The Escape Diaries (11 page)

           
“Busted.”

“How come you’re
here?”

“In the wilds of
Minnesota, you mean?”

Annoyance cut
through my pangs of terror. We cheeseheads hate being confused with those
lutefisk-eaters across the river.

“Wisconsin.”

He gave a
potato-pohtahto
shrug. “I pissed off the wrong people.”

This was probably
the most bizarre conversation I’d had in my life. “What if you don’t catch me?”

“Then they’ll
send me somewhere worse. Maybe Idaho, to nail guys with twelve-year-old wives.”
He levered himself farther out the window, extending his hand until it nearly
grazed my knuckles.

“Don’t!” Was this
guy nuts? He was going to overbalance, kill himself, and ruin his expensive
suit. “You’ll fall.”

“Nah. I’m braced.
Come on, Mazie—grab my hand. I’m tougher than those cowboy marshals. I
won’t let you drop.”

I looked up into
the licorice eyes. “I didn’t kill my husband.”

He looked back at
me, unsmiling, then, as though channeling Marshal Gerard in
The Fugitive,
said, “I don’t care.”

His fingers
wiggled invitingly, inches above my own, like worms on a fishing line. All I
had to do was bite. Not far away, some enterprising firefighter was backing a
hook and ladder truck in my direction. I was willing to bet there was a four-story
extension ladder on that truck.

You’ll never
take me alive, copper.

           
I’ve
always wanted to say that.

           
I
didn’t have the breath left to say it, though. I simply released my hold on the
elevator, flailed my arms and legs, and soared into space.

Escape tip #9:

You can’t go wrong with basic black.

Accessorize with white.

I landed in a
pile of poop, a mini-mountain of cow manure and straw bedding ten feet tall and
twenty feet long. I could see now why Norbert wanted a new manure spreader.

           
Cow
manure has a lot of uses. Applied to fields, it grows crops. Burned, it’s a
mosquito repellent, although I personally planned to stick to OFF. But the best
thing about manure? It’s soft enough to break a human’s fall from a height of
four stories. I knew this because my brothers had once dared me to jump onto our
farm’s manure pile from the cargo door of our barn. Of course I did it. I
burped cow poop for a week.

Another advantage
of manure? It’s a natural lubricant; I was able to wriggle out of the wire
binding in seconds. I corkscrewed myself out of the muck, rump-skied down the
hill, heaved myself to my feet, and took off running.

           
Stunned
by my suicide leap, the law enforcement people just stood there, jaws agape.
This gave me a heartbeat’s head start, but within seconds they were hard on my
heels—cops and yelping dogs and reporters and camera crews—everyone
yelling contradictory orders and getting in one another’s way.

           
Galloping
over a rise, I blundered straight into the Lautenbacher cow herd. They were
Holstein cows—the black-and-white spotted ones that star on all the
Wisconsin postcards. Holsteins are big and bulky, but unless they have a
newborn calf or their teats are pulled too hard they’re shy and gentle.

           
There
must have been thirty or forty Holsteins in this herd. I threaded my way
between the cows, who were standing companionably in the shade of an elm tree,
chewing their cuds or just staring aimlessly into space with their pretty,
long-lashed eyes, thinking their cow thoughts. Cows like things to be quiet and
predictable. This would be a cow’s ideal week:

           
Monday:
Eat alfalfa, poop, stare into space.

           
Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday—same as Monday.

           
Now
the circus had come to town. Cops and dogs and people with big, scary-looking
cameras were hurtling over the rise. Cows don’t like surprises. Cows don’t like
strangers. And cows really, really don’t like dogs.

           
The
dogs had broken loose from their trainers and were dashing around, forgetting
they were supposed to be capturing a wanted fugitive, and going berzerko on the
poor Holsteins, barking and snapping at them. The panicked cows stampeded,
their big, heavy-veined udders swinging as they bowled over cops, trampled
expensive TV equipment, and lashed out at the irksome dogs with their
surprisingly powerful hind legs.

