Chapter 6a
Tommy – Behind Enemy Lines
When I came to, I still felt dizzy
but I managed to open my eyes and look around the room. It was unfurnished except for three chairs
where Dicky, Sergeant McAlister, and I were tied up. The walls were plain light blue and the floor
was a tan-colored stone. We were lined
up facing the door and to the right high up on the wall was a small
window. A warm, salty breeze and the
sound of seagulls blew through the window.
“This is not what I expected,” Dicky
muttered beside me.
“Dicky, are you OK?”
“I think so,” he replied. “Can you move your chair?”
“Yeah, why? Can’t you?”
“No, it’s a little too tall. I can’t quite reach the floor. Could you turn your chair a bit so that I can
see what kind of knot they used?” I hopped
my chair around so that I was facing the window. “They have got to be kidding!”
he exclaimed. “OK, Tommy, come over here
and I’ll untie you.”
“Yes, sir!” I said as I backed myself
toward him. “Is that close enough?”
“Yeah, hold on.” He untied me and I stretched my sore arms in
front of me.
I sighed and felt the restraint of
my bandage. I opened up my shirt and
looked down at it. “Oh look, they
re-bandaged me,” I said. I untied my
feet and stood up slowly. I was not as
dizzy as I had been previously. I untied
Dicky’s hands, and then glanced over at Sergeant McAlister.
“He’s not tied up,” I said.
“He’s not?”
“That’s weird.”
I heard Dicky drag his chair to the
window. “That’s a long way down,” he said.
“Well, I guess if we are going to try to escape again, we’ll have to use
the door.”
I stood in front of Sergeant
McAlister and shook him a little, trying to wake him up.
“The door’s unlocked! These bad guys are so idiotic!” Dicky exclaimed
from the other side of the room. “I think maybe we should try to escape.”
“What about him?” I asked,
motioning toward Sergeant McAlister.
“Let’s wake him up.”
Dicky came over with me in front of
the great big cop slumped in the chair. I walked around behind him.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed.
“What?” he came around behind the
chair.
“Look at all that blood!” I cried
out. Dicky took a step back and put his
hand to his mouth. Sergeant McAlister’s
head was bleeding in the back, just above the neck. Dicky grabbed my shoulder to steady himself.
“That can’t be good,” he said from
behind his hand. I grabbed Sergeant McAlister’s
arm and started to pick him up.
“Don’t move him!” Dicky exclaimed.
“You could make it worse!”
“We are not going to just leave him
here!” I exclaimed. Dicky jumped. I had never used that tone of voice before,
and was a little surprised by it. “We
have to get out. All of us. The Frenchmen will probably kill Sergeant
McAlister if we leave without him. He
isn’t worth billions of dollars to them like you and I are.” I knew what I had to do. “Grab his other arm, Dicky,” I
commanded. Dicky, for once, followed my
directions without question. We dragged
Sergeant McAlister off of his chair, across the room, and out the door. Taking the left hall, we slowly approached
the end of the hall. McAlister was much
heavier than he looked. I started to
feel woozy again. There were three doors
at the end of the hall, two on the right and one on the left.
I shifted McAlister to one shoulder
and tried the first door on the left. It
was only an empty bedroom without even a closet door. We struggled a few more feet forward to the
next door. It was some kind of
garage. Old tools and two-by-fours were
lying around the room. It smelled like
old oil and sawdust. There were three
doors; the big garage door and two normal doors on each side.
“Oh man,” I sighed, “more doors.”
Dicky sighed in agreement and left me
and Sergeant McAlister at the doorway as he picked his way through the mess to
the other side of the garage. The door
to the left was locked, the other led only to a closet, but the huge garage
door rolled up slightly when he tugged on it. A small beam of bright sunlight poked into the
grim dimness.
Dicky got down on the ground and
peeked under the door. “It looks like a courtyard,”
he said. “There’s a way out!” He stood back up and pulled the door up the
few feet it would go.
Dicky came back and we half carried,
half dragged Sergeant McAlister across the garage without speaking. I tried to open the door a little more, but
only gained a couple inches. We pushed
the policeman through the opening and crawled out after him.
I used all my strength to get on my
feet and pick the bleeding policeman up off the ground. The dusty courtyard seemed like a vast desert
that I could never cross. Concentrating
all my efforts on the latch on the big red gate, I struggled forward and
eventually made it to the gate. We set
the cop down gently and I leaned against the gate to keep from falling. I put my hand on my aching stomach and felt
for blood. It hadn’t bled through yet,
but I could feel that it was going to soon.
“Earth to Tommy, come in Tommy,”
Dicky leaned against the gate latch.
“Can you help me?” he asked when he knew I was paying attention.
I nodded slowly, “I can push on it
from this side, you pull.” I planted my
foot out and leaned against the wooden board holding the doors shut. He gripped the pull-handle and braced his
feet against the ground. The beam moved
a little and squeaked. It started to
slowly jolt out of place, then began to slide more quickly. One last final jerk and Dicky and I both fell
to the ground. The gate was open.
Dicky got up and pulled the doors
in until there was enough room for the three of us to get through. Dicky grabbed Sergeant McAlister’s arm and
began dragging the limp figure out. I
pulled myself up using the door, and went to join him.
The sun was just over the horizon
by the time we had gone a hundred feet.
The dusty path was well-worn and wide enough for a car. Brush and dried grass came up to my shoulders
on either side of us. All around it was
brown and dried; no life, no civilization.
I heard a sound behind me and
looked back at the fortress we had just left, now orange in the sunset
light. A man stood in the gate. It was too late to hide, he was already
starting toward us with his handgun drawn.
“¡Detente!” he began shouting random things at us.
We did not have to try to interpret
his broken English to know what he wanted.
