The Safety Expert

by Doug Richardson

  “Would be two of us,” said Ben.

  “There you go. A little perspective. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “It could work,” said Ben.

  “Perspective? Or you talkin’ about something else?”

  “All I need is the gun.”

  “Swear, Benjy,” said Gonzo. “I will cuff your ass to my bedpost and make you watch Oprah reruns—all night—if that’s what it takes to talk you down from the idiot tree.”

  “He beat the shit outta her,” said Ben. “And she’s got a restraining order!”

  “Who?”

  “Pamela. Stew’s wife.”

  “And what the hell would you know about her? And how would you get her gun? How deep into her shit are you?”

  Ben looked sideways. He couldn’t imagine a succinct answer, let alone one that could explain feelings that he hadn’t yet even begun to sort out.

  Gonzo moved on.

  “So that’s a surprise? That Stew the Dipshit beats his wife?”

  “You don’t know what I know,” Ben said sotto voce. He rested his head on the seat back, his eyes swirling behind closed lids.

  “Okay, okay,” said Gonzo. “I’ll bite because we got a ways to drive. So we’ll talk for a while. You say what you need to say. Then we pick up my boy, go to my house, and that’s when we stop talkin’ shit and start talkin’ about tomorrow. Waking up, taking a shower, moving on. Remember that? Those were your words, right? It’s all about ‘moving on.’”

  Gonzo turned the wipers on full. But no matter how quickly they cycled, the rain and spray from all the other cars and trucks were almost too overwhelming to safely keep the car in the fast lane.

  But Gonzo had opened the door. She had invited Ben to explain himself. Yet in thinking of how to recount his clandestine relationship with Pam, he realized he would be admitting to lies on top of deceptions, not to mention the potential for indiscretion. All in the name of a plot, just two hours old, that had hinged on his breaking into Stew’s house, stealing Pam’s gun without her knowledge, and returning to Pam’s hotel room. All that had been left for Ben to figure was how to tell Stew where he was and who he was with. Ben knew enough about the law that if Stew were to violate Pam’s restraining order, Ben would be well within his legal rights to shoot and kill him in Pam’s defense. And using Pam’s gun to end Stew’s life would make the case all the more airtight.

  “Oh,” said Gonzo. “So now you don’t wanna talk. Can I take this as a positive? A moment of self-evaluation? That the adrenalin in your veins and the testosterone in your pants are no longer ruling your senses?”

  If Ben were to answer honestly, it would have been a resounding, “No.” Though Gonzo had suggested something that made him think.

  What about tomorrow?

  Ben had no Plan B. That and fate had him on a return trajectory to Simi Valley. He was sure that once Gonzo had tongue-lashed him until she was convinced he was no longer a threat to himself or Stew or the general public at large, she would deliver him to a flower shop and then his own front doorstep with advice on how best to make things right with Alex. But what after that? What of Stew? He certainly wasn’t going to move on until Ben or Pam or both of them were dead.

  “Gotta question,” asked Gonzo. “What happened to the sensible Ben Keller? Nice guy, smart mouth, wiseass cocktail party flirt that makes all those Simi Canyon mommies feel so safe and secure and wish you were the one they were sharing carpool with?”

  “Vanilla Man,” Ben found himself whispering.

  “Come again?”

  “That guy was one hundred percent bullshit,” said Ben, loud enough for Gonzo to hear him through the perforated holes in the Plexiglas.

  “Well, I liked that guy,” said Gonzo. “That guy was sweet and funny and...”

  Gonzo’s eyes moved with sudden intuition.

  She flicked a look into her right side-view mirror as a blast of high-beam fury exploded from the pack of cars behind her. The closing headlights cut back across three lanes and crowded her rearview mirror like an oncoming locomotive engine. The cab ignited with light. A collision was a matter of certainty. In her single defensive maneuver, Gonzo floored the accelerator. Then while letting go of the wheel, she reached with her good arm in a last attempt to string the seatbelt across herself and into the buckle.

  Crunch!

  Ben heard the ugly sound of mashing sheet metal and thermoplastic polymer, felt his body violently compressed into the rear seat, then experienced the world spinning in a momentary panorama of streaking white and red lights.

