4 Real Dangerous Place Read online

  Except I wasn’t laughing. I couldn’t even breathe.

  Elton reacted faster than I did.

  “Stay right where you are.” He had already unsnapped his seat belt and squeezed through the gap between the two seats, then dived into the panel truck’s rear cargo section.

  I didn’t need any explanation from him. Something seriously bad was going down right in front of us, with a corpse in a police uniform leaking blood on the freeway pavement. Whatever was happening, the motorcycle cop with the gun in his hand didn’t need to know that there were two of us in the truck right in back of him.

  The mirror-lensed sunglasses scanned around the area, like some creepy slow radar. I had seen that sort of thing before, with Cole when he’d still been alive. You do something like pop a police officer right out in the open, you need to make a pretty careful assessment about any potential trouble coming down on your ass . . .

  Two bright, stabbing flashes of light bounced off the sunglasses, hard enough to make me wince, as that shielded gaze fastened right on me.

  The fakeness vanished from inside my head, and everything became real again. A little too real. I dragged one deep breath after another into my lungs as I watched the motorcycle cop – or whatever he really was – step over the body at his feet and walk toward the panel truck. His boots left red prints on the pavement behind him.

  That was when he leaned in the panel truck’s side window and put the gun to my head, setting the cold circle of its muzzle right between my eyebrows. I froze with my hands right at the top of the steering wheel. I knew better than to make any kind of sudden movement. In his sunglasses, I could see two little pictures of myself giving a convincing impression of a wide-eyed, frightened young woman. Which actually wasn’t hard to do at the moment.

  “Kind of a crappy ride you got here.” He peered around the gun at me. His face was even older and harder up close. “Yours?”

  “No . . .” My voice was a little squeak, the kind I’d had before I got into my present line of work – which right now was the last thing I wanted this guy to know about. “It . . . belongs to the company I work for.”

  He looked back along the side of the van at the logo of Karsh’s heavy equipment outfit painted on the side, then back to me.

  “Whoa.” His scrutiny had dropped a little lower. “Kind of a bad girl, aren’t you?”

  He’d spotted the little Smith & Wesson strapped to my thigh, peeking out from below the edge of my skirt.

  “I make the bank deposits –” I spoke quick and breathless, gasping out the words. “Sometimes . . . sometimes they’re big.”

  “Uh-huh.” He brought his face even closer, the eyes hidden behind the sunglasses prying deep into mine. “Sure.”

  He reached inside, below my arms, so he could lay his other hand flat on the Smith & Wesson, his fingertips stretching past the holster and onto my thigh. I just held my breath as he kept looking into my eyes, waiting for a reaction. He finally pulled the gun out of the holster and drew back with it in his fist. His own, much bigger gun was still pressed against my forehead.

  His eyes narrowed as he peered into mine. Without saying anything, he leaned farther into the truck, reaching past me to flip open the glove compartment.

  “Well. Look what we have here.” He pulled back with Elton’s gun in his other hand. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  I kept silent. There’s not much you can say in situations like that.

  “Hey! Richter!” Other men’s voices shouted from beyond the empty black-and-white police car. “What are you waiting for?”

  The cold mirror-lensed gaze swung over that way for that moment. “I’ll get back to you,” he said, pulling the gun from my brow. “In the meantime – don’t make trouble.” He slipped the other gun inside his fake CHP jacket and turned away, heading back toward his crew.

  “What’s going on?” Hunched down behind the seats, Elton whispered to me.

  “Not sure –” I could see the other men up ahead, who had shouted out to this Richter guy. Several more of them were jumping down from the opened back of the big rig stretched across the freeway lanes. What else I knew now was the name of the one who’d just put a gun to my head – or at least what the others were calling him – and that he seemed to be in charge of whatever operation was going on. His crew looked just as hard as they walked down between the lanes of vehicles, their drivers cowering back from the assault rifles slung in the men’s hands. “They’re setting something up –”

  Elton raised himself up far enough that he could look out the windshield as well. We could see as the big rig’s cab door opened up and the driver climbed out. So much for my heart attack theory – this one was big and hard-muscled, his face swarthily unshaven, and he had some large-caliber gun in one hand. So he was obviously in with the rest of them.

  In fact, the guy was Richter’s second-in-command for this operation. When it was all over, an Israeli passport was found on his body, with a first name of Mozel and something Russian-sounding for the last name. Good chance it was a phony, but it didn’t really matter.

  Meanwhile, the fake motorcycle cop Richter was talking into a cell phone he’d unclipped from his belt. There was a skinnier guy who’d also climbed out of the back of the truck, only with some kind of electronics box with push-buttons in one hand rather than carrying an assault rifle like the others. With a matching cell phone to his ear, he looked down the freeway lanes toward the motorcycle guy, then gave a single nod and flipped his phone closed. Richter was walking away from us as the skinny guy pushed one of the buttons on the box.

