Stephen White - Warning Signs

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.

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."

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 turnedout, 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.