by Jeff Dixon
Juliette brushed her hair gently back behind her ear. “Hawk, I really think you intrigued a lot of people tonight. You promised a perfectly blended balance between experiences for thrill seekers and themed family attractions to take people on the adventure of a lifetime. The new resort area will create jobs and be a huge benefit for the Central Florida economy. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate a milestone anniversary for Walt Disney World than a new theme park.”
“Promising a perfect theme park is one thing; making it happen is another.” Hawk smiled slightly as the car cornered wide, beginning the journey toward Interstate 4 down Hughey Avenue.
“Granted, you have put before the company quite a task.” Rales’s eyes sparkled. “But Walt Disney’s Adventure will feature a city built under the sea, a city built up in the sky, a city built underground, and a city built inside an active volcano…I’d like to help build it myself!”
“You can.” Hawk turned back toward the old Imagineer. “I’ve been thinking it was time for you to come out of retirement. You’re never really going to be able to step away from what Walt put you in place to do.”
“No, I’m far too old and way too tired. Someone recently said, when you combine sweat, determination, inspiration, and hard work…magic can happen.” Rales grinned. “That’s why you are in charge…I did my job when I selected you.” The car approached the Amway Center. The arena that hosted concerts and sporting events had been built in hopes of revitalizing the Downtown Orlando area. In some ways, that had happened.
Just past the arena, the motorcycle escorts were going to pull aside, and the car would accelerate onto the interstate and head back to Walt Disney World. Hawk’s driver slowed and stopped at the traffic signal on the corner of Hughey Avenue and Church Street. One of the escorts waved over his shoulder, indicating they would be leaving the car to make the rest of the journey on its own. Hawk watched the officers pull toward the side of the road as the light turned green and the car began to pick up speed, heading toward the entrance ramp.
An explosion of glass filled the back of the limousine with tiny, glistening shards. A muffled thud came from the seat where Juliette and Farren were riding. Another explosion flung pieces of glass into the seating area as the car continued to pick up speed and merged into traffic on the interstate. Hawk had reflexively turned away from the window as the glass blew into the automobile. Trying to comprehend what had just happened, he looked across to where his friends were seated and found himself staring into a nightmare.
CHAPTER THREE
Seven Days Ago
Evening
Hawk dropped to one knee and moved in front of Juliette, who was helping Farren lie down on the seat. Glass and red specks of blood were splattered across the seat and floor.
“Help me,” Juliette sobbed as she lowered Farren.
Hawk cradled Farren’s head and eased it back. Once Hawk had taken control of Farren, Juliette stepped behind and past Hawk, banging her hand against the glass that separated them from the driver. The driver was looking back over his shoulder at the commotion behind him and struggling to keep the car steady on the road. The automatic window between the compartments lowered as Juliette snapped out instructions.
“Get us to a hospital!”
Hawk quickly looked over Farren as he tried to hold him securely on the seat. A rapidly expanding blot of blood covering his friend’s shirt. Gripping the shirt and pulling it open, Hawk gazed in horror at a hole on the left side of his chest, the source of the blood. Staring at the face of his friend, Hawk spoke calmly.
“Are you with me, Farren?”
Juliette eased back next to him with Hawk’s tie bundled up into a mound of fabric. Placing it over the wound in the Imagineer’s chest, she pressed. When she did, the old man’s eyes sprang open and he gasped.
“Farren, hold on,” Hawk encouraged. “We are going to a hospital.”
Rales coughed. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Juliette handed Hawk his neatly folded coat and gestured to Farren’s head. Hawk slid the suit jacket under the man’s head as a makeshift pillow.
“Gunshots?” Juliette continued to apply pressure to the wound.
“Two of them.” Hawk glanced over at her. “I think…Juliette, are you hit?”
“No.” She kept her attention on Farren. “I heard the glass shatter and looked to see where it came from. I felt the car speed up and then heard more glass breaking. I saw Farren jerk back in the seat and then slump forward. When I put my hand on his back…” She choked back the next words. “There was blood.”
The driver swung the car wildly off the interstate and through the streets of Orlando. Hawk did his best to keep Farren stable on the seat as the car jerked around corners, headed for the Orlando Regional Medical Center. In the background, a faint voice demanded details as the driver used his cell phone to call for emergency assistance. Almost instantly there were flashing lights flanking them. Perhaps their motorcycle escorts had rejoined them.
In a matter of minutes, which seemed like hours, the car pulled into the emergency entrance of the hospital with an ever-growing police presence accompanying them. It jolted to a halt. Instantly, the back door was opened and emergency medical personnel bounded into the car. Juliette and Hawk began to make room for the doctors when an old hand with an iron grasp locked on to Hawk’s arm. Hawk looked back and saw Farren, his eyes wide with a look Hawk had never seen before, staring at him.
“I need you to move,” a doctor urged Hawk.
Hawk leaned away to give the doctor room, but Farren gripped his arm even tighter and pulled him closer. Hawk bent back toward his friend.
“Please, move now!” the doctor said authoritatively.
