Blonde Bomb Tech

by Lara Santiago

  Over his shoulder Sabrina saw Jake’s mom watch them. The look on her face was one of contentment. Not upset. Not ‘get your hands off my baby,’ but a sincere look of satisfaction, the kind given only when someone is doing something you approve of.

  Approval felt good. Sabrina wanted to bottle the feeling and bring it out whenever evil, lonely thoughts invaded her mind. The secret was on the tip of her tongue. Jake’s ear was so close. She should tell him. No, not yet.

  Sabrina faltered as the two halves of herself fought for control. The conflict could insidiously let her secret creep in and push her into a terrible slide down into the deep dark place she’d crawled out of five years ago.

  Buzz. What?

  Buzz. Saved from despair by her pager. Sabrina grabbed it and looked at the read-out.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. She stood up and reached for her cell phone, dialing as she raised it to her ear.

  “What is it, babe?” Jake asked with concern.

  “It’s me. Where is it?” Sabrina asked Hennessey. He gave her an address. “Got it, I’m on my way.”

  Ring. Brian looked down at his cell phone. He also stood up as he answered, “Donovan. Yeah, on my way,” he said, as he watched Sabrina hang up her phone.

  “Need a lift, Sabrina?” Brian asked as he stepped away from the table.

  Jake stood up as she answered, “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”

  “What is it?” Jake asked again as Sabrina kissed his mouth quickly.

  “There’s another bomb,” she whispered. “It’s in an apartment building downtown. I’ve got to go.”

  “Be careful, babe.”

  She nodded and kissed him again one last time before she followed Brian to his vehicle.

  “Why does the address sound so familiar?” Sabrina asked him five minutes later as he swerved and dodged traffic. Brian had a nifty siren and flashing light attachment, so they were making great time.

  “It’s the address Suzanne Forester visited to get her mother’s diary,” he said tonelessly.

  Chapter Eight

  Brian’s expression looked as if it had been carved from stone. Sabrina didn’t talk the rest of the trip to the third and latest bomb threat site. She remained silent and thought of the implication to the other two bomb threats…and the tie-in to her parents’ deaths.

  There had to be a connection.

  There was already a circus in progress once they got to the address of the apartment building. Sabrina stepped out of Brian’s SUV and looked towards the bomb truck, which had just pulled up.

  Before closing the door she paused. “Thanks for the ride, Brian.”

  “No problem,” he said, exiting the vehicle. “I’ll find you later and see if you need a ride home.” She nodded over her shoulder and headed towards the bomb squad truck. It was parked next to the established perimeter a hundred feet or so from the old apartment building.

  People streamed out of the front of the apartment building in various states of undress, horrified expressions on their faces. She saw several firefighters and police officers directing people and holding back the lookie-loos, who’d collected to watch the main event.

  Sabrina couldn’t help but glance around to see if Suzanne Forrester was there. She had, for whatever reason, been present at the other two most recent bombings. While they had unofficially deemed Suzanne’s presence a coincidence at the first two sites during the earlier review of the files, Sabrina looked around expecting to find her. Suzanne wasn’t a suspect, but she was certainly involved somehow. Sabrina decided that she didn’t believe in coincidences. But she couldn’t spot Suzanne or anyone else who looked suspicious. Everyone looked appalled, as if waiting for the worst possible outcome. So did Sabrina.

  “Hey, what’s the story?” she asked Hennessey as she snapped back to the situation and stepped up next to the bomb squad truck.

  “You got here fast,” he remarked with surprise. “You even beat Murphy here. Is Hell freezing over right now?”

  She heaved a long-suffering sigh before they heard someone approach. “I’m here,” Murphy said, running up. “What’s going on?”

  “Okay, the bomb is in a second-story apartment. The resident came home and saw a guy exiting his apartment. Thinking the guy was a thief, he chased, but lost him. When he opened the door the device armed and started a timer set to go off at midnight. Which is in an hour and twenty-seven minutes.” Hennessey checked his watch. “Guy freaked out and called 9-1-1 from the landlord’s apartment directly below. They’ve been trying to get everyone out. If he hadn’t come home early, we’d be looking at a twenty-seven minute defuse time and a nasty evacuation to go along with it.”

