Remember Our Song (15 page)

My overworked adrenaline glands kicked into action again, spurring me back out of the car, and rushing me towards the little security shack.  I saw Nelson open the door and come out, looking as if he thought I was about to attempt to scale the wall or something.  His expression changed when he saw my face though.

“What’s wrong
?”

“Call him! 
Stop him!”

“I can’t, nothing’s changed in the past few min…”

“He’s gonna kill himself!”

“What are you talking about?”

I waved the piece of paper around frantically like it was a surrender flag, “He’s gonna
kill
himself!  Get on the phone God dammit!”

Nelson
scrutinized me for a moment and then charged back into the shack, pulling up a handset and pressing buttons on a phone obscured by the counter.  His face was reasonably calm but I could see the hand that wasn’t holding the handset to his ear was bunched into a fist with the knuckles turning white.  Approximately an eternity passed before he unclenched his fist and reached under the counter.

“No answer.  I’ll try again… wait!  I’ll try Stan.”

The sound of phone buttons being hammered with Nelson’s thick finger slipped out the window and it was all I could do to not scream hysterically. 
Please
I thought,
let him get through and just have Stan turn the car around!

“Stan!  It’s Nelson, where are you?”

I strained my ears to make sense of the tiny and distant voice coming through the earpiece of Nelson’s handset, but couldn’t make out a single word.  It was torture to have to just stand there like a bump on a log doing nothing.  I glanced at the paper in my hand and winced, it couldn’t end like this, not now, not after everything that had just happened.

“Stop him!  Get in there, stop him!”
Nelson yelled.

The tone of the voice on the phone communicated reluctance and confusion as well as any words could have until Nelson cut him off.

“He’s lost it man, he’s gonna kill himself!  Stop him!”

The phone was silent for a moment then I made out my first and only words from Stan since the conversation had begun.

“Come on… this a joke?”

“No.  You’ve seen what he’s been like lately.  Christmas bonuses?  In May?  He’s gonna top himself if you don’t stop him!”

Stan hesitated and then spoke some more words I couldn’t make out.

“OK, call me back straight away.  Wait… tell him Mrs. Holt is here… yeah.  OK, call back.” Nelson said and hung up.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“They’ve gone to a place called Ozzy Aviation to pick up Mr. Holt’s new helicopter.  Stan said he dropped him off about half an hour ago and Mr. Holt said not to wait for him, he’d be catching a ride in the helicopter.  Stan was assuming he was going to hear from Mr. Holt later and probably have to pick him up from somewhere else in the city.  Stan was still there outside the place because he was having some lunch in the car, so he’s right there, he’s gonna call us back.”

“Oh my God… where is it?”

“Just a second, I’ll look it up.”

Nelson pulled out a tablet PC and began tapping away on the screen, eventually flipping it around and showing me a map with a picture of a big thumbtack labeled “Ozzy Aviation Ltd” stuck into it.

“Do you know how to get there?”  Nelson asked.

I scanned around the streets nearest to the thumbtack looking for somewhere I knew, and managed to figure out exactly where it was in my mind.  I looked back to Nelson and nodded.

“Probably best to wait for Stan to call, he’ll bring Jeremy straight back anyway.  That’ll be safest,” he said.

I nodded again wordlessly and sat on the ground with my back against Nelson’s guard shack, my body protesting at the swings from high-adrenaline panic to having to sit and wait.

“Please stop him…” I whispered as if Stan could hear me from where I sat.

Chapter 15

I kept a constant watch on the clock on my phone, every agonizing minute ticking over with no update from Stan.  A little over a quarter of an hour had passed by when Nelson picked up the phone in his shack halfway through the first ring.

“Hello?  Stan?  Shit!”

Nelson leaned out the window and looked down at me as I was struggling to my feet, my eyes wild with exhaustion and desperation.

“Stan didn’t make it in time, Jeremy’s up in the air already, flying ‘erratically’ and Stan says he’s been drinking,” Nelson said

“Jesus Christ!  Why did they let him in the helicopter in the first place?”

“I don’t know…” Nelson turned away from me to speak into the handset again.  “Stan, calm down… calm down… he called you a what?  No… just calm down.  I’m calling the police, hell, I’m calling everybody, sending the works out your way.  Go back and talk to him, tell him Beatrice is on the way… You have to, man, get the hell back in there.  Go!  Goodbye.”

Nelson slammed the phone back down and looked at me incredulously.

“What are you still doing here?  Go!  There’s still a chance!”

“What can I do, though?”

“He’s still semi-communicating through radio, called Stan a lying asshole when he said you were here.  Go, Beatrice, just go!  It’s not too late!”

Nelson’s words sank in for a moment and I turned to sprint back towards my car, hurling a mixture of curse words and gibberish at it as I approached, threatening the inanimate object with all manner of violence if it even thought about not starting on the first God damned try.  The threats seemed to work as I turned the key and caught the glimpse of smoke out of my rear view mirror when the engine coughed to life.

