You Have the Right to Remain Silent

by Barbara Paul

  In spite of his tension, or perhaps because of it, Holland barked out a laugh. “That’s Large Marge? Oh, magnificent.” He laughed again. “And she picks pockets, too!”

  Marian started the car; they’d waited only to make sure nothing had gone wrong. She pulled away from the curb even before Ivan and Romero had gotten their prisoners into their car. She sped through a cross street just as the light was changing and headed toward the Village and Bleecker Street.

  They were both silent during the drive downtown. When they reached Bleecker, Marian spotted a fire hydrant to park by; the safe house was on up a block or two. They left the car and started walking.

  They could hear the church before they saw it; high-decibel rock pounded through the chill evening air, offering eternal deafness if not eternal salvation. Marian and Holland paused to get their bearings. A pink neon sign spelled out Souls on Parade in script over the door, which stood open in spite of the cold weather. Marian was warm, too warm, inside her down jacket. Three teen-aged boys hurried inside without giving them a glance. The sidewalk separating the church from the building next door was so narrow Marian and Holland might have missed it if they hadn’t known to look for it.

  Holland led the way, playing a flashlight over the side of the building. The iron fire ladder was toward the back; it had a sliding bottom section that stopped a few feet over their heads. I’ll go first, Holland mouthed over the music, putting his flashlight away. He jumped up and caught the bottom rung of the ladder and his weight slowly pulled the ladder down, the noise of its descent drowned out by the driving musical fervor pouring out of the Souls on Parade.

  Marian waited on the ground, holding the ladder with one hand and shining her own flashlight up to the nearest third-floor window. When Holland reached the window, he motioned for her to turn her light off and took out his own. Carefully he examined the frame of the window, even peering inside the best he could. When he was satisfied the window wasn’t wired, he placed his palms against the top frame of the bottom pane and pushed—and to Marian’s surprise, the window lifted easily. Holland stepped through into the unused apartment. There’s another law broken, Marian thought.

  When he was inside, Marian climbed the ladder, which was on the shaky side. Her heart beating a little faster, she stepped over the windowsill and pulled out her flashlight again. Yes, the window had locks on the inside; why had Page left it unlocked? Behind her, the bottom section of the ladder pulled back up to its original position. Inside the building, the music took on a different quality; the melody dwindled to nearly inaudible while the bass line became more prominent. The wooden floor was vibrating in the empty apartment. Marian started hunting for the kitchen and the pantry.

  She felt Holland’s hand tugging her arm and followed in the direction he was leading. He opened a door and played his beam over a hole in the wall: the pantry. Marian crouched down and duck walked through to the adjoining pantry. The door between the pantry and the kitchen was locked, just as Romero had said it was. Marian held the light while Holland took out his picks; the first one he tried worked.

  The apartment was dark. That was bad; could Page have moved his prisoner to a different hiding place? Or even worse, killed him? Still using her flashlight, Marian found the living room … and Edgar Quinn. He was alive, but there was a problem. He was tied to a chair, his mouth taped shut, and a bomb was strapped to his stomach.

  Marian froze. Only when Holland found the switch and turned on the lights did her paralysis begin to dissipate. She caught a whiff of an unpleasant odor and it took her a moment to identify it as Quinn’s sweat. Fear did have its own stench; nothing else smelled quite like it. Quinn’s eyes were rolled up so only the whites showed, and he’d wet himself. The music pounded up through the floorboards.

  Holland pointed. Marian followed his finger as he traced a trip wire connected to the outside door. That’s why Page had left the window unlocked: so he could get back in. Holland pointed again; the bomb also had a timer, set for midnight—they had four hours. Page was protecting himself both ways; if someone found the safe house or if he himself was prevented from returning, the evidence against him would be blown to kingdom come—along with all the parading souls in the lower part of the building.

  Holland ripped the tape off Quinn’s mouth, none too gently. Quinn started screaming something, but they couldn’t hear what he said over the uproar from downstairs. He seemed to realize that, because he took a deep breath and mouthed one word at them: Page, Page, Page, over and over again.

