4 Real Dangerous Place Read online

  “We’re not interested in those. There’s a dairy products truck in the left lane, about halfway down. That’s the one.”

  “A dairy truck?” Glover looked at the other man in amazement. “I’ve got a hundred people trapped up there, and I’m supposed to be worried about the frickin’ Good Humor man? What, are the Fudgsicles gonna melt?”

  “Just do it,” said Weiss.

  Glover glanced over at MacAvoy. The colonel nodded.

  † † †

  The news copter pilot looked over at the traffic reporter. “The police want us to do what?”

  “I don’t get it, either.” Holton lowered the microphone in his hand. “But if they want a close-up of some dairy truck, that’s what we should give them.”

  “Okay –” The pilot banked the copter away from the freeway section he’d been hovering the machine over. “Whatever.”

  † † †

  Inside the police command post, MacAvoy and the others gathered around the video monitor. The feed from the news copter camera was shaky but clear. They could see the two men inside the cab of the dairy truck, right down to the name tags on their white uniforms.

  “There they are,” said Cammon out loud. She sat on a folding chair right in front of the monitor.

  “Yeah?” Glover stood behind her with his arms folded across his chest, with MacAvoy next to him. “So who’s this Mike and . . .” He peered closer at the screen. “Can’t make out the other one.”

  “You don’t need to know that,” said Weiss.

  “What are they doing?” muttered Cammon.

  “Playing it cool,” Weiss answered. “Just the way they’re supposed to.”

  She shook her head. “It’s got to come out of there.”

  “Right.” Weiss turned toward Glover. “You heard her. We need to extract that truck from the situation.”

  “Really? And how do you propose to do that? Wish upon a star?”

  Weiss shrugged. “You can help us or not, Captain. We can have our own team here and set up in an hour.”

  “You got a hearing problem?” Glover stared at the man. “Don’t you remember what I told you before? First step your team sets on that freeway, it’ll be raining bodies around here!”

  “That’s unfortunate. But what matters is the truck.”

  “Unfortunate? You got to do better than that. What’s so important it’s worth a hundred lives?”

  “You’re not cleared to know that.”

  Glover turned to MacAvoy. “Is this guy for real?”

  “I’m afraid he is,” said MacAvoy. “They both are.”

  “So you know what he’s talking about, huh? I mean, with this dairy truck and all.”

  “Yes.” MacAvoy nodded. “And believe me – you’re better off not knowing.”

  † † †

  Menard pointed to one of the gauges on the control panel. “We gotta take ’er in.”

  “Take her in? Are you nuts?” Holton goggled at him. “This is the biggest story of the decade, and we’re right on top of it!”

  “Yeah, and we’re going to be crashing on top of it if we don’t go in to refuel. The cops got the close-up they wanted – and that’s going to have to do it for now.”

  “Jeez!” The traffic reporter shook his head in disgust as the copter banked away from the freeway.

  † † †

  The traffic reporter fed quarters into a coffee machine, winding up with a styrofoam cup of something that looked black and tasted like kerosene. He managed to get down the first swallow, then looked over at the copter pilot.

  “How soon ’til we’re ready to go?”

  The pilot shrugged. “Ten . . . fifteen minutes. While they’re getting us fueled up, I need to check out a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Menard walked out of the airfield office and headed over toward a small hangar at the far side of the tarmac.

  He unlocked the side door and flipped on the light as he stepped inside. A faded sign leaned against the wall. EAGLE-EYE AVIATION, STUNTS & CAMERA-WORK. Below that was the motto We Get the Shots Others Can’t.

  For a long moment, the pilot gazed at the sign. Then he walked over to a storage locker at the side of the empty, high-ceilinged space.

  The locker was full of dusty, long-unused gear. He looked across the shelves at the back, then pulled out a tattered manila envelope, stuffed with papers. One by one, he pulled old photographs out.

  The first one showed a crashed helicopter with flames and smoke billowing through its crumpled rotor blades. In the next photo, the blackened and twisted wreckage was visible after the fire had been put out.

  More stuff came from the envelope. A yellowing newspaper clipping was headlined FILM PRODUCER CLEARED OF CHARGES IN MOVIE SET TRAGEDY – D.A. Blames Pilot Error for Deaths. The grainy picture on the clipping showed a grinning, younger Karsh on the courthouse steps, hands raised above his head in victory.

  Menard’s expression darkened as he looked at the clipping. He crumpled the yellowed paper into a ball and threw it as far away from himself as he could.

  Out on the airfield, Holton watched as the pilot loaded stuff behind the copter seats. “What’s all that?”

  “Just stuff.” The pilot finished stowing the last of it. “Like I said – don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay, but –”

  “Come on.” The pilot climbed in behind the controls. “We got a job to do.”

  The traffic reporter hesitated for a moment. A part of him – a big part – didn’t want to get in the copter with Menard.

