Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  I didn't know where the other tank had gone.

  T he binoculars still at his eyes, Sam yelled, "He's turning the rack this way. Everybody run!"

  The steel rack was now pointing right at us, the blunt end of the remaining tanks shining brightly like polished coins.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Ramp launched three tanks in rapid succession. Cops, firefighters, and paramedics scattered like ants. I was pinned by two Denver Police patrol cars. My only route to safety was following Sam across the road toward the front end of the parked flatbed truck. Ramp couldn't rotate the rack that far-if he did, the cab would interfere with the launch of any more tanks.

  I could feel the impact of one of the newly launched tanks as it crashed into a patrol car behind me. The concussion was so intense that I almost fell to the asphalt as I sprinted after Sam.

  The patrol car burst into flames. A second or two later the whole thing ignited like a bomb as the fire reached the fuel in the gas tank.

  Sam and I were enveloped in heat; the force of the explosion threw us to the ground. We crawled the rest of the way across the street and crouched out of sight in front of Ramp's truck. I looked back to discover that the other two tanks had made it all the way across Broadway and impaled themselves in the façade of the Philip Johnson-designed Denver Public Library.

  I tried to find Rivera in the chaos. I couldn't spot him.

  Sam said, "He only has two tanks left."

  A new roar filled the air and another rocket left the launcher. Sam held up his index finger and mouthed, "One."

  CHAPTER 60

  M y instinct was to turn my head to follow the trajectory of the missile as it lifted from the back of the truck. But Sam held my face firmly with both his hands, forcing me to stare into his eyes. As the roar of the newly launched tank diminished, he said, "I'm going to shoot him, then I'm going to compress the switch on his foot. You're going to press the button on his hand every five seconds until the bomb squad tells you to stop. You are not going to hold it down. Every five seconds. You got it?"

  I nodded.

  "You're sure?"

  I nodded again.

  He moved around to the passenger side of the truck. I followed him.

  Ramp turned just as Sam was leveling his weapon. Ramp's eyes were soft and inviting, at once disbelieving and trusting. I sensed that he knew what was about to happen, and that he welcomed it. My ears were so overwhelmed by the hissing gases and the fomenting chaos that I'm not sure I even heard the explosion from Sam's handgun. But I think I saw a dark hole emerge three inches below the collar line and two inches left of center on Ramp's chest.

  Ramp's face registered no surprise before he fell.

  Sam screamed, "Alan, now! Every five seconds. Count out loud so I can hear you."

  Ramp had collapsed into an awkward heap in the confined space between the steel rack that had been full of tanks and the big metal equipment box. Sam and I were bumping into each other, clawing at Ramp's limbs, desperate to find the correct hand and the correct foot.

  Sam yelled, "I got his foot! I have the switch."

  Ramp's right hand was pinned beneath his body, which seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. I yanked at his elbow. It didn't free his hand.

  "You got it?" cried Sam.

  I didn't answer. I put all my weight into another tug on Ramp's elbow. In my head I was counting to ten and was already at eleven.

  Ramp's hand came free.

  I traced down his wrist, turned his hand palm up, and pressed maniacally with my thumb.

  The red button was gone.

  "It's gone."

  "What do you mean it's gone?"

  "It's gone."

  "Get Lucy and get out of here. Do it! Now!"

  Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

  I crawled backward off of Ramp's body and almost fell before I ripped open the door to the truck. Lucy was huddled in the footwell on the passenger side. Her eyes were streaked red and tears stained her cheeks. As she saw me, she pushed herself up onto the seat. I raised her over my shoulder in a fireman's carry and ran north on Broadway, waiting for an explosion to sever Lucy's body and end my life.

  I screamed, "Bomb squad! Bomb squad! Over here! Bomb squad!" until Lucy and I were just inside the taped perimeter near Fourteenth Street. But when I arrived at that spot and looked around, I realized we were alone.

  The aftermath of the impact of the last few tanks that Ramp had launched and the destruction caused by the exploding patrol car had created enough carnage and confusion to occupy all the emergency personnel on the scene.

