‘Alive. Behind a tree.’
‘Any sign of your brother?’
Jimmy gave her an annoyed look.
Karen stepped to the open doors and looked out into the yard. There was no sign of Chris or Donny but nor was there any more gunfire. She looked down. Haddon was crawling towards the yard past her feet.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
She took a quick step to the side as he threw up at her feet.
‘Yeah, a blow to the head does that. Now turn around and crawl back to the sofas.’
Sheriff Wilson worked his way backwards, shielded by shrubs and bushes, until he could turn and hurry down the road. In his house he turned a T-shirt into a tourniquet then unlocked his armoury and took out his .38 Special and his hunting rifle. He got more shells for the .357 Magnum, his primary duty weapon.
He was worried about that other shot he’d heard from the back of the house. He called Finch.
‘You alone?’ he said.
‘I’m with Nadine.’
‘Okay. Come to Barbara’s neighbourhood with as many men as you can muster. Set up a perimeter around 50 yards out including the beach and put roadblocks on every road in the neighbourhood. Get someone going house to house to clear the area. Then you come to Natasha’s by the back door. I’ll be there.’
‘What’s happening sheriff? Mr Smith?’
‘Negative. The hit-and-run people. At least three bad people. They’re armed and one is certainly trigger-happy. And they have hostages. How’s Josie?’
‘No better, no worse. So we got a siege situation?’
Finch sounded excited.
‘It would appear so. Is Nadine nearby?’
‘She’s sitting right beside me.’
‘I figured. No need to be so gung-ho – you know she already likes you.’ He heard Nadine sounding indignant in the background. ‘Natasha hasn’t shown up anywhere has she?’
‘You didn’t find her?’
Wilson paused.
‘I think she’s one of the hostages.’
‘Shit. Okay, I’m on my way.’
‘Johnny? Bring a medic for a flesh wound that hurts like hell.’
Wilbur Parker was sitting quietly in Tom Haddon’s house when he heard the first shots from the house next door. He was at the bedroom window, watching through the fringes of the big mossy trees the waves break on the reefs. He was wondering why anyone who wasn’t hiding out would choose to live in this Godforsaken place.
He was a city man, always had been.
He was waiting for the yoga teacher to come home because he had a feeling Haddon was Hanson. He’d found no proof when he’d tossed the house but that meant nothing. There was something about the guy and the timing of his arrival on the island was right.
He’d got ready when Haddon cycled up an hour earlier but then Haddon had gone next door. There was a party going on. Parker had settled down for a long wait. He was good at waiting. Then he heard the gunfire.
From the bathroom window he’d seen a white van tucked out of sight between the two houses. A big punk with one of those stupid cockatoo hairstyles was popping away one handed at something in front of the house. The hair made Parker want to shoot him on principle. Instead he went to the front window and saw a sheriff’s vehicle across the road. The punk was trying to shoot the gas tank. He’d seen too many movies. The punk was hoping the car was going to go up in a big ball of orange flame. Only a bullet in the gas tank would never have that effect.
Parker could see the sheriff’s left boot sticking out beside another big tree dripping moss between the two houses. Then it moved.
Parker couldn’t see anything going on at the front of the house from this position. He went up to the bathroom again. A grey-haired guy had a gun to the punk’s neck and was whispering stuff in his ear. The punk had his gun held out, hanging by the trigger guard off the end of a finger.
When the grey-haired guy was satisfied he went back into the yard. The punk stood there, peeking round the corner at the front of the house.
Parker was working it through.
A rival hit team for Luke Hanson? He dismissed that out of hand. What were they doing next door if that were so?
The house was being robbed? The party had alerted the cops? That worked. Damned bad timing for him but it worked.
The punk was shouting something now, popping his head round the corner of the house front. Then he took another pop with his gun.
Parker went to the front window in time to see the Sheriff skedaddling down the street, leaving a blood trail on the dirt road from a wound in his arm. Parker pondered this. He had time to get out of the house before the cop came back with reinforcements.
He decided to stay. He went into the kitchen and took a beer out of the fridge. He was relieved Haddon/Hanson wasn’t a full-time yoga geek. He didn’t fancy sweating out the next few hours with only herb tea or some spirulina shit for company.
Donny lumbered back in with Chris following behind. Chris looked tense. Karen gave him a questioning look.
‘Donny here decided perforating a Sheriff was our best means of getting off the island.’
‘Best way for me to get my rocks off, at least,’ Donny said, smirking.
‘Except now, dumb-ass, the law knows where we’re holed up,’ Chris said.
‘You should go now, whilst the Sheriff is distracted,’ the Natasha woman said. ‘Get over the causeway.’
‘Should we now?’ Karen said. ‘How long do you think it will take him to phone the cops on the other side?’
Innocent shrugged.
‘Not long. Then maybe you should just give yourselves up.’
‘Maybe we should shoot all the hostages first,’ Jimmy said.
‘It seems to me you’re in enough trouble as it is,’ the round-faced man called Gus said. ‘– but not too much that you can’t get out of it before it gets worse.’
