Red Lines part 6 viewMDA Press

Red Lines, Part 6

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By Chris McCarthy

The conclusion finds Leo facing decisions good and bad…

The Suburban speeds on the tarmac. Private jets line the runway to the left of the vehicle. To the right, a fifteen foot concrete wall reaches into the sky. 

Leo looks behind him then ducks, just as a man fires a gun out of the open jet door. The bullets blow out the rear windshield with a SMASH. The man pulls himself back inside, trying to get the jet door shut, but he can’t get it to move. Leo feels the back of his neck and head for injuries and is relieved that he’s unscathed. Another close brush. 

Roderick gurgles blood and sputters out nonsensical words as the Suburban beelines toward a seven-foot wide electrical junction box. A large piece of metal, a piece of a stair from the airplane stairway they violently drove through, has pierced through his left shoulder, and terrifyingly sticks out six inches in the front and back of Roderick’s chest. Leo sees blood on the shoulder, but the metal appears to have passed clean through him. The gurgling of blood may be from another injury, Leo thinks. This guy is clearly a force to be reckoned with. If Leo can just hold onto his apparent luck and this other guy’s misfortune at constantly being on the receiving end of brutal violence, things just may work out in his favor. Then again, this guy seems to be able to take a horrific amount of abuse with no slowing down. 

“Fuck!” Leo takes a quick look behind him and sees the gunman hanging his head and shoulder outside of the jet door once again. He sees the black of the gun barrel pushed out the opening once more, so Leo leans forward with a burst of energy and shoves Manny to the side into the passenger seat where Roderick sits, and grabs the wheel with his left hand. Another bullet whizzes over his right shoulder and through the open area where the front windshield used to be and sparks off the painted white metal of the Warning: High Voltage sign Leo can clearly see on the junction box, which gets closer and closer as the Suburban barrels toward it. 

Leo jerks the wheel to the left to avoid the large green metal box and feels the odd feeling of weightlessness as the car teeters on two wheels at seventy miles per hour. Leo tries to reach down with his right hand to push the break, but Manny’s left leg and torso obstruct the footwell. With the help of gravity, the car rights itself again, before slamming headfirst into the concrete wall separating out this private section of tarmac. The car impacts so hard that the back wheels jump off the ground two feet before landing again.

Leo comes-to seconds later and hears the loud persistent horn of the Suburban. The top part of Manny’s body is thrown out onto the hood, his legs on the front console of the car, bent unnaturally. Leo thinks he’s going to throw up and realizes he’s been thrown back into the back seat of the car. Then he hears a rhythmic THUD THUD THUD, as if it’s the base note to the loud horn that Manny’s left knee is pressing on the steering wheel. It’s Roderick’s elbow slamming against the back window quickly but intermittently between jerking on the door handle with all the force the strong but severely injured man can exert. Leo smells smoke and feels the heat of flames coming out the front console of the vehicle. Each breath is more painful than the last. The door is jammed, but the next session of elbow slams shatters the window and Leo climbs out with Roderick’s help.

Leo’s body wants to fall to the ground, but Roderick keeps him on his feet by holding him with one arm at his midsection and the other under his armpit. Leo almost passes out when he sees the large piece of metal sticking through Roderick’s left shoulder. 

“We gotta finish this… The cops are almost here… We can’t let these fuckers leave.” Roderick says, gritting his teeth. He falls to his knees, clearly in agony and bleeding out from his vicious shoulder wound, but picks himself up. His wallet falls out but it’s obviously not something to worry about now. 

He points at the automatic weapon on the ground just outside the driver’s side door of the car. “That’s you.” 

Leo must look at him with a look of utter confusion because Roderick says, “Just point and pull. I can’t fucking carry it.” He looks down at his damaged left side and his clearly out-of-commission left arm.  

Roderick stumbles a few feet ahead and falls down behind a parked luggage cart. He leans out to the right of the vehicle and shoots his pistol at the jet, then ducks back behind it, his breathing labored. He motions to Leo, who kneels just behind the back bumper of the Suburban, to come up by him. 

