Disclaimer: The TV show MacGyver and its characters are the property of Henry Winkler/John Rich Productions. No copyright infringement is intended.

Author’s Note: The events in this story take place after the events in my short story “One Shot,” so for an introduction to this series please read “One Shot” first.

Colorado Springs, Colorado—July, 1994

Being blind’s a nuisance when people are trying to kill you. For me, being surrounded by loaded guns feels about the same as free-climbing elevator shafts, and the only difference blindness makes in either situation is that I have to be extra cautious before I make my next move. Carelessness is what mostly gets me into trouble, not blindness.

“What is this place, anyway?”

“A holding tank. No more questions—just walk.” Nesmith torqued my free arm again and shoved his gun harder against my backbone, his point clear.

“All right already. Just slow down, will you? I can only move so fast.” Whenever Sam and I have free time and he has enough energy, we do a lot outdoors—day hiking, backpacking, camping, stream fishing, skiing, even mountain-climbing—so I actually could’ve moved a lot faster than I was, even with industrial hoses sprawled all over the floor. It took a fair amount of concentration to do it, though, and holding back is part of the trick I’ve developed; I keep my peak skills hidden until I need to use them. In this case, I used my reserves to remember the way in so I could find my way back out later. Overhead track lighting provided the best landmark, but the hoses on the ground would also make good reference points.

“Quiet.” The gun in the back again.

Courtland, Nesmith’s partner, strode ahead to open an oversized door with shrieking hinges. “You can keep each other company.” Nesmith shoved me through the open doorway, and Courtland grabbed my cane as I stumbled past. He snapped the cane in a couple different places, then tossed the pieces near my feet.

Nesmith chuckled. “Good idea. Shut the door, Gray.”

“Hey!” I kicked my foot around, hoping to lodge one of the broken pieces in the doorway. “What’s the big idea? I needed that thing!”

“What for? You’re not going anywhere.”

The door slammed shut before I could find the cane, and a bar dropped into place from the outside. I was locked in. The echo illuminated a small space compared with the warehouse outside, and one that sounded mostly empty. Personally, I prefer clutter. “Drat!” I slammed a fist against the door, then turned to let my back sag against it. Three days on the assignment, three times I’d gotten into trouble already. Luckily, Sam and I always worked with a plan in case I got caught.

With my back to the door, I took a good look around the room. Light filtered in from the far wall, three or four yards above ground, but it seemed dim—maybe a ventilation grill, certainly nothing big enough to crawl through even if I could reach it. That was the only light source.

“Welcome to the joint.” My cellmate was a man, late middle age and short—assuming he was even standing—but his voice was muffled by something. So the room was occupied after all. “Bad news?”

“Nah, I carry an extra. I’m just getting tired of the game, that’s all.” I kept my aluminum cane on standby in my jacket pocket, on the side opposite my duct tape. Walking across the room without it was nothing, especially looking for something massive enough to hide a grown man. Close to the back wall, I drew up short just in time to avoid colliding with what turned out to be a pile of boxes, then moved behind the pile to offer my cellmate a handshake. “Hi. Name’s MacGyver.”

At first there was silence. Then my cellmate stood and, before I knew it, a familiar pair of hands grabbed me into a bear hug. “MacGyver, am I ever glad to see you! Where did you come from?”

“Pete?” Fourteen years Pete Thornton and I had been friends. I should’ve recognized his voice the first time he spoke, but I had no reason to expect him here, in Colorado. I found myself clapping him on the back, laughing. “Pete, what the devil are you doing here?”

“I was just asking you the same thing. You go first.”

“An old lady up in the hills, Madeline Henderson, hired me to find out what her nephew is up to. Apparently she’s thinking about cutting him out of her will, and she wants to know if her instincts are right. What are you doing here?”

“Who’s her nephew?”

“The guy who just threw me in here.”

Pete grunted. “Michael Nesmith. I’ve had the pleasure.”

“So I assumed, since you’re in here. How are Nesmith and the Phoenix Foundation connected?”

“We’re not. We’re connected to the other goon, a hotshot named Grayson Courtland. Would you believe he’s one of the troubleshooters we hired to cover your assignments?”

“Ouch. How’d he get past the security screening?”

“Don’t ask.” Pete moved out from behind the boxes. “Sorry, I’ve been sitting back here fuming. I wasn’t even listening. What did they grab, your Swiss Army knife or your duct tape?”

