He twisted the strap in his right hand and tried to tug his body upwards, but the limb just wasn’t up to it, and he succeeded only in spinning himself around 180degrees. He could see Maddy again now, and this time she had an unfocused eye open. She coughed and wiped some blood-matted hair from her face, then seemed to remember where she was and who he was.
‘Stephen,’ she mouthed hoarsely, then began crawling towards the edge. Time for her to return the compliment.
Steff felt the earliest stirrings of relief. It left a tiny space in his furiously cluttered mind for thoughts unrelated to gravity and the vast distance between his feet and the floor. The first was of her face, and the now shortened odds that he was on for at least a wee snog once they were through this. The next was that it would have to wait until he had found and thoroughly leathered whoever was responsible for the bomb.
Larry recoiled from the earpiece as a sound like a massively amplified static crackle pierced the right half of his skull. A couple of seconds later there was a bang from outside that passed through his internal organs like a shockwave.
He put out the emergency call himself, telling every ambulance and paramedic in the area to get down to the Pacific Vista stat, appending a warning to the news crews who would be monitoring the police bands that ‘if anyone sees one of your vans in front or in the way of an ambulance, you’ll be goin’ home in one’.
Bannon strode confidently into the centre of the station, silencing the hubbub, dispensing orders. Cops only panic when they’ve got time to panic, he’d once told Larry. Keep ’em busy and you’ll keep ’em calm.
‘Freeman,’ he said, ‘your job is to locate the girl and bring her in before the media get wise to what the real story is here. Zabriski, you get down there and organise the cordons. I want the streets blocked off to traffic between the Vista and St Mark’s to the north, SM Mercy to the East. I want clear corridors for those ambulances and I don’t care who gets pissed off in the process. Baker, I want you to liaise with the bomb squad, get them in there looking for whatever’s left of the device, I don’t care if the building’s still on fire . . .’
By that point Larry was walking swiftly out of the main doors.
Maddy took hold of the strap and helped Steff climb out on to the terrace, then they made their way to where the slope levelled out near the opposite corner. They sat down shakily, side by side on a sun lounger.
Steff said nothing, just stared into space. He could feel now how buggered up his system was. He didn’t know whether he was about to shit, puke, faint or spontaneously combust. The screaming below had given way to shouting and sirens, and it was all starting to sound further and further away. He could see the yawning gash in the roof, the jagged bite taken out of the building, the twisted and broken girders jutting accusingly at the sky.
The motion stilled, the dust blown away on the breeze, the roof was starting to look like it had always been that way, as though the pair of them might have climbed up here to see this radical piece of architectural sculpture. That was when he knew it was over; whatever it had been, it was over.
Steff looked at his watch but didn’t know why. He didn’t need to know the time; maybe he needed to know that time was still passing. That it was still the same day, that the world was still turning, that two blocks away there were people in an office who heard a distant bang, looked up from their computers for two seconds, then got back to work.
‘The pool cleaner? That woman?’ Maddy said croakily.
Steff shook his head.
‘Jesus.’
‘You all right?’ he enquired.
‘Yeah. Got a bit groggy for a while after I hit the side of the pool. I think I’m okay. I’m gonna have nightmares for the whole rest of my life, but other than that I’m cool.’
Maddy got up and walked to a low table nearby, next to which her bag still sat where she had left it. One of Steff’s cameras lay on the ground a few feet away. She retrieved that too and handed it to him as she sat back down. The object looked irrelevant in his hand for a few moments. Then he remembered what it was for – what he was for – and pointed it at the damage, but the film had run out. It had auto-repeated until the roll was finished. He rewound it and popped it into his pocket for safekeeping. It was either going to win him a mantelpiece full of awards or there’d be twenty-odd shots of a blurred floor-tile. Probably the latter.
Steff placed the camera on the floor at his feet as Maddy bent over and opened her bag. She pulled out a light summery dress, a blue one, laying it on the sunbed, then also produced a white T-shirt from inside the holdall.