  “Anyone seen the bomb up close?” Sabrina asked.

  “Nobody that knows what they’re talking about. That’s why I invited you two along to the party.”

  Sabrina and Murphy gathered their gear from the truck and headed toward the door to the lobby of the apartment building. As they approached, Ted Echols and another firefighter exited. He paused in his hurry to leave the building and smirked at her.

  “You look good, Sabrina,” he remarked when she came abreast of him.

  “Yeah, for a ball-breaker with a nice ass, huh, Ted?” she couldn’t help but say with a smirk of her own in place.

  “My, my. Are we a little uptight tonight? What’s the matter, your new boyfriend’s not giving you what you need in the sack? I told you, you should have picked me. I’m sure I could satisfy you.” Ted laughed a nasty little laugh, glancing at his partner who looked uncomfortable with the current conversation. This was exactly why she didn’t date firemen.

  God, she hated the grapevine in her job.

  Sabrina forced a laugh and shook her head. “If you’d stop running your mouth around me, Ted, I’d be more than satisfied.”

  “Come on, Sabrina, it’s not like we haven’t heard rumors from the other women he’s been with. You sure he’s big enough for you?”

  Sabrina paused at the “other women” remark, but ignored it. Ted was just being a jerk. To vent, or not to vent, that was the question. She looked at Ted’s smug, over-confident face.

  Vent, definitely.

  Sabrina wiped the mirth from her face and stepped up close. “Well, in fact, I am used to being around bigger pricks, Ted,” she paused for effect staring directly into his eyes. “But trust me when I tell you Jake’s stallion-like ten inch cock fills me near to bursting, satisfying me at an orgasmic level I’ve never experienced before. So you don’t have to worry about me or my satisfaction anymore, okay?” She turned abruptly and entered the apartment building’s front doorway, leaving Ted gaping at her and stuttering.

  Sabrina suddenly remembered a certain phone call to her apartment the first morning she’d spent with Jake. She turned back to Ted suddenly.

  “And don’t ever call my house again!”

  His eyes, which had shown an almost awe-filled surprise at her declaration of Jake’s equipment, now narrowed as if he didn’t understand English any longer. He muttered, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Whatever.” Sabrina turned away again, dismissing him immediately, and marched to the stairs leading to the second floor. She glanced over her shoulder once to make sure Murphy came along with her. He did, but not before she heard him say one final cutting remark to Ted.

  “Why don’t you go make sure everyone is out of the building, Ted? You know…your job?” Murphy brushed past him and into the apartment building behind Sabrina. She heard Ted and his partner shuffle away. She found the apartment quickly and put her focus on the bomb.

  “You are a ball-breaker, Sabrina,” Murphy laughed, after they were alone.

  “Yeah, well, he started it,” she murmured, and focused on the job at hand.

  Sabrina turned on her flashlight and aimed it around the room before settling the light on the bomb device to study it. The room was dark, so she left it that way. The only light spilled in from the hallway.

  The b
omb housing set up in the center of the room was a fifty-five gallon drum with circles painted all over it. Orange on black. When she got closer Sabrina realized someone had painstakingly painted little pumpkins all over it. Creepy.

  The little pumpkin knows why this has to happen, the typed letter from the rubble of second explosion slid into her mind.

  “Looks like a directional bomb. Set to go straight up, but we don’t know the load capacity. It may only have enough power to go to the next apartment. Or it may have enough to blow the building a new skylight eight stories high,” Murphy observed, squatting next to the front of the bomb.

  “What does it look like on the back?” Sabrina asked, as Murphy peeked around to look behind the device, shining his flashlight to see.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God!”

  “I hate it when you say that. Scares the crap out me.”

  “Well, take a look for yourself.”

  Sabrina bent at the waist and looked in the direction of Murphy’s flashlight beam. “Ditto on the scary talk. Jeez, this is going to take forever.”

