Stagehands Walk

Set against the backdrop of the arcane world behind the scenes in the live entertainment industry, this is an action story about two men old enough to know better and the people they care for.

CHAPTER # 1 - JUNE 8, 1998, 11:35 AM

COASTAL SHORES, VIRGINIA

 

The bright red granular spot of laser light appeared on O'Donnell's chest. He gazed at it with as much calm as he could muster given his current state of exhaustion. The still functioning part of his brain instantly recognized the laser's characteristic dispersion pattern. It could be either a benign laser pointer in the hands of one of his coworkers or a hostile gun-sight laser in the hands of a trained assassin. Although why anyone would want to threaten him this way was beyond him. The days when this might have made sense were decades gone. In any case, he was in no mood to sort this out. O'Donnell was way too tired for whatever this was. He attempted to focus his bleary eyes on the short elderly Chinese man blocking the walkway in front of him. He shook his head to clear his mind. If this was someone's idea of a joke, it was not funny. They could bother him later. He might enjoy the humor later. He was going home and no vertically challenged refugee from an old age home was stopping him. He had worked too many hours in a row with no sleep and had every intention of dragging his sorry little self to the car and going home to bed. There was nothing wrong with him that a good night's sleep and a solid breakfast could not cure.

The Chinese man had appeared from behind a hedge and caught O'Donnell by surprise. O'Donnell tried to step around the stranger. He was doing his best to control one of his most intense hatreds. Old animosities died hard. Half a world away and a generation ago he had patrolled a tropical jungle where the Pentagon's official "smiley faces" mouth pieces insisted there were no Americans. The Chinese insisted that none of their people were there either. They both lied. O'Donnell knew differently. He had been there. In those days he would have quickly taken his rifle and shot this intruder. Killing came easy when he was younger. He had plenty of experience. He had few regrets. But today he had no rifle. Of course, even in the close quarters of jungle combat, he would not likely have gotten this near the enemy without being shot himself. Thirty straight hours with no sleep working in the Convention Center made him testy. When the small man blocked his path, O'Donnell roughly pushed him aside.

"Mr. O'Donnell. Stop," the man commanded.

"I don't know what bean brain put you up to this, but I'm going home," O'Donnell snarled.

"Mr. Quentin Xavier O'Donnell. You very difficult man. Red spot on chest not a laser pointer."

His accent made is "l's" sound like "r's." The thought of a "razor pointer" amused O'Donnell through the fog in his mind and he smiled at the paradox.

"You not smile at me," the man continued with an anger cold in its hardness. "You looking at the laser from sight of a high powered rifle. Two rifles are aimed at you. If you not do as I say, you not leave parking lot alive. You understand, Mr. O'Donnell?"

"And who are you?" His mind filled in a racial epithet which he left unvoiced. Not that he had not used this epithet and others like it hundreds of times before. Not saying what he wanted to say was as close to "politically correct" as he got. He remembered trading fire with some of this man's colleagues a generation ago. The animosities lingered and burned deep in his memory.

"I have control of two high powered rifles aimed at your chest. That all you need to know."

When O'Donnell saw the second bright red spot appear close to the first, he noticed how steady they were. O'Donnell had worked with lasers from the time they had first been introduced in rock concerts. He knew what they could and could not do. The aura around the center beam had the distinct red color, intensity and granular appearance his trained eye recognized as a gun sight laser. The steadiness of the light spoke of skilled marksmen. He slowly decided this was not a joke and the refugee from a rice paddy standing before him that he would have shot without hesitation in the jungle had they met thirty years ago was not about to take "No" for an answer.

O'Donnell had been a stagehand for a long time and worked thousands of concerts and stage show tours. He had been an "adviser" in Vietnam before the war was a war. By the time he returned to the States, he had accumulated more wear on the top of his combat boots than most GI's get on the bottom. He had been in many difficult situations, but nothing prepared him for the dispassionate force of this stubborn Oriental. O'Donnell had always believed the Orientals were patient people and that characteristic made them formidable adversaries. But this one's patience appeared to be wearing thin and he doubted provoking a rash act would be a good idea.

