Three Shirt Deal (2008)

by Stephen - Scully 07 Cannell

  "Get him in the car," Church ordered.

  Two of the VSL veteranos picked me up and set me into the coach. They covered my bound hands with a jacket and shoved a ball cap on my head, then pushed the car out of the repair building through the curtain. I looked down and saw that the track I was on was about twenty feet off the ground. I was weak, but decided that once I was a few hundred yards from the repair shed, I would find a way to lunge out of the car and drop down the two flights to the ground below. If I didn't land on my head, the worst I would get is some broken bones. However, my plan was instantly rendered useless as Mike Church ran along the landing beside the track, grabbed the rail of the cart and jumped over the side, easing his huge frame down, filling the space beside me.

  "Ready to go coastering, homes?" he grinned.

  Diego and Cisneros continued to push the car along the track that led to the staging area. The giant scaffolding loomed above me. As we neared the boarding platform the crowd noise grew, merging with the occasional roar from the streaking Goliath coaster a few yards off to our left. We were buffeted by the slipstream as it passed.

  Suddenly, I started to convulse. I couldn't control my lower body. My legs cramped and I spasmed violently.

  "Cono! Que te pasa?" Church blurted. "Do that again, I'm gonna slit you right here." He flipped open a four-inch serrated blade and stuck it in a spot between my ribs on the left side right next to my heart. I could feel the sharp point poking my skin.

  Our car was pushed in front of a line of empty carts. Diego and Cisneros hooked us to the next empty train, which would soon be filled with waiting passengers. We were in the first car. Church yanked a knit watch cap from his pocket and pulled it low above his eyes. Then he donned a pair of dark glasses and settled back in the seat, the knife still poking between my ribs. I felt the hooks under the roller-coaster suddenly engage the car and we began to click forward toward the loading ramp.

  When the car reached the white boarding line, the train stopped. One of the ride captains came up and frowned down at us. "How'd you get in there, man? You gotta board through the load line."

  "We work the refit shed, dude. Makin' a test run. Gotta make sure this car don't still have no brake drag." Church showed the man his old, plastic maintenance badge. The loader barely glanced at it before he turned to check the other passengers who were now climbing into the cars.

  I suddenly realized that his might actually work. Then, before I could come up with any kind of new escape plan, a loud bell rang and the cars were again engaged from below and clicked up the wooden scaffold, pulled up by a chain toward the first drop on the ride.

  As we ascended the wall of white scaffolding Church used the serrated pocketknife to cut off the plastic ties binding my wrists, then put the knife back between my ribs. I reached out with white knuckles and gripped the useless safety bar that rattled uselessly in front of me. There was nothing I could do now--nowhere I could go. I was too high to jump. If I yelled out, I knew he would shove that knife into my side, piercing my heart. As the cars inched up the near vertical incline, the park fell away below us. Masses of people swarmed like ants at the base of the ride. Then we were at the summit of the first drop.

  "Man, I love this fucking coaster!" Church said, his face an ugly mask of perverse delight.

  Another loud bell rang.

  Then the car launched forward and locked into place at the top of the ride. I was suddenly looking over the edge, straight down the track, at the pavement over ninety feet below.

  Chapter 53.

  THE BRAKES RELEASED AND THE GROUND RUSHED UP AT US. I

  could barely keep from flying out of the coach and desperately gripped the safety bar clattering in its metal housing. Church sat beside me grinning as the train plummeted straight down toward the ground. I tried to use my knees to wedge myself tighter into the car, but could get very little purchase. We hit the bottom of the first dip and the car lurched dangerously into a right turn going over sixty miles per hour. The jolt almost threw me out of the coach. We were pulling at least two G's as we whipped through the first turn.

  Mike Church craned around theatrically and shouted at the people in the car behind us. "Hey! This safety bar is loose!"

  The guy riding behind us yelled, "Huh?"

  The car began to bank left, gathering speed heading into a looping turn along the wooden track approaching the double bumps.