“I will,” Hawk snapped back. “Farren, you have got to let these people help you.”
“Ha…wk,” gasped the Imagineer. “Listen…you don’t know…what you have…”
“Later.” Hawk pulled back only to find the man’s grip was like iron.
“Not later, now!” Rales suddenly found his voice.
“OK.”
“You need to do something.” The old man’s voice turned raspy and quiet. “Open it.”
“What?”
Two doctors now had Hawk by the shoulders, forcing him back from their patient laid out on the limo seat. As he yielded to their physical suggestion, he never broke eye contact with Farren. “Open it?” Hawk repeated.
“The cylinder.” Rales closed his eyes as the doctors aggressively began to assess his situation.
Hawk stumbled back out of the car as the unloading area outside the emergency room became a beehive of activity. What looked like an endless stream of people poured into the car to attend to Farren. Turning away, he found Juliette speaking to a nurse. The flashing lights of the police vehicles danced a blue-and-red rhythm across the growing crowd gathered around him. He walked to where Juliette was in conversation and interrupted.
“You sure you’re OK?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she reassured him. “I didn’t get hit.”
Her eyes registered concern. At the same instant, the nurse directed her attention toward him and motioned for additional help.
“What is it?” Hawk stammered, eyes widening at their reactions to him.
The doctor joined them. “Let’s get you inside, sir,” he said forcefully.
“Why?” Hawk asked.
“Hawk.” Juliette walked next to them as they escorted him into the emergency room. “It’s your face. You’re covered in blood.”
Hawk looked down in a useless attempt to somehow see his own face. His mind registered it as being ridiculous as he noticed the blood dripping onto his white, starched shirt. Instinctively he reached up to touch his face.
“Try to refrain from touching your face please,” the doctor again spoke.
The automatic doors hissed open, and Hawk was rushed briskly through the entry area, seated in a wheelchair, and escorted through a hallway to an examination room. As he w
as rolled through the doorway to the room, he looked back down the hall and saw eight people running alongside a stretcher. Farren was stretched out on it, a flurry of activity taking place around him, as people worked to stabilize him and treat his gunshot wound. Juliette, too, had turned around to watch Farren.
“Juliette.” Hawk’s voice rose above the noise consuming the hallway. “Stay with Farren, let me know how he is.”
“Let us do our job with your friend.” The doctor was now helping Hawk out of the chair and seating him on a bed. “Let us do our job with you.”
“What is wrong with me?”
“It looks as if you’ve been cut. On my initial inspection, it looks like your face has been hit by shards of glass.”
“My face was hit by shards of glass,” Hawk confirmed.
“Then my diagnosis is right,” the doctor said in monotone. “That must make me good at my job. So let me do it and allow my coworkers to do theirs. In order to do that, you need to sit right here and let us see if there is any glass embedded in your face and get you cleaned up. Got it?”
“Got it,” Hawk sneered, and the muscles in his face stung with the motion.
A bright light was placed near his jaw, and the doctor and an assistant began the tedious inspection of his face. Working quickly, succinctly, and carefully, they looked for glass that needed to be removed. Hawk’s eyes danced around the room and locked on Juliette, who was peering in from the hallway. He raised his eyebrows and asked the unspoken question: How is Farren? She shrugged and shook her head. A police officer appeared at her side, said something to her that Hawk couldn’t hear, and she disappeared from the doorway with him.
A stab of pain rolled across his face, and he locked eyes with the doctor in front of him.
“I bet you felt that one come out, didn’t you?” The doctor glanced away from his work, meeting Hawk’s gaze. “If it hurts too much, I can give you something for the pain. Do you want something?”
“Nah,” grunted Hawk. “Just finish what you’re doing so I can check on my friend.”
“We’re working just as fast as we can…and trying to take the best possible care of both of you.”
“I know,” Hawk murmured with minimal movement of his mouth.
As the doctors and nurses attended him, he took inventory of the activity he could view through the door of his room. This narrow window into the emergency room provided him a glimpse at the endless stream of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and hospital employees caring for the patients coming and going on this particular night. Hawk also noticed law enforcement officers hovering outside his room, which made sense to him. After all, he had arrived in a limousine that had become the target of someone with a firearm. Occasionally he was distracted from the world outside of his door by the blood pressure cuff tightening on his arm. As the doctor worked, a team of others took and recorded Hawk’s other vital signs. No one was sounding an alarm, so he assumed he must be fine—with the exception of the glass. Eventually, the plucking and pulling on the side of his face ceased. The doctor pushed back from where Hawk sat on the bed.
“I think we’ve gotten it all.” The doctor smiled. “It certainly could have been worse. We’re going to get you to lie back and relax on the bed, and the nurses are going to finish cleaning you up. We’re also going to give you a few bandages to keep those cuts from getting infected.”
With great impatience, Hawk reclined on the elevated hospital bed. The angle of the head of the bed allowed him to be seated nearly upright. Sighing, he watched as much of the action happening around him dissipated. A nurse handed him the call button and promised to answer him if he called. As she exited the room, Juliette, accompanied by a police officer, entered.