Tears stream down Leo’s face. He pulls the machine gun up to his shoulder and aims it at Roderick. He looks down the gun’s sight and moves it across the tarmac until he sees Emily, her red hair and her rag-dolled arms and legs, laid out unnaturally on the tarmac. He knows she didn’t die painlessly but hopes she died quickly. He shudders out a tear and a sound of agony escapes his chest, overcome by emotion. 

“You killed her!” He says, now overtaken by anger.  

“Oh, that bitch?” Roderick has the temerity or death-wish to say. 

“How can you say…? OK, you’re going to stop firing on that plane! We’re going to sit and wait for the cops to come. You’re not getting away with this.” Leo trains the gun on Roderick, who still shows no fear.

“Leo, you really have no fucking clue what’s going on.” 

“Yes, I do. You were transporting those girls…kidnapping them to sell them as slaves or worse…” Leo says, dropping the gun a hair before raising it back up in anger. “You’re scum… You killed her.” He motions his head twenty feet up the tarmac and again looks at Emily’s contorted body, his anger turning into an aggression he feel rising in his throat.  

“If I had finished the job earlier, Emily—that girl—would still be alive. This time you’re not surviving.” Leo says. 

“Leo, think for a second. I’m guessing Emily was the one you spoke to if you spoke to the girls at all. She probably piped up and took control of the situation, doted on the other girls, made them feel safe…”

Leo feels his throat tighten. He doesn’t see Emily’s face in his mind. He remembers the look in the brown-eyed girl’s face when she looked at Emily. She was seeking comfort from her and getting it. “Yeah… I… she did. She took care of them.” 

“Leo, you need to know something. She’s not thirteen or fourteen or whatever she told you. She’s in her mid-twenties. She’s their handler. Their groomer.” Roderick says, leaning against the baggage cart, now moaning loudly between breaths. In the distance, the man who’s been trying to close the jet door kicks off the top steel connector for the stairs, which lodged into one side of the passenger entry door when the Suburban slammed into it. He finally gets he door shut. Just as he does, the jet’s engines power up. 

“What… I don’t…” Leo stammers, trying to see the brown eyed girl’s face. Since he was driving the girls back to Los Angeles, he was mostly talking to them looking in the rearview mirror, with his eyes alert to anything happening on the road ahead of him and behind him. So perhaps his recollection was unclear. Was the brown eyed girl trying to tell him something with her wide doe-eyes? Did he miss it entirely?

“The woman you know as Emily is one of the traffickers. Her role is to take care of the girls and give them a false sense of safety until they’re sold. It’s how they do it. They’re a sophisticated operation. They take these girls to… you don’t want to know, Leo.” Roderick says. “Now get over here.” 

“No, that can’t be. It’s not true…What about the cop…Jack. He died protecting them” Leo says.

“Hah. The scumbag who picked you up after you attacked me?” Roderick shakes his head in disgust and disbelief. “We were hiding them from Jack and Emily and all the other people trying to hurt them. That was our safe house he took those girls from!” 

Leo looks at the high concrete wall to his left and wonders if he’d have any luck scaling it.

“Get that fucking gun off of me. You know Manny and I saved your life back there? Those fucks were moments away from killing you. They just didn’t want the girls to see. You weren’t going to live long enough to get on that plane.” Roderick says.

“What did I do?” Leo says.

He now knows why Celia left him. It’s because he’d left her years before, emotionally. He checked out when things got too serious. His entire life had been about avoiding difficult decisions and not deciding who he wanted to be. He lived trying to avoid regret and realized he hadn’t lived. Until today. And he doesn’t mean it in a movie way. He wants more of this. More moments. More life. None of the shit that streams through his mind on a daily basis matters at all. None of it has any consequence. The only thing that matters is life. He flashes back to the sound of an ice cube cracking in his iced Americano. The one he left untouched at the coffee shop. He wants to be back there, drinking it and doing anything, anything other than looking out the window as the sad story he created in his mind plays out. Because it’s all just a story. And Leo now knew he hated his main character. But he knew how to fix him. And the only way to fix him was to somehow figure out how to let him keep breathing. 

