4 Real Dangerous Place Page 4

  The pilot made no reply, but banked the craft toward the east and the slow, snaking curve of the Santa Monica Freeway. For a moment, his partner had a dizzying view across the city to the Pacific, where the smokey horizon reddened with the approaching sun. Holding in another hit, he turned his gaze back to the city sprawling toward the low, gray hills. The people down there, in the cars and trucks – those were the ones he felt sorry for.

  Then it happened. And he and the pilot saw from up there what Elton and I had seen down below.

  “Christ Almighty –” Stunned, the traffic reporter gazed down in amazement. “What the hell was that?”

  Menard circled the copter around the smoke rising up from the freeway. There had been a giddy moment when the fireball had erupted beneath them, and he’d had to fight the controls to keep the impact from tumbling them upside down. The horizon, filled with the dull gray-blue of the Pacific, had yawed and tilted in the distance, standing almost vertical at one point before he had been able to level off the copter.

  “Beats the crap out of me.” He worked the machine another hundred feet in altitude, sliding it into the clear air at the side of the smoke column. Below, the freeway lanes narrowed with distance. They could still see the cars scattered from the black wreckage at their center and the first of the people climbing out and running from them. “Something went off – maybe a gasoline tanker –”

  “No . . . I don’t think so . . .” Holton shook his head as he laid his hand against the curved glass and peered down. “It was just an ordinary freight truck – look, you can see a big chunk of it right over there, with one of the doors. Or part of it, at least.” He glanced over at the pilot. “Can you take it in closer? We gotta get the best shot we can.”

  “Nope.” Menard shook his head. “Not until we get some idea of what’s going on down there. I don’t want to get us caught in something else lighting up. ’Til then, I’m just gonna hang out up here where it’s nice and safe.”

  “Yeah, but –”

  “But what?” The pilot reached over and laid his hand on the traffic reporter’s sleeve. “You see those people running around down there? If there’s another bomb – if that’s what it was – inside some other truck, you want us coming down on top of them?” He shook his head even more firmly. “You wouldn’t exactly be walking away from that, with your microphone in your hand.”

  “Oh.” The reporter slowly nodded. “Guess you’re right.” He turned back to the radio and flipped the transmit switch. “I’m going to get hold of the news desk, see what they know about all this.”

  “You do that.” The pilot turned back to his controls, banking the copter around the widening column of smoke.

  † † †

  I didn’t find out until later that there was a connection between the helicopter pilot, Larry Menard, and me. The connection was Karsh – I worked for the guy now, and Menard had worked for him a while back, when Karsh had been first screwing around with low-ball movie production. That hadn’t worked out well for either one of them. So there was some bad blood, which accounted for a lot of the nasty stuff that happened there on the freeway. But we’ll get to that.

  For the moment, Elton and I were sitting tight where we were. We’d simmered down from our little outburst at each other. Might as well, I figured – whatever was going on, it didn’t seem to be directed at us. Not that there would’ve been much we could’ve done about it if it were, what with being seriously outmanned and outgunned by Richter and his crew. We had zero guns, actually, both Elton’s piece and my little Smith & Wesson having been lifted from us.

  If we’d been up there in the copter, we would’ve had a better idea of all that was going on. Richter and his assault rifle-toting crew had set up a nice, tight bottle. Trapped on this elevated section of freeway, there were roughly about fifty or sixty vehicles, bounded at the front by the double rig that had jackknifed itself across the lanes, and at the rear by the flaming wreckage of the truck they had set off in one big explosion.

  Things were a lot quieter on the other side of the freeway. Elton and I hadn’t been able to see it, but there had been one more piece of Richter’s operation that had just fitted into place. A flat-bed rig, with some huge cargo strapped down under a canvas tarp, had been heading the opposite direction toward us, right when the explosion had gone off. Just as it had reached the point across the center divider from where the first truck had slewed across the lanes, this one repeated the move on the opposite side of the freeway. That maneuver effectively cut off any more traffic from rolling into the area on that side; the lanes emptied out as the traffic ahead of the flat-bed truck rolled on toward wherever they’d been heading when things had lit up so spectacularly.

  Frankly, I wasn’t paying that much attention at the time to all the various pieces of the bottle being set up. Even before I figured that Elton and I were okay for the time being, I was thinking about my brother Donnie in the half-length school bus trapped up ahead of us. I couldn’t be sure yet what Richter and his crew were up to, but this seemed to be shaping up into some kind of hostage situation. Why else would they have gone to such elaborate lengths – a jackknifed big rig in front of all these trapped vehicles, a huge fiery explosion behind – to trap this many people on a length of freeway?

  What I had to be concerned about was whether Richter and his bunch would consider a school bus full of kids with mobility issues as just the kind of hostages they wanted, or whether Richter would consider Donnie and the others as disposable, or just more trouble than they were worth. When you’re dealing with types like this, you can just never tell what they might be calculating.

