Chapter 7 - THE FIRE ESCAPE
The rusted counter-balance ladder of the fire escape was jammed twelve feet above the asphalt, held fast by decades of chipped paint and neglect.
Above them, eight-year-old Leo hung his skinny legs through the iron grating of the second-floor landing. Inside the apartment, Richard could hear the muffled sound of a heavy fist pounding on a hollow-core closet door and Victoria’s sharp voice demanding that the boy come out.
“Hold on, baby, don’t jump!” Maria whispered fiercely, scrambling atop one of the tall metal dumpsters beneath the fire escape. Even standing on the closed steel lid of the dumpster, her outstretched fingertips were still three feet below the bottom of the stuck iron ladder.
“My hands are slipping, Mommy!” Leo whimpered. He wasn’t crying loudly—he was a brave kid who had clearly grown up in tough neighborhoods and knew when to stay quiet—but his small knuckles were white around the cold iron rail.
Richard looked at the rusted hinge holding the drop-ladder in place. A massive rusted padlock had been snapped through the chain by the landlord years ago to keep burglars from climbing up from the alley.
If he shot the lock with the twelve-gauge, the roar would bring the two armed guards from the front of the building running into the alley in ten seconds flat.
Richard looked at the heavy iron tire iron leaning against the back wall of the dry cleaner’s loading bay. Then he looked at the dumpster.
At eighty years old, his left hip had a titanium pin in it and his doctor had told him not to lift anything heavier than a briefcase.
Richard leaned his shotgun shells and the metal pawn box behind a stack of plastic milk crates, grabbed the iron bar, and hauled himself onto the low concrete loading dock beside the dumpster. With a low, grunting breath that tasted like copper in the back of his throat, he stepped onto the lid of the dumpster beside Maria.
The tin lid buckled slightly under their combined weight.
“Brace my legs,” Richard whispered to Maria.
“Mr. Whitmore, your back—”
“Do what I tell you, girl,” Richard growled, a flicker of the old South Boston lumber-yard foreman flashing in his eyes.
Maria wrapped both arms tightly around his tailored wool trousers to keep him from slipping off the curved lid. Richard reached up as high as his bruised shoulders would allow, wedged the flattened tip of the tire iron directly into the rusted shackle of the landlord’s padlock, and pulled down with every ounce of weight left in his eighty-year-old bones.
The rusted iron screeched. A muscle in Richard’s lower back tore with a hot, blinding flash of pain that made stars burst behind his eyelids. He bit down so hard on the inside of his cheek he tasted blood, refusing to make a sound.
Snap.
The corroded brass housing of the padlock sheared in half.
Richard caught the heavy iron drop-ladder with his forearm before it could clang all the way down to the pavement, guiding it slowly until the bottom rungs rested silently against the top of the dumpster.
“Got you, kid,” Richard breathed through clenched teeth.
Leo scrambled down the rungs like a monkey, dropping straight into Maria’s waiting arms. She buried her face in his neck, kissing his dark curls over and over as they climbed down onto the concrete loading dock.
Leo looked at Richard over his mother’s shoulder, his big brown eyes—Clara’s eyes—studying the old man in the torn, dusty thousand-dollar suit.
“Are you the man who eats the star carrots?” Leo asked softly.
For the first time in fifty-two years, a genuine smile cracked across Richard Whitmore’s weathered face. “Yeah, son. That’s me.”
Suddenly, the second-floor window above them flew open.
Victoria leaned out over the sill, looking down into the shadowed courtyard just as the beams of two tactical flashlights rounded the corner of the alley from the front street. Greg’s two guards had heard the faint snap of the padlock.
“They’re in the back alley!” Victoria screamed down from the window. “Don’t let them reach the street! Take the box!”
The two guards sprinted into the narrow brick courtyard, cutting off the exit toward Main Street.
Richard didn't reach for the shotgun behind the milk crates. He saw something better—and far more permanent—pulling into the wide commercial driveway at the far end of the service alley.
It was a Bridgeport municipal sanitation truck, flashing its amber strobe lights as it backed in for the midnight commercial pickup on Main Street, accompanied by a marked Bridgeport police cruiser doing a routine business-check patrol along the avenue.
Instead of running away from the guards, Richard handed the metal pawn box to Maria, grabbed the heavy iron tire iron, and swung it directly through the plate-glass back window of the dry cleaner’s shop—right across the bright yellow tape of the burglar alarm ribbon.
A deafening security klaxon erupted into the night air, echoing off the brick tenements and turning every apartment light on up and down the block.
The two guards skidded to a halt thirty feet away, reaching into their jackets, just as the police cruiser at the mouth of the alley flipped on its blinding takedown floodlights and red-and-blue strobes, illuminating the entire courtyard like a football stadium.
“Bridgeport Police!” a voice boomed over the cruiser’s PA loudspeaker as two uniformed officers stepped behind their open cruiser doors, hands on their holsters. “Everyone in the alley, hands where I can see them!”
The two estate guards froze, hurriedly letting their hands drop empty to their sides before the cops saw their unlicensed weapons.
Up on the second floor, Victoria yanked her head back inside the window and slammed the sash shut.
“Don’t move,” Richard murmured to Maria and Leo, stepping calmly forward into the blinding police floodlights with his hands raised, looking every inch the patrician billionaire even with brick dust on his sleeves. “Officer! Thank God you’re here. My name is Richard Whitmore. Those two men just tried to abduct my great-grandson, and their employer is coming down the front stairs of that building right now.”
Within sixty seconds, backup units had sealed both ends of Maple Avenue, catching Victoria and Greg before their silver Mercedes could pull away from the curb.
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As the officers placed Victoria in the back of a squad car while she screamed about her cognitive decline affidavit and Dr. Avery’s signature, a silver-haired police captain walked over to Richard, looking doubtfully from the eighty-year-old tycoon to the tearful maid and the little boy in Spider-Man pajamas.
“Mr. Whitmore,” the captain said carefully, holding up the faxed power-of-attorney document Greg had just handed him. “Your son-in-law has a valid court affidavit signed by your physician stating you’re suffering from severe dementia and wandered off your Greenwich estate tonight. Unless you have someone who can legally refute your doctor’s diagnosis tonight, I’m legally required to release you into your daughter’s medical custody.”