With tires squealing, I pulled a U-turn and pushed my car to the absolute limits, thrashing the engine for all it was worth.  I cursed myself for panicking and driving down instead of catching a flight, so what if I couldn’t have afforded it?  Debbie, or somebody, would have loaned me the money I bet.

Now that delay meant I was in a race against time with my window of opportunity to save everything rapidly closing.  I had to get to Ozzy Aviation, and on to the radio with Jeremy, before he finally decided that enough was enough and crashed his helicopter.  There was a lot of concrete to hit around L.A.

I came up behind some elderly woman who could barely see over the steering wheel taking her pristine 1980s car out for a Sunday drive and leaned on the horn angrily.  Instead of pulling over or speeding up, she slowed down even more.  I screamed in frustration and pulled out to overtake her, planting my foot on the accelerator and barely getting back into my own lane in time to avoid crashing head first into a car coming the other way.

The sound of horns blaring quickly faded into the distance, only to be replaced by new ones as I drove like a maniac through increasingly busy streets.  All I wanted to do was shut my eyes tight and then open them to find I’d woken from a bad dream, but I forced myself to concentrate on seeing everything there was to see on the road, I wasn’t even sure if I blinked a single time.

After about ten minutes of miraculously not getting my tires shot out by police, in fact not seeing a single one, I spotted a helicopter in the sky up ahead.  It was swaying drunkenly back and forth, side to side like a college student staggering home after a night on the town.

Every uncoordinated-looking banking turn to each side looked like it could send the poorly controlled craft straight to the ground.  I didn’t even notice that I had gone through a red light until a huge truck nearly killed me, narrowly missing my car as I shot through the intersection.  For a few seconds the whole world was screaming
tires, horns and shouts of ‘You crazy bitch!’ as I somehow made it through unscathed.

The decision on whether to risk another blast through a red light was taken out of my hands at the next intersection, which was blocked up several cars deep while the road that ran perpendicular to ours had the green.  I rolled to a halt behind some station-wagon with a man and a woman in the front and a stuffed rabbit being held aloft by two little arms over a car seat in the back.  Jeremy and I had been planning on having kids ‘sometime in the next few years’.

“We can still have it all, baby,” I said. “Hold on.”

The lights turned green and I almost screeched in frustration at how long it took for the car in front of me to begin moving.  When it finally did, I put my foot down on the accelerator again and my car lurched forward, then made a terrifying grinding noise and came to a complete halt.  Smoke, or steam, or something began billowing out from under the hood and nothing happened when I turned the key.

“Piece of
shit!
”

I threw the door open and jumped out into the middle of the street, ignoring the man who asked me if I ‘needed some help’ as I decided to sprint the last couple of blocks towards Ozzy Aviation.  I managed to get across the first street while the lights were still red, but danced with death on the second one.

People either scattered out of my way as I tore along the sidewalk, or looked like they might have thought I was a fleeing bank robber and were considering tackling me.  At last I spotted a building labeled “Ozzy Aviation” in dark blue lettering behind a chain-link fence with a security guard in a little shack guarding a gate.  The shack was much like the one outside Jeremy’s house, and the guard reminded me a lot of Nelson, except for the uniform.

I ran up to the window, my breath coming in ragged gasps as I tried a combination of pointing at the gate and miming for him to open it up.  The guard slid the window to the side and I could see the stress on his face as the sound of a helicopter almost directly above us could clearly be heard.

“Sorry Ma’am, we’re closed for the time being.  Some drunken idiot has taken a copter and is threatening to crash it, so we’re waiting for the police and fire department.  You should go get under cover somewhere, to be honest.”

“That’s my husband!  I have to get in there, I can talk him down!”

“What?  Stay there a minute.”

The guard slid the window shut and picked up a phone, talking animatedly with somebody on the other end, while holding a small bottle of what I assumed was pepper spray in the other hand.  Somewhere in the distance I heard sirens, barely audible over the much nearer sound of the wavering helicopter.

I looked towards the gate and weighed up my chances of successfully climbing over it.  Seeing the barbed wire on top, I estimated my chances were slim, but if the guard wasn’t off the phone in the next couple of seconds, I was going to try it.

Before he even slid the window open again I heard the electric hum of the motor that controlled the gate and saw it begin to roll to the side.  I was already moving before his voice reached me from behind.

“Go!  Straight to the front door, Lloyd will let you in!”

I slipped through the gate as soon as it was open enough for me to get through and ran towards the only door I could see on the front of the building.  A bald man in a suit opened it wide and ushered me in, beats of sweat standing out on his forehead.

“Up the stairs, he keeps saying he’s going to crash it!  Go, go, go!  Holy shit!” he blurted out.

I spotted the stairs he was referring to and heaved myself up them, my legs threatening to give out on me at any moment.  The stairs lead to a single open door and a room full of electronic equipment well lit by huge windows that overlooked the helicopter equivalent of a used car lot.

