Still
pointing the gun at me, Vanessa backed up, reached for the space heater, and
hoisted it off the floor. It was an old-fashioned model: large and clunky,
turned to the highest setting, its bars glowing fiery orange, its frayed cord
plugged into an ungrounded outlet. Clutching it by the handle, she advanced
toward the tub.
“You
cheated the electric chair, Mazie Maguire, but you won’t cheat God. God wants
you to suffer before you die. God wants you to experience the agony of having
electricity course through your body. God wants you to jump and twitch and lose
control of your bowels.”
Vanessa’s
trolley had jumped its tracks long before Kip’s death, but now she had
completely derailed. I had no doubt that she intended to carry out my
electrocution. I started to scramble out of the tub, but Vanessa shot at me
again, the bullet pinging off the waterspout, ricocheting and nearly hitting my
knee. I screeched in terror. Still keeping the gun aimed at me, Vanessa swung
the heater toward the tub.
At that moment
Muffin exploded into the room, bounded onto the tub, and launched himself at my
face. Gasping in horror, Vanessa halted her throw mid-swing and dropped the
heater. It bounced against the rim of the tub and clunked to the floor. There
was a sizzling crackle as a lightning-blue spark jittered along the length of
the cord. Standing in a bathwater puddle, Vanessa was jolted backward by the
force of the electrical shock and flung against the opposite wall, the cord
wrenching loose as she tripped on it.
Meanwhile
I had my hands full with Muffin. I pried him off, trapped his muzzle, and did
something I’d always dreamed of: I spanked his furry little behind. He yelped
in outrage. Clutching him against my chest, I heaved myself out of the tub, my
legs quivering so violently I could scarcely stand. I bent to examine Vanessa,
who was wedged between the toilet and the sink. She appeared dazed, her eyes
unfocused, a stream of drool running out of one side of her mouth. Her fingers
were twitching and her legs were jerking, but I guessed she’d have all her
neurons firing in a minute or two. Then she’d come after me.
I
picked up the gun, which had shot out of Vanessa’s hands and skittered under
the sink. I didn’t want it, but I figured it ought to be taken away before
Vanessa started taking potshots at the neighbors. Gun in one hand and dog in
the other, I bolted down to the main floor, terrified that I’d accidentally
pull the trigger and blow my foot off.
Curses and thumps came from the basement.
Still clutching Muffin, my hand clamped over his nasty little snout, I crept
down the basement steps. Labeck was locked inside Vanessa’s luggage closet,
attempting to kick down the door. A padlock was attached to the door hasp, its
key nowhere in sight.
“It’s
me!” I yelled.
The
pounding stopped. “I heard shots,” Labeck called through the door. “Are you all
right?”
“She
tried to electrocute me.”
“You
didn’t shoot her, did you?”
“No!
She
tried to shoot me!” I looked around for the padlock key, hoping
Vanessa had left it out in plain sight. Of course she hadn’t. Time was running
out here and the back of my neck was prickling. I could picture Vanessa
charging down the stairs with a chain saw in her hands.
“Stand
away from the door,” I yelled. I aimed at the lock and for the first time in my
life pulled the trigger of a gun. The padlock exploded.
I
screamed. Labeck screamed. He emerged from the closet a moment later, looking
pale and shaken.
He stared at me.
“You
elected
to marry into that gene pool?”
Escape tip #14:
Don’t fall in the radon.
Labeck
stopped in a deserted church parking lot to rip the cable company signs off the
van while I huddled in the passenger seat, stuffing wads of Kleenex inside my
soaked clothes. Labeck got back in, started the van, and peeled out.
“Was
she always like that?” He was still smarting over the way Vanessa had forced
him to the basement at gunpoint and locked him in the luggage closet.
“She’s
mellowed a bit.” I sorted through my memories, trying to select one that would
illustrate what it was like having the kind of in-law who would booby-trap your
shoes with scorpions or spike your coffee with WD-40. I told Labeck about the
time Vanessa and I had gone shopping together and she’d planted an expensive
necklace in my handbag so I’d be arrested for shoplifting. How she’d
volunteered to mail out our wedding invitations, but had never mailed the ones
to my side of the family. How she’d given Kip’s best man a thousand dollars to
get Kip so drunk at his bachelor party he wouldn’t make it to the church.
“You’d have been
a lot better off if he hadn’t shown up,” growled Labeck.
Muffin
snarled, annoyed by Labeck’s tone of voice. He was imprisoned inside an
upended plastic milk crate on the
van floor. The mutt had chased us as we’d run out of Vanessa’s house and leaped
into the van. A rottweiler trapped inside the body of a beanie baby, he’d
rampaged around madly, trying to rip out our jugulars, until Labeck had the
presence of mind to clap the crate over him. Labeck was not taking any guff
from a two-pound fur ball; when Muffin snarled at him, he snarled back.
Growling sullenly, Muffin lay back down, his upraised hackles clearly
expressing the concept:
This ain’t over yet.
“Think
the Queen of Mean called the cops after we left?” Labeck asked.
“Who
knows what goes through that diseased brain? If the police pick me up, she
loses her chance to force drain cleaner down my throat.” Nervously I checked
the van’s rearview mirror. Vanessa must have seen the cable van, parked outside
her house. The police could be pulling over white vans all over the city.
Labeck
fiddled with the illegal police scanner on the dashboard and we listened to
garbled transmissions for a while. They might as well have been speaking
Klingon as far as I could make out, but Labeck seemed to comprehend the static
and after listening for a while relaxed.
