4 Real Dangerous Place Page 5

  “Maybe,” I said, “there’s something here they want. I mean – here on the freeway.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” I sounded annoyed even to myself. “If I knew stuff like that, would I be asking if you had any ideas about what we should be doing?”

  Elton didn’t say anything, but just kept squinting and peering ahead, trying to make out what this Richter guy’s crew was up to. There was something going on outside the jackknifed big rig they seemed to be using as their operational base. It looked like some sort of portable radio tower being bolted together – like one of those metal Erector sets – then cranked into place with wires dangling from it.

  I had no idea what that meant. Turning a little sulky myself, I folded my arms across my chest and watched. This whole business of just waiting to see what happened next was getting on my nerves.

  Looking up ahead, toward the now-empty patrol car, I could see the police bike that Richter had left parked at the side of the freeway’s right lane. It had all the right CHP markings and equipment bolted on to it, but I should’ve known it wasn’t on the level. It was one of the old BMW R1200 models that the Highway Patrol had phased out in favor of the Kawasaki Concours 14. When Donnie and I first arrived here in L.A., I’d gotten the crazy notion of upgrading myself to a much bigger bike – and just about anything would’ve been bigger than the Ninja 250 I’d left back home. Los Angeles was infested with showboat Harleys, but they all seemed to have orthodontists and accountants on top of them, so I didn’t want anything like that. I’d taken some long test rides on the civilian versions of both the R1200 and the Concours 14 and managed to handle them well enough, but finally decided they just weren’t for me. The sheer speed of machines like that was a kick, but I figured somebody my size would look like a twelve-year-old riding something that enormous. How intimidating would that be?

  Though now, sitting bottled-up on this freeway, a wild notion flitted through my mind, of slipping out of the panel truck, sneaking up to where Richter had left the BMW, climbing on it, and barrel-assing down the side of the lane and out of here, before anybody realized what was going on. Easy enough – I could see he’d left the key in the ignition slot between the handlebars. Even the possibility of taking a burst of assault rifle fire into my back, when one of Richter’s bunch got his weapon swung in my direction, seemed preferable to just sitting here, stewing and waiting for God knows what to happen.

  Fun idea maybe, but I finally pushed it out of my head. Doing something like that, whether I got away with it or not, would mean leaving my brother Donnie behind, here in the bottle. And there was no way I was going to do that.

  So like it or not – and I didn’t – there really wasn’t anything to do now. Except wait.

  “This is driving me nuts,” I muttered half under my breath. “Just sitting . . .”

  “Take it easy. Here –” Elton rooted under his seat, then held something out toward me. “Read a magazine. Pretend like you’re in a waiting room. Since you pretty much are.”

  “What the hell’s this?” I looked at the wrinkled magazine he’d put in my hands. I’d been expecting some motorcycle rag, or Hustler maybe. “You read Science Digest? Really?”

  “Yeah, well, sorry I’m not living up to your hillbilly expectations. I read all kinds of things. You Asian types don’t have a lock on the brain department, you know.”

  I let that one pass. I flipped through the magazine pages. Sure, there were pictures, but there were plenty of words, too. Who knew? The guy was a constant surprise to me.

  “I dunno, Elton . . .” I shook my head. “Maybe it’s great there’s all these new developments with nuclear reactors –” That’s what the cover story was about. “But we don’t have one of those right now. So I’m not sure this is all that useful.”

  “You never can tell.” He reached over and stuck his forefinger in the middle of another page. “Now this is kinda interesting.”

  It was something about spiders. In the big color picture, they seemed to be doing something disgusting with each other. “Ick.”

  “Don’t be such a girl,” he said. “You should read this. The thing is that with this particular species of spider, after the male mates with the female –”

  Sure enough, smut talk. That, at least, didn’t surprise me.

  “His penis falls off.”

  I swung my gaze around to Elton. “Say what?”

  “It’s true,” said Elton. “These spiders have detachable penises.”

  Hard to believe that I was having a conversation like this, with the smoke still billowing up from the wreckage behind us, and guys walking around with loaded assault rifles. But there you go.

  “Hmm.” I nodded. “Must make them popular with the feminist-type lady spiders.”

  Elton sailed right on. “The really interesting thing,” he said, “is that after the male spider loses his unit – he’s a better fighter. ’Cause he weighs less without it. So he can fight off the other male spiders who might want to mate with his girlfriend.”

  “I get it.” Another nod from me. “So this is how you’re planning to take on these guys here. You’re gonna drop your penis on the floor, then go out and kick ass, because you’ll really be in fighting trim then. Super plan.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. This has got absolutely no practical application –”

  “Thank God,” I said. “I was worried – not so much for me, but for you.”

