Ransom River

by Meg Gardiner

  Wieland gazed up at her with surprise in his eyes. Rory felt the world seem to tilt and slide away. He was bleeding profusely. Without immediate medical care, he wouldn’t stay alive for long.

  The man in red check said, “What do we do?”

  Rory turned, lips parting. Nixon loomed above her.

  He grabbed her by a handful of sweater, fingers twisting into the fabric and into her hair. She cried out.

  “Up.”

  He dragged her away from the judge. She struggled for balance, knees sliding along the stone floor.

  “On your feet,” Nixon said.

  “Let me—”

  “Up.”

  He lifted her by the scruff of her sweater. She flailed to her feet. He pointed at the man in the red shirt. “Move it, pops.”

  The man looked up with shock and complete loss. “But…”

  Nixon swung the barrel of the gun toward him. The man threw his hands in front of his face.

  Nixon pointed at Cary Oberlin. “You too. Come on. Now.”

  Then he shook his head at the dead wannabe hero in the Justice! shirt. He turned sharply toward Reagan. “Fucking idiot—”

  Outside the main doors, noise. Voices in the hallway, footsteps, the squawk of a radio. The door handles rattled.

  Reagan and Nixon turned toward the doors.

  A man in the hall called, “Open up.”

  More rattling sounds. “Sheriff’s Department. Open the doors.”

  Beyond the windows, the first of the sirens floated on the morning air.

  6

  Nixon snapped his fingers at Reagan. “Get ’em out. Hurry.”

  Reagan waved Rory and Oberlin and Red Check toward the door to chambers. “Go.”

  Judge Wieland lay breathing shallowly, his face white. Blood soaked his robe, dark and sparkling against the black fabric. He caught Rory’s eye. She found her feet unable to move.

  She turned to Reagan. “We’ve got to get him help. You—”

  He shoved her toward the door to chambers.

  Nixon lumbered ahead, opened the door, and ducked into the hall. A second later he returned, eyes narrow, and shut the door behind him.

  “They’re outside.”

  Reagan said, “No. God, what…”

  “Shut up.”

  Sirens strengthened. The main doors rumbled again, rattling the Club steering-wheel lock. Something heavy—a shoulder or foot—hit the door.

  From outside, a man shouted: “Open up. What’s going on in there?”

  A moment later, the phone at the court clerk’s desk rang. And, more distantly, another phone, in Judge Wieland’s chambers. Then a cell phone stuffed inside Reagan’s plastic supermarket bag.

  Nixon grabbed a chair from the defendants’ table, dragged it to the chambers door, and jammed it under the doorknob.

  Reagan twitched. “No. We gotta get out of here.”

  Nixon said, “I know.”

  The chambers doorknob rattled and turned. But with the chair jammed against it, the door wouldn’t budge.

  On the far side a man said, “Wedged shut. Get a crowbar.”

  Outside the main doors, harsher: “This is the Sheriff’s Department. Open the doors or we’ll break them down.”

  The sirens grew loud outside. Rory heard them as the sound of deliverance.

  Reagan grabbed Nixon’s arm. “We need to move. Come on, man.”

  Nixon held up a hand. Then he raised the shotgun toward the ceiling and fired.

  People screamed. Plaster exploded and pebbled down.

  Nixon tightened his grip on the shotgun and stalked down the aisle to the main doors. He planted his feet wide.

  “Touch the doors again and people will get shot,” he called.

  Plaster dust drifted around Rory’s head. The banging and rattling of the chambers doorknob stopped. In the courtroom, the air seemed freighted.

  From the hallway, more distant now: “Is anybody injured in there?”

  Nixon looked at the dead Justice! vigilante. He didn’t even glance at Judge Wieland. “One down. His own fault. If you want to keep casualties to that number, you stay away from the doors.”

  From beyond the windows came the heavy blat of rotor blades. A helicopter was approaching. Rory had an unobstructed view of the street, the parking garage, and the mall. Two Ransom River PD cars raced up, lights popping.