I risked a glance
over my shoulder. Katz was barreling through the herd, zigzagging around cows
like a wide receiver eluding tacklers. He was in shape; he looked like a guy
who ran every day; he was catching up. But he was dressed wrong for a rundown
in his slick-soled shoes; he slipped on a cow pie and went down hard.

           
In
my manure-smeared white shirt and black pants, I blended into the Holstein herd
like a chocolate chip into a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Screened by a trio of
bellowing heifers, I crashed through a thorny hedge and found myself in a
field. Sunflowers this time, splashing up a hillside in a carpet of waving
golden heads. Bleeding from wire gouges and thorn scratches, I belly-crawled
through the sunflowers, smearing the roots with blood and manure. Mazie Maguire,
the Amazing Human Fertilizer! Emerging at last from the sunflowers, I paused to
consider my next move.

A narrow gravel
road meandered between fields here. A mobile satellite van was parked on the
road’s shoulder. Bold red letters across the van’s sides read
Action 13!
Milwaukee’s First with the Latest!
A radar dish the size of a flying saucer
perched atop a cherry picker pole. Cables and cords dribbled out of the back
doors, which astonishingly—were open! Cautiously emerging from the
sunflowers, I duckwalked to the van and peeked inside. Empty.

           
Acting
on impulse, I hoisted myself into the back of the truck. The Action 13 team
were slobs. Electronic gadgets, camera equipment, and fast-food wrappers were
strewn all over. How did they ever find anything in this mess? Then again,
neatness was highly overrated; three out of four fleeing felons preferred
clutter to organization. I crept beneath a recessed bench seat, pretzeled my
legs, and hauled a thick black cable cord over myself, feeling like one of those
circus midgets who crawl out of clown cars. Stinky,
the Eighth
Dwarf.

           
I
took a deep breath. Then was sorry I’d inhaled. Minutes trickled torturously by
as I crouched there, chewing my knuckles, mentally pummeling myself because I’d
trapped myself in this van. I should have taken my chances in the fields. It
might not be too late. I was just starting to extricate myself from my hiding
place when I heard rapid footsteps outside the truck.

Nearly fainting
with fear, I braced myself for the drawn guns and shouted orders. But it wasn’t
cops. It was just a couple of slobby guys in baseball caps and jeans, tossing
stuff in the van, rolling up cable, slamming doors. They climbed into the
front, started the truck, and took off. The van bumped along the dirt road,
then sped up as it turned onto the highway. Peering out between the strands of
cable, I checked out the guys. The driver, bearded and scruffy, wore a
camouflage pattern baseball cap. He sniffed. “Jeez—what’s that smell?”

“I don’t smell
anything,” said the shotgun guy, who was also scruffy: hair way past its
trim-by date, ditto for shave, Manitoba Moose Hockey cap.

           
“Like
cow crap. It reeks in here.”

           
“Probably
on our shoes. I must have walked through every cow flop on that farm.”

           
I
was the source of the cow crap odor, of course. I was a stowaway, an unwanted
passenger like a wood tick on a dog. At the moment I would have traded places
with a wood tick on a dog. I hurt in so many places my ailments had to take a
number for my brain to process them. But I couldn’t think about my cuts and
bruises at the moment, because it would take up valuable energy I needed to worry
that the Action 13 guys would decide to investigate the cow crap aroma. There
was no partition between the cargo hold and the front seat, so my manure odor
could circulate freely, stinking up the whole interior.

           
 
Both men rolled down their windows.

           
“We’re
going national,” chortled the Moose cap guy. I couldn’t see his face, just his
dark, unkempt hair. “CNN picked up.”

           
“Turn
it on.”

           
Moose
punched on a television monitor mounted in the dashboard. Peeking out between
the gaps in the cable cord, I could catch glimpses of what they were watching.
It was the Lautenbacher farm.