She moved around to the other side of Steff, the T-shirt in her hand.
‘Let me take a look at this.’
She tore the sleeve away from Steff’s arm around the protruding piece of glass, wiping blood off gently.
‘Looks subcutaneous,’ she said. ‘Messy and sore, but no biggie. If it had hit anything major, you’d be spraying all over the carpet here.’
Steff looked at her quizzically.
‘First-aid training. Did it at college. Thanks for saving my life, by the way.’
‘Don’t mention it. I think you saved mine back. We’re quits.’
‘Hardly. We’re a long way off quits. You don’t get rid of me that easily. This is gonna hurt.’
‘What? Owww!’
She yanked out the shard of glass in one smooth motion and held it up for him to see. It was about a quarter of the size it felt, and like the iceberg principle in reverse, what showed on the surface was far greater than what had penetrated underneath.
Maddy ripped the white T-shirt into a long strip and wrapped it tightly around the wound, then placed Steff’s hand on the makeshift bandage.
‘Just hold it there. Keep pressure on it.’
She stood up and pulled off her sleeveless top, dropping it to the ground in a damp thud, then reached for the dress, which she slipped quickly over her head. She removed her wet shoes, shorts and underwear, pulling on a fresh pair of knickers under the frock. Next she pulled from the bag a pair of dressy blue shoes with a substantial heel.
‘Maybe not,’ she decided, and settled for the wet canvas ones again.
‘You think anyone knows we’re up here?’ she asked, sitting back down.
‘Maybe. But the rescue services’ll have their hands full downstairs.’
‘Well, there’s an emergency staircase runs down the outside of the canopy on this side, just there. You fit to walk?’
‘I’ll fuckin’ well walk oota this place.’
Larry Freeman had seen a lot of things he’d rather have passed on working for the LAPD. Images that as soon as they met your eyes you knew you’d be seeing them until your mind failed in some drooling-years, casket-fitting waiting room. Sights that too graphically illustrated the fragility of the human body when it met with misadventure or with man’s own tirelessly inventive cruelty. He had seen every kind of mutilation human technology could effect, every viciousness anger could blindly inspire, every death a man could die.
But he had never, ever seen so much blood.
Whether they were walking out or being carried out, everyone leaving that building was covered in it.
‘Bomb turned the place into a giant fucking blender, man,’ Arguello said when Larry found him on the steps, helping ferry the unconscious and the merely dazed into the hands of the still-arriving ambulances. Pedro’s once-white shirt was sticky with red, none of which, he was able to assure Larry, was his. ‘I was okay, bein’ up in the office suite, but Christ, the lobby . . .’
Pedro’s face screwed up and he shook his head. He looked close both to tears and to collapse. Larry pulled him away from the shattered doors and sat him down at the side of the steps. He held on to Larry’s arms like if he let go he’d be sucked back into the horror inside.
‘It was the glass, man,’ he said, as if trying to explain it to himself. ‘All that glass, like a million fucking razor blades flying through that place. Cut everyb
ody to ribbons. And the roof . . . Bits kept falling. We were trying to pull everybody clear. Anybody who could stand, anybody who could see, we were all dragging people clear, out to the sides. But there were folks trapped . . . all those stalls and shit just folded up and collapsed into each other with the blast. I was trying to get one guy free when I heard a noise from above, like a crack, and water started pouring in.’
Pedro started shaking his head. ‘It was the swimming-pool, man. It started to come apart, slowly at first, then it broke like a fucking piñata. I couldn’t get back to the guy, man. The water came down and pushed me away, flushed me like a fucking turd, and I couldn’t get back to him. Then this slab of glass . . . Oh man . . .’
Pedro finally broke down.
Larry put an arm round his shoulders. ‘Take it easy, Ped, you did your stuff. Nothin’ else you could do.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ he announced, wiping his eyes. ‘I’ll be okay. I better get back to work.’ He stood up, sniffing and taking a breath. ‘They still ain’t got everybody out of there.’