  Jerkily, Reagan ran to the window. “They’re swarming us. What…”

  Nixon turned. “Get away from there.”

  Reagan’s shoulders spasmed up. “We need a lookout, we need a way out…” He pressed a hand against the window and peered at the frame. There were no shades, no curtains, and, on that side of the building, no ledge outside.

  “Get away from the window,” Nixon said.

  Reagan turned his head, hand still pressed to the glass. Though his face was obscured, Rory swore he seemed confused.

  This was not good.

  More police cars pulled up outside. Officers jumped out and ran into the building.

  Nixon yanked Reagan back from the window. “They see you, they shoot you.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Reagan said. “Oh, man.”

  Nixon stalked back to the center of the room. He pointed to Rory. “Against the window.”

  He snapped his fingers at Red Check. Or tried to. The sound was muffled by his glove. “You too.”

  Heart drumming, Rory walked to the west-facing window that overlooked the front entrance to the courthouse, the street, the mall, and the parking garage.

  “The judge needs help, bad,” she said. “Let him go. Somebody can carry him out and—”

  Nixon shoved her. “Forehead to the glass. Hands flat against the window, level with your face. And shut up.”

  She pressed her palms to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass.

  Outside, through the glare of her own reflection, the morning gleamed. Five police cars had pulled up outside. With their lights spinning, it looked like a carnival ride, lurid and out of kilter.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Nixon shove Red Check against the window to her left. Reagan pushed Cary Oberlin against the window to her right. She heard a sharp cry as Nixon grabbed another person from the floor.

  “Stand there. Forehead to the glass. Don’t move,” Nixon said.

  Rory breathed. In the glass, her see-through reflection did the same. She saw, in the V-neck of her sweater, the turquoise stone in her silver necklace. She saw herself swallow.

  Nixon and Reagan rounded up enough people to block all—what were there, nine?—windows in the courtroom.

  On the floor behind her, the volume diminished to a vicious hum. The air seemed charged, but the pitch of fear had changed. Whatever this was, whatever it had started out to be, it was now a siege.

  The sirens continued to come. She waited. Somebody would be appointed spokesman. If they were wise. Were they? Were they competent? The cop she had known best on the Ransom River police force certainly had been.

  Police cars kept arriving, black-and-whites. They turned sideways at either end of the block, barricading the road. Officers jumped out and stopped traffic. Outside the River Mall, pedestrians paused on the sidewalk and stared and pointed.

  Moms with strollers. Elderly mall walkers in their mom jeans and sun visors. A cop jogged toward them, radio to his face, and brusquely waved them back.

  Her gaze clocked each of the people on the sidewalk. She was hoping not to see her parents. Please, don’t let them be here for this.

  And yet she felt a catch in her throat and a low, sad longing. She wished her mom could pull her around a corner, laughing her melancholy laugh, saying, Don’t be silly. Get your keester out of there, kid. Her mom, calm and practical and no-nonsense after thirty years of teaching at Ransom River High School. Samantha, who hugged hard, as though the earth’s gravity had evaporated and she had to anchor Rory.

  Her eyes stung. In her mind her dad appeared, stern and warm, his hair too
gray, his arms tanned and strong from a life spent working outdoors. He seemed to shake his head and say, Let her go, Sam. World’s a big place and she needs to get started if she’s going to see it.

  Her eyes welled. She wanted to wipe them but didn’t dare move her hands from the glass. She blinked and tears fell to her cheeks.

  Get out. That’s what her dad had always told her about Ransom River. Half the folks who lived there might think it was paradise, but for her it had become a landscape of strip malls and stagnation, bullies and heartbreak.

  And when she said, How come you and Mom don’t leave? he’d say, We’re old. It’s different. Then he’d grin, a sideways smile, a smile that wanted to be careless but always had something behind it. And when she called him on it, he’d quote Satchel Paige: Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

  She had tried. She thought running, training, being strong, getting an education, keeping her eyes wide open, and always having one foot on the gas, one thumb out to hitchhike out of this town, would take care of her.

