VELOCITY

by Jude Hardin

  “Are you saying I was set up?”

  “I don’t see any other way it could have gone down like it did. It had to have been planned from the get-go.”

  I was about to ask him who could have played me like that when it hit me like a ton of crab nachos.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I drove back to the motel and loaded my things into the rental car. I walked into the room for one last look around when my cell phone rang. I picked up.

  “Hello.”

  “Is this Mr. Lamb?”

  I recognized the voice. It was Sharon, the ICU nurse. I’d told her that I was Virgil Lamb’s son.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is Nicholas Lamb.”

  “I’m breaking all kinds of rules here, and I’ll get fired if anyone finds out, but your dad regained consciousness a while ago and I thought you might like to talk to him. His heart rate is in the forties and he’s not breathing well, so this might be the last chance you’ll have.”

  “Can you put him on now?”

  “I will, but let me tell you, he’s a bit confused. He keeps saying crazy things about how the world’s going to end today. Sometimes it helps to talk to a family member.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Okay, here he is.”

  The next voice I heard was a gravelly whisper. Even with the volume on the phone turned all the way up, I had to make a concerted effort to understand what he was saying.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “And I’m not confused.”

  “Who am I?”

  “Nicholas Colt. You’re a private investigator.”

  “That’s right. How do you know that?”

  “I was a prisoner at Brother John’s complex, same as you. He forced me to tell him things.”

  “What kind of things?” I said.

  “Things about my past, and things that might happen in the future.”

  “You were a psychic in a traveling carnival. I know about that. But you don’t expect me to believe—”

  “Believe whatever you want to believe. I predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I predicted the Martin Luther King assassination and both Kennedy assassinations. I predicted the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on nine-eleven. Just to name a few. None of those things had to happen. They could have been prevented if anyone had taken me seriously. The things I see are parts of one possible future, but the future can be changed. It happens every day.”

  “So you’re saying that the world is going to end today?”

  “The beginning of the end might happen today, but there’s still time to stop it. There’s still time if you’ll only listen to me.”

  “How do you know all these things?” I said.

  “I just know. That’s all.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it, but I decided to humor him.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s just say all that’s true. Why did Brother John come to your house and murder your wife and daughter-in-law? Why did he kidnap you and take you to his compound?”

  I paused. I wondered why Virgil didn’t predict those things. I wondered why he didn’t predict them and then try to prevent them. That’s where the whole psychic thing falls apart for me.

  “And whatever happened to your grandson Joe?” I said.

  “Brother John used my wife and daughter-in-law to lure you in. That’s what that was all about. It was a trick. He knew about the tilted cross cut into Leitha Ryan’s forehead, and he knew you were emotionally involved in that case. He knew duplicating that would draw you to Tennessee. He kidnapped me and Joe and brought us to his compound for one reason: he wanted me to tell him things to come. My grandson was only important in that he was important to me. Brother John made me watch Joe being tortured with electrical current. That’s how he got me to tell him things. Joe was suffering so much, I begged Brother John to kill him. I promised to give him the ultimate prediction in return.”

  “What do you consider the ultimate prediction?”

  “The day Jesus Christ will return to Earth. That’s the one he wanted all along.”

  I dredged up a faint memory from Sunday school when I was a kid, before my mother’s ’65 Falcon slammed into an oak tree and nobody took me to church anymore.

  “Doesn’t the Bible say that nobody knows when Christ will return?” I said.

  “Yes. But like I said, I just know things sometimes. I don’t know how it happens.”

  “So you gave him a date?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a long way off, and we’ll be dead and gone by the time it happens. But, I also gave him the date of an event that will set the wheels in motion. That’s the date we can do something about.”

  “And what date is that?”

  “Today.”

  “And what’s the event?” I said.

  “There’s going to be a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles.”

  His voice had gotten even weaker, and I could barely understand him.

  “Did you say a nuclear explosion?” I said. “In Los Angeles?”

  “Yes. You know those Marshall speaker cabinets you took to L.A.?”

  “Yeah. As far as I know, they’re still on the eighth floor of the building where we were recording. What about them?”

  “In each of those speaker cabinets there’s a small nuclear device commonly referred to as a suitcase bomb. Each bomb has a digital timer set for noon today. Eastern Standard Time. At that time, several square blocks of downtown Los Angeles will be vaporized.”

  “That’s insane,” I said. “Why would Brother John want to kill all those people?”

  “Because I told him it was going to happen. In his mind, the prophesy must be fulfilled.”

  I tried to wrap my head around the sheer absurdity of it all.

  “Why Los Angeles?” I said.

  “It’s a densely populated area, for one. More bang for the buck. But it’s more than that. Brother John’s goal isn’t simply to kill a hundred thousand or so people. The prophesy calls for something much more catastrophic.”

  I thought about it for a few seconds. The San Andreas Fault. That had to be it.

  “He’s hoping to cause an earthquake?” I said.