A single man, equally as bald as the one that had let me inside, was sitting on a chair with a headset over his ears and the microphone on a boom in front of his mouth.  Stan was leaning against one wall, vigorously chewing on a fingernail next to a door labeled as an emergency fire exit. He stood up straight when he saw me and spread his hands out.

“Sorry, I couldn’t stop him!”

“Not your fault… it’s my fault,” I panted.

Lloyd caught up with me and grabbed me by both shoulders forcing me forwards and down on a stool next to the man with the headset before shoving one of my own over my ears.  Both of them looked at me expectantly.

“Talk!  Talk!”

“Is it on?  Hello?  Jeremy?”

Nothing but faint static came through my ear pieces and I looked back and forth from Lloyd to the other man with my hands held wide, mouthing ‘what do I do?’  Both of them simply made ‘more’ gestures with their hands and I turned back towards the window.

“Jeremy, it’s me, Beatrice, I’m here.  Can you hear me?”

“Nice try.  Stan, if you’re listening that does sound a lot like her.  My wife is gone though, I saw it in her eyes.  I met my replacement,” Jeremy slurred.

“No!  I
am
here, Jeremy, I’m right here in this room at Ozzy Aviation.  I remember!  I remember almost everything, I’m back!  I’ve been driving since Friday because you haven’t been answering your phone.  I love you, please don’t do this!”

Through my headset I could only hear that faint static again, but the sirens of the police, fire department or ambulance were much closer now and I could hear them even though I was inside.  Finally I heard a deep hitching sigh come through and Jeremy spoke quietly.

“I haven’t seen my wife in almost a year… is it really you?  Looks like a lot of flashing lights heading your way.”

“It’s me, Jeremy… it’s Bumble Bea.  Please just come down… it’s just you and me and we can still have everything.”

“I… want to believe you… but I can’t,
can’t
, go on like I have been, can’t be tricked on to the ground only to be thrown in a padded cell.  Tell me something only Bea would know… what did you call me after we saw that X-Men movie?”

I felt a huge wave of relief when he asked the question because I knew straight away exactly he was talking about.  We’d watched it in a special VIP area of a cinema that Jeremy hired out completely so we had it to ourselves.  The standard area below was still full, but upstairs we had huge comfortable seats, food and drinks were all served right were we sat.

It was a movie about heroes with superpowers saving the world and afterwards I’d thought to myself about how Jeremy had been a hero that saved my own world in a way.  The end credits were rolling when I’d leaned over to him, pulled him close by the tie and said…

“Kiss me, J-Man.”

Sure, it was a corny line, but kiss me he did and I couldn’t have been any more smitten with him even if he could fly.  I could only hope that now that he
was
flying, he would land safely.  The silence coming through my headset was agonizing, it seemed to last forever.  I just about passed out with relief when I heard him respond.

“I’m… coming down.”

The man with the other headset took it off and rested his forehead on the table in front of him, offering prayers of thanks in hushed tones.

“What is it?  What’s happening?” asked Lloyd.

The man’s forehead didn’t leave the surface it was resting on, instead he simply raised a hand in a thumbs-up gesture.

“Is he landing?” asked Stan.

The thumbs-up raised even higher before falling back down as the noise of an approaching helicopter drowned out the sirens and at last I saw the cherry-red aircraft come into view through the window, coming in over the neighboring buildings.  It looked as unstable as ever, veering from side to side, just barely in control but coming down nice and slow at least.

As he was passing over the building right next to Ozzy Aviation I saw something that had me on the edge of my seat, gripping the end of the table with white knuckles.

“Look out for the…”

Too late.  The tail rotor clipped a flagpole that was planted on top of the building and with a huge metallic
clang
Jeremy’s helicopter, already barely held in check, became completely untamable, beginning to spin around and pitch to one side.

“No!” I screamed, standing up and staring out of the window in horror.

The helicopter leaned in our direction, still spinning around, and began heading straight towards the Ozzy Aviation building while plummeting downwards at the same time.  Flashes of sunlight caught on its red paint as it got closer and closer until it seemed like it was going to crash straight into the room we were in.

“Holy shit! 
Get down!”

Somebody tackled me from behind and threw me to the floor, falling on top of me as the sound of the helicopter nearly drowned everything else out.  All around me was noise and confusion, I thought nothing could possibly be any louder until the sound of the helicopter crashing into the ground outside raised the cacophony to insane levels.

Something smashed the window and a shower of glass fell on to the table, before a few pieces dropped off the end and rained down on us.  I shut my eyes and turned away as the wind brought in the smell of fuel and the noise hit a new high, with metallic grinding and scraping filling the room for a few moments before becoming ominously quiet.

“Get off me! 
Get off me!
” I yelled, struggling to my feet and cutting the palm of my hand on a shard of glass.

I looked out the hole where the window had been and saw Jeremy’s helicopter in a tangled heap next to another one that had been parked and looked to have received the full brunt of the impact.