The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (13 page)

The pilot was good. He couldn’t land but he hovered as low as he could over the grass median. It was nowhere near flat enough for him to safely land, as a matter of fact the strip was almost angled sharply enough to form a V.

The tack unit went out first. I watched how they did it. The drop was about eight feet. A few of them landed and went into a roll, while the rest managed to hit the ground and stay vertical.

Manetti forced her way out next. She landed softly and went into a roll. I decided to follow her lead.

I managed not to get myself killed. But barely. These days I didn’t do so much tumbling. I made a mental note and added it to my ever-expanding self-improvement list. Assuming I made it out of this investigation alive.

“Come on,” Manetti said.

I took her wrist and sprang up. There were a few aches but otherwise my body seemed okay. Probably adrenaline just masking the injuries from the drop.

The tack unit lined up in a huddle around us.

Manetti said, “This truck could explode any minute. We need to get as many people to safety as we can.”

I pictured Alison’s dream in my mind, watching the explosion play out. “At least a hundred yards away to be safe.”

“We got our work cut out for us, then,” one of the guys said.

The huddle broke and we hurried toward the truck. There is no feeling like running toward a chemical tanker you know is going to explode any moment. Now I knew what those firemen felt like, the brave, selfless ones that had run into the Towers. Those guys were true heroes.

Me on the other hand? Not so much.

I ran straight for the truck. A horrible smell rose in the air. It was leaking something, liquid or gas or maybe both, didn’t matter. Whatever it was, the stench almost knocked me over and with all the static electricity in the air and gasoline and just about every other combustible material imaginable, it was only a matter of time before something sparked.

In the distance, I heard the wails of what seemed like a dozen fire engines and twice as many police cars. I kept running as hard as I could for the truck, trying not to think about what I was actually doing.

Five cars had rammed the truck when it had gone down. The other drivers, the ones that had managed to stop short, weren’t all saved. A bunch of them got rear-ended. All three lanes of northbound traffic were clogged with wrecks now. The lucky ones were just dazed. They were getting out of their cars now.

I tried to keep up with the tack unit but these guys were animals. At least I stayed up with Manetti, but it took everything I had.

The guys in front of me slowed before reaching the truck. I saw why. The spill was funneling toward us. Of course. The road was dark and slick with something. The fumes coming off it were powerful up close. I smelled gasoline but I smelled something else too that I couldn’t put a finger on.

“Get these people back!” Manetti ordered the nearest guy, a short man with a beard. He nodded at her behind his dark sunglasses and started going car-to-car.

“What about them?” I pointed at the cars that had smashed into the truck. The airbags in all but one had deployed, so there was a good chance those people were alive. The last car was older, and nobody was moving in it.

Manetti looked at me. “How much time do we have?”

I thought back to the dream. “A minute.”

“ONE MINUTE, THEN PULL BACK!” Manetti yelled.

I started to run for the truck and wrecked cars, but Manetti grabbed my arm. “You’re assuming this all plays out the same way.”

“It will,” I said, even though I’d had the same fear. I shrugged out of her grip and made a break for it with the tack unit to the truck. We stepped into the spill. I nearly wiped out.

Manetti was right behind me. “We caused this accident, Eddie.”

“We can sort it out later.” I’d had the same thought. But how was that possible?

I checked the car with no air bags first. There was no driver. The windshield was smashed, a hole large enough for a man to fit through in it. I stepped in front of it and saw him. No seat belt. The crash had ejected him from the car, and he’d slammed into the undercarriage of the truck. He looked like road kill. His insides were now part of his outsides.

I choked back the vomit and went to the next car. I was afraid to look in, not wanting to witness anything else horrifying today. But I forced myself to open the driver’s door. A man practically spilled out of the car. By the way he sort of slithered to the ground, I thought he was dead. But then he was moving, trying to pick himself up.

“My neck…what happened?”

He was middle-aged and dressed in a shirt and tie. I noticed the wedding ring. Funny how you never notice a wedding ring on anybody till you offer one to a lady.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

“THIRTY SECONDS!” Manetti shouted.

The guy groaned and tried to crawl on his hands and knees.

“Hey, pal, we need to get out of here. Can you walk?”

“I am walking.”

He’d said his neck was hurting, so grabbing him and hauling him to his feet probably wasn’t the preferred method. But I had no choice. I had to get him out of there. We three-legged it back to the other cars, the ones that had been able to stop, where another man offered to take over for me.

