Pekoe Most Poison
Page 26
Up to the top floor they’d been led by the nervous owner, and then down a long hallway lit with bare bulbs. They’d ghosted past small cramped dormitory rooms that held two and three sets of narrow bunk beds, finally emerging in this end room with a lumpy bed and smells of rancid cooking oil and mouse droppings. A room with a single window that afforded the perfect prospect of the slow rolling Mississippi River and, beyond it, the University of Minnesota Hospital complex.
• • •
The helicopter swept in from the north, decelerating to approximately five knots. The Bell Jet Ranger held two pilots who’d made this run a hundred times before. They’d just dropped out of an indigo sky scattered with bright stars, like jacks strewn haphazardly across a dark-blue cashmere blanket. A mile to their right, Minneapolis skyscrapers twinkled in the night. The IDS tower, Capella Tower, Wells Fargo Center, as well as a dozen high-rise luxury condominiums. Closer still was the newly constructed football stadium, raking the skyline with its harsh, unforgiving wall of reflective glass.
The chief pilot, Captain Sam Buell, had his hands on the cyclic stick, his feet working the rudder pedals. He was carrying no emergency patients tonight, just medical cargo he’d picked up in Madison, Wisconsin. So an easy run for Buell, who was looking forward to spending the night with his girlfriend who lived in a nearby North Loop condo. She was an assistant producer at a TV station, a hot chick with a killer body and a healthy appetite for experimental sex. She had no clue that Buell had a pregnant wife waiting for him back home. Or if she’d figured it out, she didn’t much care.
Buell’s feet worked the pedals as he swung the helo around in a wide arc over the turgid Mississippi. He was preparing for their final approach. All he had to do now was coast in slowly and drop the skids. The landing zone, with its sixteen green perimeter lights, shone like a Christmas tree. No problem there.
“Looking good,” his copilot, Josh Ansel, said. “Ten-degree angle, LZ dead ahead. Almost there.” Ansel was young and unmarried so he might be hitting the clubs tonight. First Avenue, where Soul Asylum and Prince got their start. Like that.
Buell hovered the Bell 407 over the dark ribbon of river as easy as a giant bubble floating on a summer breeze. He was just about to throttle back and adjust his airspeed and pitch when a tiny flash, no bigger than a lightning bug, caught his eye.
Buell frowned, concerned that someone might be aiming a laser pointer directly at his windshield. There were dormitories close by, jammed right to the edge of the towering riverbank, so there was always the chance some dumb-ass kid would pick him out as a target.
But dumb-ass kids were the least of Captain Buell’s problems at this moment. The rocket slammed into his helicopter with an angry hiss, piercing the metal skin, pulverizing the gearbox, sending the bird into a perilous and lethal spin. In the darkened cockpit, with the hydraulics gone, sensor gauges, warning lights, and control switches all went crazy. Ansel screamed in fear, or maybe it was pain from the raging inferno that suddenly engulfed him.
And when the big explosion came—a riotous event of incandescent shrapnel—Ansel was already gone, bones and flesh sizzled into an unrecognizable carcass. Buell had maybe a split second longer, time for a fleeting regret about a baby he’d never see.
• • •
Two students walking back from Stoll’s Bar in Stadium Village witnessed the eruption overhead. A raging, pulsing beacon that looked as if a big-ass Saturn rocket had just blown up in space.
“Holy shit!” one of the men cried as the remains of the flaming bubble jerked and throbbed in the air and then, like an angry demon cast out of the bowels of Hell, hurtled downward in a furious arc, screaming directly toward them. The two men had barely the presence of mind to dive beneath a bus shelter before sheets of fire and twisted hunks of metal rained down upon them.
Nearby, on Washington Avenue, a bus was hit by an enormous fireball of white-hot metal that shattered the windshield and sent it crashing into a light standard. A rotor spun free of the plummeting debris and carved its way into the side of the chemistry building. More debris rained down as students returning from Walter Library, a Chekhov play at Northrup Auditorium, and a French film festival at the Bell Museum, all began to shriek in terror. A minute later, a dozen sirens cranked up to join the unholy cacophony.
Laura Childs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Tea Shop Mysteries, the Scrapbooking Mysteries, and the Cackleberry Club Mysteries. In her previous life, she was CEO of her own marketing firm, authored several screenplays, and produced a reality TV show. She is married to Dr. Bob, a professor of Chinese art history; enjoys travel; and has two Shar-Peis. Visit her website at laurachilds.com.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.