4 Real Dangerous Place

by K. W. Jeter

  Glover stared uncomfortably at the ground.

  “All right –” He looked back up at the colonel. “You don’t have to stick around here. I’ll deal with this Richter bastard. He probably doesn’t even care whether you’re still here or not. He’s stuck it in your face, and that’s enough for him.”

  “Maybe.” A slow nod. “Maybe it’s enough for me, too. I can’t get a handle on him. Not the way I could when he was just a mercenary. I could figure out how his mind worked, when he was just in it for the money. I could tell what he was going to do next. But now –” MacAvoy’s face set grim. “Even if I did, I don’t have any resources. This is your scene, Captain. Not mine.”

  “Like I said. You don’t have to take the fall for it. If it goes bad – and it looks like it’s going to – then I’ll take the heat.”

  “You’re right,” said MacAvoy. “I could just walk away and peddle my memoirs. That’s about what I’m good for.”

  “You’ve done enough already –”

  “No.” Eyes narrowed with anger, MacAvoy turned on Glover. “If I’d done my job, Richter would be dead. And he’s not.” His voice turned bitter. “I wasn’t up to it. I’m still not up to it.”

  “You want to walk,” said Glover, “then go ahead. I understand.”

  Glover turned and headed back into the police command post, leaving MacAvoy gazing at the ground, spine rounded. Then suddenly his head snapped back up.

  “Hey –”

  The police captain halted and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Screw you.” MacAvoy’s back was ramrod straight again. “I can’t leave. Not until this job’s done, at least.”

  “All right, Colonel.” Glover held the tent flap open for him. “There’s one thing this Richter guy’s right about, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re in charge,” said Glover. “From now on, you call the shots.”

  † † †

  I’m glad they left that part in the movie, that little exchange between MacAvoy and Glover. Makes them seem human.

  At the moment, though, I didn’t even know those two guys existed. Or what they were doing about this whole situation. I was still on my own.

  From underneath the car, I could hear people closer to me – not the nice sort of people – taking control of their own end of the scene.

  “Get that mess outta here!” That was Mozel, Richter’s second-in-command, shouting across the center divider. “Now!”

  On the empty side of the freeway, his buddy Scavulos shoved the Claw’s control levers. The big articulated arm swung over the lanes, then lowered so the steel talons could seize on the burning wreckage of the panel truck. Scavulos pulled back on the levers, hoisting the torn and fiery metal into the air.

  The Claw’s arm extended farther, out past the guardrail. The talons spread apart, letting the panel truck drop, trailing smoke and flame.

  From where I was tucked out of sight, with my brother Donnie next to me, I could hear the thudding clatter of the truck as its remains fell alongside the freeway pillars, then hit the pavement below.

  What I didn’t see – and no one else saw, either – was the smoke-blackened figure that clung by one hand to the electrical conduit bolted to the side of the freeway. It hung there for a moment, then slowly, painfully, dragged itself upward.

  † † †

  Outside the jackknifed truck, Richter stood with arms folded across his chest, a pissed expression on his hard, narrow face.

  “Stuff happens.” Beside him, Mozel shrugged. “Some guy blew himself up. So what?”

  Richter glared at him. “Clear the other ramp,” he said. “We need all our crew off it. Immediately.”

  “What for?” Mozel’s heavy brow creased in puzzlement. “I don’t even know why we wired it up. There’s no hostages there –”

  “Just do it.”

  Mozel shrugged and headed back toward the other end of the bottle.

  † † †

  With what had been left of the panel truck plucked by the Claw and thrown over the side, I could see what had happened to the two guys I had called Short and Tall. They’d had the misfortune of standing right next to the truck when Elton ignited his improvised bomb. Looking out from under the car’s front bumper, I noticed something that looked like a bundle of burnt rags on the pavement, several car lengths down the lane. That was one of them, at least.

  Then I saw where the other one had been tossed by the blast. The body was right there alongside the car that my brother and I were hiding under.

  “Keep an eye out,” I told Donnie. “Let me know if anybody looks over this way.”

  I scooted myself partway out from under the car and searched the body as quickly as I could. I couldn’t even tell which one it was. A lot of it was missing and the rest smelled like hamburger that’d been left on a barbecue grill too long. I was hoping that the guy, Short or Tall, had held on to his assault rifle when his remains got tossed.

  No luck. The only useful thing I found was the lighter that he and his buddy had used for their final cigarette break. I gave it a flick to see if it was still working – nothing happened. Tossing it aside, I crawled back under the car.

  † † †

  “All clear?” Mozel spoke into his own radiophone. “I don’t want to lose any more of our people.”