I laughed again. Of all the old friends I could’ve run into, Pete Thornton was the most refreshing. “Relax, I’ve got everything I need.” I started a perimeter search, following the wall with my hand just to see if anything was available to work with. Luckily, we seemed to have time—no gas leaking into an enclosed space, no freezing meat locker, no ticking bombs. Nesmith called it a holding tank, so apparently they wanted to slow us down rather than kill us. “Save me some time, Pete. Do you see anything laying around that I might be able to use?”

“What’s the matter, your eyes haven’t adjusted yet?”

He’d forgotten. I would’ve figured it for impossible, but somehow Pete had forgotten about my vision. Right after Sam and I escaped Murdoc, I called Pete to let him know I’d been hurt but that Sam and I were both alive and otherwise fine. If Murdoc decided to brag to Pete that he’d finally scored even a small victory against me, I wanted Pete to hear the news from me first. I told him then that my eyes had been burned, but I hadn’t mentioned it in our conversations since—hadn’t thought I needed to—so maybe he assumed I meant temporarily. Anyhow, I’d have to break the news to him carefully if I wanted him to stay focused on the situation rather than on me. “They’re not gonna adjust, Pete. Remember?”

“What?”

“Remember how I called you a couple years ago and told you Murdoc had paid Sam and me a visit? I told you then that he’d burned my eyes…”

“I thought you meant temporarily, like the time your boat blew up and your eyes were patched for a while. I never figured you meant you were really—” Pete stopped just short of the truth. “MacGyver, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

I shrugged and settled both hands into my jacket pockets. “Just look around and tell me what you see.”

“Huh?”

“We have to get out of here, Pete. What do you see?”

“Oh, right. There’s not much—just a bunch of empty boxes and some kind of industrial hook laying on a table over in the corner, but that’s about it. Think you can do anything with that?”

“Maybe. Get me the hook and let me have a look at it. What is this place, anyway?” I already knew the answer, but I hoped that getting Pete into idle conversation would help him relax and forget about my eyes for a while.

“The sign out front said it used to be a place called Workman’s Laundry, but it looks like it’s been abandoned for years.” He was gone several seconds, then brought the hook over to me. “I don’t know what you can do with this hook—it’s not much, even for you—but here it is.”

A deep hook, moderately heavy, it had a small hole at the base where a pin would have been inserted to hold the hook in place on the machinery out in the warehouse. Instead of a pin, I had the elastic cord from my broken cane and it was just about the right width that it might fit through the hole. If I threaded the hook onto the cane cord, I could attach the other end of the cord to my spare cane and have a reasonably sturdy fishing pole—if only there was a place to go fishing. “Are there any windows other than the one on the back wall?”

“You can see that one?”

“I can see the light from it. I can still see light and where it’s coming from; it’s called light projection. What about it? Any other windows?”

“Not to the outside, nothing big enough to crawl through.”

“What do you mean ‘not to the outside’? There is another window? Where does it lead?”

“It’s directly over the door.”

I turned my back to the ventilation grill and looked up toward where I thought the door was, hoping to see some kind of light from inside the warehouse. None. Either the lights were too dim for me, or Nesmith and Courtland had shut them off when they left. “Over the door. Like a transom window?”

“Yeah, I just couldn’t think of the name for it. But, MacGyver, it’s ten feet up; there’s no way either one of us can reach it.”

“Maybe we don’t have to. Here, hold this.” I handed Pete the hook, then pulled out my aluminum cane and let it unfold. I squatted and laid the cane along the floor, sweeping it in a wide arc.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for the cane Nesmith broke.” The two canes met, and I reached for the broken one. “Hold on while I pull the cord out.”

“Then what?”

“Then we go fishing.” The broken cane was a simple creature: six sections of carbon fiber shaft, held together by an elastic cord that ran through the center and knotted at the bottom, hidden inside the shaft and protected by the tip. The first step in removing the elastic was to work the tip off and drop it in my jacket pocket; I could reuse it on another cane. The next step was to expose the knot, which involved a little more elbow grease. Cutting the knot freed the elastic, and I slid five of the shaft pieces off the cord and stuck them in my back pocket, if only to keep from tripping over them. After that, it was a matter of pulling the cord up through the grip and adding the sixth piece of shaft to my collection.

“I can’t believe this.”

“Can’t believe what?”

“That I’m standing here watching you make a fishing pole out of a blind man’s cane. Your cane.”