  Marian wanted at least to untie him, but the ropes binding him to the chair were interwoven with the harness that held the bomb; too risky. The trip wire to the door was taut, running through a series of tiny pulleys positioned to keep Quinn from attempting to move at all. She couldn’t see a telephone in the room, but they could never have made themselves heard anyway. Marian and Holland exchanged a look. They were going to have to leave him. She stood in front of Quinn’s chair and pantomimed dialing and then speaking on a phone, but she wasn’t sure he understood what she meant. He started screaming again when he saw them leaving.

  Through the hole in the pantry wall, out the window. While climbing down the fire ladder, Marian decided it would be quicker to go back and use her car phone rather than look for a phone nearby. She hit the ground running, with Holland close behind. It took forever to run the block and a half to the car; and as they pulled away from the racket coming out of the church, Marian became aware of an unpleasant, high-pitched ringing in her ears.

  Something else was ringing as well: the car phone. Marian scratched the paint in her haste to get the door unlocked. She snatched up the receiver and yelled, “What?”

  “He’s out,” said Ivan Malecki’s voice. “We couldn’t hold him ten minutes.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” She held the receiver out a little from her ear so Holland could bend in and listen.

  “Did you get Quinn?” Ivan was asking. “Page ought to be arriving there any minute now. I’ve been calling—”

  “We’ve got a crisis here,” Marian interrupted.

  “Quinn,” Holland gasped and took off running back to the church and the third-floor apartment.

  “I want you to call the bomb squad and give them the Bleecker Street address,” Marian said to Ivan. She went on to describe what they’d found in the apartment.

  “Shit! Are there people downstairs in the church?”

  “Yes, they’ll have to be evacuated. Ivan, make sure the bomb squad understands the bomb is hooked up to the door. They must go in by the fire ladder.”

  “Gotcha. God, Marian, if you’d used the door—”

  “I know.” She was trying not to think about that part of it. “Tell Gloria to make her calls to DiFalco and the FBI now—don’t wait. Hurry, Ivan. Holland’s gone back to guard Quinn since Page is on the loose, and he’ll need back-up.”

  “You’re not going back in there?”

  “Have to.” She broke the connection and ran as hard as she could back toward the cacophony and the danger.

  24

  It took Marian three jumps before she was able to catch the bottom rung of the fire ladder. The climb wasn’t any easier the second time; her sneakers kept slipping on the iron rungs. But at last she made it to the top and climbed through the window. The noise from downstairs—Marian could no longer think of it as music—was relentless. Her head was starting to throb in time with the bass rhythm.

  But as she was crawling into the pantry, it suddenly stopped. Blessed, blessed silence! Through for the evening or only changing the tapes? She stepped into the kitchen and started toward the living room—and then stopped dead.

  “—window was open,” Trevor Page’s voice was saying from the next room. “And the lights were on. I turned them off when I left.”

  Marian didn’t dare breathe; a deep chill ran through her. Slowly and quietly she unzipped her jacket and slipped out of it. She reached around to the small of her back and drew her weapon from its h
olster.

  Holland’s voice sounded, cold and angry. “Do you plan on shooting me with my own gun? Don’t you think that just might arouse some curiosity in official quarters?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that much matters now. But I didn’t plan on your finding this place just yet. How did you find it?”

  Holland evidently saw no reason not to tell him. “From the FBI’s list of safe houses. This was the only one in the Ninth Precinct.” He didn’t mention Marian.

  She edged up to the doorway and risked a look. Page was standing between Quinn and Holland; Quinn was crying. Page had one gun pointed at Holland and another—his own, presumably—held loosely in the other hand. He’d been waiting for whoever had broken in. How pleased he must have been to see it was Holland.

  Procedure called for her to erupt into the room shouting and going immediately into a crouch. But she didn’t dare chance it, not with a gun pointed straight at Holland. So almost casually she stepped into the room, aimed her weapon at Page, and said, “Put the guns down, Trevor. It’s over.”

