One Last Score

They met in a back room of an ice cream parlor, knowing the shouts of the soda jerks and whirrs of the blenders would protect their speech from passers-by.

"I know you retired, Terry," Vinnie said, chasing a maraschino cherry around his tall slender glass. "But I got somethin' for ya, if you're interested."

Terry stirred his raspberry phosphate idly. "I'm not sure, Vinnie. I got a good thing going. Free lunches at the senior center every day, field trips, and Mabel, well Mabel, she's sweet on me."

"I know you're livin' the life," Vinnie said, "Got the world on a string. But Terry, you're the best. I know you got at least a dozen capers in ya. Ya just gotta dig a little deeper."

Terry sighed.

"I'll pay your AARP membership for the next ten years," Vinnie said.

"Okay, Vinnie, I'm in. One last score."

Added by a Facebook friend:

The handcuffs bit into Terry's thin, blue-veined wrists as he stood in the cold hallway at the police station. A daisy chain of young punks shackled wrist to wrist shuffled past, headed for detention, headed for a future Terry would warn them about if he thought they would listen. Kids never listened. He certainly hadn't. If only he'd listened to what his old man tried to tell him every evening after sweating out a 10-hour shift at the foundry. But Terry only saw that honest work was for suckers.

Tears welled in his eyes. His old man was long gone, but somehow Terry sensed his disappointment, his shame. He shoulda left those ruby slippers alone. He shoulda stuck to fixing bingo games and cheating at canasta and forging Social Security checks. Senior citizen rackets.

A hand hard as a wooden paddle smacked Terry upside the head, so hard his dentures rattled. When the stars in his vision settled, they revealed a pair of old eyes drooping beneath folds of weather-beaten skin. Officer Ed O'Malley, the only 90-year-old on the force. They'd run together as kids, but eventually Ed ran one way, Terry another.

"What's this, Terry? Crying because you got pinched?" Ed's voice was heavy with scorn. "You did a man's crime, now act like a man."

Ed moved on down the hallway. Terry watched him go, then straightened, the cuffs not so tight anymore, the hallway not so bleak. He may have had to make five trips to the bathroom every night and couldn't trim the hair in his ears fast enough to save his life, but he was still a man. He'd show those young punks how to take a pinch.

And more:

Warden Baum sat in his office, his fingers tented before his pursed lips, his eyes staring off into the middle distance. The phone continued to ring, but he knew there would only be questions on the other end of the line. Questions for which he had no answers.

The warden furrowed his brow. In the prison’s fifty-six year history, there had only been one officially recognized escape, and that was way back in 1977: Lenny “The Hyena” Scarpacci, so called because of his distinctive laugh. The Hyena had been recaptured within minutes of crawling through a window in the laundry. Old timers said his cackle could be heard all the way to D Block as they dragged him back inside.

Tonight, however, nobody was laughing.

How had Terry pulled it off? He had been in his cell at lights out, and the next morning he was gone. There was no evidence of a tunnel, no loose bricks in the walls, and nothing out of the ordinary. Terry’s bed was still neatly made, with razor sharp corners, a holdover from his time in the Army.

The entire prison went into immediate lockdown, and every single inmate was extensively interrogated. But nobody talked.

Terry had simply… vanished.

Warden Baum exhaled deeply through his nostrils and looked at the scrap of paper sitting in the middle of his desk. He’d read the simple message written thereon a hundred times, and it still didn’t make any sense. This scrap of paper was the only unusual thing found in Terry’s cell, sitting neatly in the center of his bed. A scrap of paper that contained only five words:

“There’s no place like home.”