Ransom River

by Meg Gardiner

  Reagan muttered something. Nixon nodded.

  “When’s the helicopter getting here?” he called.

  “We need some time to arrange a chopper that meets your requirements. I’ll see what we can do. But while we’re working on that, let’s work on helping you and the other folks in the courtroom with you.”

  “I don’t want to hear you’re working on it. I want to hear you tell me exactly when the helicopter is going to land on that lawn outside,” Nixon repeated.

  “Then work with me. Fair enough?”

  “No.”

  This, Rory thought, was a half-assed ransom negotiation. Her first, and it was simply piss-poor. Nixon wouldn’t give an inch.

  Nguyen said, “We heard gunfire earlier. You gain nothing by letting injured people suffer. If you want the helicopter, you’re going to need to help me out—”

  “Forget it.”

  “That’s a tough attitude,” Nguyen said. “Who am I talking to here?”

  “The guy who needs his fucking helicopter and five million dollars,” Nixon shouted. “And Fox Fucking News outside, ready to broadcast the confession to murder by these tools of the police state.”

  “Then give us something,” Nguyen said.

  Reagan waved an arm in frustration. He strutted up to Nixon, jumpy, like he was walking on hot coals. He hissed, “It’s not working. They aren’t budging.”

  Nixon stared at him for several long seconds. He turned toward the doors.

  “Get the chopper here in the next ten minutes or I’ll shoot a hostage,” he said.

  A woman cried out. The entire room stirred, like birds challenged by a fox.

  “Ten minutes—that’s unrealistic,” Nguyen said.

  “Do it. Get me the chopper now.”

  Nguyen said, “It’ll take longer than that to get a heavy-lifting-capacity helicopter.”

  Reagan yanked on Nixon’s sleeve and whispered, “That’s not what I meant. Hell you doing?”

  Low and sharp, Nixon said, “Getting us out of here. Sticking around is not an option. Don’t you get it? The longer we stay, the more the odds stack against us. We go, and we go now.”

  Rory began writing on the window again. One small letter at a time. Help. Hurry.

  She tried to stay present, to focus. On anything, even the song she’d been singing. Welcome home…

  Home, as empty as ever.

  She wondered where SWAT was and how many long-range rifles lurked in the shadows of the parking garage across the street. She wondered if her roomie was out there in the crowds behind the barricades, muttering about karma and worrying who would take care of the dog if Rory didn’t come out alive. She wondered if her parents were there. The thought tightened the knot in her throat.

  Get out, they’d said. They’d been concerned when she came home this time. Hell, she’d been concerned too. Out of work, the entire thing kicked out from under her and, awfully, out from under all the people who relied on the charity.

  She had always believed the Japanese proverb: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” But she had run, and run, and ended up back where she started. Maybe it was a sign: Whatever her life was missing couldn’t be found. And here she was, at the finish line.

  Behind her Reagan paced skittishly. Nixon stood planted like a stump.

  “Nine minutes left,” he shouted. “Where’s the chopper?”

  From the hallway, Sergeant Nguyen, said, “Give us more time.”

  “You’ve had time,” Nixon shouted. “You’ve had two hundred fifty years to impose the police state on us. And to let thugs and criminals run rampant while cops take bribes to look the other way. You’ve had all the goddamned time you need.”

  Holy shit, Rory thought.

  “Get a chopper on the lawn or the roof of the courthouse right this goddamned minute,” Nixon shouted. “I can hear a whole bunch of them outside. Tell one of them to land. You have ninety seconds.”

  11

  Pressed against the yellow police tape at the perimeter, the crowd had grown nervous. The camera crew rolled continuously, catching the windows of the courthouse, the eerie no-man’s land in front of it, the police officers who dashed anxiously from location to location. A mobile command unit, a huge gaudy RV, had rolled up and parked a block to the south. Overhead, three helicopters hovered.

  The honey with the cousin inside tried to pace in a packed space. She weaved back and forth, turned in circles, pressed a hand to her ear while talking on her cell phone.

