Stephen White - Warning Signs

I wasn't looking for metaphor. I asked, "Somebody was hurt in the Denver explosion, weren't they?"

"It only happened half an hour ago. They've just started to sift through the mess."

Sam stepped away from me and stopped a patrol officer who was hurrying toward one of the ambulances. I stayed a step behind Sam.

He asked the officer, "What's up?"

"Hey, Detective. One of the elevators had its cable severed by the explosion. They just found a body in the car in the basement."

"Dead?"

"Yeah."

I thought about my friends on the fifth floor.

Sam asked what I was too stunned to ask. "Who is it?"

The officer said, "It's some guy named Bob. He's like the super, the maintenance guy in the building. He fell from fifty, sixty feet up, maybe more. Apparently everybody knows him."

"I don't," I said.

Sam's phone tweeted in his pocket. He pulled it out, hit a button with his fat thumb, and said, "Purdy."

A few seconds later he turned his head away from me and said, "Yeah, of course. What's up, Walter?"

I waited until Sam shut off the call before I asked, "What did Walter have to say?"

He flashed a how-the-hell-do-you-know-about-Walter look until he recalled our conversation wandering the aisles of the grocery store. He said, "The Denver Police just found an apparent explosive device in the center of the stage at Red Rocks. Bomb squad is responding."

I was focusing most of my attention on the lobby entrance to the Colorado Building, waiting for Lauren and Cozy to emerge. What could be taking the rescuers so long? Sam's words registered on the boundaries of my awareness. I said, "What?"

"There's a bomb, or something that looks like a bomb, right in the center of the stage at Red Rocks."

"The amphitheater?" Red Rocks was Denver's world-famous outdoor concert venue. It was set in a gorgeous sandstone bowl in the foothills west of the city. Although totally surrounded by Jefferson County, Red Rocks was technically a Denver city park facility.

"Yeah. The bomb squad's on the way to evaluate it. It doesn't look good; they want to X-ray it."

"Is there a concert or something up there?" I asked.

"On a weekday morning at this hour? Hardly."

A yellow-suited firefighter emerged from the front of the Colorado Building, waving one arm back and forth across his chest to clear a wide path from the lobby to the ambulances waiting nearby. I started toward the doorway as though I were on a moving sidewalk.

The end of a stretcher broke the plane at the front of the building. Thick rubber wheels. Tubular aluminum frame.

I saw sneakers. The woman who had been carrying the coffee.

An eternity passed before a second stretcher breached the doorway.

Wingtips the size of dinghies.

Even from thirty feet away, I could almost count the little holes in the leather.

Cozy.

Sam's fingers curled over my left shoulder. He was providing comfort. He was also preparing to keep me from rushing the door.

A third stretcher began to emerge from the door as though the building were giving birth to it.

Triplets.

I held my breath and waited to see one black Cole Haan slide and one elegant, very pretty, bare foot. Lauren's toenails were painted. I tried to recall what color she'd used. I couldn't.

The stretcher came out the door empty.

A sound emerged from somewhere deep in my tissues. Somewhere that knows no sound. It was part groan, part yelp, part plea.

Sam's fingers tightened on my shoulder. He said, "Wait."

It was an order.

I didn't know it at the time, but Sam's eyes were flitting between the doorway and Scott Truscott, the Boulder County coroner's assistant. Scott's vehicle was across the street and Scott was waiting to be invited inside the building to assess the casualties whose injuries were so monumental that they didn't require an ambulance ride to anywhere.

"Where is she?" I said to God.

Another stretcher began to come into view.

I saw black hair and I started to cry.

T he long trip from Denver's Platte Valley tothe foothills near Morrison perplexed Lucy. She was able to track the journey from her cramped lair on the floor of the welding supply truck by reading the overhead highway signs on the Sixth Avenue Freeway.

When Ramp stopped the truck, he didn't bother to restrain her further. He told her he wouldn't be gone long and that she shouldn't move. She could feel the truck shudder as he did something in the back. The movement stopped; she guessed that Ramp had moved away.

She considered her options. Despite the restraints on her wrists and ankles, she thought that she could manage to get the truck door open, tumble outside, and try to hop away. It was possible that Ramp had parked the truck in a location that would allow a passerby to see her and come to her rescue. Possible, but not likely.

Not at that hour.

She raised herself up from the floor and, bracing her bound wrists on the seat, lifted herself up high enough to look out the back window of the truck. Eight or ten tall green oxygen tanks almost completely blocked her view. She looked out to the side and was thrilled that what she was seeing was slightly familiar.

She couldn't quite place it. The huge rocks. The dust. The flat-roofed building. Wait, wait, wait. Could this be Red Rocks?

"I told you not to move."

Ramp's voice was admonishing but not angry, the kind of tone someone might use to correct a curious puppy.

"Get back down. We're leaving."

Lucy thought, No explosion ? She fell heavily to the floor of the cab.

As though he'd read her mind, he said, "This one's different from all of the others."

The highway signs told her they were going back into Denver. The noise told her that traffic was starting to accumulate. Ramp played a Dave Matthews CD, not the news, and didn't seem at all concerned about his rearview mirrors.

The light to the east told her it was dawn.

T he next placethat the truck stopped was somewhere near Sixth and Santa Fe, and Lucy's promise to stay down-the alternative was having her wrists duct-taped to the center console-earned her coffee and an egg-and-chorizo burrito. She wasn't hungry but she forced herself to eat a few bites.

While the gag was still off her mouth, she asked him, "What exactly are you doing?"

"Making this memorable. I want people to talk, remember?"

"Dialogue."

"That's right."

"So you're going to blow up Red Rocks?"

He smiled at her. "That would piss people off, wouldn't it?" She couldn't read his eyes.

He replaced the gag, pausing when he was done to caress the soft skin below her temple. "Don't worry, I don't have enough explosives to blow up Red Rocks. Anyway, I like Red Rocks."

S anta Fe allthe way to Speer, Speer north toward I-25. As soon as they were on the freeway, southbound Lucy thought, they exited again. She wished she knew Denver's geography better. She thought that they must have been somewhere near the Children's Museum.

Only thirty seconds or so after they turned off the freeway, they turned again. Soon the truck came to a stop.

Ramp put the truck in park and killed the engine. He said, "I like this view. You want to see it?"

She nodded. He leaned over and helped her pull herself up onto the passenger seat.

She looked out the windshield. Ramp had parked in one of the big lots flanking the banks of the South Platte River just east of Denver's new aquarium, Colorado's Ocean Journey. On the river, a couple of hardy early-season kayakers were slicing across the abbreviated rapids at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek. On the other side of the river was Six Flags Elitch Gardens, and beyond it, the downtown skyline.