  “Not just any earthquake. The earthquake. This one is going to send half of California reeling into the Pacific. And he’s not just hoping to cause it. He showed me the graphs. By his calculations, the precise placement of the device combined with the strength of the blast will make a seismic event of epic proportions a mathematical certainty. There will be an earthquake, and it will kill millions of people.”

  “So that was the deal with me going in to record with that band? To get the bombs in?”

  “Yes. And that’s where the precise placement comes in. That building in downtown L.A. is in the optimal location to trigger the quake.”

  I was still puzzled as to why Brother John had concocted such an elaborate scheme.

  “Why not just park the van by the building and leave it there?” I said. “I don’t see why he went through all that rigmarole.”

  “He needed time to get far away from California before the blast. If he’d parked the van and abandoned it, all kinds of things could have gone wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “People get nervous when they see an abandoned vehicle. They call the cops. The cops bring bomb-sniffing dogs, and then the bomb squad comes. On the other hand, nobody’s going to suspect a world-class guitarist to be carrying a nuclear explosive in his speaker cabinets.”

  “So what’s the point in killing all those people?” I said. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Brother John had an envelope he planned to send to the Director of Homeland Security. The nuclear devices in the Marshall speaker cabinets were originally built by the Soviet Union during the cold war. More recently, they were acquired by a country in the Middle East that, how should I put it, has historically had a rather strained relationship with the United States. In the envelope is a metal plate with a ser
ial number on it, along with a note spelling everything out. The metal plate can easily be traced. Once our government discovers who was responsible for blowing California off the map, they will naturally retaliate. Do you think they’re going to combat a nuclear strike with conventional weapons? Highly unlikely. It’s going to be no holds barred this time. Despite protests from the rest of the world, the United States will be forced to launch a full-scale nuclear attack against—”

  “You’re talking about World War Three,” I said. “If the United States starts firing nukes, then a bunch of other countries are going to get involved.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “Today’s mushroom cloud in L.A. is merely the catalyst, the first in a series of events that will lead to the end of the world as we know it.”

  It all made perfect sense. Brother John was going to facilitate the return of Jesus Christ by starting World War Three. In his mind, he was going to be a hero.

  “And you’re sure all this is going to happen?” I said.

  “No. Like I said, it’s one possible future. It can be changed. The people here won’t listen to me. The guards, doctors, nurses, none of them. They think I’m a crazy old man, out of my mind. I’m a prisoner and they won’t let me make phone calls. Otherwise, I would call in a bomb threat so the right people could get out there and defuse those things. It’s up to you, Nicholas Colt. You need to make that call.”

  I wondered why Virgil was a prisoner, and then I remembered the police were still sorting through the people found at Brother John’s complex and determining which ones were there by choice and which ones had been abducted and brainwashed. Virgil obviously hadn’t been cleared yet.

  And something else clicked. Now I knew why Brother John didn’t put up a fight when I punched him in the restroom at the studio building. He wanted to be taken into custody as quickly as possible, and extradited to Tennessee as quickly as possible. He didn’t want to stay in L.A. and be vaporized by his own bombs.

  I looked at the time on my cell phone. It was 9:37.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll make the call. There’s an LAPD detective I’ve been dealing with. I’ll call him directly and tell him everything you said. If you’re lying—”

  I heard a loud clank followed by what sounded like rubber-soled shoes squeaking on a tile floor. Someone said he’s not breathing, and then another voice shouted call the code. The phone went dead, and I had a strong feeling Virgil Lamb did too.

  I pulled Greg Sloan’s business card out of my pocket and started punching in the number. I was about to hit the last digit when a freight train named Chelton plowed into me and knocked me on the floor.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Chelton straddled me and pinned my wrists to the floor. He had hit me from behind and the impact had jarred the cell phone from my hand. It was only three feet away, but it might as well have been three miles.

  Lester was walking around the room looking in drawers, but I’d already loaded everything into the car. All that was left was a Gideon’s Bible and a phone directory.

  “I don’t care what you do to me,” I said. “But I need to make a phone call, and I need to make it now.”

  “The only thing you need to do is shut up,” Lester said.

  “You don’t understand. If I don’t make that call, it might literally be the end of the world.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, right. It’s fixin to be the end of the world for you, anyway.”

  When Virgil Lamb told me there was going to be a nuclear explosion at twelve noon in the city of Los Angeles, the first thing I thought about was my wife and daughter. Juliet had told me their plane was landing at eleven, and that they would be stuck at LAX for over an hour. If the bomb went off at twelve noon, Juliet and Brittney would be among those killed in the blast.

  Lester sat at the desk and lit a joint. His lip was badly scarred from when I’d yanked the ring out of it. The upper lip and bottom lip didn’t make a tight seal anymore, and he occasionally had to wipe the slobber from his chin. I had a feeling he probably had trouble getting dates now.

  “Gimme a hit on that,” Chelton said.

  Lester held the joint to Chelton’s mouth and he sucked on it and inhaled deeply and held the smoke in his lungs until his face turned blue. He finally coughed it out, inadvertently spraying me in the face with his vile spittle.