With the old cane disassembled and the elastic unstrung, the next step was to tie one end to the elastic inside my good cane. Different cane, different brand, different method of attaching the tip: this tip was attached directly to the cord, which made it a lot easier to access the cord. The trick was, I needed two hands to pull the shaft and the tip apart. “Okay, Pete, lay the hook down for a minute. You’re gonna need both hands.”

“For what?”

It seems like every time I ask somebody else to tie a knot in an emergency, it ends up getting me in trouble. This time I took matters into my own hands. “To hold my cane. Just lay the hook down.” I waited while he bent over to set the hook at our feet, then held out my cane as he straightened. “Take this, one hand on the shaft and the other on the tip, and pull until you can see the cord. Then I just need you to hold it that way with the cord exposed.”

He took the cane after some hesitation. “Okay. You can get at it.”

“It’s just a tool, Pete, no different than a pair of glasses.” I wound one end of the old cord around the new double-strand cord down near the tip and tied it off, then tested the knot. It held. “Now let the tip settle back into the shaft as far as it’ll go.”

“Okay. Now what?”

I tested the knot one more time and decided it would hold, then followed the cord to its other end and bent down to feel for where he’d laid the hook. “Now this. Is the transom window open or closed?”

“Closed, but the weight of the hook should be enough to shatter the glass. I still don’t understand what we’re fishing for.”

Threading the cord through the eye of the hook was easier than threading a needle, but it still took a few tries. “When Nesmith shut the door, did you hear the sound the lock made?”

“Like I told you, I wasn’t listening.”

“Well, I was, and I heard something drop after the door shut. I recognize the sound.”

“How?”

“Take your own advice—don’t ask. Anyway, what I heard was a bar being dropped between two uprights, so all we have to do is lift the bar free and the door should open.” With the cord finally threaded, tying and testing the knot was easy.

“You’re sure this is going to work?”

“It should.” Unless, of course, the hook was so heavy that casting it snapped the elastic of either cord. I kept the cane myself, holding it like a fishing rod with the tip in the air, and handed Pete the hook. “Would you like to do the honors?”

“Thanks. Have you got a good hold on that thing? Because this is gonna be the big one.”

I set my feet to withstand a good jolt, then braced the grip of the cane against my body and tensed my muscles. “I’m ready on three. One-two-three.”

Pete let the hook fly and glass shattered overhead, busting away from us into the warehouse. The cane jerked as the hook reached the end of its rope and bobbed on the elastic; I tugged back, and the hook clattered against the door. After that, it was all a matter of maneuvering the hook into place, adjusting vertically to find the height of the bar and horizontally to find the best leverage.

“How’s it coming?”

“I think I’ve got it. I’m not sure how high the uprights are, so get ready to start pushing on the door. Tell me when you’re in place, but don’t start pushing until I say.” Pushing too early would create too much friction between the crossbar and the uprights for me to lift the bar.

“Okay, I’m ready.”

I started backing up, making sure to keep the line tight. “Okay, try now.”

“Not yet.”

I backed up several more steps. “Now.”

“Nothing.”

I backed up more. “Try it again.”

“Not yet, but I think you’re close. Move it another few inches.”

I took only a few steps this time. “Okay.”

The hinges shrieked again as the heavy door swung open. “MacGyver, you’re a genius! Come on, maybe we can still catch up—”

“I can’t—not that fast—but you can. Go, I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Pete. Go.”

“Okay.” His footsteps dashed into the warehouse, hurdling hoses along the way.

I squatted to untie the hook and its line from my good cane, using one of the broken sections from the old cane to keep the good elastic exposed while I worked with it. A lot had changed in two years. Back then I would’ve had the laundry hook spotted, the fishing pole put together, the lock lifted, and been the first person out the door all in the time it took now to put the fishing pole together. Sight provided a lot of shortcuts I’d learned to work without, letting Sam bend time for the both of us in other areas to make up for the time I’d lost. Things still had a way of working out, the same as they always had, but the pace was different than Pete remembered.

I left the hook and cord behind and stepped into the darkened laundry. Nesmith and Courtland must have shut the lights off. I felt around the wall nearby for a switch—the overhead lights had made a straight path to the stairwell door—but turned up nothing. The only other reference points available were the hoses strewn across the floor. As long as I had to step over them instead of walking beside them, I would eventually reach the wall with the outside door and from there it would just be a matter of looking for the doorway itself.

