* * *
The kitchen of the Mellings’ house looked more like a war room than a place to cook and eat. Scotty could tell from the looks he was getting that some of the cops didn’t think he belonged there. He tried to remain as invisible as he could, even as he tried not to miss anything.
That first cop—the one he’d run into on the beach—had asked him a zillion questions before handing him off to the ambulance guys, but then, before the ambulance itself had gotten very far at all, somebody had called on the radio and told them to stop. They’d sat there for the longest time. After the EMTs put a bandage on his head, no one seemed to know what to do, so they passed the time by taking his blood pressure every other second, and by talking about everything except what was happening with Gramma.
Finally, a stream of cop cars swarmed onto the beach, and after some discussion he couldn’t understand through the walls of the ambulance, a big cop with a gold badge and eagles on his collar climbed into the back and asked Scotty whether he thought he’d be up to helping the police capture the people who’d hurt him. Scotty had jumped at the chance almost before the cop had finished asking the question.
The cop’s name was Maury Donnelly, but all the other cops who toadied up to him called him Commander. Scotty avoided calling him anything at all. Either way, Commander Donnelly seemed not to like anyone very much, but was nice enough to him as he explained how much Scotty could help by drawing them a map of what the inside of Gramma’s house looked like.
Scotty wasn’t there when they’d asked the Mellings to let them use their kitchen as a command post, but he would have loved to see it. Everybody knew that Mr. Melling brewed his own booze and grew pot under lamps in the shed out back. He must have shit his pants when he saw the cops gathering outside. In his mind, Scotty could see them all scampering to hide evidence. Trying to help them out a little, Scotty had even put a magazine over a pipe they’d forgotten to put away. He wasn’t completely sure, but he’d have sworn that Commander Donnelly saw him do it, and the little smile he’d sent told Scotty that the cops weren’t interested in drugs and alcohol today.
They brought Scotty into the kitchen and sat him down at the table with a piece of paper and a pencil. They asked him to draw a layout of his Gramma’s house. He’d given it his best effort, but he’d never been any good at drawing pictures. After one abortive effort, they all decided to let him talk them through the layout of the house. While he described things, a cop whose name he didn’t catch drew the lines on the page. The front door was here; the kitchen was there; that sort of thing. When he finished, they’d thanked him and started talking in their radios, telling people what to do.
A few minutes ago, Kathy Melling had brought him a T-shirt from her father’s drawer to replace the one that the EMTs had cut off in the ambulance. It was a zillion sizes too big, and sported the silhouette of a naked woman, but Scotty was grateful for the effort. The Mellings had a window air conditioner in their kitchen, and even with all the people in the room, he was getting pretty chilly sitting in front of it.
“Hey, Scotty, can you come here?” It was Commander Donnelly, beckoning him to the table. “Make a hole for the boy,” he said to the rest of his cops.
Five of them were gathered around the drawing of the house Scotty had dictated before.
“How sure are you about the placement of the furniture?” Donnelly asked.
Scotty thought it was a weird question. “Pretty sure.”
“That’s not good enough. I need you to be sure.” So much for Mr. Nice.
Scotty leaned farther into the table and looked more closely. “What do you need to know?”
“Tell us about the floor coverings,” said one cop.
Responding to Scotty’s look of confusion, Donnelly said, “Are there rugs or carpets on the floor?”
“There’s a rug in the living room. On the floor.”
“How big?”
“I don’t know.” Who paid attention to how big rugs were?
“Does it cover the whole floor?” Donnelly asked. “Or just the center?”
“Just the center, I guess.”
“Think hard now, son. This is important. How much plain floor—floor without carpeting—is there around the outside?”
Scotty was tempted to say he didn’t know, but stopped himself. He wanted to be as helpful as he could. He’d played with his soldiers on that floor a thousand times, lain on it watching television. Why couldn’t he remember—
Wait a second. He could too remember. He pointed to the drawing. “The TV is on the floor. Just the floor. And about this far behind the edge of the rug.” He indicated a distance of about three inches with his thumb and forefinger.
“And you think it’s that way all the way around the living room?” Donnelly pressed. “Say, three feet of rug-free floor on all sides?”
Scotty closed his eyes to remember. “Yeah, about this far.” This time, he used both hands to show a distance of about thirty-six inches.
“At least two feet,” Donnelly proclaimed, turning back to the other cops.
“What are you going to do?” Scotty asked.
They weren’t paying attention to him anymore.
Donnelly turned to the cop who’d first encountered Scotty on the beach. “And you’re sure there’s a crawl space underneath?”
Matt Hayes looked solemn. “Absolutely certain,” he said.
“You realize the risk you’re taking, right?” Donnelly asked. “If Ward hears you under there, he’s likely to start shooting. If he fires through the floor, you’re screwed.”
“You’re not going under the house, are you?” Scotty gasped. The thought of it horrified him.
All heads turned toward the boy as Donnelly said, “Is there something we need to know? A reason not to do that?”
“Have you seen the bugs that live under there?” Scotty said, prompting laughter from everyone but Trooper Hayes. “It’s only about that high.” This time, his hand marked a space of eighteen inches over the table. “I lost a soccer ball under there a week ago. No way would I crawl in there.”
