Hope to Die (28 page)

The nose of the car smashed into an ancient cedar tree, snuffing out the remaining headlight and causing the trajectory of my descent to change. The Jeep whipsawed rearward in one last, long drop, at least ten or fifteen feet.

The back of the car’s impact with the ground should have been colossal, bone-breaking certainly, perhaps neck-snapping and fatal. And the sound should have been deafening.

Instead, the swamp seemed to open up and swallow the speed and mass of the car with a noise that was a bizarre cross between the thwacking of a tennis racket hitting a ball and the splash of a kid doing a cannonball into a pool. Reeds, swamp water, and oozing black mud blew out the rear window and sucked up half the car before it stopped.

For several long moments in the pitch-black, I sat there in the astronaut’s position, rocked back in total shock. Finally I moved, shaky with adrenaline.

Nuggets of shatterproof glass spilled away from my arms, which, other than suffering from a funny-bone sensation, were working. So were my legs, and so was my neck, which, like my head and face, was splattered with the muck that had saved my life.

I pushed at buttons to get one of the interior lights to go on, but the electrical system had died. I dug in my pants pocket, found the mini-Maglite I always carry, and shone it about, trying to get a full sense of my predicament.

The swamp had swallowed the back half of the Jeep and pinned my door shut. The hood jutted above me, free of the mud. Broken branches and limbs stuck up from the grille like a bizarre floral arrangement.

I got my cell out and saw it had died. There was no calling until I could recharge it. The driver of the car that had swerved in front of me had to have seen me go over the guardrail, right? The police had probably been alerted, or would be in minutes. Had there been any other cars or trucks close enough behind me to see the crash?

I couldn’t remember. At that late hour, in the bad weather, traffic had been exceedingly light.

What if no one came?

Then it dawned on me that time was ticking away. Sunday had given me a deadline. I had to be in New Orleans by 4:30 a.m. That was two hours and forty minutes from now. I couldn’t afford to wait for rescue. In fact, I couldn’t afford to
be
rescued. There would be police and ambulances and questions that I had no time to answer.

After unbuckling my seat belt, I had to do several contortionist moves to get my head and shoulders across the front passenger seat and my feet and legs up onto the driver’s seat. At some point during the car’s fall, the passenger-side window had been blown out too. I punched out the remaining glass, pushed aside the vegetation, and looked out, happy to see that the muck was a good eight inches below me.

Shining the flashlight around, I saw a stand of cedar and cypress trees on a bank of sorts about five feet off the nose of the car. My beam picked up scars and broken branches on the tree closest to a twenty-five-foot cement stanchion that supported that section of the highway.

Overhead, a truck roared by and disappeared in a hiss. It was raining again, and if there were sirens coming, I couldn’t hear them. I flashed the light back at the stanchion and up its side a solid ten feet, and I found what I was looking for.
Okay
, I thought.
I have a chance
.

Looking around, I smiled, dug in my pocket, and came up with my jackknife. With several quick cuts, I removed the driver’s-side and passenger’s-side seat belts and tied and snapped them together to form a makeshift rope about four feet long with a closed buckle at one end from which a two-foot piece of strap hung. I tied that around my waist.

After taking several deep breaths, I put the flashlight between my teeth and squirmed my head, shoulders, body, and hips out the car’s window. At that point, I was sitting in an awkward position, gripping the windshield frame.

I needed another handhold and grasped the butt end of the windshield wiper and used it as leverage to hoist myself out and onto the hood of the car, which was canted left and rose steeply. I got my right shoe braced against the windshield frame and my left against the wiper base, and I was able to reach up and grab some of the tree limbs sticking up from the front grille.

It wasn’t pretty, but I managed to pull myself up onto the nose of the car, which was rock solid. It took me three attempts to get into a crouch, left knee down in the branches, right foot up on the grille.

Gripping two other limbs, I took several deep breaths, said a prayer, and then sprang out into space.