"Five Hundred Dollar now and Five Hundred on Delivery," the Chinaman stated. "Guide white Cadillac from V I P parking area in front of Convention Center to top floor of Palace Hotel parking garage. Someone will meet you there. Open trunk. Give him automobile tires. He will give you money."

"If I refuse?" O'Donnell's tone was still defiant.

"Don't." It was an order, as cold and unemotional as everything else this little man had said. "Take the middle size flat blade screwdriver from your tool belt. Insert it in the outside door lock on the passenger side of car."

O'Donnell looked at this tool belt. Worn and dirty from a decade of use, going to work without it was as foolish as not wearing pants. Most technicians only carried two screwdrivers in their tool belts. O'Donnell wondered how this man knew he carried three.

"Use screwdriver like joy stick to control car. Push forward to go forward. Push up to turn left, down to turn right and back to brake. Here, take money. Go. There not much time, but tread carefully like skilled soldier you once were. We intend treat you honestly."

O'Donnell thought he heard a break, perhaps a bit of softness in the man's voice, but it quickly turned hard again. "Others not be so kind."

O'Donnell had a hike from the back loading docks of the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Convention Center to the limo parking area in front of the building where the white Cadillac was supposed to be waiting. The late morning was as pretty as such a day could be in this part of coastal Virginia. Unfortunately, O'Donnell was in no mood to appreciate the beauty of the day. Normally he would pause to appreciate the joys of ordinary splendor, for in spite of everything life had taught him, he remained a romantic at heart, but today was an exception. Every once in a while he spotted one of the bright red lights following him and guessed that the source of the light was on the top of the building. Weapons had been aimed at him before, but it had been a long time ago. He no longer felt the invulnerability he had felt as a youth in the jungles half a world away. Long suppressed memories rose to haunt him. His anger at his former enemy had not diminished over the decades.

The Chinaman had obviously done his homework and had known where to wait for O'Donnell. Pushing 60, O'Donnell's face was hard etched with lines that bore mute evidence of too many long rock and roll tours with too little sleep, too many 48 hour work shifts in convention season and too many near starvation off-season summers. Slight built and wiry, his  grace belied his age. His hair had long ago gone gray and he wore it in a ponytail that came to his waist. He had been a professional stagehand for since he got out of college was currently working out of the stagehand's union in Coastal Shores, Virginia, I A T S E Local 2005. Having finished the stage lighting installation for a large multi-national diplomatic meeting and treaty signing ceremony in the convention center's arena, he was tired and ready to go home when the Chinaman had stopped him outside of the loading area's protected security zone.

O'Donnell was as skeptical as he was worried. What if he delivered the tires and they decided to shoot him anyway? The only part of the trip that appeared to be shielded from the shooters on the roof would be the middle levels in the garage. Perhaps he could escape from there.

Lacking a better idea, O'Donnell proceeded as instructed. He still had his stagehand "All Access" security pass visible on its lanyard. As he approached the Cadillac, he searched for an escape route that would be shielded from the marksmen on the roof. Finding none, he strolled to the passenger side of the car mindful of the two small red lights that continued to follow him.

The car's engine idled peacefully. The control was nicely calibrated and responded smoothly to a light touch. The unusually dark tint of the side windows prevented him from looking into the car and he was far enough back that he could not look into the windshield. He realized that if he stood at his full height, it would be easy for someone inside the car to shoot him without warning. Thinking that some shielding was better than no shielding, he bent over to a crouch, so that his torso was below the line of the windows and stretched his left hand forward to control the screwdriver joystick. His crouch completely hid him from anyone on the left side of the car and the foliage hid him from view on the right.

None of the Coastal Shores County Sheriff's Deputies seemed to notice him. They were busy dealing with demonstrators on the road. A diversion perhaps? When he reached the bottom of the driveway, he waited for traffic to clear. He thought about getting to the street, abandoning the Cadillac in the traffic and running. He was in good physical shape, but broken field running with a couple of high-powered rifles in the mix was not his idea of a good time. He remembered a time where he would have jumped forward to some cover, rolled over and returned the fire, but that was long ago and far away. In another, more recent, time his first instinct in time of trouble was to cut and run. This instinct had saved him many times when the Vietnam protests he supported turned violent and the police showed up. His ability to disappear was sometimes the only thing that kept him safe from overzealous local and Federal constabulary.

