MDA PressRed Lines, Part 5
By Chris McCarthy
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.
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