Hawk sat straight up. “How is Farren?”
“I’m not sure.” Juliette stepped to his bedside and pushed him back down. “They’ve taken him into surgery. They promised they would keep us posted.”
“How long ago did they start?”
“Probably thirty minutes ago.” Concern accented her expression. “That’s all I know.”
“Dr. Hawkes,” the officer said. “I’m Lieutenant Mitch Renner. I would like to ask you a few questions about what happened, if that’s alright.”
“It’s not real complicated. Someone took a couple shots at our car.”
“So you believe you were just a random target?”
“You believe it wasn’t random?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Seven Days Ago
Evening
There is always a possibility the shooting was random.” Renner cleared his throat. “However, you were traveling in a very conspicuous style of vehicle, you’re a celebrity, and it’s just as possible it was not random at all…but intentional.”
Hawk sat up a little straighter. He glanced at Juliette, who remained unreadable. She must have already had this conversation; Hawk had only just been invited into it and had much to catch up on.
“I’m listening.”
“Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt or kill you, or Farren Rales, or Juliette Keaton?” the officer bluntly asked.
Hawk flashed back to the whirlwind of change that had blown through his life over the past three years. His friendship with Rales had led him to become the Chief Creative Architect of the Walt Disney Company, and he had discovered there was an army of people who didn’t like that at all. On two different occasions, he’d found himself in a race trying to unravel mysterious puzzles designed to protect Walt Disney’s secrets. The designers of those complicated adventures had been Farren Rales and George Colmes, two Imagineers who had created them to ensure no one could ever stumble over the secrets accidently. It was Hawk’s encyclopedic knowledge of Disney trivia and history that helped him extract the information that had been so carefully protected. Along the way, he’d been beaten, forced to fight, chased up and off of the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House, thrown off the top of Spaceship Earth, run off the road at Snow White’s Cottage…and that was just for starters. Juliette had been kidnapped, he had fought for his life in an old cemetery, and he’d had to watch as those close to him were hurt along the way. He had hoped those chapters of his life were closed forever. Yet he knew that all lives are living, breathing stories, and each heartbeat means a new page has been turned; chapters don’t close, they continue.
“I can think of a few,” Hawk said with resignation.
“In talking with Ms. Keaton, I gathered as much.” Renner exhaled. “She told me enough to get started, but I’ll want to talk with you at length…very soon.”
“Sure.” Hawk nodded. “I’ll help in any way I can.”
“Dr. Hawkes?”
“Hawk,” he countered. “Everyone calls me Hawk.”
“Very well, then…Hawk, this may have been a random event. A case of road rage, a drive-by shooting event, an accidental discharge of a gun at the most unlikely and unfortunate time . . .” The officer hesitated. “But those explanations don’t seem as reasonable as someone trying to do harm to you or one of the other passengers in the car.”
“I understand.” Hawk narrowed his eyes. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you find out who did this. Whether it was an accident or not, whatever I can do to help you…just let me know.”
“I appreciate it. We’ll talk soon.” Mitch remained stoic. “We’re going to make sure you get home safely when the hospital discharges you…and of course you are ready to leave. I know that Mr. Rales is in surgery, and I don’t anticipate you’ll want to leave until you have a chance to check on him.”
Renner turned to leave. As he got to the door and stepped into the hall, Hawk called out to him.
“You really think someone tried to shoot me tonight?”
Renner turned back into the room. He looked at the floor and then back toward Hawk, his face carefully expressionless. “From the little I have found out about you—yes, it seems to me that you were the target. But let’s be clear about something, Hawk. If you were the target, someone
did not just shoot at you. You were in a moving car on the streets of Downtown Orlando. At least two shots were taken. Someone was attempting to assassinate you.”
Mitch Renner disappeared down the hall. Silence filled the air for a few moments. Bells, voices, and intercom pages provided background noise that prevented the silence from becoming smothering. Finally, Hawk looked away from the door and saw Juliette standing beside the bed, staring at him.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he reassured her. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Scared, but other than that…I’m fine.” She patted his arm. “I thought we were past this.”
Hawk had always hoped that after he had found Walt Disney’s personal diaries and had managed to keep the other secrets he had been entrusted with safe, those who had tried to scare, manipulate, and hurt him in an attempt to steal those things and take control of the company had finally been arrested, derailed, and thwarted. In the last year and a half, he had almost managed to convince himself that these enemies were scattered and no longer a threat to him and those he loved.
“I’m sorry, Juliette.” Hawk shook his head. “I thought we were past it as well.”
“Goes with the territory, huh?”
“I just never realized that in the world of Disney, the villains are real.”
A clunk interrupted them as an orderly bounced a white metal cart off the door on his way into the room. A short, dark-haired man, his face swallowed up by oversized, black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, followed the cart into the room. His white coat was a wrinkled mess, each pocket overstuffed with paper, notes, and other items collected from his rounds. His name tag was tucked behind the stash of paper blossoming out of the chest pocket of the coat.
