The Violence Beat
Page 2
“That’s right, too.”
“You wouldn’t ordinarily let any outsider—such as a reporter—speak to the guy.”
“No, we wouldn’t. But time seems to be getting short. We’re convinced Bo doesn’t really want to hurt his son. But Bo is alternately popping pills and stuffing down chocolate candy. Between the pills and the sugar rush and his nerves, he’s losing control. We’re afraid he’ll drop the kid—simply by accident.”
I started to speak, but he held up his hand in a traffic-stopping gesture.
“Since he says he won’t tell anybody but you the conditions for his surrender, we’re pretty well out of options. Ordinarily, we’d just wait him out. But the kid makes that chancy. We’re down to the sharpshooter, but we don’t like that idea, either—because of the kid.”
“Yeah. Getting splattered with his daddy might give the kid a bit of a trauma.”
I use that tough stuff when I want to get a rise out of a cop. Every one of them thinks he’s as hard as a petrified prostitute. And I’ve never known one yet who wasn’t using that shell to hide something soft. Sometimes it’s his brain.
But Mike Svenson didn’t take the bait. He ignored the comment. “So you’re right about this being a break with standard practice. We wouldn’t ordinarily let a civilian in on the deal. This will only work if you understand the rules and agree to abide by them.”
“The rules?”
“I’ll be on the phone, too, though I may not talk. I’ll be giving you instructions—either on a note pad or verbally. If this will infringe on the freedom of the press—” He shrugged. “Then the deal’s off.”
We studied each other. A floor lamp behind him was tilted in some strange way, and it hit his hair, close-cropped, but definitely red. His hair marked him to all the Grantham old-timers as the son of Carl “Irish” Svenson, chief of police for a dozen years. Irish Svenson had died three months before I moved to Grantham, but I’d heard the legends. Mike Svenson was apparently a lot like his dad in appearance. But not entirely like him in personality.
Irish Svenson had had a reputation for honesty in two senses of the word: integrity and truthfulness. In contrast, Mike Svenson had made his law-enforcement reputation on the basis of intelligence, in at least two senses of that word: He was smart, and he was subtle.
I’d always regarded Mike with caution. Honesty, even honesty that crossed the line to bluntness, was more to my taste than the kind of intelligence which verges on trickiness.
Mike smiled again. “Are you interested in talking to Bo?” he said.
“If you think it will help,” I said. “But I’m no good at lying.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to lie. A good negotiator never breaks his word. You just listen and ask questions.”
“What questions do you want me to ask?”
The grin grew broader. “You mean I really will get to tell a reporter what to ask?”
“Is that baby actually in danger?”
He nodded.
“I’ll ask anything you want if it will help save the kid.”
“Great.” Mike Svenson reached over and squeezed my hand. “Now, there’s nothing complicated about this. The main thing to remember is to just listen. Don’t argue with him.”
“Keep my opinion out of it?”
“Correct. You don’t need to tell him he’s a total jerk.”
“You don’t want me to mention he’s costing the city thousands of dollars and causing his family lots of grief?”
“No, I wouldn’t bring that up. Sympathy. That’s the ticket. He’s had a hard life, everybody has treated him like dog doo-doo, and you can understand why he’s been driven—” Mike Svenson shrugged.
“Up the stairs?”
“That’s right.” He picked up the red phone beside him and gestured toward the black one.
I touched it. “This one’s mine?”
Mike nodded. “Are you ready?”
What a question. My impulse was to yell. “No!” and run out the door. I had no business in delicate negotiations, with a kid’s life at stake. But how could I refuse? I picked up my ballpoint and wrote down an opening question. “You’ve been a real hard-luck guy in the past year, Bo. Can you tell me about it?”
I showed it to Mike Svenson. “This is okay?”
“Sure. That ought to kick him into the talking mode.” He punched at the phone. Through the open door of the waiting room, I could hear another phone ring. It rang a couple of times, echoing off the rotunda, then Mike Svenson spoke. “Hi, Bo. This is Mike.”