“Thanks,” I panted. “Get back one hundred feet, okay?”

He said he would and I turned back around as Manetti led two injured women away from the truck. Now the smoke was building and the fumes were making me light-headed.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“He probably doesn’t deserve my help, but I’m going anyway.”

“Eddie, there isn’t enough time!”

I ignored her and hurried back to get the driver of the truck.

“Eddie, we’re out of time,” Manetti said.

She had decided to join me in my suicidal dash to the truck. “You should have stayed with your guys.”

“Like I had a choice!”

We reached the truck. The fumes from the gasoline made my eyes water. There was also a sickly sweet odor from whatever had spilled. We rounded the cab. Because the truck was on its side I had to climb up.

“Is he alive?” Manetti asked.

“I don’t know.” The driver must not have been belted because he was crumpled on his side pressed against the passenger side door.

I tried the door but it was locked.

“Eddie.”

“Hold on.”

I should have run like hell but I couldn’t leave till I knew whether he was dead or alive. As I aimed my sneaker for the center of the driver side window, Sumiko came to mind. I couldn’t never see her again. No fucking way.

I slammed my heel and the glass broke. I ran my toe along the edges of the window to clear it of glass and then unlocked and opened the door. I lowered myself and managed not to land on the semi-conscious guy that was groaning in agony.

I kneeled. He seemed to notice me. Briefly his eyes flicked open, passed over me, and then closed again.

I slapped him. “You have to wake up.”

His eyes blinked open. “What happened?”

“Can you move?”

His hand slid to his side. “It hurts to breathe.”

“Do you want to live?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I need you to move.”

“Okay.”

I reached up and grabbed the door frame and hauled myself up. I laid down on my side on top of the cab and reached down. The driver’s hand was slick with something. I realized too late that it was blood. I only got him a foot off the ground before he slipped out of my grip.

He landed badly in the cab.

“Buddy, we gotta get out of here!” I yelled.

He groaned, clearly in agony now, and I took both his hands. He must have weighed two-twenty. Every muscle in my back tightened as he pulled and as I pulled him and Manetti screamed in my ear the whole way, urging us to go faster. I got him up over the lip of the door and he managed to get a foot up. The load decreased and Manetti grabbed his belt and helped me pull his high or drunk ass the rest of the way out.

“COME ON!” Manetti screamed.

She jumped off first. I slid off the cab and helped the driver down. He was busted up internally but his legs worked okay. We ran the opposite direction from which we’d come because it was uphill and farther from the spill.

Manetti was about to say something to me when everything blew up.

Somebody stopped me before I wandered into the southbound lane of 95. Traffic had come to a standstill, so I wouldn’t have been turned into roadkill. But still.

The somebody was a middle-aged man wearing expensive glasses and a sweat-stained shirt. Once he was reasonably certain I wasn’t going to walk in front of a moving vehicle, he hurried off to help somebody else.

I turned around and got myself reoriented.

Fire crews were working hard against the flames that raged around the truck.

“Eddie.”

Manetti's black coat was gone and the skin around her one eye was bruised and yellowing. I hustled over, my head ringing a little bit. On the way, I spotted the driver sitting in the back of an ambulance, head bowed, guilt weighing his shoulders down. The crash and explosion must have sobered him up and now he was facing reality.

"You okay?" Manetti asked.

"I was wandering into the southbound lanes, but somebody tapped me on the shoulder and it sort of woke me up." I nodded at her. "Where's your coat?"

"Burned."

"You were on fire?"

"Sort of." She winced as she turned to show me the back of her shirt. It was blackened.

"Jesus."

"It was worth it." Manetti smiled. "Only one dead, Eddie. It would have been a lot worse."

I was so happy I hugged her. She wasn't expecting it. She was also big on personal space so her whole body stiffened. It was like hugging a mannequin. I didn't care. We'd saved lives and I was ecstatic. Though now that I was out of the moment, I realized just how awful a risk I'd taken to save the driver. And that made me think of Sumiko and how I almost hadn't seen her ever again.

All my life I'd never had to think like that before. I was too young to appreciate how fragile life was when my parents died. I was too reckless and heedless to appreciate it even when my brother died. Since then I'd lived a thoroughly solitaire existence and the last few years I'd thrown myself into my work, leaving no time for anything remotely resembling a social life.

Now here I was worrying about seeing somebody else again. I felt like I couldn't be careless with my life anymore, because I owed part of it to her.

I let go of Manetti.