  "This bar is out! It's out!" Church screamed. Then, to prove it, he picked it out of its housing and it flew from his hands, falling to the ground below us.

  I looked frantically around the inside the coach for something to hold on to and spotted a place where the metal frame had separated from the fuselage. Just then, the coaster whipped around another curve going at least sixty, rocketing toward the double bumps ahead. I was vibrating so hard in the seat, I was barely able to focus on the track. That's when the airbrakes whooshed loudly and the train suddenly slowed.

  "Adios, motherfucker," Church said and hit me with a powerful right hand to the ribcage.

  I doubled over, gasping for air. The coaster continued to slow as he leapt out of the car and hit the little guardrail on the side of the track. He held on as the car rumbled past, then released and dropped about twelve feet to the pavement below.

  I fought to catch my breath as the coaster traveled over the double bumps and began the steep ascent to the top of the next huge scaffolding heading for the final, gut-churning drop.

  We were almost forty feet up before I got my head out from between my knees. I'd been so busy gasping for air, I'd missed my chance to bail. I pulled off my belt and managed to loop it through the separation I'd spotted between the fuselage and the metal frame. But by then, Colossus had reached the peak of the scaffold and was cresting toward the big drop. It lurched and stopped at the very top and I was looking down twelve stories.

  "Oh, shit," I muttered as I wrapped my belt around my right wrist and gripped it tight.

  The airbrakes whooshed off and we catapulted straight down the vertical track toward the ground. My body became weightless and for a few seconds I was floating freely around inside the car tethered only by my belt. We hit the bottom of the drop and banked violently to the right. I was sucked suddenly over the side of the car and was hanging on outside, being pulled at breakneck speed, perilously close to death.

  "The fuck?" the guy in the car behind me gasped as he watched me dangling outside the car.

  I held on to my belt in a death grip as the train lurched into a tight left-hand turn. Centrifugal force pinned me hard against the outside of the car's fuselage. My feet banged into the face of the guy behind as I struggled desperately to hang on. Then I saw a metal superstructure coming up at seventy miles an hour. In seconds, I was going to be cut in two by the support beam. I lunged for the car, pulling with all my strength, and tumbled inside as the scaffolding flashed by an instant later.

  In another forty or fifty seconds the airbrakes hissed and we began to slow until we were back at the staging area where it had all started.

  "You alright, man?" the guy behind me shouted.

  Fuck no, I thought but didn't answer.

  My forehead was split open and fluid was oozing from all of my broken blisters. I had a half-inch-deep knife wound in my left side and it felt as if Church had broken a couple of ribs.

  Aside from that, I was peachy, but boy was I pissed.

  Chapter 54.

  THE NEXT THING I KNEW, I WAS UP TO MY ASS IN PARK EMERgency staff.

  "LAPD. There's just been an attempt on my life," I said, but nobody responded.

  "The bar arm was broken," the guy who'd been in the car behind me contributed. He had been less than three feet away but because of the wild ride had misread the entire murder attempt.

  "Get me some park police officers," I ordered.

  But then I saw Brian Devine sprinting between Colossus and Goliath, heading toward the main gate. I felt like hell, but anger and adrenaline formed some kind of ungodl
y cocktail in my brain. I found myself pushing the park medic aside and struggling to my feet.

  "You've got to lie down, sir. You're gonna go into shock," he said.

  Alarms and sirens were going off all around me while an ambulance was trying to nose toward us through the milling crowd. I began to stumble down the exit stairs, intent on following Lt. Devine, who was almost at the end of the walkway that ran between the two giant coasters. He looked back as he ran, shocked that I was not only still alive, but coming after him like a creature in the last reel of a horror movie. At the bottom of the stairs, I lost him in the crowd, but a golf cart pulled up with a park security cop behind the wheel. I reached for my badge case.

  "LAPD!"

  "That ambulance needs to take you to the hospital," the security guard said.