  “It’s crazy here,” she said into the phone. “Unbelievable. No, I’m not making it up. Turn on your TV. Something’s gone way to hell wrong and everybody’s trapped in the courtroom including Rory. It’s a nightmare.”

  She scraped her fingernails through her gleaming hair. A vivid tattoo ran across one shoulder and down her left arm, parrot bright, some mythic battle, demons and angels. She looked on the verge of panic. No, that wasn’t it—she looked like she was desperate to do something. To act. To help.

  The reporter said, “Miss, what’s your name?”

  She glanced up from her phone call. After a second, she focused. “Nerissa Mackenzie.”

  “And your cousin—”

  “If anything happens to her, oh God.”

  “It looks like some of the hostages are trying to communicate with the police.”

  She glanced at the windows.

  “Does your cousin have a cell phone?” the reporter said.

  Nerissa paused and slowly turned back to him. She seemed to take in the implications and instantly jumped ahead about ten steps.

  “If I can get through to her, you can patch the call to the cops.” Another quick glance at the courthouse. “It’s a long shot. Look at her. They have her pressed to the windows where she can’t move.”

  “But if her phone’s in her pocket…”

  “Yeah. Worth a try. We could find out what’s really happening in there.” She nodded at the cameraman. “Record it, so we get everything verbatim. No mistakes.”

  She hung up on her call without saying good-bye and scrolled through her contacts.

  The reporter said, “Quickly—she’s your first cousin? You live here in Ransom River?”

  “L.A. Here visiting my mom. I’m an actor.”

  “Have I seen your work?”

  “Video game—Skywraith: Ascent of the Damned. I’m the body model for a rebel fighter. And Butterfly Bombshell in Hollywood, the bar. I waitress and cosplay—role-play on duty. Catholic schoolgirl, usually.”

  “Okay.” Fabulous. And how gloriously weird.

  “I was coming to see the trial. If traffic had been better, I’d be trapped in there right now.”

  The cameraman turned to her. She straightened, flipped her hair over her shoulder, licked her lips. Eyes dazzling, her face riven with tension, she dialed a number.

  To herself she murmured, “Rory, baby, please pick up.”

  Overhead, a hard thwapping motor drowned out all sound. A black helicopter swooped over the roof of the courthouse and slowed above the lawn.

  Nixon’s demand echoed through the courtroom. Ninety seconds.

  The moment stretched. Reagan pushed Nixon and muttered at him. Rory caught, “…ultimatum, idiot, you…”

  Nixon shoved him away and pumped the shotgun. The sound chittered across the room. Rory sensed more than saw the hostages cringe. A woman’s crying turned jagged.

  “Eighty seconds,” Nixon cried.

  Sergeant Nguyen came back: “The helicopter is on its way.”

  “Seventy-five seconds.”

  “It’s coming. It’s inbound. It needs clearance to land. You have to give the pilot time to approach safely.”

  “Seventy seconds.”

  In the reflection from the glass, Rory saw Nixon turn and look around the courtroom. The ghostly reflections of the hostages shrank back. They all knew what he was doing.

  He pointed. “You.”

  A man said, “No.”

  “Stand up,”
Nixon said. He turned back to the main doors. “Sixty-five seconds.”

  “The helicopter is coming. You should be able to hear it,” Nguyen called back.

  Bullshit, Rory thought.

  “Bullshit,” Nixon said.

  Rory could see distant choppers and hear one that seemed to be hovering high overhead, but it could not have had time to load up five million dollars’ worth of gold bricks. Her stomach cramped. Whatever this was, it was coming, and fast.

  Nixon’s voice settled into a low rasp. “You at the far window there, yeah—you. Tell me what you see. You see a helicopter flying this way?”

  A woman planted against a window to Rory’s left said, “I don’t know.”

  In Reagan’s plastic supermarket bag, a cell phone rang. With Rory’s ringtone.

  Nixon’s reflection darted right, then left. With the windows blocked by human shields, he couldn’t see what was going on outside. He turned to Reagan. Snapping his fingers, he pointed at the bench and Judge Wieland’s computer.

  “Check to see what the news is showing.”