  There was something, though, I wasn’t aware of yet. There was somebody else I knew who was trapped in the bottle.

  When my boss Karsh had gotten all pissed off at me and had the limo take him from the heavy equipment company display yard, I’d figured they were just heading to whatever trendy club his girlfriend Alice wanted to hang out at. And, in fact, that actually had been their original destination. But he’d still been stewing, the big baby, about my having possibly screwed up his deal with the Japanese businessmen he’d been trying to impress over at the heavy-equipment company display yard. Apparently his girlfriend Alice had egged him on about this, just out of sheer bitchiness and the general tendency of women who think they’re so frickin’ hot to make life miserable for the ones like me. So he’d decided to fire my butt. He knew that right about then I’d be heading over, one way or another, to where the school bus dropped off Donnie – when Karsh was still being nice to me, he’d even gone there with me a couple of times, just so he could play at being a fun uncle type to my little brother. Which I hadn’t minded then, though I had been pretty sure that Donnie hadn’t been exactly fooled by him. The upshot of it all being that Karsh had instructed his driver Ferdie to head over there now, just so he could have whatever sick pleasure he could get from firing somebody right in front of their kid brother. Remember how I told you that your boss sucks? Yeah – mine, too.

  But since there really is such a thing as instant karma, at least every once in a while, the result of Karsh’s decision was that he and his mean-girl companion were actually right there on the freeway, heading to the same place Elton and I were going to, when the whole load of trouble from Richter and his crew came down on us. I didn’t know it at the time, but Karsh’s limo was trapped there as well, up toward the front of the bottled-up vehicles. Which meant that he got to have the same kind of fun that a lot of other people were having right about then.

  Karsh had been so deep in some conference call on his cell phone, that he’d barely noticed when the freeway traffic came to an abrupt halt. That sort of thing happened a lot, particularly this time of day. The driver Ferdie probably looked up ahead and saw the jackknifed big rig, but his boss would have been typically oblivious.

  The big fireball explosion behind him, though – that got his attention. Karsh took the phone from his ear and turned to look out the limo’s ba
ck window. “What the hell –?”

  Sitting next to him, Alice just shook her gorgeous head. “Must be a film shoot.” She didn’t even look up from whatever she was texting on her iPhone. “Aren’t they supposed to tell people ahead of time?”

  “That wasn’t special effects,” said Karsh. “Believe me, I’d know.” He raised the cell phone up to his ear again. “Yeah, I’m still here. Look, there’s something going on right now, and I don’t know what it is –” He listened for a couple of seconds, then lost his temper. “Important? You moron! I don’t have time to talk grosses with a putz like you. Shit is happening here!”

  Karsh jabbed the disconnect button and threw the cell phone onto the seat. His girlfriend looked at him in annoyance, then leaned forward over the top of the front passenger seat.

  “Take the next off-ramp, why don’t you?” Alice pointed ahead. “We can get where we’re going on the surface streets. We’re practically there, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Alden.” Ferdie shook his head. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere. See that truck?”

  She actually hadn’t until then. “Can’t you squeeze past it?”

  “For Christ’s sake.” Karsh rolled his eyes. “Don’t be an idiot. It’s all the way from the center divider to the guardrail.”

  “Whatever.” She held her iPhone up in front of herself. “I’m calling nine-one-one –”

  Karsh had already picked up his own phone again and was doing the same. But they both got interrupted. Before Karsh could punch in the number, somebody tapped against the side window glass. Both he and Alice looked over and saw one of Richter’s crew leaning down to look in at them. The muzzle of his assault rifle, slung over his shoulder, was pointed right at them. He smiled and gave a little hello wave.

  Alice shrank back into the far corner of the seat. Karsh stared at the guy, then frantically jabbed the buttons on the cell phone in his hand. The side window shattered from the butt of the assault rifle striking it. Glass fragments sprayed through the limo’s interior as Alice screamed.

  “You don’t need to bother with that.” The gunman – this one’s name was Tullis, I found out later – smiled and pointed to the phone. “You really think the police don’t already know there’s all kinds of shit coming down here?”

  Karsh didn’t say anything. But he flipped the cell phone closed.

  “You’re kinda cute.” Tullis peered in at Alice. “You in the movies?”

  Wide-eyed, she slowly nodded. “Kinda . . .”

  “Yeah, right. That means you’re not.” Tullis nodded in appreciation. “But you should be. Tell you what.” He drew back from the shattered window. “You just take it easy – and I’ll make sure you get out of here alive. Deal?”

  She gave another slow nod.

  Tullis let his smile widen, then turned and walked away from the limo.

  “I knew it,” muttered Alice. She gazed bleakly ahead of herself. “I knew I should’ve gotten out of L.A. when I had the chance.”

  Karsh gazed at her for a moment, then went back to dialing his cell phone. But not nine-one-one.

  † † †

  Of course, I wouldn’t have been concerned about my boss and his stupid girlfriend, even if I had known they were there on the freeway, along with the rest of us.