Donny stepped up behind Gus and cuffed him across the side of the head. The blow sounded loud in the room as Gus fell across Phoebe.
‘Does it seem like that, wise-ass?’ Donny said. ‘Seems to me things are going to get a whole lot worse for you so that it can get better for us.’
Karen walked over to Chris.
‘We have a word?’
They walked behind the kitchen counter.
‘What’s this?’ Jimmy called. ‘We ain’t a team no more?’
‘Shit, Jimmy,’ Donny said. ‘We never was.’
Gus sat up again. Donny reached out and roughly stroked Phoebe’s wet hair as she tried to jerk away.
‘I should change your shampoo, darling.’ He took a clutch of Phoebe’s hair and jerked at it. ‘We always just the hired hands, Jimmy, which is why we need to take advantage of the perks when we find them.’
‘You boys calm down,’ Chris called. ‘Just getting a couple of things straight in our heads.’
‘You do that,’ Jimmy said, glowering at him.
Chris looked at Karen.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘That woman is right,’ Karen murmured. ‘Now the sheriff is alerted there’s no way we can get off the island. It’s only a matter of time before that artist and his assistant are found trussed up at the studio. We knocked someone over and drove away and we shot and wounded an officer of the law. That is all pretty bad but taking hostages raises it to a different level.’
‘A federal level,’ Chris said. ‘But for the time being they give us leverage.’
‘Chris –’
‘Let it be until I figure something out.’
Sheriff Wilson broke into Natasha Innocent’s house through the back door. His and hers were probably the only two houses on the street that were locked and that was only because of the weapons they both kept at home. He almost tripped over a skateboard on the floor just inside the living room door. He guessed the skateboards were the presents Josie had brought back from the mainland.
He hadn’t had time to clean up his wound nor even change hi
s shirt and now his arm was throbbing, though the tourniquet had slowed the bleeding. He sat at Natasha’s front window, propped his rifle against the wall and tried to see through binoculars what was going on in Barbara’s house. She favoured wafty muslin curtains but they were pulled closed now. He wanted to get round on the beach for a better look but that could wait until back-up arrived.
He phoned the telephone company to get Barbara’s line reconnected.
He knew he should get help from the mainland. He had two full-time deputies and four part-time and only three police vehicles. With some of the tollbooth workers Finch had just about enough to form the perimeter Wilson had asked for but he didn’t know how they’d fare against hardened crooks.
For hostage and barricaded suspect operations such as this he could call in the SWAT and HNT over in the metropolitan police at Savannah-Chatham. Brunswick had SWAT too, a few miles further away.
But he wanted to wait awhile. He had the power. Paradise Island was unique among the sea islands. All the other islands came under the jurisdiction of counties. Paradise Island, through some quirk of history, was itself a county from colonial times.
The sheriff of each county was the Chief Law Enforcement Officer. In short, he was the law on Paradise Island. It was up to him to handle it. Call him obstinate but this time he wanted to do it right.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Okay if I have another drink, love?’ Barbara said to the woman now identified as Karen.
‘Knock yourself out,’ Karen said.
‘That’s my plan. And when I wake up all this will be over.’
‘If only, darling.’
Jimmy watched them both from his chair in the corner.
Barbara rooted around on the table for a moment.
‘Mind if I get the corkscrew from the kitchen?’
The woman passed one over from a hook above the hob. Barbara opened a bottle of wine and sloshed it into the glasses on the table. Karen held her hand out to retrieve the corkscrew.
Natasha Innocent looked at the people on the sofas, wondering which one had the corkscrew that had been on the table ten minutes earlier.
The phone rang. Everybody looked round.
‘How the hell?’ Barbara said.
Karen went over to the phone on the wall.
‘Sheriff Wilson here.’
‘Aren’t you a clever boy?’ she said, keeping an eye on the room.
‘Thought it might make negotiation easier.’
‘Are we negotiating?’ Karen said.
‘Well, we need to resolve this situation.’
‘Get that tourniquet sorted?’
‘I’m bandaged like a baby. Your friend owes me a shirt.’
‘No friend of mine.’
‘Strictly professional, eh?’
‘What do you have in mind?’ Karen said.
‘You’re charged only with hit and run. Now why you would escalate it to kidnap, I’m not sure. I can only think that you have done something else. No offence, ma’am, but you look like a thief to me.’
‘Oh, no offence taken, Sheriff.’
‘But I haven’t heard alarm bells from the bank or the jewellery stores so maybe you were on your way somewhere but had to abort because of your accident. Note I’m saying accident because I’m sure you didn’t intend to run that woman down. Tell me, by the way - and please don’t answer in a way that would alert her to the fact I’m asking about her – do you have a Natasha in there?’
Karen looked across at the feisty woman sitting cross-legged by the wall, head down but eyes alert.
‘I believe so. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s her friend, Josie, that you knocked down. Perhaps best not to mention that.’
‘How is she?’
‘Poorly. Listen, I was saying. Since nobody has reported another crime on the island, technically it’s still only the hit and run. We can discuss the hostage-taking. And shooting an officer of the law, of course. But maybe I can just take that out of that boy’s hide.’
