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."
CHAPTER 49
Cozy's injuries were the most severe.
The elevator car had been ascending between the seventh and eighth floors when the explosion rocked the concrete elevator tower. The car came to an abrupt halt, throwing both Lauren and the woman who had been carrying the coffee to the floor. The woman with the coffee broke her right wrist, and Lauren's head slammed against the side of the car. Cozy somehow maintained his balance. The fact that he was still standing made him much more vulnerable when the car dropped precipitously. He flew headfirst up into the ceiling of the car and crashed back to the floor when the car jammed to a stop where I found it in between the sixth and seventh floors.
Lauren's violet eyes were open as I ran to her side at the rear of the ambulance. She was strapped to a backboard, and huge cushioned cervical braces immobilized her head and upper body.
She asked, "How's Grace?"
What?
"The baby's great," I said. "How are you?"
"I'm okay," she said. They lifted her into the back of the ambulance and closed the doors.
An hour later, Cozy was in surgery. The woman with the coffee had been released from the hospital with her arm in a cast. Lauren was in observation. My own observation was that she was looking pretty good, considering.
During our few minutes together, Lauren had told me what happened.
Bob, the building handyman who'd died in the elevator crash, had been waiting in the lobby when Cozy and Lauren walked in that morning. He'd been puzzling over a sign that had been placed on one elevator declaring it out of service for a furniture delivery. Bob complained to Lauren and Cozy that no one had permission to reserve an elevator without talking to him, certainly not at that hour of the day. He told them to go ahead and use the reserved elevator, which was waiting on the first floor. He'd take the other one and find out who was responsible for the sign.
Lauren said they stopped once on the third floor and the young woman with the coffee joined them. Moments later the explosion rocked the elevator tower.
Adrienne somehow created enough of a hole in her day to sit with me while I held a cup of hospital coffee in my hand. The coffee was too foul to actually drink, but I got some comfort from holding it. Adrienne was acting unnaturally, saying pacifying things like "You know that you did everything you could." And "It's lucky you told the firefighters where to go." I think I would have actually felt better if she had just lovingly berated me like she usually did.
I said, "Based on my recent experience, I think if you have to be in the emergency room, it's easier being the patient than being the one waiting to hear news about someone you love."
Before she could respond to my comment, the phone in my pocket rang. Initially, the sound meant nothing to me. It simply didn't register. Finally, Adrienne said, "That's your phone. It may be Viv. Let's take it outside. They don't like cells in here."