A strong, warm breeze crossed my path partway across the room, and I adjusted my line of travel to follow it. Any breeze down here had to be coming from an open stairwell. My cane located the doorway itself, and as I neared the stairs the room brightened. Someone—maybe Pete—had left both stairwell doors open, letting light and wind tumble down to greet me at the foot of the stairs.

I followed the light upstairs and out into the mid-afternoon sun, where I stopped to listen. I wanted to hear people: footsteps scuffing gravel on the pavement, the sounds of a scuffle, voices, a car motor, Sam’s motorcycle, anything. There was only silence. So I started making my way around the building, starting to the right and eventually making my way along a raised curb marking out a rounded front lawn. A shade tree attracted my attention halfway around the building. I could either waste energy walking in circles in the hot sun until Sam showed up, or I could be smart and wait for him in the shade.

“They were long gone by the time I got up here. I figured they would be.” Pete was sitting nearby, apparently on the grass.

I moved up the sloping hillside to sit with him. It must have been an old tree to give that much shade. “Then why the big rush?”

“I’m really not sure, MacGyver.”

One of the low-hanging branches brushed into my forehead, and I reached up to push it away. An oak leaf dropped off in my fingers. “Maybe because you were running from seeing a friend hurt?”

“Maybe.” He was quiet for a minute, then: “I take that back. No maybe about it.”

I nodded, folding my cane and pushing it into my jacket pocket. “I can understand that.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry I didn’t come back to find you.”

“I didn’t need you to come back and get me, Pete. I can still handle myself.”

“I know you didn’t need me to, but, all the same, a friend would have.”

“Maybe.” I nodded and stretched out beside him in the grass. “Or maybe a friend would’ve gotten upset and reacted out of instinct. Don’t worry about it, Pete. No hard feelings.”

A sigh exploded from him. “Thanks, MacGyver. It really is good to see you again, you know.”

“It’s good to see you too. You sound good, all things considered. How long have you known about Courtland?’

“Not long enough; I only started following him earlier this week. I’m surprised you and I haven’t run into each other before now.”

I shrugged. “I’ve only been on the job three days, so I was probably lagging farther behind than you. Come on, Sam, where are you?”

“Sam was with you?”

“You didn’t think I was working alone, did you? Yeah, Sam’s with me. He knows what to do when I get caught.”

“What does he do?”

“Brings transportation.” A motor caught my attention, still a ways back but definitely headed toward us, and I sat up to listen better. “Speak of the devil…”

“How can you tell that’s him?”

“I recognize the motor. How’d you get all the way out here, Pete?”

“I drove. I’d gotten a tip that Courtland had weapons stored out here, but it turns out the tip was bogus. They caught me checking the place over. What about you? How’d you get out here? If Sam didn’t drive you and obviously you didn’t drive yourself…”

I grinned at Pete and stood, dusting off my seat, as Sam roared around the bend. I started making my way down toward the curb, moving one step at a time without my cane. “Who says he didn’t drive me out here?”

“He’s just now getting here to rescue you.”

Sam flicked the motor off and propped the bike up on its stand near the curb. He answered before his helmet was all the way off. “Since when does Dad need rescuing? I’m just here to give him a ride out of town. Dad, what happened to the cane you were trying out?”

I pulled one of the broken segments out of my back pocket to wave it in the air. “Right here.”

“That didn’t last long. How did it break?”

“Nesmith.” I pushed the carbon fiber stick back in my rear pocket and stepped off the curb near the rear wheel of Sam’s bike. “Give me aluminum any day. How much time did you buy us?”

“Depends. How long do you figure it’ll take them to walk into town to buy spark plugs?”

Pete appeared on the other side of the bike. “Somebody fill me in?”

I locked both canes in one of Sam’s saddlebags to keep them from falling out on the road. “Sam and I came together. Your car was already here when we rode up, but we didn’t know who it belonged to. When Nesmith and Courtland caught me, Sam hid until they took me downstairs, then ran back to their car to steal the spark plugs and—Sam, I assume you checked to make sure they don’t carry spares?”

“I did, they had spares, and I took them. Relax, the last time I checked they were cussing each other out on their way toward town. But we should still hurry. If they know who we work for, I wouldn’t want them getting there first.”

I nodded, reaching for my helmet. “Pete, are you with us?”

“Where else would I be? I’ll follow you.”

To Be Continued…