The Road To Ruin Read online

  “Mad at Mr. Hall?”

  “Oh! No-no-no, I’m not mad at Mr. Hall, did I say I was mad at Mr. Hall? Well, I used to be mad at Mr. Hall, just a little bit mad at Mr. Hall, but I got over all that, I mean I’m not mad at him now, that was just—”

  “Why were you mad at Mr. Hall?”

  Oh, why did I tell them that? Flip demanded of himself. Now I have to tell them I’m a tax cheat, and they’ll be convinced I’m a hardened criminal, and—

  “Mr. Morriscone?”

  My mouth has been open a long time, Flip pointed out to himself, and shut it, then opened it to say, “He got me into a little trouble with the IRS. I didn’t know he was going to report what he paid me, so I didn’t report what he paid me, and that’s the only time in my life I ever did anything like that, and I’ll never do it again, and in fact, after I stopped being mad at Mr. Hall, and never was really mad at him, but then after that I was actually grateful to Mr. Hall, because I learned my lesson, believe you me.”

  He didn’t want to stop talking, it seemed to hold the inevitable at bay if he kept talking, but all at once he ran out of things to say, and so he just sat there. His mouth was open again. He thought, should I tell them about the time I cheated on the test in high school? No, they don’t want to know about that, they want to know all about Jay Gilly, and I can’t tell them about that, somehow I have to not tell them about Jay Gilly, not the truth, oh, no, not the truth. His mouth closed.

  Meanwhile, the talking policeman nodded thoughtfully a while, then turned to the other one and said, “You see what this is, Bob.”

  “I think I do,” the other one said, Flip hearing his voice for the first time.

  “They talked to people who knew Hall,” the talking policeman said, “looking for that weak link.”

  “That’s the story, all right.”

  Weak link? Do they mean me?

  “Probably met in a bar somewhere,” the talking policeman said, “something like that.”

  I don’t go to bars! Fortunately, Flip didn’t actually say that, or anything else.

  “So this is another blind alley,” the talking policeman said, “like that foreign embassy.”

  Foreign embassy?

  “Sure looks like it.”

  The talking policeman stood, and then the other policeman stood. The talking policeman said to Flip, “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Morriscone. Here’s my card.”

  They’re not going to arrest me! Fortunately again, Flip also left that sentence unspoken. Instead, he got to his quaking feet, took the card without looking at it, and waited for whatever would happen next.

  “If you remember anything else, give us a call.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And when we get this Jay Gilly, and you can count on it, we will get him—”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “—we’ll ask you to come in to identify him for us.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “We’ll let ourselves out.”

  They did, Flip staring at them in wonder the whole time. It was true! They were letting him go! They weren’t suspicious! He was a weak link!

  He locked the door after them, hurried back through the gym to the changing room, and took a long, long shower. Partway through, he took off his clothes.

  55

  THE FACT IS, almost everybody who uses a power drill releases the trigger just a second too late. You or I, if we drive a long thin galvanized screw through three-quarter inch of plywood into a hardwood window frame, will keep going that tiny bit too long after the job is done, to leave the plywood around the screwhead dimpled, dented, with some few of the fibers of the plywood already torn.

  This is what had happened at the window where Monroe Hall, with all the obsessive patience and single-mindedness brought on by total darkness, struggled to lever a corner of plywood away from the window frame. The first part was the hardest, as that first tiny damage to the plywood caused by the power drill was worried and pressed, twisted and stressed. More fibers snapped. Air from the outside world seeped into Hall’s prison room, and then more air.

  None of the screws pulled out of the window frame. They were too deeply embedded in solid wood for that. Instead, slowly, relentlessly, they were pulled through the plywood, leaving not quite an inch of sharp-edged screw jutting from the frame, plus a small Etna of splinters that exploded inward from the plywood.