I ALMOST MADE THE
bank. My right foot actually reached firmer ground, but my left leg plunged into mud up to my thigh. For three to four minutes, I couldn’t move at all. But when I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to lose my left shoe and probably my right, I grabbed at the exposed root of the tree I’d crashed through and hauled myself out and up, left shoe gone, but right still in place.

Panting, I again listened for sirens but still heard none. I found the ground like a saturated sponge that demanded the gingerly placement of my bare left foot. Twice in the ten feet or so to the stanchion, I broke through the spongy earth into the mud. The second time, my right shoe disappeared.

I didn’t bother trying to dig in the muck; I crept to the side of the cement upright. Shining my flashlight, I saw that the lower flank of the stanchion was smooth and uninterrupted cement. But ten feet up, a rung of bent steel rebar stuck out. I’d seen it from the car.

There were other rungs above it every two feet or so, climbing toward the underside of the highway and the guardrail. When road crews put up these kinds of giant engineered supports, they need a way up and down them during the installation process. The rungs are set in the cement to form a ladder.

When the work is done, however, they cut off the first four or so rungs to make it impossible for kids or thrill seekers to climb them. The rest are left in place in case the stanchion ever needs to be inspected from above.

Now, I’m six foot two and have a thirty-inch reach, but I’d known just looking at it from the car that I had no chance of snagging the lowest rung on my own. I untied the strap I’d made with the pieces of the seat belts and held it with the buckle and loose strap away from me. Then I began to spin it slowly, checking for any give in the knots and testing the weight of the buckle.

When I thought I had it right, I sort of underhand-lobbed the buckle up there. It clanged off the rung and rebounded back to me so hard, I had to duck. The second time and the third time were not much better. On my fourth attempt, however, I changed tactics, going back to basics, taking the buckle in my right hand and holding the end of the strap in my left.

I crouched, leaped up, and released the buckle as if I were making an outside jump shot. It went over the rung and swung there. I undid my leather belt and used the knife to slice a hole about three inches from the end of the strap. I fitted my belt buckle through the hole and then passed the leather through the buckle and drew it all tight.

My belt added thirty-six inches to the overall length of the strap, and I was able to jiggle and then snag the loose piece hanging off the seat-belt buckle. I tied a loop in that part of the webbing and passed my belt and the rest of the improvised rope through it. When I pulled on the slack, my lifeline was anchored tight to the rung.

I tested it, holding tight to the webbing and lifting my feet off the ground. There were
tut-tut-tut
noises as the knots tightened, but they held.

Understanding that in my weakened, exhausted condition, I was probably going to have one shot at this, I stood there for several moments listening to the swamp waking up from the storm, the thumping of frogs, and the first whine of insects.

I figured the slime on my socks would work against me, so I stripped them off and stood more firmly on the ground. Then I put the Maglite back in my pocket. There was no way I could hold it in my mouth during a climb. I was going to have to do this by Braille. Not necessarily a bad thing. The darkness would make me concentrate all the more.

I held the strap with my right hand, lowered my head, thought of my family, and then got the bottom of my left foot against the stanchion and reached high overhead, finding the strap again with my left hand. It was going to tear up my hands. I could already feel it.

But I grabbed hold as tight as I could and then exploded into a blind, frenzied scramble of bare feet up the wall, hand over hand up the rope, past my belt buckle and on. My left hand slipped on the fourth grab. The seat-belt webbing ripped a bloody groove, and I almost let go.

But Mulch’s face appeared in my mind and triggered a rampage within me. My right hand stabbed up, slapped steel, but I couldn’t hold on. I grabbed the strap again, took one breath, and then furiously threw my bloody left hand up and caught the rung.

Once upon a time, I might have had the upper-body strength to crawl up the ladder from there with little or no problem. But now it took a rage-fueled, all-out effort to get to the second and then the third rung before my right knee found the bottom one. I hung there like a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound moth, panting and doing my best to forget the popping sound my shoulder had made and ignore the pain as the rebar dug into my patella.

