by Nick Petrie
Maybe the trooper wouldn’t have to die.
Peter just hoped he and Deacon wouldn’t get themselves shot, either.
Then the first man, still in his ski mask, turned and raised a hand to the trooper.
The trooper raised a hand back and rolled in a slow U-turn, coming up to park on the shoulder ahead of the smashed pickup.
Lights still flashing.
Blocking the view of other drivers, just like the ambulance on the far side, sending the same message to anyone driving by.
No need to stop, no need to call the police. Everything’s under control. Keep driving, good citizens, and safe journey to you all.
Fuck me, thought Peter. These guys are good.
He caught Deacon’s eye and shook his head. Not yet.
Maybe three minutes gone, now.
He no longer thought he might live.
But he wanted to. More than anything.
—
Once the trooper’s Charger was parked, the first man patted Henry’s pants pocket for the key to the big orange toolbox in the pickup bed.
Peter watched Henry for some sign of movement. Nothing.
The toolbox was made of heavy steel, the size of a small refrigerator laid on its back, bolted through its bottom into the bed of the pickup. The specialized padlock sat in a protected cavity, shielded from bolt cutters. The box was basically a big safe for power tools, designed to sit unattended on a truck or at a construction site and guard its contents until they were needed.
With the key, though, it was easy to open.
The first man opened the lock, raised the lid, and removed a single cardboard box, seemingly at random, turning it to look at the label.
Peter had carried some of the boxes. The labels had numbers and location codes, but otherwise carried no indication of their contents. Peter had seen the boxes opened at other drops. Bundles of wrinkled bills, usually twenties and fifties, wrapped with a rubber band that also held a slip of paper with an amount written on it.
Dope money.
Legal dope money, because this was Colorado, but still.
It wasn’t worth dying for. Money never was.
Your friends, though. That was another story.
Henry was his friend. Deacon and Banjo, he’d only known them a few days. But they were friends, too.
They’d shared meals together. He’d met Deacon’s girlfriend. They were connected by the job, this one and the one they’d done before.
The hijacker raised a hand toward the police car. A thumbs-up. Peter saw the shadowed form of the trooper, inside his car, tilting his head to peek at his rearview mirror.
The trooper, if he was a trooper, still hadn’t gotten out of the car.
Maybe he was a real trooper. Peter had caught a glimpse of the plate number, not something he’d forget. If he managed to get out of this, he’d have something to start with.
“Listen,” he called out to the first hijacker. “How does this end?”
“Shut up,” said the man with the shotgun.
Then the ambulance came back.
Peter had lost track of it in the crash, but now he saw it backing down the road. An older Ford Econoline cab with a rectangular box on the back, red lights flashing but no siren. Smaller than most modern ambulances, and showing its age.
The police car pulled forward to let it in. The trooper, fake or not, got out of his cruiser and lit a half dozen road flares and tossed them down.
He wasn’t wearing a mask, but he never turned his face toward the captives. Because he was the one who would have to talk to anyone else who stopped.
Although Peter hadn’t seen any other cars yet.
Four minutes since the crash now, maybe five.
The ambulance driver and another man got out of the cab and walked around to the back. They wore blue-and-white paramedic uniforms, blue baseball hats with white logo patches, and blue nitrile medical gloves. They opened the back doors, but the interior didn’t look like the inside of an ambulance. It looked like an empty white box with narrow benches over the wheel wells and an ancient gurney taking up the space down the middle.
Peter felt the white static flare at the sight of the empty box. The only windows were small portholes in the rear doors.
He didn’t want to know what the ambulance was for.
The fake paramedics pulled out the gurney, dropped the wheels, and rolled it down into the ditch. Their faces looked oddly shiny, stretched somehow. As they got closer, Peter realized they were wearing thin masks made of hard, clear plastic, compressing their features.
The masks gave him hope again. If they didn’t want him to see their faces, it was still possible this didn’t end with a bullet in the head.