  The look on his face made her stomach turn over. But unexpected as her appearance was, he still reacted quickly; he whipped up his other arm and pointed that gun at Edgar Quinn’s head. Marian could see beads of sweat on his forehead. “I’m bound to get one of them before you can drop me,” he said in a tight voice.

  “It wouldn’t do you any good if you got all three of us,” Marian shot back, her own voice none too steady. “Do you think Holland and I are the only ones who know? Those two cops who arrested you in FiFi’s—they know. And a third is notifying DiFalco and your bosses right this minute. Where do you think we were just now? Calling for help. The bomb squad is on its way. It’s over. Put the guns down.”

  Page’s face had changed expression half a dozen times while she was talking; his poise was deserting him and desperation taking its place. “I know it’s over,” he groaned. “But I’m not going to prison. I’ll never go to prison. And if you pull that trigger, I swear to god, Marian, I’ll take these two with me. You put your gun down.”

  She looked straight into his eyes and knew she didn’t have a choice; he meant every word of it. Holland and Quinn were as disposable to him as were the four dead men he’d left in East River Park. Slowly she lowered her gun and placed it on the floor by her feet.

  “Good. Now kick it over here.”

  She did as he instructed. “If we don’t stop you,” she said, “somebody else will. There are just too many people looking for you.”

  His laugh was artificial. “You think I didn’t plan for this possibility?” he asked arrogantly. “I have a dozen contingency plans. Ah Marian, Marian! Why did you cast your lot with him?” He jerked his head toward Holland. “Marian, do you have any idea of what you’ve done, of the plans you’ve ruined?”

  “You mean your plans for arming terrorists with laser guns?” She started inching toward him, trying to move without being seen and praying that Holland was doing the same thing.

  “Counterterrorists!” Page said sharply. “Those guns were never meant to be used in the United States. They were for men and women all over the world who aren’t afraid to fight the threats to democracy that Americans are too blind to see. The accelerating ambitions of the Islam ‘nation,’ for one. And the Russians are still pulling our strings in spite of all that’s happened.” He snorted. “You think that’s going to stop by itself?”

  Marian inched a little nearer. “And you appointed yourself to straighten it all out.”

  “Somebody has to. The CIA has turned gun-shy.” But Page was too keyed up to be diverted for long. “Enough talk, now. Move over there with Holland.”

  She was about six feet from him. “And all the heady power that comes with the job, deciding who lives and who dies—that has nothing to do with it, I suppose.”

  “I said move over with Holland! Do it, Marian, or I’ll have to—”

  Baaaa-rooooom! The music exploded like a burst of dynamite, making Page start in surprise. In that split second of distraction Marian launched herself toward the gun pointing at Quinn, aware that Holland was going for the other arm. She pushed Page’s arm up; the gun discharged, sending a bullet into the ceiling. She got her hands around Page’s wrist and twisted them in opposite directions, hard. The gun fell to the floor. She glanced over; his other hand was empty as well.

  Just then a great pain shot through the lower part of her left leg, causing her to cry out; Page’s toe had caught her just below the kneecap. Her legs flew out from under her and all three of them went down in a struggling heap. Marian was having trouble breathing; she was caught between the two straining men, as she had been from the very first day. Holland was on the bottom; Page was trying to reach around her to get a grasp on Holland’s throat. She could feel Page’s hot breath on her face as they all three fought to get some sort of purchase on the wooden floor that was again vibrating from the taped rock band blaring away below. Marian kept pushing back against Page, trying to move him to the right, away from Quinn and the bomb. But Holland was working against her, trying to move them all in the other direction.

  Then she saw why: one of the guns was on the floor not a foot beyond his outstretched fingers. Page now had one hand around Holland’s throat while Marian held off the other. Trying to ignore the pain in her left leg, she squirmed and twisted and got herself turned around, facing Holland and away from Page. Then she put her right foot on the floor and pushed as hard as she could. They moved a little. She pushed again; Holland’s fingers could just touch the butt of the gun. She pushed one more time, but then Page got his hand free. He grabbed her hair and yanked her head up, preparatory to smashing her face into the floor. Holland jerked up his arm, pressed the nozzle of the gun against Page’s right eye, and fired.