‘No,’ Larry said. ‘You ain’t goin’ back inside. Fire crews are here now, they’re trained for this shit. I need you cleaned up and thinkin’ straight – downtown. This ain’t over, remember. This was just the warning shot.’
‘Shit man, I forgot. The boat. Jesus.’
‘Don’t sweat it. I’d understand if it slipped your mind in the last half-hour. You know where Nunez is? She okay?’
‘Yeah, man, she’s with the paramedics. She was takin’ names from anyone who walked out, and tryin’ to ID the unconscious ones, so we got some idea who’s still missing.’
Larry looked across at the horseshoe drive, at the stroboscope of flashing lights, the white shapes of the ambulances, the green-clad crews, the red-streaked figures of the wounded. He saw Nunez talking to a guy from the Fire Department, gesticulating back towards the lobby, and made his way towards her. She spotted him coming and nodded towards the grass area at the side of the drive, off the path between the exit and the impromptu field-hospital that was taking shape.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Not a scratch,’ she said. ‘My lucky day, huh?’
‘Yeah, real lucky. You find—’
‘She was on the roof,’ Nunez said. Larry’s eyes widened with concern. ‘Don’t worry, she made it. The girl I sent up there to find her didn’t, though. She was nineteen.’
‘Christ. Where’s Witherson?’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t see her myself. I talked to that guy there, the paramedic with the clipboard – he had her name. She and the photographer guy climbed down the emergency ladder on the other side, so they must be okay, comparatively. They’re being treated on the spot. Go ask him to point them out. I gotta get back inside. Fire crew need the building plans.’
Steff sat on a kerbstone on the horseshoe drive while a nurse knelt on the grass verge beside him and put stitches in his arm.
Maddy was standing behind him holding a cup of water, wearing a blanket around her shoulders. There were ambulances everywhere, paramedics and nurses treating the walking wounded, presumably because the local ERs would be bursting at the seams with the more seriously injured. There were police cars behind the ambulances, providing a protective barrier against the next wave of vehicles, which was made up of TV vans. Maddy had been checked out by a triage nurse who declared her okay but nonetheless offered to arrange transport to a hospital for a closer look. She settled for a few sticking plasters and something to drink.
Steff noticed a paramedic pointing in their vicinity, and saw that the guy being directed was holding up some sort of ID. As he walked nearer, Steff recognised him as the big, bald, black guy who had been standing near him during St John’s speech the other day. That was all the confirmation he needed about who had done this.
‘Miss Witherson?’ the guy enquired, displaying the ID again. ‘I’m Larry Freeman, LAPD. Are you okay?’
‘I’ve had better mornings, but I’m still here.’
‘Miss Witherson, I’d like you to come with me right now. It’s extremely important.’
‘Where?’
‘Just somewhere, away from here. We need to talk.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Not here.’
‘Okay. Soon as the nurse is through with Stephen, we’re all yours.’
The cop looked down briefly at Steff, giving him a do-I-know-you? stare. Steff waved with his free hand. ‘Saw you across the road the other day,’ he clarified. ‘One of those mental God-squad wankers did this, didn’t they?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t comment, sir.’
‘That’s a yes. You’d have said you didn’t know otherwise.’
‘Excuse me,’ the cop said, ‘you are?’
‘Steff Kennedy. Photographer. Motherwell supporter. Bomb victim.’
‘He saved my life up there,’ Maddy added, perhaps to compensate for his attitude. She’d have her work cut out if she planned to keep it up.
The cop nodded. ‘Well, Mr Kennedy, as Miss Witherson has indicated her desire to have you accompany her, and providing you assent to that, I will be explaining to both of you just as much as I know myself once we are out of sight and earshot.’
‘Do you mind coming along?’ Maddy asked.