  The blow from the new white pickup truck sent the cab hydroplaning, leaving little to no traction between the tires and the road. When the cab hit the concrete divider it was traveling eighty-two miles per hour in a pouring rain. The force of impact was so great it reversed momentum and sent the cab twirling counterclockwise back into traffic. Airbags were deployed, barely cushioning the teeth-shattering wallop from a ten-ton semi-tractor trailer rig. The force lifted the cab onto two wheels, tipping the vehicle into a watery tumble across four lanes of traffic until it punched clean through a guardrail, snapping off the six-by-six-inch wooden posts like matchsticks, and twisting the metal barrier into a forty-foot ribbon of skyward-reaching sculpture.

  The pileup of cars was like a Russian ballet or a synchronized swimming exhibition. Cars didn’t collide so much as they glided and spun, sending great red-lit rooster tails of water spraying into the air.

  A Caltrans traffic camera caught the entire event in digital color. In later months, then years, it was studied by traffic experts and eventually replayed in slow motion video all over the Internet. First came the attacking white pickup truck, the initial collision, the cab’s impact with the center wall, the reverse spin, the crush from the semi-rig, then the cab tumbling out of the picture’s frame. Meanwhile, the white F-250 pickup bucked off the concrete meridian and got caught with its wheels stuck behind the divider sliding along with a display of trailing sparks. The rest of the show looked as if it had been story-boarded by a second-unit director. The subsequent cars were all braking and spinning like pinwheels in opposition, yet miraculously, not a single innocent vehicle came in contact with another. The video ended with ten seconds of no movement whatsoever but for the steady pour of rain.

  Stew didn’t miss a moment of the wreck.

  He was conscious from the initial surge across three lanes of traffic, the satisfying strike as his shiny new pickup impacted the checkered cab and the explosion of the airbag in his face, to the sensation of being airborne as his rear wheels took flight before straddling and skidding along the top of the concrete divider for a good hundred and seventy feet.

  All the while, Stew had fully expected to flip at any moment and re-enter traffic as a target of heavy-metal death. Instead, his truck hopped and skidded and sent incandescent embers into the black night. From his driver’s side window, Stew caught the last sparks from the impact of the semi crushing the cab, which only added to his vindictive pleasure. He did his level all to grapple against his steering wheel so he could remain fixed on the yellow checkered cab as it tumbled end-over-end across traffic, stripping the guardrail before disappearing into the dark beyond the wash of headlights and streetlamps.

  But when the stillness came, the noise inside his skull got louder and ugly, as if he needed mayhem to quiet the grinding gears gummed by the residual methamphetamines. What he needed was booze. A super-sized shot of Jack and Coke to set him straight.

  But not until he was sure both the bastard and the dyke cop were dead.

  Stew shouldered his door open and slid into the rain. When his feet touched the pavement, his left knee screamed with pain. Was it just a memory from his last accident? Or had he re-injured his ACL during the crash?

  “Fuck it,” mouthed Stew.

  He slid a twenty-pound fitting wrench out from underneath the seat. So what if he was slightly busted up? He had suffered worse injuries. And a hellish limp would sell the illusio
n that he was just another victim of a weather-induced freeway mishap.

  Not your fault Stewy. He started it.

  Using the fitting wrench as a crutch of sorts, Stew began a dead-reckoning gimp across the five freeway lanes. A graying Indian man, stuffed into a dress shirt soaked and buttoned to his Adam’s apple, stood at the open driver’s door of his stalled Chevy Malibu with a helpful arm held out in Stew’s direction.

  “Are you okay, sir?” asked the Indian man, shaken to his core. “I... I just called for nine-one-one assistance. We should sit and wait, you think?”

  Stew’s eyes swerved, regarding the Indian man with a glare so menacing it sent the would-be Good Samaritan recoiling back into his vehicle. Stew never changed direction or altered the painful hitch in his step. The drugs were fading on him. If there was finish work to be done, Stew would need to do it on resolve alone. The hole where the cab punched through the guardrail and disappeared lay ahead—beyond the asphalt, the freeway streetlamps, and under a relentless assault of rain, a backdrop of utter blackness—a void where Stew and that twenty-pound fitting wrench were headed.

