The Safety Expert Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Doug Richardson

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Doug Richardson

  Dark Horse

  True Believers

  VELVET ELVIS ENTERTAINMENT

  13547 Ventura Boulevard

  Suite 126

  Sherman Oaks, California 91423

  Copyright © 2011 by Doug Richardson

  Cover design by Karen Richardson

  More information at http://www.dougrichardson.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9848071-1-6

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Velvet Elvis Entertainment.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942976

  Printed in the United States of America

  Richardson, Doug, 1959-

  The Safety Expert / Doug Richardson.

  For Kate

  prologue

  TICK. Tick. Tick.

  “So there it is. I’ve made my confession. It’s off my back. And now it’s on yours.”

  Old man Pratt shut his mouth and sucked back some fresh O2. Tick. Tick. Tick. The oxygen meter continued. It sounded every bit like a death clock, counting down to his very last moment on earth.

  “I don’t care what you think about me, who I am or what I done. I said what I said for me ’n’ me alone. You understand?”

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The goddamn oxygen meter—always talking over Pratt while he was thinking. Some days he would stare at it for hours, watching the tiny indicator arm vibrate with every merciless tick. Other days the meter reminded him of the gas gauge attached to the north side of the one and only house he had ever owned. Stockton, California. ’63 to ’69. There was that one time, he recalled, his pet Rottweiler nearly tore the legs off one gas company employee who came to read the meter. What the hell was that dog’s name? he thought. Good dog. Fat prick of an animal. The name came to Pratt. He had called the dog Gutter, on account of where he had found the poor thing, its leg busted by a passing car. Best three-legged dog ever, thought Pratt. Good damn guard dog, too. After the incident with the meter reader, the gas company wisely provided a set of field glasses for readers to track Pratt’s gas consumption from the street. Nowadays, figured Pratt, he would have been sued by the meter reader and lost or had to settle. The thought made him glad he no longer owned the house. In Pratt’s rulebook, owning anything was for losers.

  “Where the hell was I?” he grumbled. “Ain’t got no regrets, neither. You can’t live with that shit... Hell. You can take regret and flush it for all I care.”

  A ribbon of plastic hoses coiled around him, each neatly affixed to him with tabs of white, sweat-resistant tape. There were two bags of IV fluids hanging from what could have passed for a hat stand. What was in those damn fluids, only God and chemists knew. The contraption on Pratt’s head was elastically fit, the nipples releasing the precious oxygen into his nostrils. The rest was up to Pratt. As long as he kept breathing and his heart kept pumping, the fluids would flow and the O2 meter would tick, tick, tick. All charges paid for by the Indiana State Bureau of Prisons.

  “So if I got no regrets and don’t give a shit what other people think, why’m I tellin’ you this? That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer just yet. Maybe I won’t send you the tape. That’ll prove I don’t give a rat’s piss.”

  Rat’s piss or not, Pratt kept talking. With every lung-load of fresh O2, he watched the microcassette player rise and fall on his goiter-like stomach, a round orb of a gut that was his own work of art.

  “Just so you know, I got no proof. Just what the guy said. But lemme say this: I’ve been in the joint long enough to know bullshit from what’s real. And this guy, believe you me, was real as real gets. No shit. I believe him to this goddamn dyin’ day —”

  “Will you shut the fuck up?” barked the black con. “Jeesuz H. Christ, man. All you do is beat your fuckin’ gums.”

  The black con was two empty beds over to Pratt’s right. The infirmary was at a low population. The sixteen beds were separated into two rows of eight, divided by a double-lane causeway and cut up with vinyl curtains hung on roller track. Only four of the sixteen beds were occupied. And the two other cons were so narced on sleep meds that Pratt would have laid bets that the Second Coming wouldn’t have roused them.

  That left Pratt and the black con.

  “Shut your cotton pickin’ ears and go to sleep,” said Pratt.

  “Shut your mouth... cracker fuck.”