Leo hears sirens and sees two police SUVs coming around the turn and speeding toward the tarmac. Two more vehicles come from the other direction. These two are heavily-armored SWAT tanks.

Roderick looks at Leo. “Oh thank God. They’re here.” His relief is palpable. 

Leo looks at the powered-up jet, or tries to, as vibrations and pressure waves hit his body. The intense VRROOOOOMMM WHOOOOSH of the engines drown out all other sounds and Leo knows he wouldn’t be able to hear his own voice if he screamed. The plane inches forward on the runway and Leo sees that the police presence is increasing by the second. Three black and white cruisers pulls up in front of the plane, blocking its path. The doors swing open and officers jump out and point shotguns at the plane. The SWAT tanks pull up closer to the front of the plane but further out on the right and left flanks to stay out of the crossfire of their colleagues. Leo takes in the sight of the first responders expertly doing their jobs, a completely silent tableau, drowned out as it is by the jet engines.

Leo’s eyes land on something that catches the light by Emily’s body. It looks like a small foldable knife. Not something a kidnapping victim would be allowed to have.

Then Leo’s vision narrows and he tips to the side. Leo feels a rush of wind on his face and then something hard on his cheek and shoulder and realizes he’s fallen down to the ground. It’s then that he sees Roderick’s open wallet six inches in front of him with his one open eye. He sees what is clearly a gold police badge on one flap and a small image of Roderick smiling for his official LAPD Detective’s badge photo on the other.

Leo fights to keep his one eye open. 

The end. 

Copyright Chris McCarthy and MDA Press, 2024.

Red Lines part 5MDA Press

Red Lines, Part 5

/by

By Chris McCarthy

Leo finds himself at gunpoint in the back of a Suburban heading for the airport with more than one surprise ahead…

The sound of the Suburban doors shutting reverberates off the concrete walls and floor, accentuating the emptiness of the large parking structure-like space.

Leaning against the concrete in an alcove created where the wall and the ramp support pillar meet, Leo is suddenly hyper-aware of the intensity of his breath in his chest and the pounding of his heart in his ears. He looks down at his phone on the ground by his feet but is too terrified to pick it up. 

He’s not that concerned about the absence of the gun in his waistband. It’s not like he knows how to properly use the weapon and he’s not about to have a stand-off with someone who is clearly a professional. Making a run for it isn’t an option either. The two dead men whose bodies lay on the concrete between Leo and the opening in the wall where the baggage cart exited make this point exceedingly clear. The terrifying rat-at-tat-tat of the submachine gun wielded by whoever the hell these guys are has created the desired effect, the decision to not fight back and the idea that wholly submitting is the best and, indeed, only option. 

Leo steps out quickly, his hands up in the air, fingers spread wide. The headlights on the vehicle blind him as he ambles forward. The two men walk toward him, already much closer to him than he had estimated. One of the men oddly wears a dark mask covering half of his face. Or maybe the mask he’s seeing is a relic from staring into the huge piercingly bright late-model LED headlights. The man holding the machine gun yells at him to get on his knees and points his gun from Leo’s face to the ground to accentuate his command. He has an American accent with a hint of a hispanic, possibly Mexican, lilt. 

Leo falls to his knees immediately while keeping his hands up. “OK. OK. I’m not armed. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.” 

The man walks up to him and places the muzzle of the gun right at his forehead. Unlike the other time a gun had been placed half an inch from his frontal lobe just a few hours earlier while he was deep in an anaphylactic fit, this time he feels the slightly warm steel against his skin rather than just the pressure. The lights on the Suburban go out and Leo’s eyes quickly adjust. Leo looks up at the other man and realizes he’s not actually wearing a mask. There is just something dark covering the side of his face—a liquid of some sort or a deformity perhaps. There’s something familiar to the face too. The man grabs Leo by the neck of his sweatshirt and yanks him up viciously, toward him so they are face to face. 