  The best Ben could figure was that he had lost consciousness somewhere between the collision with the semi and the time it had taken the cab to come to rest. He had somehow missed the part where the cab had tumbled end-over-end and snapped that ribbon of guardrail like a worn shoelace. When Ben awoke, the cab lay inverted on its half-crushed roof, teetering on a sandy precipice. He was hanging upside-down, turned backwards, cuffed and tangled in his seatbelt harness, his bloody scalp scraping against torn upholstery.

  Beyond the shattered windows, he could make out the tips of trees and scrub growing up from around ramparts that lifted the freeway over what he reckoned was the Sepulveda flood plane. Then he thought of Gonzo.

  Ben tried to choke out her name, but found his larynx clogged with spit and phlegm. He coughed and twisted toward the driver’s seat. His neck stung. Pain, he recognized, was a good thing. He wriggled his fingers and toes, feeling the handcuffs and the seams inside his sneakers. There was no obvious sign of spinal distress, the single most common injury in vehicle accidents where cars become airborne and flip.

  “Lydia?” whispered Ben before finding the bass in his vocal chords. “Lydia!”

  Ben pushed with his knee and swiveled himself toward the driver’s compartment. The yellow-tinted Plexiglas partition was partially dislodged and looking as dangerous as a guillotine blade. The steering wheel had snapped at the column and was at rest in the passenger-side’s foot well, hanging by the spent airbag. But for the jagged, toothy edges, all the glass from the windshield had been blasted out.

  “GONZO!” screamed Ben

  He hoped to hell she would hear him and answer back. Just like he had prayed that when he had finally turned himself around he would find her equally strung up and alive. Instead, she was nowhere to be seen. Not a body or severed limb or bloody trail to be seen in the bare gleam of light coming from the opened glove box.

  What did catch Ben’s eye was the slick glint off Pam’s revolver. The gun lay in a spray of bejeweled safety glass, mere inches away, but on the other side of the now-slanting, see-though partition.

  A thick blackness filled his eyes, obscuring his vision beyond the simple blink of his eyelids. Ben wiped at them, smearing blood across his sleeve. He was bleeding from somewhere unknown and it was draining into his eyes. He cleared them again, blinked and blinked, trying to focus again on the brightest light, a metal halide streetlamp that hung over the freeway, some sixty-plus feet away.

  Under the lamp, Ben saw a single, silhouetted figure.

  Praise Christ. Help has come.

  The figure limped and appeared to be using some sort of heavy stick for a crutch. Ben wiped his eyes once more, strained to focus, and made a more honest assessment. The savior with the faltering gate was no savior at all. It was, indeed, Stew Raymo. And Stew was coming to finish the job.

  Ben’s instincts flared. He fought with the seatbelt, seeking places where it was slack so he could untangle himself, then looked for a cut or a weakness in the fabric where he might slip the handcuffs free. But the cab was a late model Chrysler, and just moments after his struggle began, Ben surrendered when his mind recalled the latest goddamn study on modern seatbelt safety by the National Insurance Institute. His brain swamped with survival statistics of accident victims using the old No Locking Retractor recoiling lap belts versus the Emergency Locking Retractor harnesses. The latter technology was sensitive to vehicle rollovers, thus working as a decelerator during momentum shifts, keeping the wearer locked in position until all life threatening movement had ceased.

  Once again, Ben’s view swung to Stew, steady on the approach. Next, his bloodied eyes keyed on Pam’s revolver. If only he could reach it. He had to release the inertia reel of the seatbelt tensioner. That meant un-weighting himself in order to release the clutch in the mechanism. So with all that he had in his weakened abdominals, he pulled himself upward until, with his cuffed hands, he was able to sink his fingers between the cushions, find a handhold and slowly pull until he felt the click. The shoulder belt eased enough for Ben to depress the buckle release. That’s when gravity took over. And though Ben fell only inches, when he landed on his head it felt as if he had been dropped five feet onto solid concrete.

  The car shuddered, rocked, slipped across the sand for nearly an entire yard, then stopped again.

  Ben caught his breath, but couldn’t slow the feeling that his heart was about to burst from his chest. He rolled to his stomach, fully intent on slipping his cuffed hands under the Plexiglas to retrieve the gun. But a shadow fell across him, blocking the light from the distant streetlamp.