We set down the unconscious man and held our hands up. The man switched
his gun to one hand and grabbed a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. As he spoke rapidly into it, a desperate idea
hit me.
I leaned toward Dicky, “Dicky, get
ready to run.”
“There is no way we can…” Dicky
started angrily.
“Shh! Just go when I say.”
Dicky sighed in frustration as he
subtly turned toward the edge of the path.
Finally, the man with the gun let his guard down as he almost dropped
his walkie-talkie. I sprang for his gun.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Chapter 6b
Dicky – Off to the Races
I jumped up the embankment and
through the brush, scrambling west toward the setting sun. I heard shouting as I scampered away, and I
hoped beyond hope that Tommy was alright.
I ran, or maybe I hobbled, into the
dark; too scared to stop. Adrenaline
pushed me on through the night as I tried to sufficiently distance myself from
my captors. My thoughts raced in my head
over and over, replaying the events of our escape and trying to see what went
wrong. I had an intense fear that Tommy
was dead, and I struggled back and forth.
They probably shot him again and he bled to death. Maybe he got the gun and was holding off the
guard. No, he was in critical condition
like Sergeant McAlister. It was entirely
my fault, I should have stopped him. He
was dead because of me, he saved my life.
I need to find the police. I need
to avoid any bad guys. I need help. I need to hide.
I heard a rumble from behind me,
and I turned to look. The sky was
beginning to lighten with the dawn, and there was a headlight. A motorcycle roared past me as I hit the
dirt, but I was too late. He slowed down
and came back, stopping just a few feet in front of me. Huge black leather boots stepped through the
grass. I closed my eyes as he got
closer. He grabbed my shoulders and
gently flipped me over. I opened my eyes
and saw his concerned eyes looking at me.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me up.
I suppose he was talking to me, but I was too stunned to
comprehend. It was dream-like; being led
to the motorcycle, feeling it fire up underneath me, and blasting across the
plain. As we reached the blacktop, I was
slipping into unconsciousness.
What seemed to be a few seconds
later, my eyes blinked open to see a sunlit room. It was almost like a movie; waking up in a
strange place, wearing different clothes and thinking that maybe I had died and
gone to heaven. I sat up and tried to
adjust my eyes to the light that streamed through the creamy linen
curtains. Then the door right in front
of the bed opened silently and a lovely girl stepped softly into the room. She exclaimed something and then started
speaking Spanish. Each word proceeded
from her soft pink lips so beautifully.
She sat down on the edge of the bed as she continued speaking. Her silky, dark hair flowed gracefully past
her shoulders.
I paid no attention to the meaning
of her words until she said, “Do you speak English?” She had the most enchanting accent I had ever
heard.
“Oh y-yes…” I stammered.
She reached out her hand and placed
the back of her hand on my forehead.
“How are you feeling?”
“O-ok, fine,” I managed.
“What are you called?”
“Richard.”
“Richard? That is interesting.”
I started to perspire and
fidget. A sudden shyness swept over me
and I could no longer make eye contact.
“My brother is called Ricardo,” she
continued cheerfully, “and I am Maria.”
I wanted so badly to forget what
had happened to me in the past few days and persuade myself that I really had
gone to heaven, but I just couldn’t. I
started to tell Maria everything. She
listened very intently as I explained how we were kidnapped. I told her how jealous I was of Tommy and the
kind of selfish person that I thought he was.
Then I explained how confused I had been when Tommy kept sacrificing
himself for me.
“He could be dead, and I don’t
understand why it’s not reversed. I
would have thought that he would be the one who got away and I would be the one
who was dead. How did he get so heroic
all of a sudden?”
“Maybe his heart inside changed,”
Maria said. “He maybe decided that he
did not have to be selfish anymore.”
“How is that even possible? People can’t just transform themselves like
that.”
She laughed, “Are you the same as
when you were two years old?”
“Well, no, but…”
“How many things did you do since
you left home that you never would have done before?”
I thought back on the events of the
past couple days. I hadn’t really done
much differently than I would have. Then
I recalled all the things that had seemed so out of character for Tommy;
running behind me to shield me from the bullets, sharing his sandwich, and
taking charge of our escape with Sergeant McAlister. He had taken off his mask and shown me who he
really was. I then realized that if I
had changed my attitude toward Tommy, then we could have been a great team even
before we inherited all that money.
“O my God, I blew it. I killed the best friend I ever could have
had, and I didn’t even know it!” I dropped my head into my hands and
sobbed. I grabbed my hair and pulled it
down in frustration.
Maria stood up and put an arm
around me. “There is still a chance,
Richard, you may save him yet.” She
patted my shoulder and left the room.
The pressure of the tears
eventually subsided and I took a few deep breaths. Soon, the man who had rescued me came into
the room with a box. He began to speak
to me in Spanish. I understood enough to
know what he was trying to tell me. He
set the box down on the end of the bed and left. He wanted me to pick out an outfit from his
old clothes, and then come out to the kitchen where Maria would have food.
“I may save him yet,” I said to
myself as I threw on some clothes. “Even
if he’s dead, I’ll make sure that that man who killed him, the Horrible, is put
behind bars forever!” I rolled up the
legs of my new pants and hurried out to the kitchen.
Maria handed me a sandwich, “I
explained to Ricardo why you are here, and he suggests you go to the
police. He knows a man in Gruissan,
France who will know who can help you.”
Ricardo began to speak excitedly
and set down his now empty plate. Maria
translated, “Ricardo wants to know if you would like to go right away.” She
leaned closer and whispered sarcastically, “Mostly he just wants to try out the
car he has just finished working on. He
is very proud of it.”
“Sure, I guess.” I smiled at Maria and then asked Ricardo,
though I didn’t know if he understood or not, “What kind of car is it?”
Ricardo beamed and then motioned for me to follow him.