  She’d gotten nowhere. Something had been gaining on her all along. And here it was.

  She gritted her teeth and fought the need to let her shoulders jerk. Don’t give them anything. Pull down the shades. Don’t let them see a crack they can exploit. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop any further tears.

  Outside, a news crew packed up their van. Everybody jumped in and they floored it—straight across the street into the mall’s parking garage. The van’s back doors were open. The cameraman sat in the rear, filming.

  The police perimeter took shape. The phalanx of patrol cars retreated from the curb directly outside to a safer distance. Uniforms and plainclothes officers now stood behind their vehicles. A policewoman jogged toward the shoppers outside the mall, one hand on her utility belt to keep it from bouncing. She urged them back.

  The officers outside looked sharp in the morning sun, moving with dispatch, their uniforms dark blue against the green grass. So close, tangible, separated from her by millimeters of glass and a hundred feet of air, right there.

  That’s not who she saw. Not who she could almost feel, who was whispering in her memory.

  The tears welled again. Hell.

  Behind her, barely visible, a ghostly reflection from the glass, Nixon grabbed Reagan’s sleeve. He leaned close and shook it, as if to get Reagan’s full attention.

  She leaned against the window, exposed, surrounded, motionless, and her mind filled with a knife-edge of a voice. Don’t go quietly.

  Of all the people surrounding her, the one she longed overwhelmingly to see was a man who might not even know she was alive. She forced herself to stare at the officers below. Her necklace, the turquoise stone, shone back at her. Seth had given it to her. Of all the things she had lost, all she had jettisoned when she went away, that was one thing she’d kept. Given to her on a hot night when things were good, when the world had opened up and shown her she could breathe, that there was a rapture to being alive. And all it took to light the sky was one person.

  Just one, Seth Colder, the joker, the wild card, the school friend who grew up to show her what was what, that love felt as brilliant and sharp as the blue knife of an acetylene torch. But that was long gone. Burned out, swept away.

  She resisted the desire to touch the necklace. What was this surge of sadness and longing? She was on the verge of losing it. Thinking of Seth, for Christ’s sake? Cut that out, Rory.

  Except that as she stared out the window, listening to the gunmen mutter and argue behind her, she couldn’t stop thinking: Seth would know what to do. Seth would know how to end this thing. Seth had been a cop.

  A bullhorn voice emanated from the hallway. “This is the Ransom River Police Department. Put down your weapon. Open the doors and come out with your hands behind your head.”

  They thought there was only one gunman inside.

  7

  In the hallway, Lieutenant Gil Strandberg lowered the bullhorn. Since the shotgun blast, nothing more had been heard from Judge Wieland’s courtroom. Nobody had answered his order to surrender.

  The Ransom River PD and two bailiffs had set up a perimeter at the end of the hallway twenty yards from the courtroom door, out of the line of fire. In the parking garage across the street, snipers were maneuvering into position. Their rifles had scopes that would provide a direct view into the courtroom. Other officers were reconnoitering the courthouse roof. They would place microphones and try to listen in. He had ten channels of chatter on the radio, people running around outside, officers trying to clear civilians from the street. He had two security guards who didn’t know what the hell had happened, except that they had apparently let a man armed with a goddamned shotgun into a murder trial.

  A uniform jogged up, radio whining. “County Clerk’s office is getting the courthouse blueprints. Should have them in ten minutes.”

  That was barely a start on what Strandberg needed. “Find out the strength of the glass in the windows. In case we have to go in that way.”

  SWAT was headed in this direction, and a hostage negotiator.

  Neither of those specialties had been employed in Ransom River in the last year. Strandberg didn’t know whether that meant they were rusty, eager, or both. He didn’t know anything except that this morning had turned from dull to deadly.

  “What about the door into the court from the judge’s chambers?” he said.

  “Wedged shut. We might be able to force it.”