  But then he thought about being famous. He’d lived in Los Angeles a long time – long by L.A. standards – and he knew what kind of nice things came along when that happened.

  He climbed into the copter. A moment later, they were off the ground and heading back toward the freeway.

  THIRTEEN

  MAYBE IT WAS the sun going down that did it. When it’s nighttime, people get all sorts of ideas.

  One idea that Karsh’s girlfriend Alice got was that if she was going to get out of this mess alive, she’d have to take care of it herself. Not only had Karsh failed to do much for her acting career, but right now he was even more useless. He just sat there on the other side of the limo’s rear seat, brooding as if it were some big humiliation for an important person like him to be stuck in a situation like this. Only little people were supposed to be taken hostage. In the mind of somebody like her, she wasn’t little people – she was an incredibly important person, who just hadn’t gotten her own cable reality show yet.

  And which she wasn’t going to get, if she wound up dead on this stupid freeway, along with all these nobodies whose only airtime would be when footage of their corpses showed up on the evening news broadcast. From what I heard later, that was what really annoyed her. She hadn’t moved from some poky little town in Idaho and gotten herself all glammed up and surgically enhanced here in L.A., just to have her opportunities taken away from her.

  Especially since what her busy little mind was cooking up, as a way of getting out of this situation, wasn’t all that much different from what had gotten her into it, so to speak. Given her talents, such as they were – pretty much the same as those of a lot of other so-called actresses in L.A. – it was her basic approach to getting whatever she wanted from life. Even when she had still been back in Idaho, and she had mainly been using it on the varsity football squad. If it had worked for them, these guys with the assault rifles should be the same piece of cake.

  Going into action, Alice thumbed the button for the tinted limo window beside her. Ferdie still had the limo’s accessories switched on, so the window slid down like silk, letting her poke her head out and look down the lane behind.

  Which was where one of Richter’s crew, the guy named Tullis, was stationed. Keeping an eye on the cars and their drivers, intimidated virtually immobile by the assault rifle casually slung from his shoulder. They all knew h
e could whip that ugly piece up in a second and fire off a game-over burst.

  Alice didn’t care about that at the moment. The first time Tullis had come around the limo, when the bottle was first being set up, he had shown a certain, shall we say, interest in her. By the standards of some of the morons she’d had to deal with in her short career, including Karsh, that made Tullis something of a smooth talker. If nothing else, it gave her something to get started with.

  “Hey –”

  He had been looking down toward the rear of the bottle, past the school bus with my brother Donnie in it. Hearing Alice’s voice brought his gaze swinging around like a cold searchlight.

  Seeing her face, though, made Tullis smile. Because she was smiling at him. The way she knew how to.

  “So . . .” Tullis stood at the side window, looking in at her. “Something I can do for you?”

  “Yes.” She looked up at him through her lashes. “There is.”

  I’m always amazed moves like that work. Guys are just walking clichés. My problem is that I wouldn’t be able to even try it without laughing. Which would spoil the effect, I suppose.

  Tullis played along. “Yeah, I bet.” He lifted the assault rifle up in both hands. “The gun thing must turn you on.”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.” She reached out and stroked the barrel with her fingertips.

  From the other side of the limo’s back seat, Karsh looked over at her. “What the hell are you doing?”

  She shot a venomous glance over her shoulder at him. “Shut up!” Then she turned her attention back to Tullis.

  “Let me show you . . .” She pushed the limo door open and swung her admittedly killer legs out. Standing up, she pressed herself close to Tullis, the assault rifle between them. Her hands moved down to work on his belt buckle.

  Later on, after it was all over, Donnie filled me in on what had been the reaction of the kids aboard the school bus. Because they’d had a clear shot through the bus’s front window, of what was happening farther ahead of them in the freeway lanes. That action between Tullis and Alice, once a couple of the kids had spotted it and alerted the others, had them all hooting and shouting.

  The bus driver Connie was taken by surprise. She’d had her back turned to the windshield, keeping an eye on the kids. Next thing she knew, they were out of their seats, pressed up around her, scrambling past her to get a better look at the action outside the limo up ahead.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw what the deal was. “Damn –” It’d already been difficult to keep the busload of kids calm and settled down without a sideshow like this. “All right, that’s enough.” She pushed against them as though they were a small, agitated tidal wave, trying to get them to sit back down. “Nothing going on you haven’t already seen on TV –”

  “Yeah,” said Mitchell the ringleader, “but this is real.”

  “No, it’s not.” Connie bodily hoisted him up and set him down farther in the bus aisle. “It’s all just some stupid TV show. That’s all that ever happens around here . . .”