Or maybe it was just because they would be working close to the highway and were worried about being seen by oncoming traffic.
Maybe they were just disciplined.
Maybe Peter would never know.
He didn’t have a move just yet.
5
Peter could feel the wind blowing cold off the bony peaks of the Rockies. It was late September, but they were over ten thousand feet. When the sun had begun to drop, the temperature had begun to fall.
It would get colder still before this was over.
The fake paramedics got Henry loaded onto the stretcher with a minimum of fuss. They strapped him down tight for the awkward roll up the side of the ditch. The stretcher was old, low-tech, some kind of surplus item, like the ambulance.
Henry had some size on him. Peter had to give them credit, the two fake paramedics hauled Henry out with no trouble at all.
They didn’t need any help from the man with the shotgun, or the first hijacker, who held Peter’s rifle.
The armed men stood guard, and the trooper watched the road.
When the fake paramedics had the antique stretcher rolled inside the fake ambulance, they came back for Banjo.
His face was creased with pain, but he was alert now. When the ambulance driver pulled a pair of yellow plastic handcuffs out of a cargo pocket, Banjo kicked out to keep the driver at bay. “Y’all not putting those goddamn things on me.”
He was thickset and strong, but he was banged up with only one good arm. When the man with the shotgun stepped over and tapped the barrel against his bad shoulder, Banjo’s face broke into agony and he gave up. “Man, y’all can just go fuck y’all,” he said bitterly as the plasticuffs tightened down.
Peter watched Deacon twitch slightly beside him on the embankment. A visible urge to move, quickly damped down.
Now Peter knew why Deacon had been shaking before. Rage and adrenaline both.
The paramedics in their clear plastic masks plucked Banjo off the ground like so much empty luggage. One man held Banjo’s hurt arm, for control, while the other patted him down. They took his wallet, phone, keys, and a bone-handled folding knife that was a gift, Peter knew, from Banjo’s father.
As the paramedics walked Banjo out of the ditch toward the ambulance, the man with the shotgun turned his head to track them and Deacon launched himself out of the ditch.
Peter leaped to his feet behind Deacon, but the man with the shotgun was quick and competent. Standing on the road shoulder, he’d had his shotgun at low ready and barely needed to aim, just raised the barrel and fired.
Deacon was only six feet away, and the tight cluster of heavy buckshot tore down through the top of his vest right below the neck, making a fist-sized hole where his heart used to be.
Deacon fell at his killer’s feet, his body dead before his mind got the message.
“Stop right there,” said the first hijacker, his voice loud from ten feet away, his pistol aimed at Peter’s face. The second man had already racked the shotgun and pointed it at Peter.
Peter was breathing hard, amped up. One man in front of him, another man to his right. Neither man was likely to miss at that range, even if Peter could get to one of them before he fired. The embankment and ditch limited his flight, locking him
in like a shooting gallery.
He raised his hands back up behind his head.
Fight or flight. Neither one was working.
Without Deacon, the math had changed for the worse.
These people were very good.
The man with the shotgun stared hard at Peter through the holes in his face mask. “Just so you know,” he said, “I don’t care how you get up in that ambulance. You can go on your own, or we can hurt you, or we put you down for good like your friend over there. It’s up to you. But if you don’t piss us off, you got a better chance of walking away from this.”
It was the kind of thing you said to keep a prisoner calm. Give hope for his salvation.
Peter didn’t believe a word of it.
Banjo was hurt. Henry was hurt badly, maybe dead. Now Deacon was dead.
But he just stood there while the fake paramedics hauled Deacon up the side of the ditch by his arms and lifted him into the back of the ambulance.
Held himself still and calm under the unwavering eye of the shotgun, fingers laced behind his head while the paramedic patted him down, took his wallet, keys, and the good folding knife clipped into Peter’s front left pocket.
But he missed the small knife hidden in Peter’s belt buckle.
“No phone?”
“It broke,” Peter said. “Haven’t had time to replace it.”