  The first to come loose was at the lower-left corner of the window, and then the one a foot above that, and then the one a foot to the right along the windowsill, and then back to the next-higher screw on the side. When the fifth one popped, along the windowsill, he could force one end of his bar into the corner and push the other end up along the complaining face of the plywood until the bar was perpendicular to the building and the plywood was arched backward like a dog-eared page in a book.

  Was this enough? Every time he reached over the sill, it seemed, his hands hit either the cutting edges of the exposed screws or the nasty points of the shredded plywood fibers. Also, the tapered opening was still mostly too narrow to permit him to slide through.

  So, no; he had to do more. His fingers were bleeding from the work, and the backs of his hands were bleeding from the plywood shreds, but fortunately in the darkness he couldn’t see any of that, though he could certainly feel it. After a very brief pause to breathe in the fresh air, he pulled his lever back in and went on to finish the job of freeing the plywood all across the bottom sill. And when he wedged the lever in to make the dog-ear this time, there was much more room to maneuver.

  He remembered there’d been an armchair in the room. Stumbling around, cautious but hitting into anonymous things anyway, he found the chair at last and dragged it over to the window. Standing on it, he confronted an opening he really still couldn’t see, though there was by now the faintest hint of light from the outside world, and he decided the way to go out was feet first.

  It was very awkward, holding on to the window frame, the window, the chairback, the sill, while he maneuvered himself around, but finally there he was, seated on the sill, legs outside the house, nose against the window glass. He had no idea what was outside or how far away the ground might be, but did that matter? No, it did not.

  Where were those jutting screws? He felt under his thighs, and there they were, too close together to avoid completely. He’d just have to slide out above them somehow.

  Grasping the bottom of the open window with both hands, he leaned far backward into the darkness of the room, then began to hunch himself forward, first on left buttock, then on right, while pulling with the strength of his forearms, upturned hands gripping the window bottom. Outside, his feet kicked in the night air, until he pressed his heels against the side of the house and used that leverage, too.

  He was moving. The curl of plywood pressed against his right hip, but he was moving, inexorably moving, and all at once the plywood let him through.

  Gravity took over. It took over too soon, before he was ready, before he was clear of the building. Two screws laid tracks of sharp awful pain upward along his torso, and he couldn’t twist away. His flailing left hand hit the wedged bar and grabbed it, pulling it loose, and the plywood snapped back down onto him like a mousetrap, scraping the entire upper half of his body as it squeezed him like toothpaste out of the building.

  Eleven feet below this window was the ground, dark thin mountainous soil full of boulders and rocks. Most of Hall’s parts hit rocks when he landed, most significantly the head-sized rock he hit with the back of his own head.

  He was unconscious then, but didn’t know it. On automatic pilot, he struggled to his feet, straightened, and marched into the wall of the house. Correcting, he spun himself about, lost his balance, found his balance, and headed off downhill, reeling forward, still clutching the metal bar in his left hand, only staying upright because his feet still knew their job was to stay, if possible, directly beneath his head.

  Plunging in this way, his head hurtling down the mountai
n while his feet scrambled to keep up, he legged it some distance from the house, and might even have gone on like that all the way to the valley if his head had only been alert enough to tell his feet to avoid that tree.

  Concussed for the second time, Hall dropped onto his back like a delivery of curtain rods. His extremities twitched, then lay still. A frown gradually faded from his brow as, off to his left, the sun at last put in an appearance.

  56

  MARK GOT BACK TO the lodge a little after nine in the morning, and the brown Taurus was already there, tucked in next to Os’s white Porsche. Putting his mother’s hand-me-down Buick Regal in next to the others, he was happy to see that Taurus, because it meant the union guys had not funked.

  He himself had almost funked, damn near funked. After yesterday’s traumatic experience of having Monroe Hall recognize his voice, on top of the tension and disbelief connected with actually doing this thing, he had, after returning the horse and its carrier with Os, spent the rest of a mostly sleepless night in his miserable basement room under his mother’s off-limits mansion thinking about what he could possibly do now, and what he’d mainly thought about was funking it. Caving in. Being a quitter. Giving up the whole idea.