“Nothing.
I think we’re okay for now.”
He reached inside
his shirt pocket and pulled out a black cartridge, tossed it in my lap.
“Is this it?” I
breathed. “The nanny cam tape?” There was a white label on the outside and the
date 9-25.
“Might be. I
found it inside your mother-in-law’s VCR. The reason the cable wasn’t working
is that she accidentally unhooked the cable link when she plugged the cord into
her old VCR player.”
Yes, I could
picture that. Vanessa, sitting in front of her television, watching the
videotape of Kip’s murder scroll across the screen, psyching herself into the
state of bubbling bile that would enable her to execute me.
“I
want to run that film through the NSRT at the station,” Labeck said.
“Sorry,
I don’t speak acronym.”
“Nonsequential
ray tracing. A videotape analysis program.”
Moving
west through Milwaukee’s sluggish mid-morning traffic, we pulled into Channel
13 headquarters half an hour later. It was a one-story brick building with
billboard-sized photos of Peter Polifka mounted on the roof amidst a jungle of
antennae and satellite dishes large enough to bounce signals to distant
galaxies. We rolled around to the back, where a parking lot held two more
camera vans like Labeck’s.
“Take
the toolbox,” Labeck said. “There’s a face mask in there—put it on.”
I
found the ventilator mask, a flattened paper cone of the type worn by brain
surgeons and asbestos removers, snapped it on, and immediately began to breathe
like Darth Vader. We got out of the van, me lugging the heavy toolbox and
carrying a clipboard. Muffin, who’d been sullenly lying inside the crate,
sprang to his feet and began biting at the crate slats, growling out threats
about what he was going to do to us once he busted out. Labeck slammed the van
door.
“You’re
a service guy,” Labeck instructed. “You’re here to fix the . . . you’re
checking for
radon
. Nobody knows what the hell radon is, so we ought to
be safe with that story.”
We.
What a
sweet word. A buddy-buddy word, a spine-stiffening word, a word ten thousand
times more powerful than the puny
I.
When had
you
and
I
morphed into
we
?
Had Labeck begun to believe my side of the
story; was that why he was still helping me? Maybe it was best not to look too
hard into that particular gift horse’s mouth.
Labeck
took out a set of keys and unlocked the building’s back door. I followed him
inside, into a service corridor. We hadn’t gone two steps before a mens’
restroom door opened and a man emerged, still zipping his fly.
“Benny,
my man!”
“Hey,”
Labeck responded unenthusiastically.
My
Darth Vader breathing quickened. Standing directly in front of me was the real-life
Peter Polifka, Channel 13’s anchorman. He was even more gorgeous in person than
on TV. He was tan, square-jawed, and full-lipped. His teeth were the blinding
white of a Cloroxed toilet bowl. He wore a pink shirt, a burgundy tie, and a
dark gray suit. His voice was a deep, sexy baritone. I knew two Taycheedah
inmates who had his face tattooed on their inner thighs.
Polifka
pointed at me, puzzled by my mask. “What’s he here for?”
I
hated being a male in front of Peter Polifka. I wanted him to see me as a
desirable woman, not a shrimpy repair creep. Although now that he was standing
in front of me, I noticed that he was a foot shorter than I’d pictured and that
his tan looked like pancake makeup.
“Radon
check,” Labeck muttered.
Polifka
looked alarmed. “Oh. Is there—”
“Strictly
routine.”
Polifka
peered at me. “Do you know your pants are wet?”
“He
fell into some radon,” Labeck said casually. “It happens. But you should be
okay if you stay in your office with the door locked and the blinds down for a
couple hours. Maybe crawl under your desk.”
Peter
Polifka rocked back on his two-inch heels, considering this information. “Well.
Okay then. Carry on.” He turned around and scurried away, as though radon were
contagious.
“Idiot,”
Labeck muttered. He unlocked a door marked
Authorized Personnel Only
and
hustled me into a long, narrow room lined with electronics panels that looked
complicated enough to launch an intercontinental missile. A dozen television
sets, each tuned to a different station, flickered on another wall, apparently
Action 13’s way of checking up on the competition.
Peter
Polifka grinned from one of the screens, delivering a report that must have
been taped earlier that day. He was standing in front of a suburban school.
Bright yellow buses were disgorging kids.
“
. . . It’s back to school time all over southeast Wisconsin,”
Polifka
cheerily intoned
. “I’m here at Hassenpfeffer Elementary School in Elm Grove,
where kids are saying good-bye summer, hello school year. New teachers, new
classmates, new pencils, new notebooks. But the best thing—”
He held
out a box of Crayolas, the 128 pack.
“—is the brand-new crayons. Mmm,
love that waxy smell. Some things never change
.”
What
an in-depth report! Edward R. Murrow would have been jealous.
“So,
back to you, Lori.”
Polifka giggled, as though he’d had one too many hits
of crayon wax.
“
. . .
for escaped convict Mazie Maguire
.
”
The NBC station was
leading their news with the ever-popular escape story. Marshal Irving Katz
appeared on-screen at a press conference. He did not look happy.
“We believe
that the fugitive may be hiding somewhere within a twenty-mile radius of the
Lautenbacher farm,”
he said.
Very good,
Irving, just keep on chasing those wild geese
.
I smiled.
“However,”
he
went on,
“we have strong reasons to believe that Ms. Maguire was aided by a
person in a vehicle. Citizens who choose to transport, hide, or in any way
assist an escaped felon should be warned that they will face obstruction of
justice charges.”