippling ache in her back. Throughout this peculiar and unpleasantly noisy undertaking, Teddy maintained her silence. At least she wasn't keening anymore. That high-pitched despair unnerved Anna. It was too like the sound a dying animal makes.

Bracing her rump on the edge of the desk to give some support to her back, her knees only inches from Teddy's in the tiny office, Anna said: "Tell me what happened. Where's Bob?"

A thin moan began to build in the younger woman's throat at the mention of her husband.

"Stop that," Anna said sharply. "Suck it up, Teddy. Tell me what happened."

The John Wayne part of the Shaws' shared vision reasserted. The moan was cut off. Teddy took a couple of shaky breaths.

"We were in the living room watching Animal Planet,' a show about baby tigers. Bob's leg was hurting him and he was fretting because Donna had radioed to report the generator had gone down on Loggerhead, and he couldn't raise you on the radio. The power went off and Bob knew the generators here had been shut down and something wasn't right. Then this man comes in. We didn't hear him. Suddenly Joey ran under the couch, her tail puffed out, and we look up and this man with a rifle or machine gun or something is standing on the landing.

"Bob keeps his service weapon secured with his cuffs in the bedroom like he's been told to. The bedroom might as well have been Czechoslovakia. This guy-Perry?"

Anna nodded. Teddy was reporting chronologically and in detail as befitted the wife of Mr. Law Enforcement. Usually Anna appreciated it. This day, incarcerated in her tiny fortress of an office with the world as she knew it being rearranged by armed men, she wanted Teddy to get to the crux of the issue.

"Did he kill Bob?" Anna asked bluntly.

Teddy started to cry again. Anna couldn't see the tears, but she could make out the crunching up of Teddy's face and hear the change in her breathing.

"He smashed Bob's cast and smashed it and smashed it. Bob was screaming. I swung a chair at his head to get him to stop, but he jerked it away from me and hit me so hard I went unconscious for a minute or so. Not clear out, just sort of brownout, you know. Next thing he's got both our radios in his hip pockets and he's dragging me out. Bob wasn't screaming anymore. I don't know if he killed him or if Bob passed out from the pain."

For a second or two Anna said nothing, just winced under the cover of darkness. Why rebreaking a broken limb should set her sympathetic aches to echoing Bob Shaw's screams when the original break didn't, she didn't know, but there was something particularly brutal about it.

"My guess is he didn't kill Bob," Anna said when the involuntary shudder had passed. "Smashing up his cast looks to me like he wanted to immobilize him. Since he succeeded in that, why kill him?" Because he is a sadistic son-of-a-bitch, was the obvious answer, but Teddy didn't know Perry's idiosyncratic charms as well as Anna. Maybe it wouldn't occur to her.

"What are they doing?" Teddy asked, her voice spiraling up alarmingly.

"Stop it," Anna said again. "Don't go useless on me."

"Right." Teddy took a couple more deep breaths in through her nose, quelling the incipient hysteria. "Okay."

"Did you see those two Cubans when Perry brought you in?"

"I guess. I saw two men. One sitting."

"I think those two guys, Mack and Theresa Alvarez, masterminded this thing. They're bringing over three hundred plus Cuban refugees. They had to disable the fort to make sure we didn't get hold of the mainland in time to get the coast guard out here, stop the Cubans from landing and send them back to Castro. Besides, they had to give themselves and the boat captains bringing the people time to get away."

"Mack and Theresa?"

"I think so. Mack was born in Cuba."

"Where did Theresa go then? Cuba, to plan things?" Teddy asked.

"I don't know."

"Who's this Perry? He's not Cuban."

"There's two of them," Anna said. "Another guy, Butch, is a bigger meaner, uglier Perry. I think they're hired guns. Maybe they've developed plans of their own. They're not following Mack's game plan. They got something else going."

A ruckus from the outer office silenced them. Neither moved. Anna listened with every ounce of her will. Like bunnies, she thought, trapped in their burrow, hoping to hear the danger has passed.

A saying of her father's came to mind. He'd been dead for twenty years, but occasionally Anna heard his voice in her head as warm and clear as if he stood in the room next to her. "There's wolves and there's rabbits," he used to say. "And there's no percentage in being a rabbit."

"God damn but I hate this," Anna whispered.

The noise moved toward their end of the office. The foreshortened door was jerked open and a body pushed through. Again the door slammed, and a terrific pounding began.

"They're nailing us in."

"Daniel?"

"Who'd you think it was, Tinkerbell?" The maintenance man turned his back on the door to face them. "This baboon shows up on my doorstep with an Uzi. He says Mack sabotaged the generators. He smashes my radio and prods me in the ribs with a gun barrel. What the hell is going on here?"

Daniel made the office almost unbearably claustrophobic for Anna. His bulk crowded the cramped space. His energy vibrated back from the walls. Though he spoke in the hushed tones of the confused, the hunted, as far as the impact on Anna's brain was concerned he might as well have been bellowing.

"I've got to get out of here," she said. Then, realizing how self-centered she sounded, amended her statement: "We've got to get out of here."