  Of course, he’d tried not to phrase it in such negative terms during those wakeful hours. He’d tried for a more positive spin in his internal debate, telling himself he could “start over,” he could “reinvent himself,” he could “wipe the slate clean,” he could, in the Mark Twain way, “light out for the Territories.”

  Isn’t that, after all, what it really means to be an American? All of the current resistance to a national identification card (and many years ago, for the same reason, to the Social Security number), all of the alarm about the threats to “privacy,” are based on the simple American conviction, from the very beginning of the immigrant experience, that it was the ultimate right of every American, if circumstances happened to call for such drastic measures, to turn himself into somebody new. The classless society was the ideal partly because, in a classless society, all identity is flexible. Mark, in his sleepless hours of not so much battling funk as welcoming funk aboard, had used every shred of schooling he could dredge out of memory to convince himself that at this point of crisis in his life, it would be not only acceptable, it would be not only guilt-free, but it would be damn near his patriotic duty, to run away and become somebody else.

  And yet he hadn’t done it. Along toward dawn, he had sunk into a heavy troubled slumber, and when the alarm jolted him awake no time later he knew, grimly, that he wouldn’t be doing his patriotic duty as a turn-tail-and-run after all. There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or old, you were already you.

  So that’s what it came down to. He was Mark Sterling, of a certain background and a certain position in the community, and he always would be. He had started on this path, and the only thing to do was keep on it. And keep his mouth shut, particularly around Monroe Hall.

  So it was a relief to see the Taurus, because it meant they were all in agreement: There was no way out of this. If the union men had successfully bagged it, Mark would have felt even worse than before, but they had not, so he felt marginally better.

  Entering the house, he found an empty but astonishingly messy living room with faint sounds of activity far ahead. Following those sounds, he came eventually to a kitchen containing all four of his co-conspirators, plus more mess than a kindergartner’s birthday party. Breakfast was being made, with more enthusiasm than precision, all over the kitchen, using most of the pots, plates, cutting boards, cutlery, silverware, and electric gadgets formerly in the cupboards and on the shelves. Os was the most covered with flour, Ace the most covered with egg in varying degrees of congealment. It was as though they’d been hired by biased researchers to prove male incompetence in the kitchen.

  Os noticed Mark first: “Ah, there you are. We’re almost ready here.”

  Mac waved toward him a maple-syrup-smeared hand, and said, “I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  “I haven’t,” Mark agreed, looking around, “but I’m not sure I’m hungry.”

  “It’s gonna be great,” Buddy assured him.

  “First, of course,” Os said, “we have to not feed Monroe Hall, and then feed the butler. Then we can bring most of this back down here—well, not down here, I think the dining room would be more welcoming—and tuck in to a hearty meal.”

  Mark couldn’t help it: “Like the condemned man?”

  Os frowned at him in surprise, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Mark shook his head. “Not enough sleep,” he said, knowing it would be impossible to explain that what was wrong with him was that there weren’t any Territories any more.

  Buddy said, “You know about the reward?”

  “Reward?” All he could think of was receiving a gold star. But who would present it, and for what?

  Mac explained, “Somebody, the wife, I guess, put up fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the return of Monroe Hall.”

  “Fifty thousand?” Mark grimaced. “For Monroe Hall? That’s not much.”

  Buddy said, “Ace wants to collect it.”

  “And why not?” Ace demanded. “Fifty grand for information? We got the information.”

  Mark said, “Os?”

  Os shrugged. “It’s up to his friends in the labor movement,” he said, “to draw for Ace the direct line between that information and the jail cell.”

  “There’s a way,” Ace insisted. “We just haven’t thought it through yet.”

  Mac said, “We’re ready here.” Pointing, he said, “That’s the breakfast we show Hall but don’t let him eat, and that’s the breakfast for the butler. And all the rest of it is for us.”