When the Deputy released the cars in front of him, looking like a cross between a speed skater and a Skesis from the movie "Dark Crystal", O'Donnell shuffled bent over with his left arm outstretched guiding the car into the left lane where he had been directed. The Deputy looked away, distracted by the activity at the other end of the convention center, so he did not notice a gray-haired old stagehand sneaking beside a car making a right hand turn into the traffic. A Tradeshow Specialties Decorating Company tractor-trailer pulled into the right lane from the service driveway blocking O'Donnell's planned route. O'Donnell moved the car more slowly than the rest of the traffic to create a space for the Tradeshow Specialties truck to move into the left lane so that he could guide the Cadillac to the right.

By the time the truck had reached the driveway to the garage, O'Donnell had created a space. The truck began to move left to clear the driveway when O'Donnell heard two shots. They did not come from the Convention Center, but from the hotel across the street. Two explosions followed the shots as the truck's front tires blew out. Someone did not want him to get to the garage. Were these the "others" the Chinaman mentioned?

Panic froze him in place for only a moment. Recovering, he twisted the screwdriver in the lock and the door opened. He climbed in. Someone was in the car. He tried to speak to the driver. The driver had a tiny round bullet hole in the left of his forehead. Powder burns ringed the hole indicating a gun fired at close range. The blood from the exit wound on the right of his head had mostly missed the headrest and had sprayed over the rear seat. That must have been what had happened to plan "A", it also explained why the Deputies had not been suspicious of a driverless car leaving the Convention Center. It appeared to have a driver. The driver was dead, but still sat held in place by his seat belt. O'Donnell pulled the body to the passenger side of the car, climbed over it and drove the car forward, careful to not lean back into the blood on the headrest. Following the shots, several of the cars in front of him took off toward the median or the shoulder of the road driving over the landscaping in their haste to get away. A space opened in front of him and he maneuvered the car to the first opening. He slalomed the big car through a parking lot, down a tree-lined road, looped around a hotel complex and headed east.

As he was weaving through traffic, he wondered if the car was equipped with an anti-theft or homing device police alert. He guessed it probably was and wasted no time in getting the car out of sight. Rocketing through the residential districts, he drove to Astronaut Memorial Parkway where he found several self-storage buildings under construction. He drove onto one of the sites, hid the car in one of the spaces and sat the dead driver back up in his seat. He decided that since it was the tires and not the car, the Chinaman wanted, he would remove the tires from the car as soon as he had found a place to stash them. He briefly contemplated leaving the tires in the car, but if the tires were not delivered and someone else found them, he suspected the Chinaman would blame him for the double cross, hunt him down and kill him. Of course, no one could guarantee he would not be killed even if he did deliver the tires.

He had noticed a drainage ditch behind the convenience store next to the construction site as he drove between the rows of unfinished storage buildings. Frantically racing against what he expected was an army of miniature Chinamen who would be arriving at any moment; he yanked on the trunk release with more force than necessary. The trunk popped open and he dashed around to grab the tires. The tires were small enough that he could carry both of them. They seemed like ordinary enough tires.

O'Donnell staggered the hundred yards and looked into the water in the bottom of the ditch. He dumped the tires in the deep spot outside the culvert where they would be hidden by the dirty brown water. He dumped rock and concrete debris on them to keep them from bobbing to the surface. As soon as he was done, keeping his head low, he ran to the wooded area across the street next to the county bus stop. He hid in the brush and waited for the bus.

He had guessed correctly about the car being equipped with a homing device. The bus he caught was pulling out when two patrol cars under light and sirens in full pursuit converged on the construction site. He wondered what was so important about those tires. He did not have long to wonder before his alpha-pager went off.

'Please call about your final payment.' and a telephone number.

That was innocuous enough. O'Donnell's mind raced to interpret the message. What it did not say was important. It meant that they did not know where he was, but they knew he had escaped and they knew his pager number. They had done their homework. O'Donnell never used his first name except for time sheets and other legal documents. The crews merely called him "O'Donnell" or sometimes "Paps." Many on the crew did not even know his first name. The Chinaman, however, knew his full name. That also meant he could not go to his apartment. Knowing as much as they did about him, they would surely be watching the apartment. Who "they" were was bothering him.