  He stood at the rear end of the bottle, right where it had been sealed by the first explosion he’d set off. That truck’s wreckage had finished burning a while ago. Now its smoldering pieces formed a blackened and twisted barricade.

  He watched as a couple of Richter’s crew finished wiring up the explosive packets they’d placed outside the bottle. The long, black electrical cord stretched all the way to the top of the interchange ramp about a hundred yards behind the smoldering remain of the freight truck they’d first exploded to seal off the area. Soon as the last connection was made, the two men ran back to the bottle, climbing over the wreckage and then standing beside Mozel.

  “She’s ready,” said one of them, the wire-crimping pliers still in his hand. “Rock and roll.”

  “Then take it out.”

  The other man picked up the switch box hooked to the wire running up to the brick-shaped packets. With his thumb, he pressed the little metal switch forward.

  Just a half-second of silence, all it took for the electrical pulse to surge up the wire.

  Then the biggest explosion yet went off, making all the others so far look like Chinese New Year firecrackers. Mozel and the other men shielded their faces against the glaring light that washed over them, bright as staring at the sun. A cloud of vaporized concrete rose into the air, obscuring the interchange ramp.

  As the smoke began to clear, Richter walked up beside the men.

  Mozel glanced over at him. “That what you wanted?”

  Farther away from them, pebble-like fragments and bits of iron rebar began to rain down upon the roofs of the abandoned cars outside the bottle.

  Richter didn’t say anything. He stepped over the charred truck wreckage and walked toward the interchange ramp – or what was left of it.

  The night wind picked up, pushing away more of the dust hanging in the air. As it cleared, Mozel and the others could see Richter standing at the broken edge of the ramp, gazing with apparent satisfaction across the high, empty space beyond.

  † † †

  Donnie and I felt the explosion roll like an earthquake through the freeway, the seismic impact jarring right into our torsos.

  “Crap.” The panel truck had been only a few yards away from me when it had gone up, but that had been nothing compared to this. I could hear people screaming inside their cars. In Los Angeles, it has to be one hell of a quake before people even notice. The big fiery explosion had really enhanced this one’s impressiveness.

  “Kimmie –” My brother’s eyes widened as he looked over at me. “What’re we going to do now?”

  Of all the places I’d ever had a family conference wit
h him, this was the weirdest – and least comfortable. Even for people skinny as the two of us, there was barely enough space under the car to draw in a full breath. Plus the latest explosion had been big enough to jar something loose above me – motor oil or transmission fluid or something else like that started to drip near my shoulder.

  “We are not going to do anything now.” I gave him one of my big sister looks, this one right up close to his face. “What I’m going to do is come up with some kind of plan to get us out of here.”

  “But –”

  “Clam up and let me think.”

  I searched through the rackety fragments inside my own head, trying to see if there was enough of Elton’s original plan left to do anything with. A lot of things had happened since he had laid it out for me inside the panel truck, that neither one of us had been counting on. For one thing, I was on my own now. Whatever the stupid sonuvabitch had been thinking of when he crawled back under the truck and ignited his improvised bomb, I’m sure it had been all noble and manly and stuff when he’d done it, and I’d have a big cry about it when I was done saving my own and Donnie’s hide, but it had also left me holding the bag for the rest of this operation.

  “You’re forgetting something, Kimmie.” My little brother was always able to figure out what I might be thinking.

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Whatever you’re planning on doing – I can help.”

  I stared straight into his eyes, which were only a few inches from my own. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get something straight. You’ve done enough already – I mean, just by getting out of that school bus. Now I don’t have to go over there and find you. So that’s good. But there’s a limit.”

  “Not now, there isn’t.” Donnie looked back at me, dead serious. “You can’t do it all on your own – there’s too many of them. So now you have to let me help.”

  He had a point there.

  I was still mulling it over when I noticed something else.

  “Aw, crap –”

  “Kimmie? What’s wrong?”

  “Look at me,” I said. “I’m a mess!”

  I had just glanced down and seen what condition my full-lady outfit was in. I’d already figured that the panty hose was shot to hell, what with all the crawling around on the freeway pavement, but now I saw how trashed everything else was. The wool skirt looked like I had mopped up a garage floor with it, and one of the jacket sleeves had ripped loose, threads dangling from the shoulder.

  “Damn.”

  I stripped off the jacket and tossed it aside. That’d been the only outfit that made me look even reasonably like an adult. Now, if I got out of this alive, I’d have to go shopping again.

  And I hate shopping.

  † † †

  “I don’t get it.” Inside the police command post, Glover studied the video feed from the news copter. “Now what the hell are they setting up?”