  “No, unfortunately, it’s only going to take another hour and nineteen minutes to discover the pay load.”

  The load was hidden behind what seemed like, at first glance, about a million wires all interconnected. There were no less than twenty small power supplies jumbled along the side. It looked like a big ugly plate of wire spaghetti.

  “We could unscramble this as fast as possible and not make it,” he sighed.

  “So what are you thinking? What’s our choice B?”

  “This device will fit in the bomb containment truck. Why don’t we check for trip wires and take the whole thing downstairs?”

  Sabrina directed her flashlight down at the base of the drum. “That’s why.” The barrel was sitting in a resinous looking puddle of dried sticky substance. Murphy touched his Phillips screwdriver against it. He tapped the surface. Hard as a rock. The drum was glued down securely to the hardwood floors of the apartment.

  “Can we cut through the floor around it?”

  “Not unless we know for sure there aren’t any trip wires tucked underneath,” she said expressively.

  “Shit,” Murphy looked anxiously around the room flashing his light in a zigzag pattern. “No way we can get through all those wires and power supplies. This bomb is going off.”

  “Come on, Murphy, we’re wasting time. Let’s start with the wires at the bottom and see if we can get thorough them all. You know, make an effort, at least.”

  “All right.” He squatted and opened his bag. “But I’m going on the record that this is hopeless.”

  “Noted,” she said, but she sincerely hoped he was wrong. Sabrina wasn’t ready for another failure. They were stacking up. Painstakingly, they separated the jackets of the wires to reveal the copper, clipping and unclipping them to test for power. Only one of these wires was the important one, but which one was it? After over forty-five minutes of splicing and separating the outer coating from what seemed like a thousand wires, Sabrina was about to run out of clips. She straightened to relieve the new twinge of pain in her lower back and looked past the edge of the taped perimeter outside the window. Two more fire trucks had pulled up since they’d been working. She thought of Jake and his great big wonderful family. The one she desperately wanted to participate in. Now was not the time for that.

  Sabrina closed her eyes for a moment to clear her head. She opened them when she heard a tapping noise from above. Murphy stood out in the hall talking to someone about the lights in the apartment or rather the lack thereof. They didn’t seem to notice any noises as they continued talking.

  Had she imagined it? She listened again for the noise and heard nothing. Taking a deep breath she continued working, noting that she only had thirty-five minutes left on the digital timer. It ticked away in red glaring numbers. She didn’t need any other distractions.

  The wires were a rat’s nest of dead ends and re-routes and loops which were giving her a headache. Maybe this one was one that was meant to go off no matter how hard she worked. Maybe she lacked her usual confidence lately from all the recent explosions.

  Murphy entered and said, “No lights. The fuse is blown. There’s some technical reason I won’t go into about why they can’t turn them back on.”

  The tapping noise erupted again and this time Murphy looked up, too. Glad she wasn’t dreaming, it she motioned for the officer in the hallway. “Go ask Captain Hennessey or Chief Cochran if the building has been completely cleared of all residents. We just heard a tapping noise in the apartment directly above us. There’s thirty-two minutes and counting on the timer. See if someone can check it out? Might be a trapped pet.”

  “Roger that,” he replied, and disappeared out into the hallway. Several minutes later she heard the thumping of a fireman’s boots in the stairwell and tracked the progress to the apartment above. They heard a crash. The front door, probably. More thumping. Another crash. An axe splintering some wood. Shuffling. Quiet.

  A familiar feeling went up Sabrina’s spine. Was Jake upstairs?

  The officer returned with news.

  “Jesus, you were right, two kids are tied up in the apartment upstairs. The firefighters upstairs want to know how much time is left. The kids are really constrained.” Jake was upstairs. She just knew it. Sabrina’s heart started beating a staccato.

  “Thirty minutes and counting. They need to hurry, untie them and get out,” Sabrina spoke urgently to the officer as she clipped another dead-end route to the detonator’s power supply. Damn it.

