Stephen White - Warning Signs

She didn't look over. "Yeah, a little bit. The brain mud is better. I'm hoping it was a false alarm."

I swallowed. "But you're not sure?"

"Am I sure? With this disease? Sorry, sweetie. Hopeful is as optimistic as it gets, I'm afraid. The light's green."

After I'd heard the words I'd been praying for, my heart felt lighter as I ignored the horns honking behind me. A couple of minutes later I pulled into an empty parking space twenty or thirty feet from the lobby door of the Colorado Building.

Lauren kissed me and said, "I wish we had time for coffee. I'd love to talk more about last night."

"I have time for coffee. Starbucks is right around the corner. You know, it's the one where Paul Bigg never worked."

"I don't have time, babe, I'm sorry." She cracked open the door and added, "My car should be ready today."

"I'll give you a ride later to pick it up."

"Don't worry," she told me. "I'll get a ride from Cozy or I'll call a cab."

I spotted Cozy approaching from the north, taking long strides down the sidewalk on Fourteenth from the Pearl Street Mall. He had the kind of chin-in-the-air posture and regal gait that would have looked perfectly natural had he been tapping the sharp end of an umbrella on the sidewalk beside him. I pointed at him. "Cozy's hoofing it today," I told my wife.

We kissed again. "A cab, then. We'll talk later," she said, and hopped out of the car with her briefcase.

She waited for Cozy to join her on the sidewalk.

I checked the time and watched Lauren and Cozy disappear into the front door of the Colorado Building.

I adjusted the volume on the radio and slid the gearshift into reverse. When I looked up to check my rearview mirror again, a bakery truck that had been idling behind me was pulling forward a few feet so that I could get out.

Before I started backing up, I noticed with amazement and wonder that red bricks had begun raining off the side of the Colorado Building, about halfway up its eight-story height.

The glass doors at the lobby entrance blew apart and a muffled roar reached my ears. The car rocked gently as though a passerby had bumped against the fender.

A second or two passed before the thought careened into my head like a drunk turning a corner at high speed:

There's another bomb. That lawyer.

Lauren. Cozy.

Those lawyers.

I threw thegearshift into park and popped out of the car in a single motion.

There's another bomb. That lawyer.

Lauren.

Two steps toward the main doors. Frosty kernels of safety glass sprinkled the sidewalk in front of the building. The brick veneer that had adorned the sheer wall high above the lobby continued to tumble to the concrete alley, falling like bloody hail.

What I noticed from the corner of my eye was the bandage. If it weren't for the bandage, I don't think the fact that a young woman with her head down was walking from the lobby of the building would have registered in my consciousness. The bandaged person climbed into the driver's seat of a white Dodge Neon. She was wearing a floppy hat and sunglasses, and the steel-blue reflection of the lenses mirrored the cold terror I'd begun feeling in my soul.

The fresh white bandage had a tiny stain at the lower edge, close to her nose. The stain was rusty-red and shaped like a crescent moon.

Marin Bigg.

Almost without thinking, I slowed my run to a gentle walk and retreated between the cars toward the street. I climbed into the bakery truck, slid behind the wheel, and dropped it into gear, allowing the big van to roll forward about twenty-five feet until it blocked the rear end of the white Dodge Neon. Pocketing the keys, I climbed down from the truck, and jogged back to the sidewalk.

Sirens had begun to fill the air in downtown Boulder, the shrill squeals reflecting off the faces of the taller buildings until the urgent sounds were squeezed tighter and tighter.

The sirens were apparently Marin's cue to exit the scene. I watched her begin to back up her car. She was still leaning forward on her seat, gazing skyward, watching to see if the fat red bricks would continue to rain from the sky, so she wasn't looking behind her as she backed up. She ran smack into the bakery truck. The impact rocked both vehicles. She'd hit it pretty good.

The impact stunned her. She pulled off her reflective shades and stuffed one of the earpieces between her teeth while she shook her head. Shock and panic bubbled up into her eyes.

Solitary cop cars were approaching down the alley from both the east and the west. The cop coming in from Thirteenth skidded to a stop before his vehicle was directly below the slowing cascade of tumbling bricks. A cop hopped out of the passenger side waving his arms at me. He yelled for me to get farther away from the building.

Marin, too, was climbing out of her car. I walked three steps until I blocked her path to the sidewalk and said, "I don't think you're going anywhere, Marin."

She looked at me as though she didn't quite remember me. I wanted to reintroduce myself by hitting her in the face with my fist. I didn't. She tried to run past me. With malicious intent I grabbed her on her bandaged hand and squeezed until she screamed at a pitch that began to cause me pain.

She stopped running.

The cop approached us with his gun drawn, the barrel pointed at the sky. His eyes betrayed his confusion at the circumstances. Before he could decide what to bark at me, I said, "This woman set off the bomb that just exploded. Her name is Marin Bigg. I think you guys are looking for her."

The cop was busy deciding whether or not to believe me when Marin said, "Fuck you," and spit on the cop.

It ended his indecision. He reached behind his back for his cuffs. As soon as he stepped forward I sprinted toward the lobby of the Colorado Building.

T he dust was silky and light, the color of freshconcrete after a rain. It hung in the air like a gentle fog.

Dust or no dust, I'd been in the lobby of the Colorado Building often enough to know where I was heading. The lobby was small, maybe fifteen feet by thirty feet, and it was unfurnished. The only two elevators were side-by-side in the northwest corner, far from the front doors.

One of the mantras of my psych ER training days entered my head as I scanned the space. The first thing to do during an emergency is to take your own pulse . Heeding the dictum, I tried to stay calm and was surprised that the chaos in front of me was offering an insistent conclusion about what had occurred.

The two pairs of elevator doors had been blown outward in the center like envelope flaps puffed out by a sharp burst of air. Across the lobby, the glass wall of the brokerage was decimated, the shattered glass fragments blown into the offices, not back into the lobby. The doorway that led to the fire stairs and the lobby's alley exit seemed undamaged.

My conclusion? The direct force of the bomb blast had blown into the lobby from the thick reinforced concrete of the elevator shaft, which focused its explosive intensity like a lens. The bomb had not been placed in the lobby.

I remembered the cascading bricks tumbling from what appeared to be four or five stories up. The bomb had exploded about halfway up the elevator shaft of the eight-story building.

I poked my head through the opening that was created by the damaged elevator doors. One of the two elevator cars, the left one, was below me, in the building's only basement level. The other car had to be somewhere high above me, invisible in the lingering dust. I sniffed the air in the shaft, recognizing nothing but the nasty tang of hot electrical motors. The air was unusually pungent with an odor that wasn't familiar. The explosive?