  Os said, “Buddy, why don’t you carry the butler’s tray, while Ace carries Hall’s tray?”

  Ace said, “That’s because we’re labor, right? And you’re management.”

  “Of course,” Os said. “And also why I’ll be carrying the laptop.”

  Mac said, “Masks.”

  So everybody put the dumb masks on, Buddy picked up a small tray of breakfast while Ace picked up a large tray of breakfast, and they all trooped upstairs. Buddy put the butler’s breakfast on a side table in the corridor and Os picked up the laptop from where they’d left it leaning against the wall, while Mark went down to the circuit breaker box at the end of the corridor. He waited there until Os inserted the key into Hall’s door and nodded to him, then switched the lights on in Hall’s room as Os unlocked the door and everybody pushed in.

  Mark came back, entered the room, and saw everybody milling around. He said, “Where’s Hall?”

  “Hiding or something,” Os said. He sounded irritable. “Damn it, Hall!” he said, raising his voice. “Stop playing the fool!”

  “You two shouldn’t be talking,” Mac pointed out.

  Oops; Mark put fingertips against his mouth.

  Ace had put the tray on the bed, then looked under it. They looked into the closet and into the bathroom. Then they stood in the middle of the guest room and looked at one another, baffled and silent, until Mac said, “How come that window’s open?”

  They all clustered around the plywood-shielded window. Now that they looked at it, they could see that the plywood was pushed outward from the sill along the bottom and part of the left side, held away by the screws that had once held it down. Tentative, unbelieving, Buddy pushed on the plywood, and it moved.

  Mac, in awe, said, “He got out.”

  “Then,” Os said, “we had better get out. Who knows how long ago he escaped?”

  “I knew it!” Mark said. If only he’d funked, after all. If only there were Territories!

  They hurried from Monroe Hall’s former prison to the corridor, leaving breakfast behind, and turned toward the staircase. Going by the other tray of breakfast, Mark said, “The butler!”

  They all stopped. They al
l looked at the butler’s breakfast, and then at Mark. Mac said, “Maybe Hall took him along.”

  Os said, “Hall? Look out for somebody else?”

  Mark said, “We have to let him out.”

  “Here.” Os pulled the other key from his pocket. “Do what you want; I’m getting far from here.”

  Not far enough, Mark thought. Not all the way to the Territories. Thinking that, he hurried back down the corridor, fumbled with the key in the lock, finally got it to turn, pushed open the door, stepped into the room and, just one second too late, saw that chair swinging like a runaway satellite around the edge of the door, swiftly in his direction at, well, at head height.

  57

  THE SLOPE WAS STEEP, but he could hand himself down from tree trunk to tree trunk, most of the time managing to stay on his feet. As the sun rose higher, off to his left, the chill in the air grew less, but he didn’t mind the chill, really; the exercise of walking down the mountain kept him warm.

  His head ached, and other parts of him hurt, while different parts stung. There was an intermittent buzzing in his ears, and from time to time his eyes lost their focus and he had to cling to a tree until he could see clearly again. But it wasn’t so bad, and when he came across the road it got even better.

  The road was one lane, dirt, not much more than a pair of rutted grooves angling diagonally across his downward path. It descended leftward, so he followed it, because it was easier to walk on a real road, and he had no clear destination in mind. It was just important, it seemed to him, to walk down from the mountain.

  It was just as well there were no mirrors or streams or other ways to see himself along the way, because his appearance had not been improved by recent events. His red-check flannel shirt was redder than before, with dried blood, and sported two irregular long gashes up the back. His tailored blue jeans were ripped here and there, splotched with grass stains, and with the left hip pocket half torn off, to dangle like a warning flag. His dark leather cowboy boots were so mud-stained you could no longer see the pictures of cactus plants on their sides. His hair was a tangled snarl, his face and hands streaked with dirt and dried blood, and his eyes had a strange look, like a fish tank overdue for cleaning.