A friend had often advised, "Hide in plain sight. They will never find you."

The bus he happened to catch took him to the Coastal Mall. He knew that he would need some cash for whatever he decided to do and headed to the ATM. He suspected that whoever wanted those tires had enough connections to monitor the ATM machines. After all, that was the modern way to track terrorists, criminals or aging anti-war protesters. If he got his cash and quickly took a bus out, he figured he could be gone before anyone could catch him.

The next bus out was headed to the theme park and entertainment complex. He rode the bus to their movie theater complex where he knew it would be easy to hide. He paid cash for whatever the next movie was and went in.

He paid no attention to the movie. He had more pressing things on his mind. He sat in the back row and watched to see who came in after him. No one did. He wondered if he was being paranoid. He decided paranoia was the healthiest choice. O'Donnell assessed his situation. At least one armed force that was not the government was looking for him. Local law enforcement was involved.

If this thing were big enough, Feds would be involved. O'Donnell did not like tangling with law enforcement at all, but tangling with the Feds was especially worrisome. Somehow, he needed to deliver the tires and escape before he could be shot either by the people to whom he gave the tires or by the people to whom he did not give them. He could imagine the chaos in the Convention Center's security office where the surveillance monitors were. He wondered if the camera he noticed on the roof had caught his departure. Even more importantly, why had they missed the shooters on the roof?

The face of one of the actors in the movie reminded him of a young technician on the job he had recently finished and the conversation they had less than an hour ago. As they we signing out the young man had asked him, "Don't you get excited about the events you work on?" O'Donnell had not replied and the younger man continued. "Don't be so jaded. Just 'cause you work on lots of history-making events, you shouldn't take them for granted."

"I don't," O'Donnell had replied. "I merely light the show. I don't make history. I made my share of history long ago. It was not fun. I don't want to do it again. I don't get off watching a bunch of powerless politicians strutting around trying to look like more than they are." He paused and looked at the kid. "Do you know why these negotiations took so long?"

The younger man had just looked at him.

"These idiots spent six months arguing over whether they should meet at a square table or a round one. Our soldiers were dying in combat and these pompous buffoons dithered over the shape of the table. Don't give these cretins more credit than they deserve."

"Aren't you at least proud of the work you do on this kind of thing?"

"Most of us spend our lives trying to keep a low profile. This business gives some of us a place to hide. Our lives are tough enough as it is. We work in dangerous places. A lot of the gear is poorly maintained. Planning is rarely adequate. We're often supervised by people who have no respect for who we are or what we do." Bitterness permeated every word.

O'Donnell's young colleague was not deterred. He continued, "Look, just 'cause this is your hundredth history-making event, for most of these people here, it's their first and this may be the only time in their lives they get to be part of something important and great. You shouldn't begrudge them that."

"I don't begrudge them anything. Let them think what they want. None of it means a thing. Go away and leave me alone."

O'Donnell had not meant to go off at the kid and he felt bad about it. In a couple of days he would see the kid again and apologize.

The thought of tangling with the long arm of the law turned his blood cold. When he had returned from Vietnam, he had become active in anti-Vietnam protests and had frequently found himself on the wrong end of a dragnet. He had always managed to leave town before he was tracked down. That was ancient history and those skills were rusty. Besides, the network it took to support people on the run had dissolved from disuse.

O'Donnell's alpha pager went off several times during the movie with the same message about the final payment. One page was from a friend. "Call me from a pay phone, Alex".

One other message stood out from the rest. "Do not go to the authorities or we will exact our revenge not only on you, but on your son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter after we have disposed of you. If you fail in your mission, we will track you down."

The threat about going to the authorities was redundant. O'Donnell had seen too many of his friends locked away on trumped up drug charges when their real crime was participation in the anti-Vietnam movement. He was living evidence to the fact that Nixon's "War on Drugs" was more about suppression of free speech than about keeping America's streets safe. He had narrowly escaped being locked up in a psychiatric ward for "combat fatigue" when his only illness was a profound hatred of all things military. Some of his friends had been hounded into submission by local police officers intent in maintaining the sanctity of the "American Way." The threat against his family, however, had teeth.