  “Wedged with what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Strandberg shook his head. “Nobody touches that door until we have more information about what’s happening inside.”

  “What does the guy inside want?” the uniform said.

  “Hell if I know.”

  Strandberg wondered how much time they had.

  At Leticia’s Taqueria on Wilshire Boulevard, the TV mounted above the counter played a news channel nonstop. Night, morning, noon, it showed violence and corruption, hurricanes and drunken senators and naked celebrities. When the jerky images and breathless audio first interrupted normal coverage, nobody bothered to look up. This was Los Angeles. Los Angeles TV news would interrupt coverage of the Second Coming for footage of supermodels fighting in an alley.

  The reporter’s voice cut through the restaurant’s background noise. “The police won’t tell us what’s happening inside the Ransom River Superior Courthouse, but we have reports that shots have been fired.”

  Seth Colder stopped eating. He turned to the screen.

  The news crew was huddled inside the parking garage across the street from the courthouse. The reporter slid in and out of view, a youngster who couldn’t get the frightened excitement out of her voice.

  Seth thought, Enjoy the rush, sweetie. It sours quickly.

  “All we know is that an incident is in progress in the Criminal Division, where Ransom River police officers Jared Smith and Lucy Elmendorf are on trial for the murder of teenage burglar Obrad Mirkovic.”

  Seth wiped his hands on a napkin. He forgot his coffee.

  He hadn’t been through the doors of that courthouse in two years, but nothing about it had changed. And what he saw, from the shoulder-mounted news camera inside the parking garage, brought him to a standstill.

  The Ransom River PD was there in force. Patrol units and unmarked cars with antennas on the back, officers positioned behind them. They’d barricaded both ends of the block.

  The reporter said, sotto voce, “There. The courtroom windows.”

  The camera zoomed in. Seth forgot that he was in L.A., that he was mountains and valleys and a lifetime away from Ransom River.

  Hostages stood pressed against the windows of a third-floor courtroom. Men and women were crowded against the glass, hands up. They blocked any view of the courtroom interior.

  He knew that police snipers would be moving into place. In that garage, certainly. The news crew would get yanked any second. If the cops were smart.

&
nbsp; If, that is, the cops realized where the news team was broadcasting from. And if they weren’t too busy to shut off the feed. And if some idiot commander didn’t decide the news team’s footage provided the PD with a useful vantage point. The authorities needed to shut that news crew down. Letting it broadcast live was dangerous.

  Because Seth knew he was looking at Judge Wieland’s courtroom. And like all busy Superior Court judges with full dockets, Wieland was adept at juggling. He would lend his ears to the case being tried in front of him while he signed motions with one hand and checked his e-mail with the other. He had a big screen on his desk, and it was wired for speed.

  Anybody in that courtroom could watch the same TV broadcast Seth was looking at. If they did, they could stay one step ahead of the cops.

  Rory swallowed hard. Hold it together. Behind her in the courtroom, crying continued. At Judge Wieland’s desk, the phone rang and rang. But she couldn’t hear Wieland, didn’t know if he was still breathing, whether anybody was able to offer a human touch as he lay struggling. Reagan and Nixon paced nearby, arguing in jittery undertones. Rory slowly, slowly turned her head so she could see them.

  “We got to do it, and now,” Reagan said.

  “No.”

  Nixon took a phone from his pocket. At first Rory thought he was checking the time, but he scrolled through a couple of buttons, as if he was looking for messages. With apparent frustration he put it away.

  “…just go, the two of us,” Reagan whispered. “We could…”

  Outside the window a helicopter lowered briefly into view. Engine noise droned through the room.

  Nixon tightened his grip on Reagan’s arm. “…losing proposition. We leave by ourselves, we die. No. The plan is the plan.”

  “Then what are we going to do? There’s…”

  From the hallway a new voice blared through the bullhorn.

  “This is Sergeant Ray Nguyen of the Ransom River Crisis Negotiation Response Team.”

  Hostage negotiator. Rory held her breath. Reagan flinched.