A pause. “Yeah, we’ve got her here.” Another pause. “Bo, I can’t allow a civilian up there. You’ll have to talk to her on the phone.”
A loud bawling yell burst in the door of the room we were in. Mike winced and pulled the phone away from his ear, and I could hear the hollering coming through the receiver as well. The yell bounced against the terrazzo outside, ricocheted off the plaster walls and reverberated against the dome, circled around our room, then made the circuit again. It seemed to grow and grow until it filled the entire building.
I snatched my black phone off the hook. “Bo!” I held the receiver to my ear as the yelling gradually died away. “This is Nell Matthews. I thought you wanted to talk to me.”
Nobody said anything for a long moment. Then I heard a sort of sniveling sob and a voice croaked, “You’re my only hope.”
“I want to talk to you, Bo,” I said. “A reporter rarely gets a chance at a story like this one—an interview with a man in a position like yours. But you know how cops are. All those rules about civilians. They won’t let me come in there.”
“They’re listening in.”
I couldn’t lie to him. Besides, I knew he wouldn’t believe me if I denied it. “Does that matter?”
“Yes. They’re out to get me. I know too much. My only hope is to tell someone.”
I knew it. A big conspiracy.
“Tell me.”
“No! Not on the phone.”
And he hung up.
I felt as if I’d been slapped. Had I ruined the negotiations? I looked at Mike Svenson, almost panicky.
“Did I blow it that fast?” I said.
Mike Svenson shook his head. “You didn’t blow it at all, except maybe you expected Bo to be rational. We’ll give him a few minutes, then call back. Or maybe he’ll call us. Do you want some coffee? A Coke?”
I shook my head, but I looked around the command post then, and I saw the coffeepot in the corner. I saw some other details, too. The chief was there, and so was the regional supervisor for the state police. So Mike Svenson wasn’t entirely on his own. The top cop was overseeing his red-haired boy’s first big negotiation.
Mike Svenson might be the son of a Grantham police chief, but he’d been away from his hometown nearly ten years, earning his spurs on a big city force and getting plenty of specialized training. He’d earned medals recognizing his courage as a TAC team member, and he’d been trained as a negotiator. He’d come back eighteen months before the day Bo Jenkins barricaded himself in the rotunda of the Central Police Station and six months after his dad had been killed in a car wreck. Among the station house gossip passed on by Guy Unitas was speculation that the chief, Wolf Jameson, wanted to groom him for the day ten or twelve years down the line when Jameson would hit retirement age and Mike Svenson might be in the right position to move into the top cop slot.
Now Mike Svenson turned to Jameson. “I thought I’d make another offer of food for the baby,” he said. “As soon as we get him back.”
The chief nodded. “Sounds good,” he said.
Svenson faced me. “We’re concentrating on the idea that Bo doesn’t really want to hurt Billy,” he said. “Apparently it was the threat of losing access to the boy that brought this situation to a head. We’ll give him five minutes to cool down. Sure you won’
t have coffee?”
I stood up, shaking my head. “No, thanks. We have plenty of coffee and soft drinks outside. What we’re short on is plumbing. Mind if I wander down the hall?”
“You’ll have to go across to the chief’s office,” Svenson said. “Stay out of the rotunda area.”
“I’ll show you,” Coy Blakely said.
“I know how to get to the chief’s office,” I said.
Svenson grinned. “I’m sure you know this building from one end to another, Nell. That’s why I’m not going to let you loose in it.”
“I have no desire to get between you all and Bo,” I said. “But if you want me to have an escort, I won’t argue.”
I followed Coy out of the room, and he led me across the foyer, around the corner into the main hall, through the door of the chief’s suite. He pointed the way to the chief’s private potty. It wasn’t anything fancy. I wiped the seat with toilet paper before I sat, and I took a look at Jameson’s personal reading matter stuffed into a wastebasket beside the commode. A collection of New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. Huh, I thought. Jameson put on such a good-ole-boy act. Who’d have thought he was a secret addict of the NYT crossword? The Sunday crossword, too, the one which takes me all week.