As one, all eyes turned to the trooper who was going to have to do just that. Matt gave a nervous chuckle. “Hey, you do what you’ve got to do, right?”
Chapter Six
Carter told himself to slow down even as he pushed the accelerator to the floor. With his left hand pressing the telephone against his ear, he did his best to control the speeding Volvo with his right. Between the pouring rain and the surging adrenaline, he knew he’d be lucky to arrive in Lincolntown alive. He’d been on hold for nearly five minutes now, waiting for some 911 operator to chat with her supervisor.
He knew from the tone of her voice the instant she returned to the phone that his cause here was lost. “Mr. Janssen?” she said.
“I’m here. Please don’t tell me no.”
“I’m afraid I have to, sir. There’s just no way that I can patch you through to the command post. If you could just leave me your message, I can see to it that it’s delivered.”
“But I need to speak to the officer in charge,” Carter said.
“I understand that, sir, and I’ve passed that along to my supervisor, but there’s just no way—”
“Okay then,” Carter said, surrendering to the inevitable. “Take this down. One of the people in that standoff in Lincolntown is my daughter. The commander thinks that she is guilty of a murder this afternoon, but she in fact is not. We’ve just found confirmation of that.”
“We?”
“Deputy Darla Sweet with the Essex Sheriff’s Department. She and I. The real perpetrator of the robbery at the Quik Mart was Jeremy Hines, Sheriff Frank Hines’s son. He just confessed to it. So, this standoff is unnecessary.”
The operator conferred with someone on her end of the line, her microphone covered. “Um, sir, we’ve just received news about Sheriff Hines . . .”
“That he’s dead. Yes, I know. His son shot him. Terrible thing. I was there.” As the wor
ds spilled out of him, Carter realized that he must sound crazy. “Look, it’s a long story. All I need from the incident commander is for him to tell my daughter—Nicolette Janssen—that she’s no longer a suspect in that crime.”
“Sir, I can’t—”
“Goddammit, that’s why I need to talk to him!” It was a trait of law enforcement people everywhere to never give the impression of urgency. They were to be calm and reasonable at all times, and it was annoying as hell.
A beep in his ear alerted him to another call trying to come through. He pulled the phone away from his face far enough to see a familiar New York area code. Shit, he’d forgotten to call Dr. Cavanaugh. “I have to take this,” he said to the call-taker. Without waiting for a response, he pressed the Send button and waited for the click. “Dr. Cavanaugh?”
“You’re pissing me off, Mr. Janssen,” he said. Carter could tell from the anger in the doctor’s voice that he was finished.
“Doctor, I need more time,” he said. “Not a lot, just another hour.”
“Absolutely not. I’m moving to the next name on the list.”
“Please don’t do that.” The finality of the doctor’s tone felt like broken glass in Carter’s chest.
“I don’t know what kind of a game you think you’re playing, or what makes you think you have the right to play it, but I’ve been very clear with you from the very beginning—”
“Listen to me,” Carter said. “I’ve been through hell here—”
“Save it,” Cavanaugh said. “I was as clear with you as I know how to be. I won’t go through this again with you. I’m moving on to the next name on the list. I’m sorry. For both your daughter and you.”
“Wait!” he yelled, but the line was already dead. “Shit!” He yelled the word so loudly that in the confines of the car it hurt his own ears. After all he’d gone through, he was going to lose Nicki anyway.
No. That was too simple. The stakes were too high and too many lives had already been ruined for him to fall back on fatalistic cynicism.
He’d come too far to lose the battle now. There had to be a way.
If only he could let Nicki know that she was off the hook, then she could just walk away. She could be back home tomorrow.
He needed to talk with her, one on one. But how? Even if he could get the number from directory assistance, the police would have already locked it up for negotiations. That was standard procedure in any barricade situation: the phones become a single-line connect to the command post, making it impossible for the hostage-takers to call in favors from their friends, or even to call for a pizza delivery. You had to make the bad guys one hundred percent dependent upon the good guys. Hostage negotiation was a high-stakes game that was as much mind manipulation as it was sharpshooting.
Carter had to find a way to put the transplant business behind him. What’s done was done; there’d be time later to fret about the injustice. Putting the best face on it, he told himself that the negotiators now had all the time in the world, and that he himself had time to show the prosecutors that the two young people in their sights had nothing to do with the Quik Mart murders. Maybe that would take some of the itch off of the police officers’ trigger fingers.
Of course, there were still the matters of the hostage-taking itself, and the outstanding warrants on Brad Ward, and the inevitable aiding and abetting charges that faced Nicolette when this was all over, but these were things that could be handled. Nicki would be alive long enough to retake her position at the end of the organ recipient list. There’d be jail time, no doubt, but with luck, Carter would be able to talk the judge into letting her receive the intravenous prostacyclin while they worked out all the details.
Nicki would be pissed, but at least she’d be alive.
The wild card here was Brad Ward. He was a desperate man with nothing to lose. Beyond the original sentence and the added time for breaking out of prison, he faced an inevitable death sentence—or, given a lenient jury, life without parole—for the killing of his fellow inmate in the joint. He had nothing to gain by surrender; faced no benefit by allowing himself to be taken alive.