Leo now sees the huge scar starting at the man’s right temple and curving cruelly down to the right side of his mouth. It’s a wound created out of spiteful hatred. A prison souvenir perhaps. The man turns his face to the right to show the left side and Leo sees that it’s a mess. The ear is cauliflowered to three times its normal size and the jaw looks distended, not to mention blue-black bruising surrounding the eye and a wicked gash on the cheekbone. The nose is clearly broken and pushed to the right. The entire left side of the man’s face is covered in layers of dark blood as if it’s bled and caked over several times. A strange realization creeps in. 

“You did this to me, kid.” The man says. 

“Wait…Oh my…they told me I…” Leo stammers.

“Well, you fucked me up bad. But not as bad as I’m going to fuck you up.” The man says. 

It’s the man Leo assaulted earlier outside of the coffee shop. 

He throws Leo down onto the concrete floor, ripping his right elbow to shreds and probably hairline-fracturing his right hip bone. Leo’s getting used to being thrown to the ground. It feels like more of the same on this crazy day.

The man looks at his associate with the gun. “Grab him,” he says and walks briskly to the car. The other man swings his gun over his shoulder and pulls Leo off the ground. 

“Get the fuck up. Let’s go!” The man with the gun says. 

They throw Leo into the backseat of the suburban. The machine gun man drives the car fast through the exit on the left side of the concrete space, running over the dark congealing pool of blood Mike left behind, his head face-down on the concrete. Leo tries not to look and cringes, hoping they don’t drive over a limb. He imagines the red tire tracks. 

Through a sterile well-lit concrete tunnel, they drive down what feels like two stories at least, although it’s hard for Leo to tell with any certainty. Then suddenly, they level out. The whole time, the man with the messed up face holds a small gun in his right hand just at his left shoulder, in Leo’s general direction. He tells Leo his name is Roderick. 

“Roderick?” Leo says, to make sure he got it right, his mind instantly trying to figure out if he can use the new information to get out of his predicament. But, looking around the car and out at the sterile tunnel, the lights passing by overhead at a fixed interval, just off beat to the steady rhythm of the tires crossing over the expansion joints between sections of ramp pavement every four seconds—the mundanity, the mathematical everyday-ness of it all make him realize he has no recourse. 

There’s an inevitability to him being right here where he is in the backseat of this vehicle with two armed men who want to kill him. Even as he observes his mind trying to blame someone or something of this, Leo realizes he’s never made one real decision in his life. For the first time, he learns what it means to be entirely alone. 

There’s no way out. 

Then his thinking starts to get fuzzy and his tongue feels dry. Is a hint of the anaphylaxis coming back? Or is it anxiety? Leo feels he can stave it off, whatever it is. 

“I’m Leo.”

“No shit,” says the driver.

Roderick laughs and says, “This is Manny.” 

“You fucked up big time, Leo.” Roderick says. “What the hell were you doing there today? Why didn’t you just mind your own business like I told you to. You could have avoided all this.”

Leo oddly enough feels comfortable talking to the man he viciously hit with a brick earlier in the day and who now holds a gun on him. Leo’s action was instinctive but vicious and violent nonetheless. It’s hard for him to find a place for it in his mind since he considers himself a nice guy who tries to do the right thing. Just as this self-comforting thought forms itself, in one swift movement Roderick cold cocks Leo straight on the nose and mouth with the gun. Leo yelps and immediately tastes the acidic sweet blood in his mouth. Tears stream and Leo tries desperately not to whimper as he holds both hands to his damaged nose. 

“There. Now we’re even. Sort of.” Says Roderick. 

Manny stifles a laugh. 

On either side of Leo’s hands blood streams down his face. He pulls his hands off his face, “Fuck…Why the hell…”

Then he feels something thrown against his face. He looks down in his lap and picks up a wad of napkins and puts them to his face.

“I was talking to you, fuck face. Don’t space out. Why did you intervene earlier? Are you some kind of hero?” Roderick asks again and sets the gun down in his lap, his finger still on the trigger, but more relaxed now, seeing Leo’s lost confidence. He’s in complete control now. 

