MDA PressRed Lines, Part 6
By Chris McCarthy
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.
Copyright Chris McCarthy and MDA Press, 2024.
MDA Press