‘He’s a big boy. Think you can take him?’
‘I fight dirty.’
‘I imagine he does too.’
‘Should be quite a contest then. Look are you being held hostage too?’
‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Well, only one of you would have been driving and eyewitnesses report a big guy with a baseball cap behind the wheel. I’m guessing he’s the same one who shot me. Give him up and we’ll sort something out with the rest of you. How many of you are there?’
Karen looked around the room. Jimmy, sullen, looked fixedly at her. Chris was watching Jimmy and Donny and the hostages equally. Donny’s eyes roamed from one beautiful woman’s body to the next, mouth hanging open. Natasha never took her eyes off her.
Karen said nothing. After a moment the Sheriff said.
‘Okay, then. How many hostages have you got? And I’ll need their names.’
‘We have twelve.’
‘Those toilet trips must keep you busy.’
‘They can hold it.’
‘Names?’
‘You don’t need to know that.’
‘Sure I do. Word gets out on the island you’ve got a dozen hostages you’re going to have a couple of hundred armed people down here who aren’t sure where their wives or husbands or brothers or sisters are. Of course, you may have that anyway – this is a community that looks after its own. I’m old enough to have seen a lynching back in the Sixties here in the South. I don’t want to see another one.’
‘I don’t remember all their names.’
‘Get one of them to tell me.’
Karen looked back at Natasha, who was already getting to her feet as if she was listening in to the conversation. Karen handed her the phone.
‘Don’t –’ Chris warned.
‘Just people’s names,’ Karen said.
Natasha listed everyone’s names.
‘And Karen and Chris and Jimmy -.’
‘Godammit!’ Chris said.
Karen wrenched the phone from her and pushed her back into the room.
‘We need a bus,’ she said. ‘We need to be free to leave the island with our hostages. We won’t harm them. But we need that now.’
‘Karen,’ Wilson said. ‘Nice name. Listen: the bus. The wheels have come off that bus and any other bus for you. This can’t end well. Let the hostages go.’
‘You recognise there are certain tensions,’ Karen said carefully. ‘You don’t move things along for us and these hostages will be coming out but not in the way you might like.’
‘You’re suddenly heating things up? There I was thinking we were getting along so well.’
‘Do you want to see innocent people dead?’
‘Do you?’ Wilson said.
‘It may happen,’ Karen said.
‘Is that a threat, ma’am?’
‘Think of it as a heads-up.’
‘No offence but am I talking to the right person?’
‘You mean because I’m a mere woman?’ There was bite in Karen’s tone.
‘I mean, Karen, because you weren’t the one shooting at me.’
Karen looked round the room again. Everyone was watching and listening.
‘Hope the woman gets well soon.’ Karen murmured. She was trying not to look at Natasha, who she sensed was watching her intently. ‘I’ll wait to hear about the bus.’
The moment Wilson put the phone down it rang again. He recognised the voice.
‘Madam Mayor. This isn’t too good a time. How can I help you?’
‘Seems there’s a lot going on I haven’t been notified about.’
‘Saw no need to alarm you.’
‘My office has been fielding calls from irate islanders who can neither get on or off the island since you have closed the causeway. The Mayor of Chatham has called me to ask why the hell he has a tailback of island-bound vehicles trailing through the centre of his burgh. But you saw no need to alarm me?’
‘We
have a hostage situation, Madam Mayor.’
‘I gather that from Nadine, who gave me this number for you. But what I meant was why am I not being kept informed by my Sheriff – again? Is this to do with your WITSEC man and his assassin?’
‘I don’t believe so, but the situation at Barbara’s house is delicate.’
‘I hear it might not bode well for the future of several of our citizens yet I don’t I know about it?’
‘I hoped to resolve it without the need to alert you.’
‘Have the families of those inside been notified?’
‘Again, I hoped to resolve it before that became necessary.’
‘And how do you intend to resolve it?’
‘I’m about to call in the SWAT from Savannah-Chatham.’
Horton was silent, then.
‘Let’s not be too hasty.’
Wilson glanced over at the house. The drapes were twitching.
‘Ma’am?’
‘You heard, Sheriff.’
‘Madam Mayor, it’s a kidnapping situation. That’s a federal offence. It will automatically go to the FBI too.’
‘Paradise Island is out of their jurisdiction.’
‘Nowhere is out of their jurisdiction.’
‘Harry, do you know why I employed you?’
‘I was the best person for the job?’
‘Don’t be a smartass.’
‘What are you saying, Madam Mayor?’
‘Sheriff - I thought I made it clear when I appointed you.’
‘Made what clear?’
‘Remember that conversation we had at your interview. About pragmatism.’
‘This is different.’
‘No. It’s not. We sort out our own messes here.’
‘Madam Mayor –‘
‘What happens on the island stays on the island.’
‘Madam Mayor –‘
‘I have faith in you to resolve the situation without involving anyone from outside.’
Wilson pondered for a moment.
‘Very well, Madam Mayor.’
‘Is Julian one of the hostages?’ Horton said.
Wilson frowned.
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