“I just saw you and the girl…in the car. And she jumped out to escape… and I… I just reacted. That’s it…” Leo says. 

“That’s it?” Roderick looks over to the man in the front seat, whose machine gun sits in the footwell by his right leg. “You hear that, Manny? That’s it. Just another day. Attacking a man with a brick when you have no fucking business being there at all.” 

“Are you… Are you gonna kill me?” Leo asks.

“No. Not right now. Not in my car. That would be a fucking mess.” 

Roderick lets loose a laugh that shakes the car. Manny joins him in laughter, his laughter a bit higher pitched. 

“They told me I… killed you.” Leo says. 

“Yeah, well, they would. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.” Roderick says. 

Manny slows the car down as he turns up a ramp and into daylight. Leo suddenly realizes that the car has started ascending after what seemed like a long initial descent. It takes Leo a moment to realize it’s not daylight. They’re driving on a strip of tarmac lit up with runway lights. Leo looks up higher and sees a sliver of dark gray blue, the true color of the night sky.

The man speeds up the Suburban and veers left past a high fence that seems like it’s separating a private non-public area. To his right, Leo sees a line of twenty or so Federal Express planes. He thinks back to when he and Celia flew to Hawaii and how nervous he was packing the ring in his carry-on bag. Would it fall out when he went through TSA? Would Celia catch a glimpse of it before they got to Poipu beach where he would slip it out at the opportune moment just before sunset? 

As they drive past the runway with the cargo planes, Leo realizes he knows right where they are. The FedEx shipping center on the south side of the airport is clearly visible from the elevated section of the 105 freeway. It’s an area of the airport far from any passenger airline activity. Manny makes a few more turns around the commercial shipping building and they enter a new area. Leo’s instincts tell him this section of LAX doesn’t abide by the same rules as the rest of the airport. It feels hidden, exclusive. Small unmarked private jets line a small runway. In the distance, Leo sees people moving quickly up the aircraft stairs of one such jet. Then, several flashes of light. 

And a popping sound. POP, POP, POP.

Then, the faint TING of windshield glass being penetrated in a very precise way. Before Leo can square away what is happening, Manny makes a choking noise then slumps over to the right side of the seat, blood dripping fast out of the side of his face. The car veers right as Manny’s driving hand pulls the steering wheel toward his falling body.

Leo is thrown into the window to the left of the car. Instead of blurring his thoughts, the cold hard contact wakes him up.  

“Shit!” Roderick yells. “Manny!”

He grabs the wheel and rights it with his left hand, pushing the car back into a straight line toward the jet and the men shooting at them from halfway up the extended ramp. Roderick fires his pistol through the windshield with his right hand as he tries to steady the driver’s wheel with his other hand. Leo feels tiny shards of glass shaving against his right cheek before he has a chance to duck his head. 

“Turn around! What are you doing?!” Leo asks.

“Hah, no fucking way. They’re not getting away with this.” 

Roderick speeds the car up and through a sliver of spidered windshield, he sees a man scramble up the ramp. But a woman stands right in the middle of it. If he’s not mistaken, it’s Emily, the mother hen of the group of girls, the one who spoke for them. The one who seemed older than her years, a maturity borne from a hard life that Leo could only try to imagine. She was the girl’s protector. Then the shock of red hair comes into focus. It’s definitely her. 

“Hey, you’re gonna…” Leo says, just before he instinctively buries his face in his hands.

The Suburban rips through the bottom potion of the steel aircraft stairs. A foot-wide shard of steel, one of the steps no doubt, thrusts into the front of the car, decimating what’s left of the windshield and piercing Roderick clean through at the left clavicle and exploding the leather and stuffing of the passenger seat. Instantaneously, Leo is covered in blood, glass shards, strips of leather, and dark grey foam. 

Leo looks behind him at the destroyed stairs and the two bodies now laying on the tarmac just outside the jet—the gunman and Emily. 

——

Copyright Chris McCarthy and MDA Press, 2024, Graphics by Chris McCarthy with Imagen3.