  There was at least one kid aboard the school bus who wasn’t paying any attention to Tullis and Alice getting it on. That was my brother Donnie. This was his chance.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised, if somehow I had been magically able to see what he was up to. He’d always been working out, building up his upper-body strength, even before we’d come out here to Los Angeles with my boss Karsh. I’d been able to buy him a nice semiuniversal machine with all sorts of adjustable weights and cables, that he was able to back his wheelchair up to and give himself a pretty sweaty workout. There hadn’t been even room for something like that in our old place back East, let alone the money to spring for it. But I’d already done the research online and knew what brand and model was recommended by a bunch of those wheelchair athletes with all sorts of medals and trophies, so then it’d just been a matter of ordering it and getting it installed. Donnie dug it, of course – I could lie in my own bedroom late at night and listen to the little noises coming from his room, the sliding noise of the cables going through the pulley wheels, the clank-clank of the stack of five-pound metal plates dropping back down as Donnie went through his reps . . .

  And that was why I’d been in kind of a weird down mood, even before I’d gone out with Karsh to meet up with those Japanese businessmen he’d been trying to impress. Because that morning when I’d been getting ready, I’d fixed up a glassful of that creatine powder that Donnie had told me all the big-time weight lifters used to build up muscle – I’d checked it out and it seemed harmless enough, except how much the stuff cost – and I’d taken it into his bedroom just when he was finishing up his first-of-the-day workout. Donnie had been sitting there in his wheelchair with his T-shirt off, with his back turned to me as I’d set the glass down on the little table beside his bed –

  And I’d seen the scars on his back, the ones from all the surgeries he’d had when he’d been a little kid. Just a baby. At least the social services agencies had managed to wangle payment for that much, back when we’d both been drifting around from one foster family placement to another. And the operations had been successful – or successful enough to keep me from being all on my own for at least a little while longer. There are a lot of things I know, that I was told because now I’m his legal guardian, that he doesn’t know. At least I don’t think he does – because I haven’t told him. And I really, really don’t know when I will. Things the doctors told me, about what’s likely going to happen with Donnie in the future. And then I really will be all on my own.

  The only other person I’ve ever heard of with those kind of scars up near the shoulder blades is a Japanese pop singer named Shiina Ringo. Her stuff’s a little too weird and avant-garde-y for my taste. Donnie’s got a thing for those kawaii groups like Perfume and AKB48 – duh; he’s a guy – but those are the normal sort of J-pop groups, and they still all sound like mice on helium to me. So the only reason I came across Shiina Ringo is because I had been cruising around on the Internet late at night, Googling on esophageal atresia to see if there had been any medical breakthroughs that I hadn’t heard about yet. You’ve probably never heard the term – I’m sick of hearing about it – but that’s the condition that both my brother and this Shiina Ringo were born with. It’s basically a congenital narrowing of the esophagus where it connects with the stomach. You can die from it – and Donnie nearly did, before he had the same operations as a baby that Shiina Ringo did. The surgeons have to go in from the back, right by the shoulder blades, and that’s what leaves those scars that look like an angel’s wings have been removed. My little brother’s had those scars just about all his life – I can’t remember when he didn’t have them – and apparently so does Shiina Ringo. But the operations she got must’ve gone better than Donnie’s, because I didn’t come across anything about the infections and other complications that he had. Which he just about died from anyway, with all the post-op bandages wrapped around his frail little body, making him look like a partially finished baby mummy, with his bare skinny legs sticking out. And which were also the reason why he’s in a wheelchair and Shiina Ringo isn’t. Just the way things worked out. I’ve never met her. I’ll never meet somebody like that – why would I? – but I know she’s probably a wonderful person, who deserves every good thing that’s happened to her. And I’m an absolute creep to have lain on my bed with my face buried in my pillow, more than once, just weeping and thinking over and over, Why her? Why not him? Like my brother Donnie had been cheated out of a good deal that some Japanese pop singer had gotten instead . . .

  I know the universe doesn’t work that way. Stuff just happens.

  Well, this isn’t getting any story told about what happened on that freeway in Los Angeles. What does it matter if that morning I leaned over my brother and laid the side of my face on his shoulder and tried not to think of the day, which I’d been told would eventually come, when the angel wings would get stitched back onto him?

 
; Because it certainly wasn’t going to happen this day, not if Donnie had anything to do with it.

  Like I said, he’d been working on building up his upper-body strength. And he’d had pretty good success – at this rate, in another couple years he’d have more on his chest than his sister did. When Richter and his crew had set up their bottle on the freeway and Donnie had figured out that he was trapped there with the other kids aboard the bus, he’d started putting his own plans into gear. Every chance he’d gotten, he’d rolled his wheelchair a little farther toward the back of the bus. When all the other kids had surged up front to watch that bimbo Alice put her full-body-contact moves on Tullis, that had allowed Donnie to roll all the way to the now-empty rear seat. With all his classmates hyperactively jumping around in front of the driver Connie, there had been nobody to see Donnie swing himself out of his wheelchair and onto the bus seat. Then he’d pulled himself up, unlatched the rear-window emergency exit, and pushed it far enough open to clamber out and dive head-first to the freeway pavement below.