Abby Hoffman, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin and a host of other names were fast fading into history, forgotten by a generation who wanted only to move on but who still bore a deep seated distrust of all things authoritarian. O'Donnell remembered the four dead in Ohio, believed in the justness of the cause and lived daily with the awareness that what the Fascists and Joe McCarthy had failed to do, Nixon had almost accomplished.

O'Donnell's thoughts returned to the present and the threatening message. Any halfway intelligent person could find out the telephone number for the alpha page system and give the operator a message to pass on to a subscriber. But, no operator would have passed on a message that threatening without alerting the police. Whoever sent it must have accessed the system through the web site where no human being could intercept the message. To do that, the sender needed to know not only the web site, but also a password to get in and O'Donnell's number. None of this information was readily available. Everything pointed to a well-researched plan that had somehow gone very awry.

Prevented from calling the authorities by his long-standing fear of arrest for a crime he did not commit and by the threatening message, he sat in the dark as his mind raced through a dozen scenarios and two entire movies before finally deciding on a plan. Once having decided on his plan, he settled back in his chair for a desperately needed nap.

After the end of the second movie, he went to the lobby and called Alex. Alex would help him, no matter what kind of trouble he was in and no matter what kind of help he needed. Alex was the author of the 'hide in plain sight' line. Alex's idea of a good time was to play chicken with thunderstorms while fixing equipment on radio and television broadcast towers. Alex was a little crazy, but off the charts brilliant. O'Donnell suspected he needed both.

As soon as Alex recognized O'Donnell's voice he asked, "Hey man, what kind of trouble you in?"

"What're you talking about?"

"It's all over the news. There's a video shot of you crouched next to a white car at the Convention Center and then the car shows up in some construction site with a dead body in it. Sheriff Burston is asking anyone that knows you to call in. They say you're not a suspect, but could be a material witness and in some danger. Wherever you are, you better get out." He paused. "Look. Better idea. How about I'll come get you and hide you somewhere?"

"Okay. Meet me at Orange. Bring your pickup." O'Donnell was used to solving his own problems, but Alex had volunteered and he could use the help.

"Okay. Soon as I can."

Warehouse Orange, so named because of its identifying orange stripe in a huge warehouse complex was the theme park's Technical Production Services support warehouse. Every stagehand in town knew where it was. It was a convenient place where Alex could meet him and, if Alex's telephone line were tapped, the listener would not know Alex's intended destination. Alex was clever enough to lose a tail if he had one. Alex lived over an hour's drive away and O'Donnell had a long trek.

By the time Alex arrived at Warehouse Orange, it was almost midnight. As Alex pulled onto the service road leading to the warehouse, O'Donnell stepped out of the darkness of the heavily landscaped median and got into the truck.

"Drive."

"Where?"

"Anywhere other than the way you just came."

Alex headed for one of the employee gates that lead into the theme park itself. He used his union worker's pass to get in, as he had done hundreds of times before on legitimate third shift work calls. The guard at the gate would likely deter anyone who might be following them who was not law enforcement personnel. While he did not want to be found by them either, the guarded complex offered protection from other random hostiles and miscellaneous unfriendlies.

Alex was a little younger than O'Donnell, but had managed to avoid the draft due to health problems. His life had been as chaotic as O'Donnell's, but Alex's spirit of adventure never faded. As soon as he had talked to Alex, O'Donnell had felt better about his ability to get through this mess with all his parts intact.

O'Donnell detailed his plan. It was risky, but he felt that he had covered all the most likely eventualities. After all, technical planning was his primary job. Alex had most of the supplies, chemicals and equipment they would need stashed in his garage. He agreed with most of the plan's specifics but made a few suggestions of his own.

When they found a wide spot in the road, O'Donnell exited the truck and Alex left the security of the guarded complex.

When Alex arrived to pick up the tires, police blanketed the construction site like ants on chocolate. Their flashing lights effectively blinded everyone within a quarter mile. No one had gone far enough away from their point of attention to look in the drainage ditch. Alex kept his head down and focused on the ground to avoid spoiling his night vision.