Peter allowed the man to wrap the plasticuffs around his wrists and snug them tight.
Then the paramedics flanked him, each man with a strong hand on one of his arms as Peter walked up the side of the ditch toward the ambulance.
At the sight of the windowless van interior, the white static sparked up his brainstem like Frankenstein’s nightmare. Amplified by the cuffs, lightning flashed in his head with each step. His heart hammered in his chest, and the muscles in his shoulders tightened like they were being wrapped in steel bands.
His fight-or-flight mechanism was in overdrive. Not appropriate in a crowded grocery store, or at the DMV. But appropriate as hell right now, one or the other.
He pushed it down. Breathe in, he told himself. Breathe out.
He wasn’t ready yet.
For fuck’s sake, keep breathing.
He put one foot on the rear bumper and climbed into the back of the ambulance, while the crackling static silently built into a storm.
—
He distracted his mind by focusing on his prison.
The interior of the ambulance was a white box, maybe seven feet wide and ten long, the surfaces durable and designed to be wiped clean. It smelled faintly of bleach. Narrow boxed-in benches lined each side where the wheel wells bumped in, leaving a wide center aisle. D-rings were let into the walls and floor and benches every few feet, Peter assumed part of the original ambulance equipment deemed not valuable enough to salvage. Or maybe valuable enough to keep.
There was little room to maneuver. Henry lay still and pale on the stretcher, taking up most of the center aisle. His face and neck and T-shirt were wet with his blood, soaked down to the ballistic vest that had done him no good at all.
They’d loaded Deacon onto the bench behind the driver. They’d laid him on his side, leaning against the wall, to fit him on the narrow bench, the hole in his upper chest ragged and red. They’d strapped him in place with utility webbing clipped to the D-rings.
These people were nothing if not organized.
Banjo sat on the passenger-side bench, hands in front, cuffs attached to a D-ring between his knees with an industrial zip-tie. He was hunched and staring at Deacon, muttering something under his breath.
One of the paramedics pointed at the bench beside Banjo. Covered by the clear plastic mask, his face was distorted and strange. “Sit.”
The paramedic was only a few feet away. Peter could do whatever he wanted to the man, but the hijacker with the shotgun would never let him out of the box alive.
Peter sat.
He watched Henry’s face. Had he seen some movement there? He looked at the big man’s chest and saw it move. Yes. Henry was still alive.
The paramedic fastened Peter’s cuffs to a D-ring on the bench with another zip-tie, just like Banjo, then snugged everything tight. Peter still had some play from the movement of the D-ring and the space between the cuffs. He sat up straight, with his back flat against the side of the box. This pulled his wrists down, away from his lap.
His hands were about twelve inches from his belt buckle.
As the paramedic backed out of the box, Peter found himself hoping that the hijackers would simply just lock them in, monitor the prisoners through the steel grate separating the box from the driver’s compartment.
Then the man with the shotgun shouldered his way in and looked around, and Peter knew they wouldn’t get that lucky.
Peter could see him thinking that there wasn’t a good place for him to sit. Peter and Banjo on one bench, Deacon’s body on the other, Henry on the stretcher in the middle.
There was room in one corner next to Peter, but it was close quarters and a prisoner in handcuffs was still dangerous, if he could get himself untethered.
Peter was careful not to smile.
The paramedics had strapped Deacon down toward the front of the box, so there was no place to sit by his head, even if you were inclined to sit at the head of a dead man you yourself had killed. But there was a small space to park at Deacon’s feet, if you weren’t too dainty and didn’t mind being wedged between a dead man’s boots and the wall of a decommissioned ambulance.
The man with the shotgun didn’t seem to mind. Without taking his eyes off Peter, he put one knee against Deacon’s boots, braced his hip against the back of the box, and pushed. Deacon was strapped in enough to keep him on the bench, but not so tightly that he didn’t slide forward ten or twelve inches until the crown of his head hit the front of the ambulance box with a distinct clop.