  Pratt figured correctly that the black con was new to the joint. The con hadn’t yet learned the martial art of doing time. Prison was never quiet. And nights were a series of terrible noises. Cries, grunts, pain, dementia. Pratt called the noises coyote sounds. Beasts barking at the dark. Or carnivores fighting over the last remains of a dead carcass. He assigned each horrible sound to its place in nature, turning prison into his own Wild Kingdom. Suddenly, those awful noises fell naturally on his ear. And sleep became easier.

  “You can either shut your ears or shut my mouth,” said Pratt. “Your call, nigger.”

  Big words. But Pratt knew the black con was strapped in with Velcro and duct tape. Some failed suicide, figured Pratt. Probably buggered-up on his first night in the dorms, and certainly not able-bodied or willing to take on the older con lying just twenty feet away.

  “Next time he’ll kill himself right,” Pratt found himself saying into the tape recorder. “Twist a rope out of a bed sheet and take a dive off the top tier. Save good taxpayers like you some dough, I expect.”

  Click. The tape player shut itself off. Pratt griped to himself, “Cuz I’m fuckin’ ramblin’ on and on...”

  Side 1 of the microcassette tape was exhausted. Pratt fumbled with his drug-swollen fingers to extract the tiny cartridge, flip it and reinsert it into the recorder. It felt as difficult as performing ocular surgery with a pair of chopsticks.

  Fuckin’ cancer drugs.

  Side 2. Pratt thumbed the RECORD button, then calmed himself with a deep breath. If he closed his eyes, he could use his imagination and make the canned oxygen smell like just about anything. Cigars. A woman’s sweaty musk. Bacon frying. This time it was spearmint. Wrigley’s Doublemint. What Pratt would have paid right then and there for a pack.

  “What I was sayin’ was just this. You don’t know me from Adam. And I sure as hell don’t know you. For all I care, you can toss this tape in the incinerator.”

  Pratt found he was holding his breath, weakening his voice to a whispering rasp. Why? He had burned half a cassette, running on like a broken valve. And still he hadn’t told it. He hadn’t delivered on the promise he had made at the start of the tape. Pratt pulled another two liters of oxygen.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  “Like I was sayin’ before. I was his cellmate. L.A. County. Eleven years ago? Twelve, thirteen? Back around them riots. All them fires, you know? We were poppin’ these little blue grinders. Good stuff somebody had scammed off a guard. Anyways, he was inside on this three month pop for beatin’ on his girlfriend. Gave him giggles that it was such a short pop considering the shit he had been doing outside. Home invasions, follow-homes, shit like that. Big money house cleaning. Had a partner, he said. In, out, jewels, cash. Said i
t was easier than robbin’ banks.”

  Pratt paused, finding his own silence unnerving. The black con had returned to the land of tranquilized slumber. The distant babble from the nursing station had faded. If he strained his ears, Pratt wondered if he would hear the old plaster cracking beneath the ward’s new paint.

  “Guy said all the jobs was slick but for this one time... one time where some soccer mom decides to fight back. Killed her and the two little girlies ‘before anybody could say, Puff the Magic Dragon.’ Them’s his words, not mine. And won’t never forget ‘em. Puff the Magic Dragon. You know what I’m sayin’. You know who I’m talkin’ about, too. Soccer mom and the little ones was yours, fellah. Your own wife and kiddies, man.”

  Pratt found himself on pause. And for half an instant, imagined himself as the man for whom the tape was intended.

  “Sorry, partner. Kinda harsh words. But I suppose that’s the shit you had to live with ever since. Guess that means I feel sorry for ya. Kinda hell a man goes through. Just since then, ever so often, that damn song comes into my head and I think of that SOB and what he did to you and what he said to me. Puff the Magic Dragon, man. Fuckin’ cold, you know?”