  Oh God.

  Reagan ran up the steps to the bench, set his shotgun on the desk, hunched over the monitor, and clumsily pounded the keyboard.

  After a second he straightened. Shook his head.

  Nixon turned. He shouted at the doors: “You’re bullshitting me.”

  Nguyen said, “It’s inbound.”

  At the computer, Reagan shook his head more vehemently. He whispered, “Cops are just standing there. Not clearing a landing zone.”

  “Sixty seconds,” Nixon shouted. “Get a chopper on the ground. Or you’ve got a kid who’s going to regret answering his jury summons.”

  A man’s voice, broken: “Don’t shoot me. Please. I take care of my mom. I have little sisters.”

  It was Frankie Ortega. Rory felt dizzy.

  She said, “I see the helicopter. It’s landing.”

  It wasn’t; it was barely visible, a copter easing its way over the roof of the courthouse, high up. But bullshit was all she had, so she’d better dish it with conviction.

  “Don’t lie to me. Fifty seconds,” Nixon said.

  “No,” Rory said. “Can’t you hear it?”

  “Where?” Nixon said.

  She hoped the other people lined up against the windows would get it and wouldn’t falter.

  “It’s directly overhead. Up high. The TV crew in the garage can’t get an angle to see it. That’s why it’s not on the news,” she said.

  The helicopter lurked at the top of the view out the window. She could tell it had law enforcement markings on it. She could also tell it wasn’t anything close to a heavy-lifting aircraft. She had no idea if the cops had actually sent it for them.

  The sound grew louder, bouncing off the walls. Nixon shouted, “Thirty seconds. Hovering don’t count. On the ground where I can see it.”

  From the end of the gun barrel, Frankie said, “Don’t, man. I beg you.”

  Reagan was staring at the computer screen shaking his head.

  “That’s it. Ninety seconds gone,” Nixon yelled.

  “It’s landing,” Rory shouted. “You can’t see it on the screen. But I can—it’s landing on the roof.”

  Red Check, next to her at the window, said, “It’s descending. For God’s sake, you can’t demand that it touch down before the cops have even had time to contact the pilot.”

  Nixon went silent. Rory held her breath. Please spare Frankie. Please. The sound of the engine blatted against the walls. She glanced over her shoulder.

  Nixon stared at the windows, trying to see the copter. Reagan continued to stare at the screen. He shook his head. “They’re not showing it.”

  “They probably know you have TV access,” Rory said. “They want to keep everything covert. But it’s there. Listen to it.”

  The noise of the helicopter grew louder.

  Nixon shouted at the door: “That had better be it.”

  After a second, Nguyen said, “It’s landing on the roof.”

  Rory didn’t believe it. She really didn’t. She thought Nguyen may have heard her shouting and gone with her bullshit, a desperate gamble.

  After a moment, Nixon said, “We’re leaving.”

  Relief bled through her. She turned around and saw Nixon pull the barrel of his shotgun off of Frankie. He stalked back down the aisle. Frankie steadied himself against a bench, one hand to his face.

  Nixon strode to the middle of the courtroom. “Heads up. We’re getting ready to depart. The three people who were tapped on the back earlier, come with me.”

  Rory didn’t know what was about to happen. But if she and everybody else in the courtroom were going to emerge unscathed, it was going to require skill, luck, and a discipline Reagan and Nixon had so far failed to show. She figured she had a better chance of capturing Bigfoot.

  Nixon shouted out the main doors: “You just got a reprieve. If you fail to carry through on your promises, that stay of execution will be lifted.”

  He beckoned Reagan. With his index finger he drew a diagram on the palm of one hand. To Rory it looked like he was drawing their exit plan. She would lay money that it involved surrounding themselves with the hostages. And she was taller than both of them. Anybody who wanted to reach them would have to go through her. Nixon and Reagan wouldn’t even have to duck.

  She didn’t want to go anywhere with these two, not even past Go on a Monopoly board. An itch in the back of her brain told her it would be equally dangerous outside, with a battery of heavily armed cops facing off against men who seemed jumpy enough to shoot at dust motes and lint. And once they got outside, Nixon and Reagan would know she’d been bluffing about the helicopter.