  "Which way's the front gate? We've got to stop that guy." Devine had already disappeared in the crowd, so the security guard had no idea what I was talking about. He just stared in disbelief.

  "Looks worse than it is," I said to break him out of it.

  He'd vapor-locked. I pulled him from the cart, slipped behind the wheel, and floored it.

  "Hey!" he shouted, and ran after me. But I was moving too fast and soon left him behind.

  I didn't know what road hooked up to what. I headed west toward where I thought the front gate was located. But the roads looped and turned, and soon I found myself driving down a path that veered east toward a thick stand of trees under another massive pipe track coaster, which appeared to span half the park. This one was a unique piece of physical torture called Superman the Escape.

  The road was a dead end. I was frantically trying to turn the golf cart around in the confined space when a loud electronic voice announced, "Prepare to launch." Seconds later, a car full of screaming joyriders streaked by overhead at almost one hundred miles an hour, powered by huge positive/negative electromagnets that hummed loudly under the track allowing the coaster to ride on a force field of negative polarity, reducing friction while increasing speed.

  I was directly beneath the ride, and as the train screamed by overhead, it blew my hair straight up in its powerful slipstream. The startling force was so great, and the screaming passengers so loud, that I lost control of the cart and swerved into the metal housing on the side of one of the huge electromagnets, and knocked the wheels on the golf cart out of alignment. Half a mile away, I saw the Superman cart climb straight up a vertical tower until it slowed to a stop almost at the top and then began to fall backwards down the track, heading straight back toward me. A few seconds later it again streaked by overhead.

  I jumped out of the golf cart and started to run from underneath the ride. But something was wrong. I felt weak, dizzy. I couldn't coordinate. Was this the beginning stages of shock? Then just when it seemed things couldn't get much worse, Brian Devine stepped away from the side of one of the nearby electromagnets. Apparently he had doubled back to finish the job that Mike Church had started.

  There was a large 9mm automatic in his hand. He fired and, using what strength I had left, I dove inside the golf cart just as the bullet crashed into the metal housing on the coaster magnet right above my head. Using my hand on the golf cart's throttle, I tried to maneuver the damn thing out of the line of fire. But the wheels were jammed. It wasn't going anywhere. Devine was still firing rounds at me. The 9mm slugs were easily punching holes into the flimsy plastic sides of the cart. The only thing that was saving me was the fact that he couldn't see where I was on the floor of the little vehicle.

  "You're a resilient motherfucker, I'll give you that much," Devine shouted. He had his gun out in front of him, and began circling closer to the cart to find me.

  I was suddenly filled with mind-numbing anger. Enough was enough. How much of this shit was I supposed to takei

  My body looked so destroyed that Devine probably didn't see me as much of a threat. He hadn't contemplated the suicidal rage that now drove me. When he was ten feet away, I launched myself at him, hitting him high in the chest. His Beretta went off, firing wide. I jumped on top of him, violently pummeling him with both hands. In seconds, two of his teeth were out and a huge gash had opened over his left eye.

  He rolled away, then stumbled to his feet still holding the gun. I was seconds from death as he pointed the barrel at me.

  "Prepare to launch," the metallic voice announced. Just as Devine was about to fire, the ride flew by overhead, blasting us with its powerful slipstream and forty screaming riders. Devine glanced up, startled. That split-second saved me.

  One of us is going down, I thought, remembering my promise as I launched myself directly at his chest. But before I hit him, a strange thing happened. Some unseen force lifted him right out of his shiny black loafers and threw him five feet in the air backwards away from me, landing him on his ass. He sat there staring at me in startled confusion as a bright red stain began to blossom on the front of his shirt. He struggled up to his knees, looking down at his bloody chest, holding both hands over the widening red stain before his expression changed and he finally seemed to get it. He'd been shot. His life was over.

  "Son of a bitch," he said in disbelief, then pitched forward, facedown, at my feet.

  My beautiful wife was standing in the road next to one of the park security carts. She was still crouched low in her shooting stance, legs wide, her silver-plated Astra nine clutched in front of her with both hands.