"You okay?" she asked again, sensing my change in mood.

There was no time for navel-gazing, though. Time to get back to business. "One down, one to go. We need to get back in front of Karen and see if she knows the people in the rape video."

Manetti nodded. "Let's go."

This time it was just Manetti and me in the copter. She explained another helicopter had come in for the tack unit. As the pilot lifted off and we climbed, I got that bird's eye view of the accident and from up here it looked ever worse. I counted five—no six—chain reaction car accidents, one vehicle rear-ending the next, and the next, and the next...and a profound sense of deja vu overcame me.

"Where's the tablet?" I asked Manetti.

"You had it last."

Old married couple, we were. I checked under the seat and found it. In ten seconds I'd managed to turn it on and flip to the car crash sequence. I tracked through it and jumped ahead to the end of Alison's dream.

And I realized it wasn't deja vu.

As I looked out the window, the scene below me was exactly the scene from the end of the dream, after the explosion. At least, it looked that way.

"Hold on!" I shouted up to the pilot.

"What?"

"We need a picture of this!"

I stuck my head into the cockpit and explained what I needed quickly. He had to turn us around and get us back over the center of the accident. Manetti grabbed my belt, I opened a door, and I stuck my phone out to take a picture. I wanted to compare what was below to what Alison had dreamed, though at a quick glance it seemed like a pretty close match.

I snapped a few pictures with my phone, and then we were off again, racing back. Ever the clock was against us.

Manetti took out her phone. "Hi, Karen, this is Agent Manetti...yes, we think it was the same accident and that's why I was calling. Are you still at the...will you be home for the next hour? We really need to show you and hopefully your husband the other video...yes, I'll hold on..."

Manetti cupped her hand over the speaker on the phone. "Has to talk to her hubby."

I nodded. On the ground below us, traffic had completely snarled on 95 in both directions. Southbound limped along, while northbound was totally gridlocked. Some cars were actually trying to turn around and ride on the shoulder to get back to the nearest exit. Seeing the devastation from the accident, I was amazed that more people hadn’t gotten killed. It seemed callous that I hadn’t stopped to learn about the man who’d died, but we had another emergency that wouldn’t wait.

"That's great, Karen. We really appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be there inside of an hour."

Manetti hung up and gave the pilot an address. He plugged it into his GPS on the dashboard and the computer gave us an aerial route. He couldn't land near their house, but there was a soccer field a couple blocks away. Probably a bunch of kids there but we had no choice, the next closest place was at least a half mile away and time was not on our side. Manetti sat back down and the pilot powered the copter up and we zoomed off.

Time for me to make a call.

"Hey, Eddie!" Sumiko's voice was right then the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. She went on to tell me about her day and I loved listening to it, enjoying the relative normalcy. "We're going to bring that one guy in. The DA thinks we have enough so they're finally ready to bring charges. I can't believe it's been seven months since we opened that one."

"That's great, babe. Miss you."

"Miss you too, husband. Have you been watching the news?"

I smiled. "Haven't had a chance really."

"This tractor-trailer carrying Xylene flipped on 95 and there was a huge explosion. They're saying the nitwit was taking a cocktail of drugs to keep himself awake. Those guys drive too long hours, they really need to pass some legislation."

"Actually, I did hear about that."

"I thought you said you didn't watch the news."

I took a deep breath, wondering how she was going to take this little bit of information. "Babe, I was practially
in
the news."

Silence. Then: "What?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you any of this."

Manetti looked up at me, her eyes narrowed.

"But I'm going to. You know why I'm here. We got advance notice of the accident and we tried to stop it."

"Are you alright?"

"Yes." I decided I could fill her in later on the details as I wasn't ready to have that conversation. "We're off to stop something else now."

"Not another explosion!"

"No. I'm not in any danger for the other thing."

Manetti's eyes had softened a bit.

"Eddie, tell me the truth. How dangerous was it?"

The truth. "Very. It was...close."

"I can't believe it's...she can really see the future?"

"Yes. Maybe. Sort of. We're still working that out."

"My God, Eddie." She went quiet for a minute. "Well how long is this going to go on?"

"What do you mean?"

"Are you just on call now? Will you be running off every time she has a nightmare about something horrible?"

"Babe, we haven't had a chance to think long-term yet. We were confronted with an emergency and had to act."

"That's fine. But I’m asking you now. When are
you
done?"

I sighed. "I don't know, but they need my help right now. And there's nobody else."