  I stood Lucy on the sidewalk at Fourteenth and Broadway and stared at her restraints. She was yelling something at me as I tugged at her gag.

  She coughed. "That's a shaped charge on my chest. It's not wired to me. It takes a radio signal to set it off. Get it off of me!"

  I examined the bulky pack on her chest.

  She implored me, "It's just taped on. Take it off! Take it off of me!"

  I looked around once again for someone wearing a windbreaker that said "Bomb Squad." No one was coming to help us.

  I thought of Sam, contorted in the truck, firmly maintaining pressure on the button on the bottom of Ramp's boot.

  Then I began to unwrap the duct tape that secured the package on Lucy's chest. Of course, my fingers shook. Of course, the tape tore where it shouldn't. Of course, I heard ticking even though my head knew that this device wasn't timed.

  I could barely see through the images of Grace that were flooding my consciousness and the sweat that was dripping into my eyes.

  Finally I had the thing in my hands. It was heavy for its size. My instinct was to twirl into a discus thrower's motion and throw the thing as far away as I could. Instead, I sat it gingerly onto the concrete as though it were a sleeping baby. Then I lifted Lucy into my arms and ran north down Broadway. I put her down in the shadows of the Veteran's Memorial and sprinted back toward Sam, making a wide arc around the shaped charge on the sidewalk.

  A hundred feet from him, I yelled, "She's safe, Sam! The bomb is off her chest."

  "I can let go?"

  "Yeah. The device is back there, on the far corner. But stay down. It's a big thing."

  "That's it? There?"

  "Yes."

  "Nobody's near it?"

  "No."

  He held his hands high in the air so I could see that he'd released the switch on Ramp's boot.

  I counted to ten. When I got to fourteen, the charge on the corner exploded.

  CHAPTER 61

  T he three of us didn't have much to do.

  By the time Sam and I had freed Lucy from her restraints and the three of us checked each other for injury and hugged each other about twenty times, the volume of emergency personnel on Broadway made our presence superfluous.

  We sat on the lawn in front of the state capitol. Across from us the distant Rockies peeked out above Civic Center Park. Ambulances were streaming from the plaza in front of the Supreme Court Building in the direction of Denver Health Medical Center and Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital.

  A small group of cops hovered around the flatbed truck. They'd found Ramp's body.

  "How did Ramp do it?" I asked. "Launch all those tanks? Does either of you know how he did it?"

  "He had small charges on the valves," Lucy said. "When he set them off, the valves blew off the tanks and the compressed gases started to escape out the opening. It was just like a rocket nozzle. He modified the rack himself. When he came back inside the truck, he told me all about it."

  "The tanks are under that much pressure?"

  She shrugged. "He told me that he had them pressurized to almost three thousand pounds per square inch. Think of the air coming out of a balloon."

  Sam shook his head at the thought. "Those tanks weigh a ton. It would be like being hit by a truck on the freeway."

  I still had my cell phone. I used it to call Lauren to see how she was doing-fine-and to tell her that the three
of us were safe. She was near panic, having watched the morning's events unroll on television. Sam asked me to have Lauren call his wife, too.

  When Lauren and I were through, I offered the phone to Lucy. "Want to call your fiancé?"

  In a quick flash something important transpired in her thinking. In another circumstance I might have asked her about it. But not then. She shook her head. "No, thanks." To Sam, she said, "They probably aren't going to let me go home, are they?"

  Sam said, "The Denver cops?"

  Lucy nodded.

  "No. I doubt it, Luce. I doubt it. They're going to want to talk to you about your time with that kid. Given your circumstances, you should probably have a lawyer with you. They're going to want to talk to us, too, Alan."

  Lucy asked, "Why?"

  Sam seemed to have trouble forcing his lips apart to say, "I'm the one who shot him over there. The kid."

