No gunshots followed my flight, but Nicky was about four steps behind me. His boots hit the floor with thumps that sent echoes bouncing off the walls. If I kept going straight down the hall, his seven-league strides would catch me before I made the front door. I turned right down the steps to the basement. The door to the backyard was my objective. Game over if it was locked. It wasn’t. I turned the handle and the door swung outwards. Nicky was coming down the short flight of stairs two at a time. I stepped through the door and paused. Nicky hit the landing at the bottom of the stairs and flung himself toward me. My timing was gorgeous. As Nicky flew in my direction, I slammed the door on his head. Smacking Nicky with doors was getting to be a habit.
It was fifteen yards to the first row of trucks. They were parked sideways to me, facing into the yard. I ran across the open space, and behind me I could hear Grimaldi urging on the troops. His voice didn’t vibrate with good cheer. I rounded the first truck, and before I disappeared from the sight of my pursuers, I took a swift look backwards. Grimaldi was in the lead. He had the gun in his hand. Jerry hurried along beside him, and Nicky trailed by a few yards. Nicky was holding his forehead with both hands.
I ran down the line of trucks, and when I’d passed six of them, just as Grimaldi and company made an appearance around the first truck, I ducked left. That put me in between two of the monsters. I jumped up on the steps that led into the cab of the seventh truck in the row. I tried the door. If it were a Humphrey Bogart movie, the door would be unlocked and the keys in the ignition. It wasn’t a Bogart movie. The door failed to open and I didn’t bother checking for keys in the ignition.
Grimaldi’s voice sounded somewhere back along the line of trucks. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Jerry’s voice answered back. Also unintelligible. I pulled myself up onto the hood of the truck and crawled over the windows to the roof of the cab. The manoeuvre put me ten feet above the ground, and when I flattened myself on the roof, I was invisible from down below. It made a temporary refuge.
I waited two or three minutes. No noises drifted up from Grimaldi or the other two. I raised my head a foot from the roof and surveyed the territory. Grimaldi came into view first. He was standing beside the office building, gun in hand, and looking toward the row of trucks that began the next aisle over from my row. Where were Nicky and Jerry? Grimaldi must have split his trio into separate search parties. He was playing the backup man, the guy with the gun who’d ensure I didn’t get out the front way.
I shifted around on the truck roof, trying to locate Jerry and Nicky. My truck stood in the middle of its row, seven vehicles from the office building and another seven to the garage with the bays for servicing the trucks. The garage seemed a logical place to seek my next temporary refuge. Might find a weapon in there. A crowbar, a wrench, something metal and heavy. How the hell did a crowbar get its name? Any connection with the ugly black birds?
“He ain’t along here.”
The voice, Nicky’s, came from immediately below me. I dropped my head so sharply that it hit the metal of the roof and made a small noise. Boing. It was as loud as a thunderclap to me. I sucked in my breath and waited. Nothing happened. No shouts of discovery. No Nicky scrambling up the truck. The noise hadn’t been as loud as a thunderclap to him. Not even as loud as a boing.
I stayed unmoving, and after half a minute I lifted my head again. Nicky was standing beside Grimaldi at the office building. Grimaldi was waving his arm, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, apparently delivering fresh instructions to Nicky. Jerry wasn’t to be seen, but reason told me that if Nicky had been searching my row of trucks, Jerry must be on another section of the grounds. Reason went on to advise me that this was probably a good time to make my switch to the garage.
I slid from the roof of the truck and trotted to the outside of the row of trucks, putting them in between me and the spot Grimaldi had staked out as his field headquarters. I ran down the row past seven trucks, watching in every direction for Jerry and not spotting him.
At the side of the garage, one truck stood separate from the rest. It wasn’t in any of the tidy rows with its brother trucks. And there was something else different about it. Its windows were open. So was the driver’s door. Only one answer. It must be the truck that Jerry and Nicky intended to employ in transporting my remains to the dump after Grimaldi finished with his execution job. Must be. If the windows and door were open, the keys might be in the ignition. I hoisted myself up the step into the truck’s cab and looked across the dashboard. No keys.
Maybe in the garage. I dropped back to the ground and hustled around to the rear of the garage and through the open entrance into one of the bays. The bay door had been lifted high overhead. I looked around for a board where keys to the trucks might be kept. I didn’t see a board or any keys.
All I saw was Jerry.
He had his back turned. He was in the garage and he was looking for me. He held a hammer in his hand. He was trying to be stealthy. Two could play at all of those games. Another hammer, many hammers in fact, lay on a workbench that was within reaching distance of my right hand. I picked one up, a ferocious-looking instrument, and tiptoed after Jerry. He was about six paces in front of me, back still turned, and I covered the space in four fast tiptoes. Jerry didn’t hear me. There was something to be said for Rockports with cushiony soles. I hit Jerry in the centre of his head with the flat side of the hammer’s business end. He fell forward on his beard. I waited, and Jerry didn’t move. No blood appeared from the centre of his head. Clean knockout.
I leaned over Jerry and detached the ring of many keys from his belt. One of the keys had to start the truck beside the garage. But which? There were at least a dozen on the ring. The vision in my head, as soon as I located the right key, was of making the great escape. Start the truck, drive down the rows of trucks past Nicky and Grimaldi, crash through the gates, and soar to freedom. Well, rumble to freedom.
The only way to put my vision on the path to reality was to test the keys in the truck’s ignition. I started back the way I’d come, through the open bay door and around the rear of the garage. Before I reached the truck, I stopped, returned to the garage, and picked up the hammer I’d used to deck Jerry. I hefted it in my hand. It made me feel semi-secure.
Back outside, I climbed into the cab of the truck and began testing the keys. It was aggravating work, slowed by the shakes in my hands and the necessity to keep a watch for Nicky and Grimaldi. I got through five keys without finding the one that fit the ignition when Nicky came into sight. He was about twenty yards away and walking down a row of trucks in the centre of the yard. As he walked, he was checking under each truck, no doubt on the lookout for my running legs. My legs weren’t running. They were in the cab of the truck and they were beginning to tremble.
The eighth key slid into the ignition. Eureka. Soon be on my way. That was the upside of the situation. The downside was that as soon as I started the engine, I’d attract Nicky’s notice. And Grimaldi’s. No choice. I turned the key in the ignition. The truck’s motor started on two sound levels. First it burped. Then it roared. At the burp, Nicky straightened up. At the roar, he came barrelling toward the truck.
“I found him,” he shouted as he ran. Liar. It was me who found me for him.
At Nicky’s shout, Grimaldi steamed into view at the top of the row of trucks to my left. He had the gun at his side and he was running hard. But Grimaldi was still eighty or ninety yards away. Nicky was closer. Nicky was coming around the front of the truck to the driver’s side.
Inside the cab, the space was a confusion of gears and levers and chains. The levers and chains worked the bin on the back of the truck. I wasn’t concerned with them. It was the gears that were giving me trouble. I couldn’t find a forward shift, something that would get the truck in motion. I was stuck in neutral. I pressed the clutch with my foot and pushed and pulled on the gearshift. The sound of grinding metal emitted from somewhere below me in the truck’s bowels. Nothing moved forward.
Nicky’s head popped up outside the open window on my side of the truck. He was on the step