From without there came the sounds of another banging door and again the murmuring of voices. None held the sharpness or edge of before. Anna feared the seeds of distrust and dissention she'd sewn had fallen on rocky ground.

She and Teddy quickly told Daniel what had brought them to this sorry state of affairs. Anna went on to share suspicions and speculations, then Daniel, his thick self hulking into the space Anna'd been using to breathe, joined them in their rabbit-eared listening. Nothing could be discerned. The door had been nailed shut and probably the filing cabinets shoved against it for good measure. Because he couldn't resist, Daniel hurled himself against it several times. There was no give.

"What are they doing?" Teddy asked after a bit.

No one had heard anything she hadn't. Anna knew she asked from frustration and the need to connect, to do something. She answered for the same reason. "Waiting, I expect. The refugees should be here soon. They've shut us down. Now all they've got to do is sit on us, make sure we don't get word out and that none of the boaters or campers get in contact with us. They couldn't have wished for better weather. The campground is deserted. The boaters are tucked in. We could scream ourselves hoarse and never raise anybody. Once they've unloaded their cargo, they'll leave. And we'll be found nailed in my office like three chickens in a coop by the first tourist who hears us hollering in the morning." That image was almost as terrifying as the other entertainments the body smugglers had been kind enough to arrange for her.

"I'm getting out of here," Anna said.

"Not through that door you're not," Daniel said, ever practical. "These aren't hollow-core doors. They're solid oak nailed into solid oak frames. And if we did have a wrecking ball and got out, what do you suggest we do? Charge five armed men with paper clips and Post-it notes?"

"There's my letter opener," Anna said.

"Jesus, woman."

Daniel was right: there was no possibility of getting out the door and no wisdom in attempting it even if it were possible. Anna turned to the only other way out of the room. "Move," she said to her fellow prisoners. Any motion in such close quarters was a cooperative effort.

She shoved her desk over beneath the firing slit and climbed up on all fours, the better to inspect the thing by feel, memory and intuition.

"Anna, that window's no more than seven inches wide. I should know. I installed them," Daniel said.

"Can you get it out? The glass and the frame?" Anna asked.

"Maybe. Then it would be almost eight inches wide. Nobody can squeeze through that."

Not so many years ago Anna would have believed him. Since then she'd been a reluctant party to a cave rescue in one of the world's greatest caves, Lechuguilla in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Claustrophobia and a clear and rational mind kept her from intentionally putting herself in squashy little places. She'd never forgotten for a moment what one of the Bureau of Land Management's premier cavers told her: "You get wedged, you die." A sentiment seldom shared with the public during cave search-and-rescue operations.

But she had seen some remarkable passages. A man who'd become her friend on that hellish expedition, a big Minnesotan named Curt Schatz, had been able to squeeze through alarmingly narrow crevices. "Mouse bones," he'd told her. Mice had sliding skeletons that allowed them to collapse down even smaller than customary mouse size.

"Mouse bones," Anna told Daniel. "Eight inches?"

"Tops."

Turning from the window, she opened the shallow drawer in the center of the desk and felt around for the ruler that everyone, even an acid-befogged, heartbroken Supervisory Ranger, kept there. "Measure my head," she commanded Teddy.

"Width or circumference?"

Anna was pleased to hear the controlled, efficient Teddy was back.

"Width."

Without light it took several minutes. Teddy had to read the ruler by the Braille method, clicking her long nails from groove to groove till she was sure her count was right.

"Six and a half inches," she announced.

"Anna, are you nuts? That's an old wives' tale that wherever your head'll fit you can get through. It's bull. Look at me. My head is nowhere near the biggest part of me. You're gonna get yourself hurt."

"Get the frame out, Daniel." Anna slid off the desk and they shuffled in a tight circle till Daniel could take her place.

The only tools he had access to were Anna's letter opener and Swiss army knife. They were all he needed. Anna and Teddy sat in the dark, listening to his scraping and muttering, and when he was ready, they pounded on the door and shouted to be let out while he completed the noisy business of wrenching the window frame out.

"Seven inches," he said as he handed Anna the window.

Anna said nothing. Maybe it was an old wives' tale.

"Move," she said.

"Keep your knickers on," Daniel replied. "Let me get what I can of the grouting out. This stuff's sharp as can be. It'd tear you up proper."

Anna bowed to his greater wisdom in the area of grout and appreciated the skin he'd thought to save.

The low-grade grumble of voices from the outer offices quieted, but they'd not heard the door open and close. Probably the smugglers left during the time Anna and Teddy were pounding on the door to cover Daniel's demolition duties.

Anna looked at the slot, a rectangle a shade lighter than the surrounding brick. Eight inches. It looked so narrow. Maybe she'd get stuck part way and be found come morning half out half in, dangling like a breech calf. She didn't want to think about it. She wanted to get out. Stopping the Cuban refugees from landing wasn't important. America could absorb three hundred more souls. Stopping what she suspected could turn into a bloodbath was.