  Lucy said, "Oh." Her eyes widened. "I thought it was a sharpshooter." She lowered her face and rested her chin on her fists. I thought she looked like she was about to cry. "It's kind of crazy, I know, but I… liked him. Jason. I liked him. If there was more time, I think I could've talked him out of it. He wasn't evil, Sam. He wasn't crazy, he was…"

  Sam said, "He killed people, Lucy. He murdered innocent people. What he did was senseless and vicious."

  "He had reasons, Sam. He-"

  "I don't care about his reasons. He murdered innocent people. That's all we need to know."

  "I know what he did, Sam. And I guess that means I should hate him. We're not supposed to have sympathy for kids who do what he did. But I don't hate him. I'm sorry he's dead."

  Sam opened his mouth to argue with her some more. She saw it coming and reached out and touched his lips with her index finger. He swallowed his words. I could tell that they didn't go down easily.

  She turned toward me and her face fell into shadow. "Is Cozy dead, too, Alan? Ramp told me that the girl set off a bomb at his office this morning."

  "Last we heard, he was getting out of surgery," I said. "Broken bone in his neck. Lauren was there, too, in the building. She's okay, a concussion."

  Lucy looked at Sam, not me. "Will Cozy be all right?"

  Sam lifted his shoulders and shook his head. He didn't know. I was thinking that he hadn't totally given up arguing with Lucy about Ramp.

  Again, I offered the phone to Lucy. I said, "You know, you don't have to cooperate with them. Maybe you should talk to Lauren and get some legal advice before you go over there."

  Sam glared at me.

  "No," she said. "I don't need a lawyer with me. I'm a cop, right? I was a hostage, right?" She stood up. "I need to pee. Then let's go find somebody in charge. I want to get this over with and go home."

  The three of us walked in the direction of the smoldering patrol car. Sam held his shield out in front of him the whole way.

  Lucy took my hand. She leaned over and her lips were so close to my ear I could feel the air moving between us as she said, "I liked him a lot."

  CHAPTER 62

  O ver the next couple of days, Sam kept me informed about the progress of the investigation in Denver. I didn't know whether he was getting his information from Rivera or from Walter or from somebody named Lou. I didn't ask, and I didn't really care. I appreciated not having to rely on the reports on the local news.

  R amp, it turned out, had been out of explosives. The explosives vault at his grandmother's ranch near Agate was totally cleaned out.

  Much of what he had threatened at the Supreme Court Building was a ruse. The Denver Police Bomb Squad found no additional devices hidden in the building. In fact, the second device that was discovered at Red Rocks turned out to be a fake that was intended to draw bomb disposal resources away from the city. No secondary devices were found at any of the earlier bomb sites. All three devices that were recovered at East High School were dummies.

  The gas cylinders that Ramp had launched at the Supreme Court had done a lot of damage. One justice had died, two others had been severely injured. The exploding patrol car had killed one cop and burned three others. A woman watching the drama from a Denver Public Library window had been badly injured by debris sent flying by the tank that had impacted there.

  The earlier bombs had mostly hit their marks. Two were dead in the amusement ride at Elitch's; two more were dead in the offices at Coors Field. The target at Union Station had escaped injury because she was down the hall in the bathroom when the bomb went off in her second-floor studio.

  I t was still unclear whether Ramp would get his wish about public dialogue.

  At first, the attention of the media was mostly on the carnage. The seemingly endless news footage of the final conflagration on Broadway proved to be enough of a magnet to attract temporary nonstop national and local coverage of Ramp's Rampage. That's what the event had been nicknamed by the loud blond guy who did Hardball on cable, and the moniker had stuck to the events like a bad cold.

  Marin's rape, Leo Bigg's retaliation on the rapist, and Ramp's mother's tragic death were all chronicled and rechronicled. Herbert Ramp's role in the demolition of Las Vegas was broadcast and rebroadcast for no other reason, it seemed, than that the tape was available and that it was pretty spectacular to watch the hotels fall down all over again.

  CHAPTER 63

  L ucy was holding two pine twigs like chopsticks to scratch at the rough granite boulder that we were sitting on. She said, "There are some things in life that Sam can't forgive. I suspect this is one."