  Nothing moved. Time hesitated.

  After an eon Marian felt Page roll away. The report of the gun so close to her ear had temporarily deafened her. She lay collapsed across Holland—sick, shocked, trying to catch her breath. After a minute or two she began to hear the thud-thud-thud-thud of the music again. She felt Holland’s fist pressing against her back; slowly, gradually, it relaxed into a hand. She wondered if her hearing would ever be the same again. If only the goddamn noise would stop—

  And no sooner had she thought that than it did stop, as abruptly as it had begun. She could make out sounds of shouting and movement from below; the Souls on Parade were being evacuated. The bomb squad had arrived.

  Marian sat up and turned to look at Page—and wished she hadn’t. The bullet fired at such close range had blown out the back of his skull. Blood was splattered as far as the wall. Small lumps of pink brain tissue were turning gray upon exposure to the air. Marian gagged once, then shut her eyes and clenched her teeth, fighting down the nausea.

  “Marian—are you going to be all right?”

  Marian opened her eyes to see Holland kneeling in front of her. “In a few years,” she said.

  He leaned forward and placed his cheek against hers. “Thank you,” he whispered. Then he stood up and went to check on Quinn, whose head had fallen forward so that his chin was resting on his chest. “He’s fainted.”

  Marian slowly got to her feet, favoring the leg Page had kicked. “Do you blame him?”

  Holland looked at the gun he was still holding. “I think this one’s yours.” He handed it to her and picked up his own gun from the floor. He left Page’s where it had fallen.

  Just then three men wearing bomb squad coveralls came in from the kitchen. They stopped, taking in the scene, their eyes traveling from Quinn and the bomb to Page’s body and the splattered blood and back to the bomb again. “Jesus, will you look at this?” one of them kept saying. “Look at it! Jesus. Jesus.”

  Yeah, Jesus, Marian thought. Look at this.

  It took the bomb squad only forty-five minutes to dismantle the bomb and free Edgar Quinn. By that time it looked as if most of Manhattan had moved down to Bleecker Street. The block where the church building
was located had been cordoned off, but outside the barriers the Souls on Parade congregated along with all the other occupants of the block. Their numbers were swelled by the hordes of onlookers that dropped out of the skies every time something unusual was going on. Six Radio Motor Patrol cars were there and over a dozen uniformed officers. A fire truck was there. An ambulance was there. Two men with a stretcher and a body bag were there, waiting to go in after Page. Ivan Malecki, Gloria Sanchez, and Jaime Romero were there—as was Captain DiFalco, who, as the ranking police officer present, was able to place himself in charge of the “operation.” The FBI was there. The TV news crews were there.

  Marian asked the medic for some painkillers; her leg was going to have one beaut of a bruise the next day, but there was nothing she could do about that. The bomb squad had just brought Edgar Quinn down, trembling and unsteady on his feet. He didn’t make it all the way to the nearest RMP; his legs gave out and he sank down on a curb, dropping his head between his knees. Marian got to him before DiFalco did.

  “Quinn?” she said, hunkering down so her face would be on a level with his. “We’ll get a statement from you later, but right now I want you to tell me something. Quinn, do you hear me?”

  He raised his head just as DiFalco got there. “You saved my life, you and Holland,” Quinn said in a choked voice. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  DiFalco had the sense to keep quiet; gratitude was an ephemeral thing at best, and this particular expression of it wasn’t directed at him. “All I want to know is why,” Marian said. “You didn’t need the money. You’re not a violent man—why cooperate in the murder of four of your own employees?”

  “I didn’t kill them!” Quinn cried, alarmed. “Page shot them. I didn’t even know he was going to kill them! They just wanted to talk to me, to try to figure out a way to find which of them had been talking to Washington about the laser gun. I’d, I’d told them I was going to let them all go if we couldn’t find the guilty one. That was Page’s idea.”