I was drying my hands on a paper towel when I heard the rumpus outside.
Yelling. And something else. A kid screaming. Pounding feet. A lot of people shouting. Something was happening.
I threw the paper towel in the direction of the wastebasket, slung my purse over my shoulder, grabbed my notebook, and flew out the bathroom door.
The chief’s office was empty. Where was my keeper, Coy-the-Cop? I ran on through the private office, through the outer office, and out the door to the main hall. Then I took a sharp left and ran toward the noise.
And I ran headlong into Bo Jenkins.
At least I thought it must be Bo Jenkins. I’d never seen the guy—even a picture of him. But how many people were running around the Grantham PD with a baby in one hand and a pistol in the other?
Bo and I whanged together like football linemen. We were all tangled up for a minute. Then I jumped back, and he jumped back, and I became aware that a whole bunch of cops were circled around us. Most of them were standing in such grotesque positions that they seemed to be playing an absurd game of Swinging Statues. All of them were looking real cautious.
Bo and I were the center of attention. All the cops seemed to expect one of us to do something.
Do what? What could he do? What could I do?
“Bo!” I guess I yelled it. “Give me the kid! I know you don’t want him to get hurt!”
Bo’s stringy, colorless hair was standing in all directions, and his skinny chest puffed in and out with each panicky breath he took. His eyes rolled wildly. God knows what kind of chemicals were seething behind them. He made two frightened sounds, like a cornered chimpanzee. Then he suddenly thrust the baby at me. My notebook flew across the foyer, and I fell to my knees with both arms full of squalling kid.
“Stay back!” Bo’s voice screeched in my ear.
For a minute I thought the kid was strangling me.
But it was Bo’s arm around my throat, Bo’s arm choking me, Bo’s arm pressing against my collarbone, forcing me to my knees. Bo’s voice yelling, “Stay back, or I’ll kill her!”
All I could see in that moment was Mike Svenson’s face. He was across the hall, and he looked like a thunderstorm.
Why shouldn’t he be angry? His fourteen hours of negotiations were out the window.
Now Bo Jenkins had two hostages.
Chapter 2
Nobody said anything, but the kid kept squalling. I held him hard against my body, but he wriggled. And Bo still had me by the throat, and I began to feel something very hard pressing against the side of my head. It must have been the pistol. The barrel felt as though it were three or four inches across.
It was lucky that Bo had pushed me to my knees. I was so scared I would have fallen to them if he hadn’t.
The little boy cried, and no one else did anything. Mike, Bo, and the assorted cops just stood around, still in their grotesque positions. Then Mike Svenson reassumed command of his operation.
“Okay, Bo,” he said. “You’ve got the reporter you wanted to talk to. Now the rest of us are going to back off.” He looked around the hall. “Everybody! Out!”
The assembled cops began to back up, moving by inches. Nobody made any sudden moves.
Except Bo. He yanked me to my feet, stretching my neck a couple of inches in the process, and we backed up, too. I realized he was trying to get his back to the wall. Luckily there was a bench along that wall, a long old-fashioned oak bench that matched the old-fashioned building that housed the police headquarters. Bo shoved me down onto one end of it, and he stood beside me. The pistol was still against my head.
I got a hand loose and tugged at the arm he had under my chin. I gasped pitifully, to indicate that I couldn’t breathe. He moved his arm from beneath my chin and gripped my shoulder instead, but he didn’t move the pistol.
I sat little Billy down in my lap, and his squalling died away to a gurgle. I took stock of the situation. The last TAC cop—bullet-proof vest and all—was moving out of sight. I knew they weren’t going far, but I had mixed feelings about their disappearance. If they stayed, they might spook Bo into some action I wasn’t going to enjoy. But if they were out of sight, and he took a notion to blow my brains out, there wouldn’t be a lot they could do to stop him.