           
“Unbelievable,”
Camo Cap said. “Oh, man—check out this part. Here she comes!” There was
Norbert’s stupid, ugly barn on the small screen. Then the camera zoomed in on
the open hatch door with the grain elevator jutting out. There I was! Dangling
on the end of the elevator, legs swinging out into space, clutching the elevator
lip for dear life. Zoom again as Katz appeared in the hatch door, all G-Man
square jaw and gallantry, extending his hand and then—

           
“Je-sus!”
Moose said. “There she goes.”

           
Camo
Cap shook his head. “Could of broken her neck.”

           
We
all watched the crazy woman leap through the air, shrieking and flailing. We
watched her land in the giant manure mound. Then we watched as the phoenix of
cow crap rose from the heap and sprinted off.

           
“I
think she just did the four hundred in six seconds flat,” said Camo, who was
making me nervous. He needed to be watching the road instead of the video,
which was now showing me vanishing into the Holstein herd.

           
I
didn’t think either of these bozos were reporters; they were too grungy-looking
to be on-camera talent. They must be camera crew. And if I was lucky, they were
heading back to their home planet, Milwaukee.

           
Moose
changed channels. “Here’s the bit we filmed with the cow herd.”

           
Now
I understood why the cops hadn’t sent the dogs chasing after me. The dogs must
have had border collie blood, because instead of obeying their trainers’
commands, they were racing around trying to round up the panicked Holsteins.

Coming next on
Animal Planet:
When Police Dogs Go Wild
.

Peter Polifka,
the station’s main anchor guy, appeared on-screen back in the station’s studio,
his teeth white against his tanned face, his jaw manly, his voice a rich
baritone.
“So Mazie Maguire eludes the authorities yet again,”
he said,
chuckling.
“And as we can see in this footage”
—instant replay of
my jump—
“she literally slips through the fingers of Federal Marshal
Sylvester Katz.”

           
The
camera cut to a young female reporter, standing outside the Lautenbacher
barn.
 

“Umm, I think
that’s
Irving
Katz?”

Right.
Sylvester was the cat who was always after Tweety Bird.

“Well, I’d say
that this jailbird is leading the Katz on a merry chase, wouldn’t you,
Brittany?” He chortled at his own lame pun.

           
Brittany
forced a smile. “She certainly is, Peter.”

           
“Do
the police have any idea where Mazie Maguire might be headed next?”

           
“Authorities
refused to comment, Peter.”

           
Camo
Cap punched off the TV and said in a deep, pompous voice, “Any idea where my
brains are stashed, Brittany?”

           
Moose
said, “I believe you’re sitting on them, Peter.”

           
They
both laughed, then Moose reached into a cooler beneath the front seat, pulled
out two cans of beer and popped them. He handed one to the driver and took one
for himself. Icy driblets ran down the sides of the cans. I could almost taste
the cold wetness sluicing down my own parched throat. My stomach let out a
gurgle nearly audible above the sound of the engine. The van rolled along, the
rhythm of tires on road so lulling my lids drooped and I fell into a waking
doze, too dopey with fatigue to plan what I was going to do next.

           
 
An hour or so passed. Although I couldn’t
see out, I figured we must be in Milwaukee because of the traffic noise and the
stop-and-go driving. Camo’s cussing becoming more inventive. His actual name,
I’d discovered, was Bob, but I hadn’t heard Manitoba Moose’s real name yet. I
hoped we didn’t have much farther to go. My muscles were cramping and I was so
thirsty I was ready to lick my own sweat.

           
The
van slowed, made a sharp turn, and stopped. Bob and Moose got out of the van,
came around to the back and began removing equipment. I scrunched myself into
an even smaller ball, keeping my eyes down because most people possess a sixth
sense that warns them when they’re being watched. At last the rear doors
slammed shut.

“I’m leaving my
car here and taking the truck,” I heard Moose say. “I’ve got an early-morning
assignment.”

“Hey, while
you’re at it, stop at a car wash and get them to clean off that stink.”