  I was worried about my brother Donnie.

  But actually, if I had been able to watch and listen in on how he was handling the situation, I would’ve been proud of him. He’s a smart cookie.

  Plus, probably because of the line of work his big sister’s in and some of the things that’ve happened to us because of it, he’s a little more tuned in to what kind of bad stuff can come down in this world. There were some kids on that bus who weren’t quite so hip.

  With all that action going on outside, most of the kids were going completely ape. In addition to the ones with mobility issues like Donnie, there was another whole group with various hyperexcitability diagnoses, the usual ADHD stuff. But you can’t set off a great big fireball explosion like that without getting even ordinary kids bouncing off the walls.

  Connie, the bus driver, was somewhere in her forties, a little on the dumpy side, with frizzy blonde hair to her shoulders; I liked her every time I talked to her. Right now, she was doing her best to calm the little bastards, but she could barely be heard over the noise.

  “Quiet down!” She’d gotten up from the driver’s seat and stood in the aisle, shouting. “Quiet, please! Everything’ll be okay!”

  I wasn’t surprised when my brother told me afterward that he hadn’t been carrying on with the rest of the kids. He sat there, with his wheelchair clamped along with the others to the security rail that ran along one side of the bus’s interior, just watching Richter and the rest of his crew moving rapidly about their business.

  “Whoa – they got some killer hardware!” That was a kid named Mitchell, who was pretty much the ringleader of the school’s obnoxious crowd. Donnie had already had some run-ins with the pig-faced little jerk.

  “Maybe . . . maybe they’re going to shoot us.” A skinny, much more nervous kid looked wide-eyed at the guns that were being toted around outside.

  “Get away from there!” Connie tugged a couple of the kids away from their perches at the bus’s back window and shoved them toward their seats. “Come on! For Christ’s sake! You want to get killed or something?”

  “You must be nuts.” Mitchell radiated preadolescent contempt at her. “Nobody ever shoots kids.”

  “They won’t have to in your case.” Connie yanked Mitchell away from the window. He landed in a seat across the aisle from Donnie.

  “My dad’ll sue this stupid bitch’s ass!” Mitchell glared sullenly at Connie’s back.

  Donnie just shook his head. “Your dad doesn’t know you’re alive.”

  That got him a venomous look from the other kid.

  “Look, everyone –” Connie took it up a notch. “Just shut up!”

  Things quieted down, at least a little bit.

  “I don’t know who these people are, I don’t know what’s going on, so we all just have to be quiet and stay in our seats. Everything will be okay –”

  “You heard the lady. Shut up and sit down.”

  Connie and the kids all looked over and saw Tullis standing in the bus doorway, still carrying the assault rifle he’d just threatened Karsh and Alice with.

  “You got the right idea.” Tullis looked right into Connie’s eyes. “Just keep ’em quiet. And everything’ll be fine.”

  He turned and stepped back down from the bus.

  “That was way cool,” said Mitchell, all impressed.

  Donnie wasn’t. He didn’t let on, but he was already making plans.

  SIX

  “SO WHAT do you think we should do?”

  I kept my head leaned back against the driver’s seat so I could hear Elton from the back of the panel truck, where he was still staying out of sight.

  “We just take it easy,” he said. “We sit right here and don’t do anything stupid. For now. Of course –” I could see him in the mirror, giving a shrug. “There might’ve been a lot more I could’ve done, if you hadn’t handed over my gun.”

  “Are you still sulking about that? You’re the one who left it there.”

  He didn’t say anything back to me.

  “You recognize any of this bunch?” I figured there might be a chance of that, Elton having been in the security business – both sides of it – a lot longer than I had. Maybe if he knew one of them, we could catch a break and just be allowed to slip out of this situation. Or at least Elton could – I’d still have to find some way of snagging my little brother.

  “Nope.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Elton shake his head. “None of ’em. Whoever this Richter fellow is, he must be recruiting his help somewhere I don’t know about.”

  “I don’t care if he got them off Craigslist.” Every time I breathed, it tasted like burning rubber and gasoline, from the black smoke that w
as still piling up somewhere behind us. “I was just hoping you had some other plan besides hanging out, waiting for another gun to be put to my head.”

  “Not at the moment.”

  It struck me that he was being entirely too relaxed about all of this.

  “The thing is,” continued Elton, “we don’t even know what these bastards want.” Out the windshield, we could both see that the initial hysteria had died down a little, with the prowling gun-toters clamping a tight lid on the drivers cowering in their vehicles. “If they just wanted to round up a bunch of hostages, then do some kind of negotiations for money, there’d be a lot easier ways to set up something like that. This whole thing’s a mess.” He frowned, shaking his head. “That’s why these kinds of things usually go down at banks. The money’s right there. But taking over a stretch of freeway? Right out here in the open like this?” Another shake of the head. “I don’t get it.”