But Bo and Billy and I weren’t alone. Mike Svenson was still there. He had backed up slowly, crossing the twenty feet of terrazzo floor until he got to the opposite wall. And there he reached a bench which matched the one I was perched on. As I watched, he sat down on it, threw one arm along the back and propped his right ankle on his left knee. He looked supremely casual.
“Okay, Bo,” he said. “Maybe we can talk better face-to-face.”
“You get out!” Bo said.
“I can’t do that while Ms. Matthews is here,” Svenson said. “She’s my responsibility, just the way Billy is yours.”
Bo took a deep breath, and I could feel the hand on my shoulder tense. I had to do something. Bo had eased the pressure of the pistol, and I could move my head a little. I looked at the baby.
“Kleenex!” I said. “Bo, Billy’s nose needs attention. I have a pack of Kleenex in my purse. I can get it out and clean up his face. Then he’ll feel better.”
I tried to assume a matter-of-fact expression, as though I were just trying to help Bo out. Then I slowly turned my head to look up at him.
I was staring into the barrel of his pistol.
The barrel was within two inches of my right eye. A small-caliber, silver-colored automatic. I’ll swear I could see the bullet in the chamber.
I believe my heart stopped. Then it began to pound like machine-gun fire. Luckily, I was frozen with fear. If I’d made a sudden move, Bo might have pulled the trigger.
Instead, he looked at me. Then at Mike Svenson. Then back at me.
“Dump the purse out on the bench,” he said.
I slid the strap off my shoulder and dumped the contents out on the bench. I felt better as soon as I looked away from the barrel of that gun. Casual. I had to act casual. The way Mike Svenson was acting.
“This is an embarrassing thing for a woman to have to do,” I said. “I never let anybody see all the junk in my purse.”
I picked up the packet of tissues and began to work on Billy’s face. He twisted, yelled, and fought, just the way my cousin’s baby did when his nose was wiped. I was afraid to look at Bo, but the process didn’t seem to worry him. When I finished, I stood Billy up in my lap. Once I’d stopped pawing at his face, he seemed almost cheerful. He was a cute little fellow, with curly brown hair and big brown eyes. He was wearing a dirty blue blanket sleeper.
Bo’s face contorted. “Julie’s never gonna let me see him again.” A tear ran down from the corner of his eye. “The judge is gonna be on her side.”
Right, I thought. After today, everybody’s going to be on her side. But there was no point in saying so. “The future stretches on forever,” I said. “Sure, you need to get your life straightened out before you can take care of Billy, but that doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen.”
I shot Mike Svenson a look. He was sitting absolutely still. He gave me a barely perceptible nod. I gathered that he wanted me to keep on along the same lines.
“I talked to Julie today,” I said.
“She hates me.”
“That’s not what she told me. She told me she’s heartsick because you two have split up.” She’s also told me Bo scared her spitless, but I left that part out. “Bo, she loves Billy just the way you do. She’s frantic about him.”
“I wouldn’t hurt him.”
“I know that! Julie knows you don’t mean him any harm! It’s all these cops. You’ve got them scared, Bo. On the defensive. She’s afraid one of them will hurt Billy—just by accident.”
Tears were running openly down Bo’s face.
Mike Svenson moved then. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and spread his hands imploringly. “Bo, let Nell take Billy out of here. Let her take him to his mother.”
“No! No! I can’t give up until I get what I want!”
“You won’t be giving up!” Mike raised his voice slightly. “I’ll still be here!”
I could feel Bo’s hand tighten on my shoulder, and his shaking increased. The knot in my stomach tied itself into a double hitch. Bo was not going to let me leave. That was plain.
Bo shook like a flagpole in a windstorm. He moved the pistol slightly. Toward Mike. I couldn’t just sit there.
“I’ll be your hostage!” Mike said.