  Nixon waved at the chosen three and snapped his gloved fingers, a dull, muffled sound. “Come on.”

  Red Check and prosecutor Cary Oberlin walked toward him, looking uncertain and alarmed. Rory remained at the window, her hands touching the warm glass, because it had become familiar, and sturdy, even though it could burst in an instant.

  “No,” she said.

  Nixon did a double take. “What did you just say?”

  She was gambling. Coin toss on her life. She was convinced they wanted her—and they wanted her alive.

  “What if I refuse to go?” she said.

  At that, people roused. A woman cried, “Shut up!” A man on the floor called out, “Be quiet. You’ve been chosen.”

  She stared at Nixon. If her refusal drove him to threaten somebody else, she could still accede. But she was calculating that he wouldn’t do that. Besides, letting others decide what happens to you is never a good choice. Fight it if you can.

  Nixon stared back. Beneath the balaclava, the skin around his eyes was pale. Below his left eye was a scar. It was deep and ran vertically, like a tear track. One that had dried into gnarled white tissue, dead and hard.

  The man on the floor reacted badly to Rory ignoring him. “They picked you. You have to go. If you resist they’ll just choose somebody else instead.”

  She barely heard him; heard mostly the whine and panic in his voice. Not fair. She felt loose at the knees and forced herself to stand still.

  Nixon’s lips parted. His aftershave wafted in the air. “No back talk. You’re going.”

  “Why?”

  She tried to put a demand into her voice. Nixon almost seemed to shake himself, to verify he wasn’t imagining her obstinacy. Reagan was across the room, headed toward the door to the judge’s chambers.

  It was perfectly possible for him to grab somebody else, somebody more pliable, somebody as tall and fast, somebody who would shield them as they escaped, without asking questions. But she didn’t think that was going to happen.

  “Why?” she said, stronger.

  Beneath the balaclava, Nixon’s eyes were flat. He crossed the space between them in three strides.

  He grabbed her arm and yanked her away from the window. He pulled her against him. He was hot, sweaty, his body odor mixin
g with the cologne. He grimaced. His teeth were chipped.

  “Why? Because—”

  The mist and dust and crack landed all at once. Nixon’s head snapped to one side and he dropped in front of her.

  The air in front of Rory was all at once empty—she could see straight across the room to the main doors—and blurred with something hot and sticky.

  People screamed. She looked down. Nixon had collapsed in a heap. The side of his balaclava had shredded. His skull had shredded. A pool of dark blood spread across the stone floor. He had been shot in the head.

  She backed up a step. People screamed and crawled away from Nixon, leaving an empty circle around her. She raised her hands. They were clean, but she felt wetness on her face. She touched her cheek. Her fingers came away stippled with blood.

  The screams got louder. The blood pool spread toward her, as if drawn magnetically. She stumbled back another step. In the window a fractured hole had blossomed at eye level, surrounded by cracks and white crazed lines. A bullet hole, exactly where she’d been standing.

  Nixon’s head had been twelve inches from hers. They’d shot him, long range, right past her. She put a hand to her mouth and gagged.

  Reagan stared at the sight of Nixon dead on the floor. He was framed against the door to the judge’s chambers, gun in his hands, mouth open. He gaped at Nixon and, slowly, at the window.

  He was still staring at the window when the door behind him burst open.

  The door to chambers shattered, wood splitting. Behind it was darkness, but Rory saw shadowed forms and a battering ram in their arms. Then she heard a clatter and saw a small cylindrical object roll into the courtroom.

  Before she could do anything, it blew.

  The noise, the flat, overwhelming bang, filled her ears, her head, deafened her. The light ignited everything, white. She found herself smacked back against the wall.

  Her ears rang. She didn’t hear the next shots.

  12

  The room seemed to billow and shake. A high-pitched whine filled Rory’s ears. Through fizzing white smoke she saw the thread-line light of red lasers. They sliced past her and lit on Reagan.