  “This is a non-smoking room,” I said. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

  “Oh well,” Lester said, flicking ashes on the new carpet. “Rules were made to be broken. And so were fingers.”

  He got up and stomped my left hand with the heel of his work boot. There was a sickening series of cracks, and the pain shot through me like a lightning bolt. My hand started throbbing immediately. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the heat and the swelling. I shouted and said some bad words. Tears trickled from the corners of my eyes, and at that moment I knew I would never be able to play the guitar again.

  “You’re going to die,” I said.

  He took a hit on the joint. “You know, I can’t drink from a straw anymore. My lips just don’t fit together right. You took that simple pleasure from me, and now I’m going to take some things from you. One by one, slowly but surely, I’m going to take them. What goes around comes around. Ever heard that?”

  I didn’t say anything. I strained and bucked but Chelton was too heavy to budge.

  The digital clock on the nightstand said 9:48. I was thinking there was still plenty of time if I could only make that call, and then I remembered that this part of Tennessee was on central time, so it was really an hour later. It was really 10:48, which meant there was only a little over an hour until doomsday. Even if I had been able to call detective Greg Sloan that second, I doubted the bomb squad would make it to the studio in time to defuse the explosives.

  Lester reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife, similar to the one I’d taken from him during our scuffle by the dumpster. He opened the blade and it locked in place with a click.

  “Hold him tight, Chelton.”

  “My arms are getting tired,” Chelton said.

  “Shut up, fat boy. Don’t be such a wimp.”

  Lester got on his knees at my feet and pulled my shoes and socks off. I tried to kick him in the face, but it was no use. He held my feet and sliced my soles lengthwise with the blade. I felt the pain of the cuts and the warmth of the blood and I turned my head to the side and tried to vomit but nothing came out.

  Lester sat back down and lit another joint. 11:01. I wondered what he was going to do to me next. I knew he was going to kill me, so I wished he would just get it over with. I thought about my first wife Susan and our daughter Harmony, and I thought about Juliet and Brittney and how dear they were to me. Did I tell them enough? Did I show them? I couldn’t bear the thought of life without them. If they were going to be vaporized along with hundreds of thousands of other people in L.A., then it was just as well that I died today too. And what kind of world would be left after a nuclear war anyway? Some sort of unfathomable post-apocalyptic wasteland, I thought. The people unlucky enough to survive would be sick from radiation poisoning, and everyone would eventually starve to death because all the animals and crops would be poisoned as well. It wasn’t a world I wanted to be part of.

  “Kill me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Take that blade and slide it across my throat and get it over with.”

  “Well that wouldn’t be much fun, now would it?”

  Chelton was huffing and puffing. “Seriously, I’m getting tired,” he said. “Can we go now?”

  “Oh, we ain’t done yet,” Lester said. “The party’s just getting started.”

  “You ain’t really gonna kill him, are you?”

  “Why of course I am. What do you think we came here for, dumbass?”

  “You calling me stupid?”

  “Let’s face it, Chelton. You ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”

  Chelton got up and took a step toward
Lester and swung at him. Lester ducked and buried the knife blade in Chelton’s fat belly. He pulled it out and stabbed him again and again and again. Chelton coughed and I could hear the gurgle in his throat and he coughed again and blood flew out and splattered on the Van Gogh print. The big man took one lumbering step toward the door and then fell forward like a tree.

  Lester started toward me with the knife, but I had already reached into my pocket and pulled the .25 caliber pistol I’d bought from the drug dealer at the bus station. I aimed at his chest and squeezed the trigger and I kept squeezing it until all the bullets were gone.

  My left hand was useless and I couldn’t walk because of the cuts on my feet. I scooted to the wall where my phone had landed and I picked it up with my good hand and pressed the final digit to call Greg Sloan with my thumb. It was 11:21.

  “This is Sloan.”

  “Greg, there’s a bomb on the eighth floor of the studio building where I was recording. Actually it’s two bombs. They’re in the big Marshall speaker cabinets and they’re set to go off at noon eastern.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Nicholas Colt. You have to hurry. There’s not much time left.”

  “Colt. Are you sure about the bombs?”

  “Yes. There’s no time to explain. You got to move, man.”

  “I’ll put in an evacuation order right away,” he said. “We’ll get everyone out of the building and block all the incoming traffic.”

  “You don’t understand. These are nukes. Suitcase bombs. It’s not going to do any good to evacuate everyone. It’s a waste of time. You need to get someone in there to defuse those things.”

  “All right, Colt. I’m on it.”

  We disconnected. I called 911 and the dispatcher said someone had already called about the gunshots at the motel and that help was on the way.

  The room looked like a horror show. There was blood everywhere. I scooted to the bed and managed to climb onto it, and then I pulled the pillowcases off the pillows and tied pressure bandages on my feet to stop the bleeding. I tightened the knots using my right hand and my teeth. It was a struggle, but I finally got it done. I was dizzy and thought I might be bleeding to death.