Warning Signs

CHAPTER 48

The long trip from Denver's Platte Valley to the 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.

The next place that 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."

Santa Fe all the 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.

Ramp lifted some binoculars from the floor in front of his seat and raised them to his eyes. To Lucy, it appeared he was examining something in the sky that was just above the jagged profile of the amusement park. In the early-morning light the park looked forlorn and insincere, the way a saloon looks afterhours when the cleaning floods are on bright.

He sighed. "There he is. Right on time. My grandfather loved punctuality more than he loved almost anything in the world other than me and my grandma. He would have loved this guy; he's always on time."

"What guy?" Lucy mumbled into the cotton sock. Lucy thought he was pointing at the Ferris wheel.

Again Ramp reached down to the floor in front of his seat. He raised a complicated black plastic device and extended an antenna from the top. Without looking toward Lucy, he said, "It's for model airplanes. Good range."

He placed the transmitter on his lap and raised the binoculars to his eyes. He held them in place while he studied a narrow slice of the Colorado sky. When he lowered the glasses, he said, "He's getting pretty high up there. It'll be just a couple more minutes."

She wanted to ask, Till what? but didn't bother. She knew. Or at least she thought she knew.

He mused, "You know how easy it was to get what I needed for all this? Anything I can't get at Toys 'R' Us, I can get at Radio Shack. Except for the explosives, of course. For that, you need a relative in the demolitions business."

He raised the binoculars once more, held them in place for only a few seconds, and said, "My guy's up there. Here goes. It took me three trips to get all these charges in place. I used more explosives here than everywhere else put together."

He fingered one of the levers on the black plastic box and raised his eyes to a spot just above the horizon. Lucy tried to follow the line of his gaze.

"Three," he whispered, "two… one."

At first, Lucy didn't see anything change in her field of vision and wondered if Ramp's device had failed. Then, barely to the right of where she was focusing her attention, she glimpsed a puff of smoke, like a flare from a campfire. It had emerged from a spot close to the ground in the middle of the amusement park.

Rapidly-close by the first-another puff of smoke followed. Lucy's eyes trailed up from the source to the elaborate superstructure of a loop-the-loop thrill ride. The highest part of the metal structure started to lean, she thought, just a little.

Another puff of smoke erupted from the base of the ride-this one was slightly larger and a little higher off the ground. Lucy thought she could hear the concussion of a blast, too. But she wasn't sure that her mind wasn't just filling in the blanks.

Ramp said, "It's called The Sidewinder. Ever been on it? It's an okay ride. It was an okay ride. I don't think it's going to be too much fun anymore."

Lucy watched the single spiral of steel lean farther and farther to the west. Then it steadied and hung in the sky in defiance. She glanced over at Ramp. He touched another switch on the black plastic console.

One more puff exploded near the base of The Sidewinder, and the temporarily reluctant steel structure continued its fall to the west.

"Wow," Ramp said as the structure disappeared into the fabric of the amusement park. "I did it. It fell right where I wanted it to fall."

He stared at the empty sky and the rising cloud of dust for more than a minute before he started the truck and eased away from the bluff above the river. "The guy who was climbing the ride just then? He was the twin brother of the defense attorney who represented the man who killed my mom."

As they circled underneath the viaduct and drove past the big REI store that had been built inside the old Forney Museum, Ramp said, "Things will start to happen fast now. If they go well, you should be free in a couple of hours."