  “Actually . . .” Elton spoke with elaborate patience. “Only reason I brought it up is to show you that bad as things are, they could always be worse. Think about this poor bastard here.” His finger tapped on the picture in the magazine again. “He obviously doesn’t know his little thrill-hammer is going to fall off, right? Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so hot to trot. So it’s a surprise. He does the job, and then he’s feeling all macho and stuff, strutting around the web, feeling good – I’m the Man! Then he looks down and his eyes, all of ’em, bug out and he goes, Hey . . . wait a minute . . . what the hell?” He shook his head. “You gotta admit, these little guys get a raw deal.”

  I gazed at him in amazement. Then I burst out laughing, so hard I had to press my brow against the top of the steering wheel in front of me to keep anybody outside the panel truck from seeing.

  Nearly a minute later, I lifted my head and sat back, wiping tears from the corners of my eyes. “You’re right,” I said. “Poor goddamn little bastards. Now I know why Spider-Man’s got all those personal issues.”

  Elton didn’t say anything. He turned away from me and the magazine. But I saw a little half-smile lifting one corner of his mouth. It’d all been psychology on his part, I knew. He’d seen that I had been getting all stressed out – I hadn’t told him yet about my brother Donnie being trapped there in the bottle with us – so he’d done something about it. Him and his stupid spiders.

  So maybe things weren’t any better than they’d been before. But I was – a little bit, at least.

  I gazed over at him. Right then, I was actually sorry that nothing was ever going to happen between us.

  “What is it . . .” He was back to the business at hand. His voice had a low, brooding tone to it. “What do they want . . .”

  † † †

  Elton was right, though, the way he was wondering about things. There was something there on the freeway – I mean, besides all of us potential hostages – that Richter and his crew wanted. I might not have known what it was yet, but there were some others trapped there who had a pretty good idea –

  Because they were the ones who had it.

  Up ahead of us, but over in the right-hand lane, there was a dairy truck. Not a big-rig tanker, but a refrigerated delivery vehicle, the kind that ran the actual cartons of milk and yogurt and whatever else to the various convenience stores scattered along their route. I couldn’t see them from back where Elton and I were, but there were two men in the cab of the delivery truck, in the short-sleeved white uniforms with the
dairy company’s logo on the back. The one behind the steering wheel had the name Mike stitched over his shirt pocket; the other guy had Jason on his. I never did find out their real names.

  For a couple of guys delivering milk, they were taking the whole situation pretty cool.

  “We got trouble.” The one supposedly named Mike said it as calmly as if it were nothing more than one of the dairy truck tires going flat.

  Both men kept their gaze level and unblinking on Richter’s crew, as they went about sealing up the freeway bottle.

  “Just take it easy.” said the Jason one. “They don’t know anything about us.”

  The first guy gave a slow nod. And went on carefully watching.

  † † †

  And of course, there were people who didn’t know anything at all about what was going on there on the freeway.

  They weren’t there. And the news hadn’t gotten out yet.

  So even though they wound up being pretty important with everything that happened – the heroes, even, of that movie you probably saw about it – they were still going about their completely unrelated business, totally unaware . . .

  Like Colonel MacAvoy. Right at that moment when I was sitting and sweating in the panel truck, wondering what the hell was going to happen next, he was striding down a concrete tunnel below a municipal convention center somewhere just south of Los Angeles.

  The actor they got for the movie came pretty close to the way MacAvoy actually looked. Sixtyish, grizzled, squinty-eyed, but with ramrod-straight military bearing, in Army summer dress uniform, ribbons and medals splashed on his barrel chest. His publicist Myers, a smaller, excitable figure in suit and tie, trotted along beside him like an over-eager fox terrier.

  “Okay, this is important,” said Myers. “These people’ve been waiting a long time.”

  “Don’t worry.” MacAvoy didn’t even look over at him. “They’ll get the show they came for.”

  They headed up a flight of clanging metal stairs. At the top, Myers pushed open a door ahead of MacAvoy.

  “Just do your thing.” Myers gave a nervous smile. “Okay?”

  The two of them stood there in the opened doorway for a moment. MacAvoy’s expression stayed all flat and hard, completely unamused. A huge banner hung across the convention center space: GUN SHOW. The crowd milling about was every knee-jerk liberal’s nightmare of gun nuts. You see a lot of camo outfits at an event like that.

  Myers kept his voice low. “Into the breach, Colonel.”

  They pushed their way through the crowd toward a table stacked with books. A sign on it read: TODAY – COLONEL WELBOURN MACAVOY. A long line of people, most of them with books in their hands, stretched away from the table. MacAvoy’s face, looking even tougher and harder, was on the back covers. The people in line spotted MacAvoy and broke into applause as he made his way past them. His expression remained stony as the crowd pressed close around him.

  Myers finally got the colonel behind the book-signing table. The gun show’s head promoter, wearing a necktie with a pattern of little crossed cannons, grabbed MacAvoy’s hand and pumped it.