It reminded Peter of the sound of the lid closing on a well-made tool chest.
Or a coffin.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Under his ski mask, the man with the shotgun moved his mouth in what might have been a smile, and sat himself down at Deacon’s feet, the shotgun held with its butt at his shoulder and the muzzle down. He had good coverage of the prisoners, although the long gun would be hard to maneuver in the small space.
A pistol would have been a better choice, thought Peter.
Another mistake.
He looked out the open rear door. He saw the paramedic lying on his back under the tail end of Henry’s pickup, fishing around in the undercarriage. He scooted back out holding a small plastic box, and Peter knew how they’d figured out Henry’s route. They’d put a locator on the truck, some kind of satellite GPS tracker.
He remembered that when the first car had disappeared, they’d lost track of it on the GPS. So maybe there was also some kind of signal jammer for Heavy Metal’s own GPS tracker.
Had Henry even thought to look for something like that? Peter certainly hadn’t.
Then he heard the rattle of a big diesel and saw the red wrecker backing toward the smashed front of Henry’s pickup. The first hijacker got out and began extending the tow bar.
Now Peter saw the plan in its entirety.
An ambush with exact knowledge of the target’s location. An unmarked police car and a man in a state trooper’s uniform to control the scene. A decommissioned ambulance to haul away the dead and injured prisoners. And a wrecker to remove the evidence. Maybe ten minutes gone so far. By the time they were done, fifteen minutes start to finish.
Everything would disappear.
Which meant that Henry’s crew would have to disappear, too.
The paramedic tucked the locator into his pocket and walked to the rear of the ambulance. “You good?”
The man with the shotgun nodded. “Roger that.”
The paramedic closed and latched the door, and Peter was locked inside that small white box with the static raging like a thunderstorm in his head.
6
Peter heard the police siren blip. Through the grate blocking the driver’s compartment, he saw the flashing blue and red lights of the unmarked car pulling slowly forward. The ambulance lurched into motion behind it, laboring up the verge and back onto the highway. Henry on his stretcher bumped forward to the front of the box. The man with the shotgun had his feet braced and didn’t move.
Using the shoulder, the police car made a U-turn to head back up the mountain. The ambulance followed, its tired springs rocking. Henry’s stretcher now rolled to the back of the box, hitting the doors with a thump. The man with the shotgun might have frowned behind his mask.
They hadn’t locked the wheels, Peter thought. Or maybe the wheels just didn’t lock on that antique stretcher. Maybe that’s what the D-rings were for, to strap it in place. Maybe they’d run out of straps, what with blowing a hole in Deacon and having to secure him.
He began to take deep breaths, thinking of the things the hijackers had done wrong. Breathe in. Breathe out. His head still hurt, but it helped him focus.
“Listen, just tell me the truth,” he said. The taste of copper filled his mouth. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“Y’all shut the fuck up.” Banjo’s eyes were closed. “All right? Just shut the fuck up.”
The man with the shotgun was staring at Peter. “Do as you’re told and nobody else has to die. We didn’t set out to kill anyone. The guy on the stretcher, he hit his head wrong, that’s all. Your friend here?” He patted Deacon’s boots. “Tried to get fancy and it cost him. So don’t get fancy and you’ll be fine.”
“Oh, man,” Peter said, beginning to hyperventilate now. Oxygenating his blood. Letting the static rise up in him, building its charge. “I don’t want to die, I really don’t.”
He glanced down at Henry, strapped onto the gurney, and saw the big man’s eyes open. Saw them slide sideways to look at Peter, then at the man with the shotgun.
Peter slumped down in his seat, the picture of despair as his belt buckle slid within reach of his hands. “I don’t want to die, not like this.” He pounded his feet on the floor like a child having a tantrum, rocking wildly in his seat, using the frantic motion to distract from his hands straining upward against the restraints to catch and release the two-inch blade from the sheath built into the buckle.