  Had she really been expecting the noise to be coming from Tippy the Wonder Dog tapping out a Morse code, yearning to be set free? Maybe, but only her glass-is-half-full self, now shrinking away in timid defeat.

  The reality was instead a horrific surprise starring two trapped children above the bomb she wasn’t going to be able to defuse in time.

  For the next several taut silent minutes she and Murphy worked feverishly clipping and re-routing at an incredible rate. They heard thumping and scraping noises from above. What were they doing up there? They needed to get out.

  “Sabrina, I think we need to call it. We’ll cover it with bomb blankets, and hope for the best,” Murphy said.

  “That won’t help anyone upstairs when it blows.”

  “That’s all we got left. No way we’re making it through the rest of this wiring in seven plus minutes.” Sabrina wiped a bead of sweat off of her forehead with the back of her as she released a huge sigh of disgust.

  Murphy nodded to the officer in the hall. “Tell them we need a wrap kit sent up, and you better get the people upstairs out of here now. Seven minutes and it’s going to blow,” Murphy told him.

  Murphy stacked several heavy bomb blankets over the device to help contain the shrapnel that would burst forth. It would only help if the load were a small one.

  A bead of perspiration ran down Sabrina’s face. She heard more thumping and strange noises from upstairs. She wanted to yell at the top of her lungs, “firemen upstairs, why aren’t you gone yet? This is your two-minute warning. Get out, now!” but knew she wouldn’t be heard.

  Seconds later, Sabrina relaxed marginally as she heard a yelp of success followed by big boots trampling down the stairs. Thank God, they were safe. Jake, if he’d been upstairs, was now safe.

  Sabrina and Murphy ran down the stairs, a little over a minute behind him, and hit the perimeter with forty-five seconds to spare.

  Sabrina scanned the immediate area for Jake, but didn’t see him. More importantly, she didn’t feel his presence. She saw Jake’s partner, Matt, holding a small frightened child near an ambulance. The squint of his eyes showed the strain on his face as he gazed back at the building.

  Sabrina noticed Chief Cochran a pace away from her, talking tersely under his breath to himself. Her heart fell to her feet as she heard him say, “Jake get out now, you’re at thirty seconds.”

  Oh God, no! Jake was still in the building. Sabr
ina moved towards the perimeter. Murphy, as if sensing her intent, grabbed her and pulled her back. She broke his hold and launched forward. Murphy grabbed her again by the arm and hauled back, but she fought him off.

  Seconds later another set of arms pulled her back, too. Sabrina looked up into the concerned eyes of Jake’s partner Matt. His mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear anything he said. The pounding in her ears from her heart trying to escape her chest was too loud. Jake was going to die. It was her fault. She wanted to die, too.

  It took both Murphy and Matt to keep her inside the perimeter. Sabrina heard screaming and realized it was her own voice she heard calling for Jake. She sounded hysterical. She had Matt in a headlock for a minute, but released him in utter despair. She looked at her watch as he held her stiff body.

  Eleven seconds left.

  Ten. Nine. Eight. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch and sagged against Matt.

  Seven. Six. Everything around her moved in slow motion. Hot tears stung her cheeks.

  Five. Four. Three. “Please Jake, you have to get out,” Sabrina whispered in an anguished tone.

  Two. One. Nothing.

  What? Sabrina looked back at the building.

  Nothing. Something had delayed the blast or the timer was off. Either way it was a miracle.

  Suddenly Jake appeared like magic at the door carrying another child. He cleared the frame of the front door and ran like the very flames of hell were chasing him. He was magnificent in motion.

  It was also the last thought Sabrina registered before… Boom.

  Matt turned and pushed her and Murphy against a nearby fire truck stepping in front of them as a shield. The blast went straight up and nearly incinerated the apartment above where they’d been fighting to release the children.

  A fire soon broke out in the apartment where Sabrina had spent an hour in a futile effort to defuse the bomb. Several windows blew out, but the damage was minimal compared to the previous two blasts. The steps they’d taken to reduce the effects of the blast had worked to some degree, but no one would have survived in the apartment above the bomb.