  “Hang on –” Elton had pretty reliable instincts about this sort of stuff. “Something’s about to happen –”

  It did. Big and loud. Louder than everything else that had happened so far.

  The panel truck’s rear-view mirrors seemed to fill up with fire as the explosion went off behind us. The shock wave was enough to lift the rear end of the truck a couple feet off the pavement. I was thrown hard against the steering wheel, knocking the breath out of me.

  With my head twisted to one side, I saw out through the side window as a great big Ford LTD, blackened by flame, went tumbling end-over-end in the lane beside us, its driver tossed around inside like a rag doll. It came down on its roof, the windows bursting out in tiny glittering pieces, wedged in the space between the lanes a couple of car lengths ahead of us.

  I could feel Elton grabbing my shoulder and pulling me back from the panel truck’s steering wheel, but I couldn’t hear what he was shouting at me. The explosion had been so close that I was temporarily deafened. My head was swimming as I caught a glimpse in the outside mirror of the fireball and smoke rolling up into the sky, charred scraps of metal and smoldering rubber scattered all around.

  Then I blacked out.

  Just for a little bit, though. When I came to again, my ears ringing, I could hear people screaming in the cars around us, and I could smell the burning wreckage behind us.

  “Take it easy,” I heard Elton say. “We’re okay . . .”

  I didn’t feel like arguing with him. I turned around with one hand on top of the steering wheel, so I could look out the panel truck’s rear window.

  There were more flames going on, not a great big white ball roaring in all directions, but orange-red tongues reaching up into the sky from what was left of the small bobtail truck that had been somewhere behind us. As I watched, blackened bits of debris came raining down onto the freeway and the roofs of the surrounding vehicles. A bumper, bent double, clanged and bounced on the pavement, like a broken half of a chrome pretzel. Fluttering ash drifted down, like a black mini-storm already fading away . . .

  And lots more screaming. Inside my head, the deafness ebbed down to a rattling buzz. Past that came the sounds of the drivers bailing out of the vehicles closest to the explosion. There were at least two cars that had been rocked onto their sides by the force of the blast. Nobody was moving inside the LTD that had been picked
up and slammed down on its roof.

  A half-dozen or so vehicles had been shoved out of the blast zone, black rubber tire marks scrawled across the freeway pavement, and slammed against the cars in the next lane over. I looked around to the other side and saw that the guardrail on the right lane’s edge had been snapped free, one end twisting ribbon-like out into the air. As I watched, a smoke-blackened sedan tilted over the edge, then tumbled down the green iceplant landscaping to the street below.

  My sight was pulled back to the people who had scrambled panicking out of their vehicles. Some of them had been seriously banged up by being thrown and bounced around inside their cars. I saw at least a couple staggering away, blood streaming down their faces and across their chests. One collapsed face-forward onto the pavement and lay there, hands scrabbling at the red pool widening beneath him. Behind us, the flames and smoke continued to churn up into the sky.

  Elton shook his head. “That’s not good –”

  “Oh, thank you for pointing that out.” For some reason, the comment unleashed my inner bitchiness. “I thought maybe these people couldn’t wait for football season and decided to get their tailgate parties started early.”

  “Up yours,” said Elton. “I knew I should’ve let you go storming off on your own. If I had, I wouldn’t be stuck here with you now.”

  “Stuck here with me? Yeah, right – you’re the one who set a land speed record, diving out of the front seat. The only thing you seem to be working security for is your own butt.”

  “Yeah? Well, let me tell you something –”

  Then things got worse. Much worse.

  Some conversations are better off interrupted. When Elton and I heard the quick stutter of the assault rifles, we knew the bad stuff had just gone up another notch.

  We watched the people fleeing from their abandoned cars. The explosion overrode whatever fear they might have had about the hard-looking men with guns walking between the lanes. With this curving stretch of the freeway so high up in the air, there was no place for them to go. Trapped, running in a panic between the lanes of stuck-motionless vehicles, fleeing from the burning wreckage behind them –

  The first shots stitched a line right in front of the first of the running people. A heavy-set businessman, necktie flopping over his shoulder, pulled himself up short as the sharp-edged chips flew from the freeway pavement, into his chest and face. A couple of women, one already missing a high-heeled shoe, collided with the man from behind, hard enough to send all three of them tumbling in a pile. The businessman found himself on his hands and knees, staring at the bullet holes drilled into the concrete an inch away from his scraped-raw fingertips.

  If nothing else, the shots got their attention. There were still people screaming, but also voices shouting in confusion, as the people bumping against each other and the cars on either side tried to figure out what new element had just entered their lives.

  We saw the businessman raising an open-mouthed, wide-eyed gaze toward something farther down the freeway. Raising ourselves up higher in the panel truck’s seats, we could see what the man had spotted.