‘Not at all. I was brought up to consider it bad manners to refuse any woman who pulls you oot a wrecked swimmin’-pool a hundred feet above a major disaster area.’
Freeman led them to his unmarked police car, parked around the side of the building furthest from the devastation.
‘A car?’ asked Maddy. ‘Where are we going? I thought you just wanted to talk.’
‘Mr Kennedy, I’d like you to ride up-front beside me. Miss Witherson, I’d recommend you get into the back and keep your head down on the seat until I say otherwise. I apologise for the inconvenience, but it would be very much conducive to your safety.’
‘My safety?’ Maddy seethed. ‘What is this cloak-and-dagger bullshit? What the hell are you talking about? Are you telling me we walked out of that nightmare and I’m still in some kind of danger?’
Freeman opened the passenger-side rear door and sighed.
‘Miss Witherson, I appreciate what you’ve been through this morning, I really do, but believe me, the nightmare’s just warming up. And once I’ve filled you in on the bigger picture, you’ll understand why I had to say the following: get in the fucking car now and keep your goddamn head down.’
twelve
Larry felt a sickening sensation in his guts as he watched the two of them sit and stare at the printout. He’d always thought nothing could match the hollow feeling of that first time you informed someone their loved one was dead; something that never became easy, but was never again quite so wounding. He remembered that woman’s face still, the name of her murdered son, his street name, the address, the screen door, the beat-up Hyundai in the drive.
This came pretty close.
What made it worse was his guilt at opting to let them read the file instead of telling them straight out. But how the hell did you break something as weird and fucked-up as this? And to two people in the shape they were in?
Neither of them had said much since Larry got them into his car. They seemed dazed, slightly disconnected, like they were taking a time-out from whatever screwed-up game was being played here. The reality of what had happened today would be hitting them only in instalments. As the images and details returned to their consciousness they’d find it hard to believe these were things they were actually remembering rather than imagining; then they’d feel the truth of it, cold and hard as a mortuary slab.
The girl had done what she was told and lain down in the back, the guy sitting up-front and just staring, like one of those plastic dolls women put in the passenger seat when they’re driving downtown at night. She was wearing a light cotton sundress and her hair was wet. Looked like she’d just stepped out of the bath on a hot summer’s day – until you saw what was in he
r eyes.
Larry hadn’t paid a shitload of attention to the stories about her in the papers or on TV, having little interest in either Senator Witherson or pornography. He didn’t know what he thought a porno actress was supposed to look like, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t it. Mind you, nobody looks much like themselves when they’ve been scared out of their minds.
The guy had this pissed-off look on his face, but not an especially pissed-off look. It was like this was merely the latest in a long line of inconveniences.
‘Whaaat a friend we have in Jeee-suuus,’ he’d sung, glancing out of the rolled-down window.
‘You okay there, man?’ Larry asked him, worried the guy might be in shock.
‘Ay,’ he said. ‘Sorry, that’s “yes” to you.’
‘I know what “ay” means, Mr Kennedy.’
‘Oh right. I’m fine. I just couldn’t help singing after my spiritual experience this morning. Tell me, Sergeant, have you found God yet?’
Larry looked around at him warily. ‘Yeah, but he had an alibi,’ he said.
‘Well, if I was you I’d take him doon the cells for a good kicking anyway.’
The guy’s jeans were damp and his T-shirt wet and bloody. When they reached the precinct-house Larry got him an LAPD sweatshirt and some running pants from his own locker, figuring they’d be the only spare clothes that would fit him. He escorted them swiftly through the station’s mêlée to a free interview room, where he had Torres fix them some coffee while he fetched the clothes and had a brief word with Bannon. Bannon told him, as expected, that the town was now swarming with FBI agents. Less expected, there was one in Bannon’s office who had asked specifically for Larry Freeman.
Larry told Bannon he’d talk to no one until the girl had been brought up to speed, and headed back to the interview room where he locked the door and handed them the printout.
Not the End of the World Page 24