  Suddenly, all my energy left me as I slumped to the ground.

  "This is an emergency. Send an ambulance to Building Six under the Superman ride," I heard her say into a park walkie-talkie.

  Then Alexa rushed up and knelt down, cradling my head in her lap. I must have finally gone into shock as she stroked my head and looked down at me, because her beautiful blue eyes were the last thing I remembered seeing.

  Chapter 55.

  WHEN I WOKE, I WAS IN ANOTHER HOSPITAL ROOM. THIS TIME I was lying inside a parabolic chamber filled with Freon, which was artificially lowering my body temperature. This was unacceptable. This had been happening way too often. The docs said I had gone into shock but now, several hours later, I was told I was stable.

  Alexa hovered nearby and Chooch and Delfina arrived. Shortly after midnight they moved me out of ICU into a regular hospital room. My body was slathered in some kind of foul-smelling ointment. I was told that the burns were mostly first degree with a few second-degree spots on my chest and arms. My survival was assured.

  Brian Devine, on the other hand, had gotten his ticket punched. I'd finally put that unreasoning asshole on the ark. They'd scraped his body up from the pavement where Alexa shot him and an ambulance carted off his remains to the coroner's office in Sylmar. Over the next hour, Alexa filled me in on what happened. Mike Church and his posse were apprehended in the Six Flags parking lot but Wade Wyatt was in the wind. Alexa had put out a BOLO, so hopefully he'd be picked up before he could take advantage of his powerful father's connections and get out of the country to some rum-soaked paradise with no extradition treaty, like Cuba.

  Alexa told me that when I didn't come back from my run, she went looking for me. A woman on the Venice bike path told her she'd seen an unconscious runner being loaded into a van by two Hispanic men.

  Alexa and Jeb Calloway immediately put the Communications Division to work on the problem. She got Mike Church's cell phone number through AT&T and started a pod track, which was a form of technology that allowed us to key in on a particular cell phone. Transmitters broadcast calls from area pods located all over the city. These pods store all the numbers they transmit. Communications scanned in the numbers from Church's cell and picked up a call from his phone that went through the Venice pod at eight-fifty-five p. M. The next transmission was out near Sunland, then Santa Clarita. The track of calls indicated Church was using his cell while heading northeast on the freeway. Alexa and Jeb mobilized two SWAT teams and headed in the direction of the transmissions.

  The last call was traced to the pod right in t
he parking lot at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

  "I can't believe how close we came to not getting there in time," Alexa said.

  "Where does it go from here?" I asked, my head still full of mist.

  "It's going to take a day or so to sort it all out," she said. "Devine is dead and Church and his homies are all lawyering up. Without Wade Wyatt to turn state's evidence, we still don't have anything that directly links any of this to Tito Morales. You can bet neither Church nor his vato posse are going to rat Tito out. Gang ethics. It looks like Morales might actually squeak through this without getting tagged."

  "Then he's still in a position to argue against Tru getting a new trial," I said.

  "We gotta go over his head, talk to Chase Beal, the district attorney," she answered. "But first I need to set up a meeting with Tito, the Chief, and Jane Sasso. I need to get Morales on the record before I go to the D. A. Jane needs to set up a new investigation into Olivia Hickman's murder for us to have any chance of getting that writ. That skinny bitch better come through this time."

  I had my doubts. It had been a long, torturous journey. If Wade Wyatt got out of the country and Church and the VSLs kept quiet, Tito was in the clear and Tru Hickman was probably going to be stuck doing life in Corcoran. Not a very rewarding outcome to a very stressful three weeks.

  As we talked, Alexa's cell phone rang. "Just a minute," she said and looked over at me. "I've got to take this outside. Be right back."

  When she was gone I was distressed that there were still things she felt she couldn't say in my presence. But then the door opened, and I knew why she'd left.

  Secada stood there looking a little less vivid and a lot thinner. She walked into the room, then sat on the edge of my bed.