  The image on the monitor showed Richter supervising some of his crew as they worked on another device they had taken out of the rear of the jackknifed big rig. Hoisting it over the center divider, they had pushed it along the empty lanes on the other side of the freeway, up to the broken edge of the interchange sticking out in the night air.

  “Can’t tell –” Beside him, MacAvoy peered close at the monitor screen. “It looks like one of those antenna masts that they put up beside their truck. But there’s no electronic gear on it – at least, not that I can see.”

  “What do they need something like that for?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you.” The colonel looked away from the monitor and out through the opened tent flaps, toward the freeway. “But if Richter’s doing it, he’s got a reason.”

  † † †

  Somebody else was asking that same question, right then.

  “What’re we screwing around with this junk for?” Mozel looked up at the new device the other men had finished setting into place. It seemed oddly flimsy and insubstantial, with no purpose other than to extend a steel hook a hundred or so feet in the air. “We’ve got the hostages – let’s kill a few more, let ’em know we’re serious. Then we can get whatever money we want –”

  Richter turned toward him. “If you thought the authorities would pay a lot of money to rescue a hundred hostages –” His cold smile showed again. “Then how much do you think they’d pay with the whole city as a hostage?”

  “Wait a minute –” Mozel frowned as he peered at the other man, trying to figure him out. “Is that what you’ve been planning all along? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have believed me.” Richter tapped the side of his own head. “You don’t think big enough. None of you do. I had to get you here first – but now you’ll see.”

  “See what? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t worry.” Richter turned away and headed back toward the bottled-up cars. “It’s on its way.”

  NINETEEN

  WHATEVER ELSE my brother was going on about, there was one thing on which he was absolutely right.

  There were too many of them for me to take care of on my own.

  If Elton had still been there with me, we might’ve had a chance. A two-man operation, with a sufficient element of surprise, can do a lot of damage to a larger number, even professionals like the ones this Richter guy had recruited. That was one of the things that I’d learned from Cole, when I’d first gotten started doing this kind of thing – it’d been just me and him going up against all of our old boss McIntyre’s security guys. And that had ended up with McIntyre dead, along with most of his people, and me still alive.

  The difference between that situation and this one, of course, was that Cole hadn’t snuffed it until the end. Whereas now, my partner Elton was already gone. Despite what you see in the movies, there’s not enough element of surprise in the world that could get one person on top of a whole pack armed with assault rifles. I might’ve been able to knock out a few, but that would be about it before the ones who were left drilled me in a crossfire.

  Especially if I was trying to pull off some big explosive surprise, the kind that would disorient this bunch for at least a few critical moments, at the same time I’d be getting into place to pick them off. That was the bit Elton’s plan had revolved around, that with the two of us working, one could manage the improvised acetylene bombs while the other got busy in a more lethal fashion. Scratch that, what with him being dead now and all. At least with him blowing up the panel truck when he did, that had left me here outside it, without Richter’s crew being aware that I was even still alive. If Elton hadn’t blown it up, they would’ve known that I’d gotten out somehow, and they’d have found and killed me by now. So it might not have been the absolute smartest move on Elton’s part, but I’d gotten this much out of it, at least . . .

  “Seriously.” My brother’s voice broke into my spiraling thoughts. “I can do stuff. You gotta let me.”

  That was another good point from him. What was the alternative? There was a bunch of stuff going on here, just like Elton had pointed out, that didn’t exactly fit into the usual hostage scenario. Which meant either that this Richter guy was nuts, or he had some other plan going on inside his head. If he’d just been going by the regulation hostage-taker play book, Donnie and I might’ve had our best chance by just staying where we were until the whole thing was over. If Richter had to kill a few more hostages to get the money he was supposedly after, at least it wouldn’t be us.

  But what if he was after something else? I didn’t like the looks of all these high-powered explosives and trigger wires his crew had laid down all along the freeway. That was way overkill, as far as I was concerned. When you have a crew fully armed with assault rifles, you don’t need to be able to blow the whole scene up just to keep people in line. Even if you were into that showboating stuff like this Richter guy, blowing up some cars with their drivers inside and throwing them over the side – a dozen or so thermite grenades and that Claw thing wa
s enough to take care of all that action.

  When that big explosion had gone off, from out behind the bottle, my first reaction had been that Richter had gone completely apocalyptic, and we were all going to go up in the next couple of seconds. But that hadn’t happened, either. As the sound of the blast had faded away, replaced with the pattering rain of bits of rubble falling across the concrete, I had crawled to the rear bumper of the car Donnie and I were hiding under. Peeking out, I had been able to see Richter, still in his fake motorcycle cop outfit, out there in the distance. He was standing up there at the broken-off end of the interchange ramp, smoke and dust rolling around him, looking out at the empty night sky like he owned it now. Or soon would.