  Click. Pratt turned off the recorder. His eyes swirled to the back of his skull. The fuck am I thinkin’? reasoned Pratt. Probably never lived with the shit. What kinda man could? Probably swallowed a bullet by now. Nobody’s ever gonna hear this. So why even try?

  With that sole idea stuck like a knife between his eyes, Pratt gave up by flinging the microcassette player. The recorder shattered against the wall and fell to the floor in broken bits.

  “Fuck that guy.”

  1

  JANUARY 5. Interstate 118. Eastbound at Tampa. The damned diamond lane, griped Ben to himself, where two or more passengers in a vehicle constitute a legal carpool. That was the law in California. Just two people per car. Any people. A pair of pot-smoking teens. A van carrying two plumbers to their next appointment. A mother with an infant riding in a rear-facing car seat. Each a legal carpool. Hardly what state traffic and safety administrators had planned when carpool lanes were originally introduced back in 1985.

  Ben checked the traffic in front of him, then his speed. It was just south of twenty-five mph. The temperature indicator to the right of the speedometer read ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit. It was the beginning of a second steaming, mid-winter week. Not that irregular for Southern Cal. Still, all the news was abuzz with more nauseating talk about global warming. That alone was enough to make Ben sweat.

  In the diamond lane to Ben’s left, a blue Camry surged by at something close to eighty mph.

  Nineteen-eighty-eight, recalled Ben, shaking his head. Back then it took three passengers to make a carpool. Back then it was reasonable to hope drivers would want to spare themselves the hassle of slow, bumper-to-bumper commutes in exchange for ride-sharing and maybe some conversation with neighborhood co-workers. Back then, any person violating the three-passenger rule would be hit with a hefty, two-hundred-dollar traffic ticket.

  But as it so often is with government plans, things worked out just a bit differently. For months and months those left-hand lanes of unencumbered promise remained practically deserted during the morning and afternoon rush hours, squeezing more traffic into fewer lanes. The average commute increased over one minute per highway mile. Traffic planners had never imagined that drivers would choose the increased expense of greater fuel and time consumption over a shorter commute with two caffeinated friends.

  Before scrapping the mega-million dollar highway project and returning the “extra” lane back to the freeway at large, someone in Sacramento suggested “two.” Not three, but two passengers to constitute a legal carpool. And just like that, along with the cost of changing a few freeway signs, daily commuters took to the “two passenger” restriction like ducks to water. Within weeks, traffic eased by four percent as the left-hand lanes filled with willing participants. Commutes decreased. And the powers that be were redeemed and rewarded for their calculation and collective genius.

  If they had only asked me, thought Ben. Or anybody with a teaspoon of common sense. They could have saved California millions in start-up costs and more than a year of nearly empty diamond lanes. Ben would have told them two was wiser and suggested authorities apply a simple and ancient axiom: three’s a crowd.

  Ben employed his turn signal for a safe lane change. It wasn’t yet 9:00 A.M. and eastbound traffic on the 118/Ronald Reagan Freeway was inching through the Los Angeles County community of Chatsworth. The January sun was angled perfectly to create annoying reflections off the Sunday-waxed hood of Ben’s new Volvo S80. The sedan was an upgrade from his last Volvo four-door, and the Volvo four-door before that. Ben would recommend getting a new car every two years to his clientele, just to keep up with the latest advances in vehicle safety technology.

  Ben lowered the visor to protect his eyes from the glare. Each squint cut deeper lines into a nearly forty-year-old face that was clean-shaven and blue-eyed under a conservative cut of short brown hair. Still handsome enough—or so teased his wife Alexandra.

  The diamond lane hugging the center meridian was, as usual, breezy and unobstructed. Drivers pushed their cars well over the sixty-five mile per hour speed limit. But not Ben. He knew better. It was his job to know better about lots of things.

  Ben’s cell phone trilled in a very phone-like manner. Not one of those customized, pop-music ringtones. Just a normal, dental office ring. He pressed SEND on his mobile and let the hands-free Bluetooth do the work. Both hands back on the wheel, he could now safely talk and drive.