  “Great to meet you, Colonel MacAvoy!”

  MacAvoy nodded. “Likewise.”

  “Got a pretty good crowd.” The promoter pulled out a chair for MacAvoy. “The line’s already stretching out past the door.” He took MacAvoy’s elbow, as though assisting an old man. “We’ve got it all ready for you –”

  MacAvoy irritably shook the man off.

  “Don’t worry,” said Myers. “The colonel knows the drill. We’ve already done over a hundred of these personal appearance gigs.”

  The promoter nodded. “How’s the book doing?”

  “Eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.” Myers nodded sagely. “War sells.”

  MaAvoy sat down behind the table. “I’ll need a pitcher of water.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” The promoter signaled to one of his assistants. “Perrier or Evian?”

  MacAvoy gazed at the man as if he were a giant bug. “Plain tap water will be fine.” He leaned over and whispered to Myers. “There better be one hell of a bottle of scotch waiting for me back at the hotel.”

  The first of his fans stepped up to the table. A female gun nut – there are a lot of those – with a thick Indian braid and a T-shirt that read GUN CONTROL MEANS HITTING WHAT YOU AIM AT – laid her copy of the book in front of MacAvoy.

  “You sure gave ’em hell, Colonel!”

  MacAvoy pulled the already-opened book toward himself and signed it with the fountain pen he had just uncapped.

  “We tried to, ma’am.” He pushed the book back across the table. “That was our job.”

  The woman stepped aside, and the next fan took her place. Bearded, grossly obese, belly straining the limits of his fatigues.

  “I got a question for you, Colonel –” He spoke with urgent, breathy haste.

  When you set up your sniper teams in Karachi in 1988, did you order them to use reticles with pointed posts and horizontal wires, or cross wires with side posts?”

  MacAvoy stared at him. “What?”

  “Their gunsights, Colonel – horizontal wires or vertical? I gotta know!”

  “Look –” MacAvoy’s voice turned disgusted. “I just told ’em to ice the bad guys’ asses. Okay?” He angrily signed the book and shoved it back toward the gun nut. Behind MacAvoy, Myers rolled his eyes. It was going to be a long day.

  Neither one of them knew what was actually to come. And how soon.

  † † †

  The news might not have gotten out to everybody yet, about what was happening on the freeway – but the police were on top of it. They were already setting up a command post on the surface street down below us.

  Somebody else you probably saw in the movie, the police captain named Glover. He was the one in charge. In the middle of the street blocked off by patrol cars, he stood looking up at the freeway.

  “How bad is it?” He didn’t turn toward the SWAT guy standing next to him.

  “Could be worse.” The SWAT team leader spoke in that professionally unemotional manner those types have. “Couple of people banged up in the car that came over the side, plus we probably lost a few when the explosion went off. But other than that, no civilian fatalities –” A single nod. “Yet.”

  “Thanks. You’re making my day.”

  † † †

  Up on the freeway, by the jackknifed big rig, Feldman handed a cell phone to his boss Richter. “I’ve got the police on the line.”

  Richter took the phone from him. “Good afternoon,” he spoke coolly into it. “You the hostage negotiator, or somebody just holding the line open until he gets here?”

  Down below, Glover had his own phone to his ear. He looked up to the freeway, trying to catch sight of the person he was talking to.

  “The name’s Glover,” he said. “You can talk to me.”

  “Glad to hear it,” came Richter’s reply.

  “So who am I talking to?”

  “Right now,” said Richter, “that’s not important.”

  “Okay.” Glover kept his cool. “So why don’t you tell me what it is you want?”

  “Simple.” The other man’s voice was low and controlled. “I want MacAvoy.”

  That got a frown from Glover as he held the phone to his ear. “Who?”

  † † †

  Over at the gun show, the stack of books had dwindled in front of Colonel MacAvoy. The line still stretched in front of him. By now, he was on autopilot, signing one book after another, not even looking up.

  “I’m a big fan of yours –”

  MacAvoy nodded absently. He glanced up as he pushed another signed book back across the table. Then his eyes widened in surprise as he caught sight of the hard-angled face, complete with mirror-lensed sunglasses, looking at him.

  “Long time, Colonel.” Richter pulled a gun from his jacket and pointed it at MacAvoy.

  He fired. The bullet hit MacAvoy in the chest
and slammed him back in his chair.

  A couple yards away, the publicist Myers saw MacAvoy jerk. He stepped forward and put a hand on MacAvoy’s shoulder. “You okay?”

  Disoriented, MacAvoy touched his chest. No blood, no wound. And no dying echo of a gunshot.

  “Yeah . . .” He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  The fan standing in front of the table was just an ordinary young guy. With mirror-lensed sunglasses, all right – but obviously not Richter.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” said the kid. “You’re a real American hero, sir.”