Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

of Oswald’s eyelids. He sees no ghosts. No Indian chieftains. No specters of his misbegotten past. He sees only a blank void of darkness, and hears the voice of the big mob capo with the Dean Martin hair rising up behind him above the noise of the train: “Hold on a second…”

“What are you waiting for?” Oswald says, eyes still closed, hands up in surrender.

“Hold on... one second.”

“What the fuck!” Oswald opens his eyes, and in the reflection, he sees the big guy behind him reaching into his pocket, digging for something. “The fuck are you doing?” Oswald says. “You gonna shoot me or fuck me in the ass?”

“Gimme a second, goddamnit!” Dalessandro says above the din, sounding annoyed.

He keeps digging inside his jacket, digging down inside the loosely buttoned silk shirt under his sharkskin. Finally he gets his fingers around a small laminated plastic card hanging from his neck.

“Special Agent Brian Cosentino,” he says, finally holding up an FBI ID tag. “Deep Cover Unit, FBI, Organized Crime Division.”

Oswald is stricken dumb for a moment, staring at the vibrating hatch.

“You’re under arrest for eight counts of conspiracy and use of interstate commerce in the commission of murders for hire, and also three violations of the RICO Act, and six additional counts of unlawful interstate transportation of hostages. Do you understand the charges as I have enumerated them?”

At last Oswald glances over his shoulder and makes eye contact with the guy. “Cucumber...?”

40.

“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket or anything,” murmurs Special Agent Wesley Fortis, sitting on the passenger side of the government-issue Escalade as it races along the access road just north of the train tracks. The Cadillac is shaking so profusely it’s making Fortis’s molars ache.

Wes Fortis, the handsome African American section chief who arrested Ann Marie Rigby, has the binoculars to his eyes. For the past hour, he’s been keeping tabs on the runaway Kalamazoo Superliner as it snakes through the Salt River valley, which cleaves across southern Berrien County, and now he fears the worst.

He fears that his man on board—the same deep-cover agent who enabled Rigby’s arrest, as well as amassing three years’ worth of evidence against the Ferri family—is very likely dead, and the train is very likely headed for oblivion.

“Whattya got?” asks the field agent behind the wheel, a heavyset lifer with the Indy Federal Marshals named Renfro, who’s currently white-knuckling the wheel. He’s not accustomed to driving ninety-five miles per hour over farm roads.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Fortis says. “But didn’t Amtrak say there’s a switch yard at New Buffalo?”

“Yeah, so...?”

Through the binoculars Fortis sees the nose of the train hurling toward the conglomeration of signal poles and forking rails.

Fortis lowers the binoculars, and then looks over at the driver. “Didn’t they say that if a runaway train barrels into one of those switchyards it’ll—?”

The explosion finishes his sentence, a one-millisecond delay off a brilliant sunburst to the east.

The boom is so enormous, so abrupt, so violent, it seems to rattle the heavens above the highway like a gargantuan clap of thunder, coming out of nowhere, turning night to day with an instantaneous flash of arc weld-intense light. The invection currents implode into themselves, melting the Superliner engine, and vaporizing all forms of life in the cab, and the resulting release of energy sends a great geyser of super-heated particles whirling up over New Buffalo like a vast roman candle, which coalesces within milliseconds into a single fireball, the maelstrom shooting straight up into the clear night sky, forming a spectacular mushroom cloud a thousand feet over the switching station, a sight that would rival many Cold War-era grade school scare films.

The sight of it is visible across seven counties. Third-shift steel-mill workers as far away as Hammond, Indiana, look up from their assembly lines and gaze in wonder at the flash against the foundry skylights like an immense photographic strobe capturing a terrible instant in time. Orchard pickers up in Grand Haven flinch in unison beneath the tangled branches of cherry trees as the instantaneous crack of lightning veins the eastern horizon and the odor of cordite and brimstone rises along the shoreline. Smelt fisherman off the docks in Benton Harbor jerk at the fiery orange reflection that flashes suddenly off the water, reaching a mile across the lake, followed by the massive report like a sonic boom behind the sky. Car alarms in Fort Wayne spontaneously trigger themselves, and a fire hydrant three miles north in Saint Michaels, Michigan, bursts and sends a gusher of water skyward.

Just north of the state line, Gerbil Goldstein witnesses the fiery spectacle from behind the window of the drifting caboose. Gazing through her tears, she cannot utter a sound, cannot move, cannot correlate what she is seeing. She thinks she is hallucinating.

Back at ground zero, in the immediate area of the switchyard, several things happen in the wake of the explosion, all at the same time, like dominoes falling.

On the adjacent highway, a quarter mile to the north, the Federal Marshal behind the wheel of Fortis’s Escalade slams on the brakes, and the Escalade screeches sideways for nearly a hundred yards before slamming to a stop against a guardrail. Fortis jerks against the shoulder strap, banging his head on the visor, his eyes pinned open and gaping at the conflagration rising up three hundred yards away in a great volcanic holocaust, so hot and intense that the bug-guts on the Cadillac’s windshield sizzle and fry.

“Jesus wept—look at that!” Renfro points off to the southeast, where the tracks converge on the switchyard in a ten-acre tangle of intersecting iron.

In the brilliant light of the inferno, the rest of the Kalamazoo “Night Owl” is collapsing into itself like an accordion closing down. One by one, the passenger cars slip the rails, then careen sideways with tremendous inertia, raising storm heads of dust and debris and sparks before banging down onto their sides in great heaving explosions of glass