It was a thought that had been nagging at Carter ever since Jeremy Hines had tried to manipulate the police into shooting him: Brad Dougherty was likely doing the exact same thing. And why not? If conditions in prison had been bad enough to commit murder and then risk death by escaping, then they were bad enough to be avoided at all costs.
With nothing left to live for, there was little room for negotiation. At the end of all the talk, it would boil down to one thing: a stranger with a badge and a gun telling a desperate kid not to die here, so he could be put to death later.
“Just kill yourself and get it over with,” Carter said aloud. “Save everybody the trouble.”
He felt guilty for even thinking such a thing, but then, out of nowhere, his mind grabbed on to an even more disgraceful thought.
His foot urged the accelerator even closer to the floor as he dialed a new number into his cell phone.
* * *
Matt Hayes wanted a cigarette. He needed a cigarette. Honest to God, he thought he’d quit for real this time, but something about the impossible tightness of the crawlspace under the house made him realize that life was too damn short and too damn dangerous to deny yourself the simple pleasures.
He lay on his back in the sand, trying his best to ignore the flies, ants, sand fleas, and God only knew what other creatures gnawed at him. As it turned out, Scotty Boyd was the smartest person in the room when it came to the wisdom of crawling under the house.
Matt had darted across the yard and approached from the living room side of the building—side two in the parlance of the police, in which the front door is always side one the others are assigned in a clockwise pattern, with side three typically being the rear. The windows were a concern, but only a minor one. The perps had closed the curtains and that cut both ways. The drapes denied snipers a view from their nest, but they likewise denied the occupants a view of what the police were doing.
On paper, his mission was a simple one. Using a powerful yet slow-turning carbide-tipped drill, Matt was to make a hole in the floor large enough to insert a tiny fiber-optic camera into the living room. He’d use the tiny monitor to position the camera, which would then beam a picture to the command post. The camera was the newest toy donated by taxpayers to the police department. A year from now, barring any unforeseen budget cuts, they expected to have an equally small microphone for audio surveillance.
Trooper Hayes had attended training for both the audio and video, but this was the first opportunity anyone from their barracks had had to use the camera in a no-shit tactical situation.
It had seemed a lot simpler in concept than it was turning out to be in practice. The biggest problem was the thickness of the flooring versus the speed of the drill. He was making progress, but it was so slow that he was beginning to feel exposed. The longer he lay here, the greater his chance of being discovered, yet he didn’t dare drill any faster.
The nightmare that Matt had constructed for himself was that he would manage to drill straight into Dougherty’s foot. The pissed-off gunman would then shoot through the floor, and then the folks in the command post would argue among themselves about who was man enough to climb into this dank nastiness to retrieve his bullet-riddled body.
After twenty minutes, the drill broke through. Withdrawing the bit from the hole, he un-snaked the coiled fiber-optic cable from his pocket and connected it to the transmitter box, locking it in place with a quarter turn. He rested the box in the sand and turned his head to watch the tiny monitor.
If all was right with the world, the command post would be able to see exactly what he was seeing, real time. Moving with impossible slowness and deliberation, he snaked the lens through the hole he’d drilled, praying that no one inside would glance in the wrong direction and see it.
From here on out, it was all about patience. And a little bit of luck.
&nbs
p; * * *
Scotty jumped out of his seat, grunting against the pain in his head. “That’s it!” he yelled, pointing. “That’s her. That’s Gramma.”
Donnelly motioned for the boy to settle down, and they all leaned in closer to the little television monitor on the kitchen table. The angle on the picture was an odd one, and the panoramic lens distorted everything, but they clearly were looking at the inside of a small house. They could see three people. An older woman—Scotty’s Gramma—sat stiff and tall in a chair on the left. Her posture suggested that her wrists might be bound to the arms of her seat.
“They tied up my gramma,” Scotty said, his voice dripping with contempt.
No one seemed particularly bothered.
“Is that Nicolette Janssen there on the couch?” someone asked, pointing to the woman on the right-hand side of the screen.
Eyes turned to Scotty. “That’s the sick girl,” he said. “The guy is Brad. He’s the one I shot.”
From this worm’s eye view, they could see not only the two women, but also the short hallway that led to the bedrooms beyond them, and the edge of the door to the kitchen.
“You dictated a pretty good picture, Scotty,” Donnelly said. Scotty felt himself blush.
A cop touched the dark spot on the front of Brad’s T-shirt. “Looks like he’s bleeding.”
“I knew it,” Scotty said.
Donnelly seemed annoyed. “If he believes he’s finished, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble here,” he said. “There’s not an animal in the world that’s not most dangerous when it’s cornered and hurt.” He turned to a young dark-skinned cop that everyone called Muhammad. “Call the teams and verify that all assets are in position.”
Muhammad talked into his radio. A moment later, he reported, “When Hayes gets back to his post, they’ll be all set. Two three-man entry teams, two sniper teams.”
“Good,” Donnelly said. “Tell them to get comfortable. We’re in no hurry.”
Time to Live: Part Five Page 5