When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I reached up, wincing at a crunching noise in my right shoulder, and got my bare feet onto the lower rung. The adrenaline rush left me weaker than I could have imagined, and I spent several more minutes clinging to the side of the stanchion, waiting until my strength returned.

A truck passed on the highway above me. I felt the vibration of it ripple down through the cement and that was enough to get me climbing again. When I reached the guardrail and got over it, I almost cried.

Another truck was coming from the west, and a car behind it. I grabbed the Maglite, turned it on, and began waving it at the approaching headlights.

I must have been a sight. My clothes were torn and muddy. My hair was muddy. So was my face. And I was barefoot, wild-eyed, and bleeding from my hands. So in retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that the truck didn’t stop.

The car that followed didn’t stop either.

Nor did the next three vehicles that passed me.

I stood there dazed and frustrated as all those taillights receded east. I’d lost nearly forty minutes to the crash.

Overhead, the clouds broke and scudded across the sky, revealing the moon and stars. I stared up into them, my bloody hands hanging, and begged God for help, for someone to stop before it was too late.

For ten, maybe fifteen minutes, there was only the darkness. No trucks and no cars passed on either side of the interstate. Then a set of headlights appeared, low and wide, from the west, back toward Lafayette.

A few seconds later, the roar of the big block engine came to me and I realized the car wasn’t just speeding. It was hurtling toward me, going a hundred miles an hour, maybe more.

I STOOD IN THE
near lane and slashed my light twice but then thought it unlikely the driver was going to slow, let alone stop, for some swamp creature, so I retreated to the guardrail and stood there. The headlights swept over me, and the car, an old Pontiac GTO with a chrome blower sticking out of the hood, roared past me. I didn’t bother to look after it until I heard the engine die off into a fluttering chug.

A solid six hundred yards beyond me, the car’s brake lights beamed. The reverse lights came on, and the car came swerving back my way. A truck went by, blew its horn, and veered into the passing lane, but the GTO kept coming.

The muscle car stopped beside me, rumbling and vibrating. The passenger window rolled down and I peered inside and saw a good old boy in his thirties with a blond buzz cut, wearing a white V-neck T-shirt over a tattooed and steroidal body.

A woman’s frail voice said, “You look like you’re having a bad day, pilgrim.”

I noticed her then, sitting in the backseat, a tiny, older woman huddled under a blanket and wearing sunglasses. Her face was horribly scarred from some long ago trauma.

“You want us to call an ambulance? The cops?” the driver asked.

“I am a cop,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross, I’m a detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, and I have to get to New Orleans. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“See, Lester?” the woman said. “I told you.”

“I don’t care about your notions right now, Ma,” Lester replied, looking over his shoulder. “He’s not getting in here with all that mud on him. We’ll call someone.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Life and death.”

“It’s gonna take me a week to clean my Goat.” Lester groaned.

“Then it takes a week,” she said. “Here, have him sit on this.”

She handed him the blanket. Lester scowled but spread it over the leather bucket seat. Apologizing and trying not to smear mud on anything, I climbed in, held out my hand, and said, “My family is at stake. I can’t thank you enough for stopping.”

Lester looked at the blood and dirt on my hand and sniffed. “That was Ma’s notion, not mine. I barely saw you.”

I shut the door and was trying to put on the seat belt when he punched the gas. The Goat bellowed out the mouth of its chrome blower. The back end of the muscle car sank, and the front rose almost like a boat’s does when it’s accelerating.

But this was no ordinary boat. Lester’s car was “souped up to the max,” as he put it. More than four hundred horsepower pinned me to the seat as he banged through gears and took us up to ninety miles an hour.

The suspension wasn’t like what you’d find in a modern sports car. There was play in it, and we seemed to drift slightly left and then right down the interstate, with Lester lightly counter-steering back and forth. The swaying increased when he took us up past a hundred miles an hour.