"Eddie...I can't lose you."

"And I can't lose you." I was surprised at being a little angry. But she of all people should have understood. "Look at what you do every day. Is this really any different?"

"I just didn't think...I thought your job was different."

"But you know what I've done the last few years. How many near death experiences have I had? Probably just as many as you, not that we should be keeping count."

"I know, Eddie, but I just didn't think I would have to worry like this...I want you safe..."

"I feel the same way."

"But you know I'm a cop. You went into this with eyes wide open."

Now she was getting angry. I should have taken things down a notch, but instead I kept going. Pig-headed as always.

“You had your eyes wide open too, Sumiko. When we met I told you all about Oregon and we both nearly died on the investigation—”

“I know.” Her voice had changed, grown distant. “I just didn’t think…”

“Think what?”

“…”

“Sumiko?”

“Eddie, I’m sorry but I have to go.”

“We need to talk about this.”

“Later, Eddie. Sorry.”

She hung up.

***

Not long after my call to Sumiko, we touched down on a soccer field in the suburbs. The pilot killed the engine and the whine of the rotors slowed. I followed Manetti out into the gathering twilight. Up in the air I’d still had a good angle on the sun, but on the ground it had slipped behind the trees and the air was cold.

Some kids that had been tossing the pigskin around crowded us when we got out of the helicopter.

The lead one was small and looked like he’d just swallowed the canary. “That looks like a new Sikorsky. Are you guys secret agents?”

Manetti, for once, was impressed. “You’re right about the helicopter, but wrong about us.”

The kid’s face fell. Apparently he must have bragged to his friends about figuring out we were secret agents, because the rest of them descended into laughter.

“She’s lying,” I said. “
She’s
actually a secret agent.”

Before Manetti could chew me out, I broke into a jog. Tablet in hand, she fell in step with me while behind us the kids argued about which one of us was telling the truth, and what did we really mean by secret agent, and that secret agents only worked in foreign countries so we couldn’t be…

“Thanks for breaking our cover,” Manetti said. “Turn right up here.”

“Who’s going to believe those kids when half of them say they saw secret agents and the other half say they didn’t?”

As we reached the end of the pitch we made a right onto a sidewalk. A lady walking her Labradoodle across the street did kind of a double-take when she saw us. We must have looked a pair. Manetti hadn’t put anything on over her half-scorched shirt and, from what she’d told me in the helicopter, I had some fresh cuts and scrapes on my neck and one leg on my jeans was ripped like it was vintage 90s gear.

In short, we
looked
like we’d been blown up.

We ran the two blocks in a minute and a half. Not bad for people that had almost just died.

Ted and Karen’s place was a small, unadorned rectangle. Only one car in the driveway, a Dodge that was probably more valuable for its parts. They had sunk all their money into their daughter’s healthcare, obviously, at first probably holding out hope doctors could cure her and later, just trying to extend what little time they had left. It was goddamn depressing to think about how they’d all fought today, watching all that bitterness and regret bubble up to the surface like water coming to a boil in a pot. The kid’s days were numbered so they shouldn’t have spent their time at each other’s throats.

I was so caught up in that horrible feeling I didn’t realize that Ted had offered his hand in apology from the doorway for a moment.

“I was out of line,” I quickly blurted out. “We appreciate all the help you can give us.”

“I’m so sorry…this is just so…I’m sure you understand.”

Ted and Karen let us in. I smelled pizza and spotted the takeout box sitting on the dinner table that faced the TV. One plate was empty. The other had a slice with only one bite out of it. It made me think about how everybody reacted to sorrow differently.

“Are you hungry?” Karen touched her stomach. “I have no appetite today.”

“No thanks,” we both said, even though Manetti had to be as hungry as I was. It just didn’t seem right to sit down and eat their food.

“Please have a seat.” Ted pointed at a sofa on the other side of the room, right next to the TV.

“Thanks, but I’ll stand,” Manetti said. I knew from talking to her on our last gig together that this was her training kicking in. Two agents working people inside a house couldn’t sit down next to each other. If there was anybody else in the house, they could pretty easily sneak up on you and blow your brains out. There was little chance of that happening here, but Manetti followed protocol.

I sat. After the cramped, bumpy ride in the copter the old couch felt great. Ted and Karen sat on the opposite sofa, no less than two feet separating them on the cushion.

“First, we want to thank you for your help today,” Manetti said. “We think a lot of people would have died if you hadn’t.”