He had little trouble spotting the pile of debris hiding the tires in the murky water. He made a pole with a hook from a broom handle he found in the convenience store's dumpster, a tire iron from his truck and some nylon cable ties. He gently nudged the tires out of the deep water to the shore, staying low enough not to be noticed. Alex picked up the tires in the darkness and carried them to his truck without incident. Once he left the area, he called Marcie.

Long ago, O'Donnell had helped Marcie when her life was falling apart. She had been injured at work too many times to be a professional dancer any more. Her last injury, a fall from a float in the theme park's daily parade, had torn ligaments in her left leg. O'Donnell had helped her use her substantial intelligence to change her life by helping her to focus her energies on working behind the stage rather than on it. He had helped her find work when she was hungry and had provided moral support in her dark days. He had even introduced her to the man who was now her husband and father of her two sons. She returned the favor by taking care of him when his arrogance got in his way as it had a tendency to do with unexpected frequency.

She had a set of keys to O'Donnell's car because she kept it for him when he was on the road. Alex doubted the car would be booby-trapped, since it was sitting in plain view of the Convention Center's security cameras and roving security patrols. She picked up the car at the Convention Center and noticed right away that she was being followed. She drove the car to the theme park's employee parking lot not attempting to lose the tail. She hitched a ride home with a friend who was coming off night shift.

O'Donnell followed the cleared area formed by the easement for the overhead power line to the employee parking lot where Marcie had parked his car. In any big complex, there are places where someone knowledgeable of the facilities can hide and take a nap. In spite of his short rest at the movie theater, O'Donnell was exhausted and needed a safe place to sleep for a few hours. Some of his less motivated colleagues had scoped out many such places.

The old prop stagecoach with its soft seats, small windows and remote location hidden in the back of a scenery storage shed next to the employee parking lot was an ideal place. O'Donnell climbed in to the back seat of the stagecoach, pulled down the blinds and went to sleep.

While he slept, O'Donnell's pager went off over a dozen times. He was too sound asleep for the vibration to arouse him, but he read the messages when he woke up late in the afternoon. Several were repeats of the payment message.

One page was from Alex and it gave the sizes of the tires. Alex also commented he had picked up the chlorine for the pool. One message read, "Don't give anything to the Chinaman. Call"and a telephone number. The last message he got was the most interesting. "We know the tires were not in the Cadillac. We will not harm you. The FBI,"and an 800 number.

O'Donnell concluded that three entities were interested in the tires. The Chinaman was sending the 'payment' message. Someone else knew the deal with the Chinaman and did not want the tires to go to him or to the third group claiming to be the FBI. Even if the third group was the FBI, which he doubted, he was not sure he wanted anything to do with them. His previous encounters with them had not impressed him with their integrity.

Alex's message had nothing to do with chlorine or swimming pools. It had everything to do with chemicals used for indoor pyrotechnic displays. He had picked up the materials. O'Donnell suspected Alex had emptied his stash of leftovers from his garage and had to purchase only a few of the items they did not already have. Alex, in addition to being a genius, was a pack rat. He often kept the surplus materials left from various shows in his garage. There had been many times when Alex's garage held the right hard to find item needed to make a show work.

Alex lived in fear of the day when a building code enforcement officer would decide to inspect his garage since among his favorite "leftovers" were the chemicals used for indoor pyrotechnics. O'Donnell could picture Alex gleefully humming and singing to himself as he assembled the hardware.

O'Donnell knew the theme park complex well. He had an access code for their voice mail system that he had picked up while doing contract work on a show in the park's amphitheater. He snuck into one of the outlying office trailers, sat down at a telephone in an unoccupied conference room and accessed the voice mail system's delayed delivery feature. He sent a message to all three telephone numbers "Even if I have what you want, why should I give it to you? Meet me at Boggy Lake Recording Studio at 0800. No sooner. If you arrive early, I will destroy what you seek."

The day shift workers from the theme park flooded the parking lot with a sea of frenetic humanity determined to find a way home. O'Donnell ran to his car from the safety of the office trailer, got in and quickly lost himself in the midst of the morass of dodging and weaving automobiles headed for the Interstate. He definitely lost one tail. Whether he had any more or not, he did not know.

O'Donnell went to a discount tire store and bought tires and rims to match the tires in Alex's message. He then headed for the Boggy Lake Recording Studio.

Author's Note

Review copies of the full text are available on request.