  "He's a good friend, Lucy. I think you can trust him."

  "It's not about trust, Alan," she explained. "You know him. Sammy has a simple view of the world. Simple in a good way. Uncomplicated. He's not an imaginative person. He still gets surprised at what's up on the screen when he goes to the movies. On his own, his mind would never travel down the road where I would have to take him. Not on his own, no way. And the truth is, he doesn't belong there. He'd try to understand what I did, why I did it. He'd try to make sense of it because he's a good guy. But he wouldn't be able to understand, not really. As much as he's been exposed to in life, he's still an innocent in some ways. To forgive me he'd have to find a way to understand what I did. And he could never ever do that."

  I still didn't know what it was that Lucy had done, nor was I sure she was planning on telling me. I suspected that her secret had to do with Royal Peterson's murder, but I didn't know whether it was as simple as explaining why she had been at his house that night or whether it was as complicated as explaining why she had killed him. I did know that I was maximally ambivalent about hearing it, whatever it was. My recent experience had taught me that some confidences of this nature, maybe most confidences of this nature, weren't worth knowing. The burden of the knowledge was often greater than any benefit that accrued from harboring the private facts.

  L ucy and I had run into each other while visiting Cozy as he was recuperating at his Victorian on Maxwell Street. It was just before noon a couple of days after the morning of bombs in Denver, and Cozy was home from the hospital, though he was still far from agile. His neck was immobilized in a plastic structure that looked as though it had once been part of an architectural model for a single-span suspension bridge.

  As we left the house together, Lucy told me she would like to talk and asked if I had a few minutes for her. When I said I did, she led me to her red Volvo and drove us up Flagstaff, taking the sharp curves up the mountainside carefully, as though she was fearful that a tire on her car was about to blow.

  The extension of Baseline that twisted up Flagstaff Mountain was the steepest and most curvaceous paved route out of Boulder. Vehicles over thirty feet in length were banned because they couldn't maneuver the curves. The upside was that a minute after passing the Chautauqua complex on Baseline, Lucy and I were afforded the kind of views that in most environs were available only to birds.

  "You come up here often?" she asked me.

  I shook my head and was going to leave it a
t that until I realized that Lucy would have to take her eyes from the road to read my head motion. I quickly added, "No, but maybe I should." The truth was that I found the view from the high foothills disconcerting. The perspective from the mountains toward the east was too infinite for my comfort, the Great Plains spreading out like a petrified ocean. I preferred the view from my house toward the west, believing that, visually, Colorado was a place that should be experienced either in the mountains or toward the mountains, but not away from the mountains. This vista, from peaks to plains, was too much like looking at the state from the rear-facing third seat in my parents' old station wagon.

  "I do," she said. "Sometimes I like to be above it all."

  She continued to drive, taking us high above the Flagstaff House Restaurant. I was beginning to suspect that our destination was the summer 2000 burn near Gross Reservoir until she pulled the car to a stop in a clearing off the shoulder of the narrow road, touched me on the leg, and said, "Come on, this way."

  I followed her out of the car and down a dusty path that wound around sharp rock outcroppings and dodged rugged ponderosa pines.

  An old-timer had once told me that Boulder had been named by the first pioneer who ever tried to put a shovel into the dirt. The old-timer then laughed and said he knew the story was apocryphal because if it had really happened that way, the town would be called Oh Shit.

  He hadn't actually said "apocryphal." He'd said "bullcrap."

  I joined Lucy as she scrambled across a rough slab of granite and perched on the edge of a boulder the size of a two-car garage. As she lowered herself to a squat, I examined the position she'd assumed and knew that I hadn't managed that particular posture in about ten years. Maybe fifteen. I sat on my butt and side-by-side we gazed at the oasis that the city of Boulder forms on the border of the endless prairie. We were a little too close to the edge of the cliff for my comfort. My thoughts were rarely far from my daughter anymore, and I was thinking that I wouldn't allow Grace to sit as close to the edge as we were.