  “Anybody left alive in there?” growled Stew, before hammering the big pipe wrench against the chassis.

  Clank!

  Ben steadied himself, focused on the gun, and lunged ahead with both hands, only to have the belt tensioner seize and stop him cold.

  “C’mon, you cockroaches. Crawl the fuck out!”

  Clank! Clank!

  With each resounding blow of the wrench against the car, Ben flinched. So Ben took a painful breath, calmed his nerves enough to refocus on the revolver, and this time, ever-so-slowly reached forward and unwound the remaining inches of seatbelt left wrapped around the inertia reel.

  “Anybody home?” yelled Stew

  Stew began gouging around with the wrench, stabbing it though the shrunken windows and working it around like he was trying to stir up a bed of snakes.

  “C’mon, lady cop. Tell me all about the trouble I’m in now!”

  Inches from the revolver, Ben flattened his hands and slid them underneath the partition, stretching with his fingertips until his middle nail actually brushed the muzzle of the gun. And that was it. As far as the belt would allow.

  Christ, no!

  Ben withdrew his hands, rolled up onto his shoulder, angling his arms differently with desperate hopes of releasing another inch of the harness.

  “I hear youuuuuuuu!” shouted Stew.

  Stew swung the wrench into the rear passenger door.

  Clang!

  Last chance, thought Ben. He reached under the partition, fingers flexed to their tensile...

  “Whatcha lookin’ for?” asked Stew, soft, throaty and almost playful.

  Ben’s sights lifted from the gun to the dashboard. There was Stew, propped on his hands and knees, head stuck through the windshield. Stew’s eyes immediately tracked from Ben, half-obscured through the tilted Plexiglas, to Pam’s gleaming, five-shot revolver.

  The gun may as well have been a blood-red bone that lay between two angry dogs. One rabid, the other desperate to survive. Stew left the wrench behind, scrambling onto his stomach, and with astonishing speed, wriggled his thick torso through the crushed and jagged window frame.

  Ben extended himself for the gun, uncoiling the belt to the very last thread—the gun, the sole core of his focus. Using the tips of his index and middle fi
ngers, he pinched the muzzle into a weak vise and began drawing the gun nearer.

  Stew kicked and howled and snaked closer. The cab rocked. The earth moved underneath and the cab tilted and slid a foot sideways. The gun slid, too. Away from Ben. Out of reach and directly into Stew’s grasp. A gift.

  Stew grinned.

  Fight or flight?

  As Stew twisted into position, poking the revolver forward and training the muzzle at Ben’s face, Ben was overcome with a sense of calm and clarity. It was all physics, he thought. To fight he must take flight. The adrenaline in Ben surged, firing every fast twitching muscle fiber into a single vicious retreat. With all his force, Ben threw himself rearward, cramming into the space between the shattered rear window and the seat’s back.

  The rest was up to Newton.

  Stew pulled the trigger in three rapid bursts. Each bullet deflected off the Plexiglas, piercing the seats.

  The cab rocked, slid and tipped. Then came the free-fall.

  The Sepulveda Dam was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1941. To the north of the barrier were parks and lakes and public golf courses, all constructed in a natural collection basin. When the gutters and flood channels of the San Fernando Valley were overwhelmed, the water pooled behind the dam and was released by a spillway into a gravel-based trough. The trough tilted south, passing underneath the Ventura Freeway.

  The cab’s fifty-foot drop between the muddy shelf and the rocky bottom was broken by a pair of large birch trees that mitigated the total force of the fall. The car twirled before it landed on its side in five feet of swift, rising water. The cab settled, pinned against a tree trunk by the sheer force of moving water.

  Then the river entered the car.

  Somehow, with help from those handcuffs still strung through the seatbelt, Ben hung on through the half-flip and touchdown without losing consciousness. He feared drowning. Swallowed by the swirling water, Ben was lost, uncertain which direction was up or down until he let the bubbles blowing from his nose show him the way. He eventually found air and a handhold near the left passenger door. As oxygen filled his lungs, Ben experienced a stab in his side, a sure sign of broken ribs. He coughed up blood, looked for a second handhold, and tried to orient himself in the darkness that, at first, seemed absolute. Ben’s right leg felt mangled, possibly fractured.