  “Okay, people!” An over-amplified voice broke through the mingled screams and shouts. “Listen up!”

  Shading my eyes against the late-afternoon sunlight, I looked at the figure standing at the edge of the jackknifed freight truck’s roof, bullhorn in hand. It was that Richter guy, the one who’d put the gun to my head, still in his motorcycle cop outfit.

  As I watched, the white-haired figure lowered the bullhorn and said something to the hard-faced Mozel guy that I’d seen run past his panel truck, right before the explosion had gone off. The other nodded, raised the assault rifle he was carrying, and ripped off a burst.

  Across the lanes of stalled traffic, the quick shots drilled holes through car hoods and roofs, shattering windshields and lacing through side doors. That started off a whole new round of screaming, as the crowd clawed itself backward, away from the gunmen.

  “All right – now that I’ve got your attention –”

  “This guy’s a dick,” muttered Elton from behind me. “But a serious one.”

  “Here’s the deal –” With the bullhorn up to his mouth, the figure in the motorcycle uniform let his voice boom out across the heads of the panicky crowd. “You need to get back into your vehicles. Now!”

  I turned my head, looking at the cars trapped around us. Some people, a half-dozen or so, were diving behind their steering wheels as instructed, but the majority were still slamming against each other, caught between the burning wreckage and the sight of the upraised rifle barrels.

  “Not joking around about this, people.” The amplified voice snapped again across the length of freeway. “Let’s do it!”

  This Richter guy lowered the bullhorn again, watching as his crew – by now I counted a pack of maybe a dozen – spread out between the lanes, assault rifles clutched in their hands. They waded into the crowd. More shouts, more screams, plus the thud of rifle butts being slammed into guts and faces, the people being hammered back into their cars. Where the guy with the bullhorn wanted them.

  Things were a lot quieter now. The gunmen were prowling about, glaring through the side windows at the people they had just forced back inside. A wind had picked up, coming off the distant ocean, smearing the black smoke still pluming up from the explosion’s blackened, torn-up debris. I could hear overhead the muffled whup-whup of a helicopter circling around.

  FIVE

  HERE’S THE deal about the helicopter that was right above us.

  You probably know about it already, because you’ve seen the movie. Granted, it was one of those made-for-TV things, but the producers had a fairly decent budget, and they actually did their research about what happened there on the freeway that day. Talked to a bunch of people – the ones who lived through it, I mean; the ones who didn’t weren’t exactly saying much, of course. And you can believe that they didn’t talk to me. By the time it was all over, I had pretty much disappeared myself. In my line of work, publicity of any sort is a negative. I’d rather not have everybody with cable even knowing that I exist.

  So even though I was in the middle of it, right there on the freeway, there was a bunch of stuff happening that I didn’t know about until afterward. Some of it I figured out on my own, when I finally had time, instead of running around trying to keep from getting killed myself. Other stuff got told to me by people who were connected, and the rest I got from that TV movie, same as most other folks did. The real problem with the movie, though, is that with all the secret government and military stuff that was involved, there was no way they were going to get a clearance to talk about everything that went on. So there’s some pretty big holes in it, that the filmmakers had to spackle over. Just the nature of their business, I suppose.

  But the helicopter thing, and what happened between the pilot and my boss Karsh – that was pretty much all in there.

  Plus, you have to admit that the guys in the copter did have a good view of everything that was happening below . . .

  † † †

  A half hour before the explosion, the traffic reporter had just been laying down his usual line of chatter into the radio microphone.

  “Not too bad a rush hour, folks.” Eddie Holton had been stuck covering the late-afternoon commute gig for nearly five years before I ever heard him. So the sight of rivers of traffic, creeping sludge-like through the city, was old hat to him. His forehead touched the cool glass of the copter’s bubble as he looked down at all the poor bastards below. “Trust me. You’ll get home – eventually. Now for the good news – you’ll have plenty of time to kick back with the soft rock tunes of your big K-Zero. Back with an update in ten.”

  He pulled the headphones down around his neck so he could only hear a murmur, past the constant whup-whup noise of the copter blades, of the warmed-over Eagles and Carpenters crapola that the station’s computerized playlists inflicted on the listening public. When the helicopter touched down on th
e station’s rooftop landing pad, and his shift was over for the day, he had a Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot with its CD changer stuffed with Bernstein’s Mahler and Furtwängler’s Wagner. He’d crank up the last movement of the Resurrection Symphony until his ears bled, just to flush it all out.

  Larry Menard, the pilot sitting right next to him, nodded toward the other side of the window. “You should’ve told them that the San Diego’s starting to look a little heavy.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Holton took a number out of his jacket pocket – ordinarily streng verboten aboard traffic copters, but Larry let him get away with it – and lit up. “Anybody who gets on the 405 at 5 p.m. deserves what he gets.”