  “Hello,” he answered, despite knowing full well who was calling.

  “Hey, Ben,” answered the familiar voice of Josie Jones, Ben’s gal Friday.

  “Morning, Josie,” said Ben.

  A Nissan Z screamed down the diamond lane, low to the ground, customized for illegal street racing. Ben mentally clocked the rice rocket at better than 90 mph. Josie never heard the speeding Z, but could almost make out the sound of creaking leather as Ben firmly re-gripped the steering wheel.

  “Do you know why diamond lanes are a mistake?” asked Ben.

  “Uh, no. But you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?”

  “Not if you don’t want to know.”

  “I don’t want to know,” teased Josie.

  “Okay. What’s on you mind?” asked Ben.

  “I was kidding,” said Josie. “I wanna know.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I super seriously really wanna know,” said Josie. “If it’s your business to know, then I should know.”

  “Fine,” said Ben, pleased. “It’s a three-factor error. Factor one is the open highway theorem. Put Lucy behind the wheel on an unobstructed highway and she will often unconsciously drive at an unobstructed pace regardless of the speed limit.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Josie said patiently.

  “Factor two, Ethel is in the lane closest to the diamond lane. That lane is usually obstructed and the difference in pace during rush hour between the diamond lane and the obstructed lane can sometimes be fifty or sixty miles per hour.

  “And factor three?” cued Josie.

  “If Ethel has a passenger, qualifying her to drive in the diamond lane, and if Ethel gets fed up with her slow commute, sees the speed at which Lucy is getting to her destination, Ethel is likely to want to switch lanes.”

  “That’s what I’d wanna do... Correction, that’s exactly what I do. So what’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that you’d glance into your side view mirror, see if it’s safe and pull into the diamond lane. Right?

  “Right.”

  “By looking into your side view mirror, can you gauge the difference between a car driving at fifty-five miles per and eighty-five miles per?”

  “I dunno. I suppose—”

  “Stop supposing. You can’t. CHP can’t. They’ve tested it. In a side view mirror, those speeds look the
same at a glance. And a glance is all most drivers in heavy traffic can afford to give without smashing into the car in front of them.”

  Ben was rolling now, picturing the situation in his mind, reeling with evidence and spewing without regard for time or usage minutes. “What kind of car you drive?”

  “I drive a Jetta,” answered Josie.

  “Average car, average acceleration. Zero to sixty in seven or eight seconds. It’s roughly the same differential if you’re driving at fifteen to twenty miles per hour. To accelerate to the speed of the oncoming car takes about eight seconds.”

  “Okay. This is higher math territory. I still can’t determine all those seventh grade problems where the train is going so many miles per hour and the car going the other direction is driving a different speed—”

  “I’ll make it simple,” interrupted Ben. “Statistically speaking, Ethel can’t accelerate faster than Lucy can safely apply the brakes. Big wreck happens. People die.”

  Ben’s summation had the tonal finality of a surgeon delivering the bad news. The patient has expired.

  “Okay,” said Josie. “Important safety tip. Now, why I was calling was—”

  “It gets worse.”

  “Of course it does,” said Josie. “It always gets worse.”

  “Josie?” asked Ben in a smiling tone. “You wouldn’t be mocking me?”

  “I would never mock the man who signs my paycheck.”

  “Now you’re kissing my ass.”

  “Dying to know why it gets worse,” said Josie, sarcasm between a drip and a trickle.

  “During normal traffic jams, fatal accidents are minimal because of slow-moving cars. Factor in a fatal accident during rush hour and how the hell are emergency services going to respond in a timely manner? Traffic is already backed up. It triples the time of first responders to the accident.”

  Ben took a much-needed breath and suddenly worried if he had missed his exit, then added, “The whole diamond lane thing is a first-class government fuckup.”