A HIGHLEY EFFECTIVE ESCAPE PLAN
Police swarmed the van, wraiths in body armor and helmets. Their shouts puffed into the cold morning. Hardcastle, no helmet and captain’s bars on his Kevlar, led the phalanx.
"Remember," the judge growled, "any funny shit and one of you dies. Oh god!" he writhed, clawing his face. "Please! Please help! They're going to kill me!"
"Out!" Hardcastle boomed through the commotion. "Slow and with your hands up!"
First Kavi and Arthur, then Harris and Alex, all four slid out onto the Bakersville Library green, hands as high as muscle and tendons would stretch. A dozen rifles pointed straight to their racing hearts.
"Get down! Get down!" Cops barked like a chorus of snarling attack dogs.
Alex dropped first, face to the ground and hands ready behind her back. "We're not resisting. Just take it easy, okay?"
The Irregulars followed, bellies to the snowy ground. Damp soil wafted into their noses. Plastic zip ties bit into their wrists. Knees pressed into their backs, held the fugitives in place. Others loomed above them, guns waiting.
"It's the Judge!" Kavi shouted. "It's the—"
"You're under arrest," Hardcastle cut her off. "You have the right to remain silent..."
"Oh god thank you!" Judge Highley stumbled out from the van's side door, rifle a makeshift crutch. "Thank god, Lemuel! They were going to kill me! It's only by a miracle, a bump in the road, that I wrestled the gun from the fat one!"
"I'm average sized!" Harris squirmed and the knee on his back dug deeper.
Hardcastle strode into the circle without hesitation, as if any bullets would simply bounce from his steeled skin. "Judge Highley," he said, "I need you to stop and put down the rifle."
"Lemuel. Lemuel," The Judge looked with wide eyes between his gun-crutch and the cop. "Can't you see I'm shot? Your detective beat me, took me captive in my own house until the Three Little Pigs could come with backup. Please. Did you know they had a second van? There it is! Please, let me just give my statement and go home, Lemuel."
"'Chief Hardcastle,' if you please," Hardcastle said. Though his gun pointed downward, he was yet to holster the weapon.
"He's—" Alex squirmed, desperate to explain. The weight on her back pressed harder, squeezing the air from her chest.
"She shot me, Hardcastle! You let a rogue cop conspire with criminals! Your cop shot me! A sitting Judge!" The Judge continued his hobbling, in open defiance of the Chief's order. If he was going to play innocent, he'd have to play it all the way. "Hardcastle! Stop being obtuse and listen!"
Hardcastle's jaw—already marble by any standard—flexed. A thought puffed from his nose. "Alright." He clipped the strap over his sidearm and stepped to the Judge. "Medic unit over here for the Judge!" he shouted. "We've got a GSW."
The Judge hobbled to Hardcastle, clapped his shoulder. "I thought I'd seen my last morning."
"Listen, Judge, I put my weapon away. I'd appreciate for all our safety if you'd do the same. We're getting you to the hospital. We'll have an officer take your statement there."
"There's no need for statements, Lemuel!" the Judge's voice rose, uneven and brittle like an ice-covered snowfall. "Just let me go home. I overheard them talking…they planted their own fingerprints! They bought this second van! The evidence is all there!"
Kavi thrashed against the officers holding her fast to the earth. "You lying son of a bitch!" She would take no more. Somewhere, in that icy Bakersville morning, her daughters were en route to school. Probably fighting over which song played on the radio. They were probably avoiding, with coy half-glances, questions about what they'd do in school today. As much as Kavi bitched and moaned about getting up with the girls, making their lunches and quenching the thousand fires which kindled each morning, the thought of not driving her two daughters to school snapped her insides. Sunlight glinting from weapons stung her eye. Kavi knew she'd rather die than spend even another moment apart from James, from her daughters.
"He's a lying bastard," Kavi growled. "Look at me! Turn around! Look at me! Look at me or shoot me!"
Hardcastle spun, shot a stare sharp and hot enough to melt a lesser being.
Kavi returned serve.
"Check the van."
"Not another word, Mrs. Andan-Byrne!" Hardcastle's hand again shot to his sidearm. The officers, seeing their Chief tense, shifted, feet ready for whatever action came their way. "I promise you; you will have time to say your peace, but let's get everyone to safety first."
"It can't wait!" Kavi crawled forward, pulling two officers with her. "There's pieces of the Judge's typewriter in the van! Highley shot it. There's strikes on the floor. The lowercase e, the r! One of them has to be viable! There's a note in my front pocket! Slipped to me in prison! Compare it to the typewriter strikes in the van!"
The Judge swallowed hard, hand sliding down the stock of his rifle, fingers ever closer to the trigger. But Hardcastle stormed toward the woman. This was his opening. The Judge swiveled from the scene and inch by inch, shuffled toward the perimeter of officers. No one gave the old man much mind.
Hardcastle crouched before Kavi. His laser vision bored a hole straight through her. Anti-protons curled from his nostrils. Then, in a flash, hands gentle and soft, his fingers dove into Kavi's shirt pocket and plucked out the tattered scrap.
Hardcastle only had to glance to the slip in his hand, "the story ends tonight," for the pieces of this jumbled jigsaw to finally snug into a clear picture. The clear typewritten letters. A typewriter in shambles. The rifle not in the Irregulars' hands, but the Judge's. Dalkowski's hunches. Highley insisting he just be allowed to leave. Hardcastle's hunches came not in neon and music, but smells. And Hardcastle smelled shit. He shot to his feet, turned.
Highley was gone. A slithering trail of uneven footprints and red dribbles snaked from the police perimeter, through the park, and disappeared near the road beyond.
"Can someone get the Judge, please and bring him back here?" His voice was quiet but firm. "Quickly."
None of the officers had time to even move. A flash of lime green glinted up the road, echoing the roar of a wounded beast. A wrecked shell of a Karman-Ghia, its hood gone, jumped the curb and threw sod through the grassy park. It slammed nose-first into a small hill. Snow and dirt exploded into the air, added to the smoke pouring from its hood. A hulking mass of a man emerged from the driver door, a flaming red face with a leather coat fluttering like a cape.
Words and shouts and echoes mixed in the clear the morning, muddied like too many shades of water paint. The giant advanced on the Judge, blocked his escape.
"No!" the Judge turned back toward the Irregulars. He raised the rifle and nestled it to his shoulder. "I will not be—"
Somewhere a woman screamed "stop!" Harris wrapped his body around Alex's. Kavi found her feet, tried to jump from the line of fire. She tripped over Arthur, and sprawled over Harris and Alex, each of them wondering, as their faces pushed into the snow, "what is that awful smell?"
Gunshots cut through the panic.
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