Widows

by Ed McBain

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  airport people involved here or even hundreds of trapped skyscraper people, there were only two punks from the nation's capital - which had the highest per capita murder rate in the entire world - and a sixteen-year-old hostage who happened to be both a Cemetery Row hooker and a certified crackhead. Whose life was at stake. Carella knew that. Dolly Simms hadn't killed his father. Sonny Cole and Diz Whittaker, acting in concert, had done that. But because Dolly was in there now with the two killers - how the hell had she managed to get herself in there, damn it! - the police couldn't just go in and bust up the place.

  It was amazing how the crowd grew. This might turn out to be merely Little House on the Prairie, but who could tell? Meanwhile, it was better being out here on the street, where there was at least the semblance of a breeze, than inside a sweltering brick tower eighteen stories high. By one o'clock that morning of the first day of August, the house was surrounded on all four sides and police barricades had been thrown up in a haphazard rectangle in a vain attempt to keep some order among the spectators. Both Emergency Service trucks were on the scene, and there were some three dozen blue-and-white patrol cars arranged like war chariots around the besieged building, with uniformed cops and detectives behind each car. A generator had been set up and spotlights illuminated all four sides of the house, but particularly the front of it, where Inspector Brady's fourth hostage negotiator crouched low behind the bushes lining the porch and tried to talk to either of the two men inside the room. Brady had used up three negotiators so far. The first two had almost had their heads blown off. None of them had dared venture onto the porch.

  Dolly Simms sat in one of the windows, staring straight out at the glaring lights.

  She was all you could see.

  The two men were deep inside the room, far from the window.

  Getting them to the window would be the first job.

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  It was Dolly who kept telling the negotiators that nobody * better start shooting. She didn't look scared at all. One of the negotiators reported that she seemed stoned - which was not a surprise.

  The Preacher was in the streets already, doing what he did best, doing in fact the only thing he knew how to do, which was to agitate people into a frenzy. Pacing behind the barricades, long hair slicked back, gold chains gleaming in the reflected light of the spots, bullhorn in hand, he kept telling the crowd that whenever a white girl yelled rape, then the nearest African-American males were always accused of it ...

  "But take a pure innocent young virgin like Tawana Braw-ley, who gets raped by a screaming mob of white men who then scrawl the word nigger ..."

  Yuh, yuh, from the handful of men in dark suits and red ties standing behind him.

  "... on her body, scrawl this word in excrement on her young violated body, and of course the white system of justice finds these rapists and bigots innocent of any crime and labels young Tawana a liar and a whore!"

  The police could hardly hear themselves talking over the blare of the bullhorn.

  "Well, brothers and sisters, what we've got in there tonight is a true whore, a bona fide and verified one-hundred-percent white purveyor of flesh who has enticed two young African-American brothers into a situation not of their own making! And that is why we have the whole mighty police force of this great city out here tonight, that is why we have this circus out here tonight, it is to once again persecute and pillory the youth of male black America!"

  Young kids bobbed in and out of television-camera range, angling for a shot, big grins on their faces, this was the big chance to be on tee-vee, wow, see myself on the news tomorrow morning. The Preacher had been right in that respect, there was a circus atmosphere out here tonight, but not because anyone wanted to see a pair of killers safely apprehended. Instead, the air was charged with an excitement

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  akin to what might have been felt in the Roman arena where nobody had a chance but the lions. Nobody in these mean streets believed that anybody in that building was coming out of there alive, not with the cops lined up out here like an army. Black or white, whoever was in there was already dead meat, that's what all these people in the streets were thinking, whatever their color or religion, whatever their stripe or persuasion. The only pertinent question was when it was going to happen. And so, like Roman spectators waiting for a lion or a tiger to bite off someone's arm or preferably his head, the crowd milled about patiently behind the sawhorses, hoping to be in on the moment of the kill, hoping to see all those fake die hard/die harder fireworks erupting here in real life on their tired tawdry turf. Hardly anybody was listening to The Preacher ranting and raving except the guys in the suits and red ties who stood behind him yuh-yuhing his every word. Everyone's eyes were on the woman crouched in the bushes, talking to the girl with the purple hair who sat in the window with the glare of the spotlights on her.

  The problem here was that nobody could establish contact with the takers. There was no telephone in the room, and so the police couldn't ask the phone company to seize the line and give them control of it, which would have allowed them -and them alone - to talk with either Sonny or Diz or whoever was calling the tune in there. The further problem was that this was what the hostage team called a two-and-one, which meant there were two takers and only one hostage, which was a hell of a lot better than a four-and-twelve, but which still meant you were dealing with group dynamics, however small the group. Nobody knew who was in charge inside that house. Dolly had told Wade and Bent that Diz was the brains of the outfit, a supposition belied by his nickname, which they guessed was short for Dizzy. But since neither of the two were willing to talk to anyone, the negotiators had no idea who was running the show. A gun - or perhaps several guns - had so far done all the talking, with shots ringing out from somewhere deep in the room whenever a negotiator so much as lifted his

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  head above the porch's floorboards. Four negotiators thus far. None of them making so much as a dent.

  The Tac Team observers with their night-vision binocs couldn't see far enough into the room to determine whether there was just that single nine-millimeter gun in there or other weaponry as well. There were five observers in all, one each on the back and both sides of the building, two at the front, where all the action was. The observers had reported that all the windows on the sides of the house were boarded over: Sonny and Diz had been expecting company.

  This was the first bit of important news Georgia Mobry got out of Dolly sitting there in the window.

  Georgia was Brady's top female negotiator, back from her vacation only yesterday, and right in the thick of it now. She was the fourth one working the window, or working the porch perhaps, or more accurately working the bushes, because that's where she was crouched some six feet from the window in which Dolly sat all pale and purple in the lights. They'd all been wondering how Dolly had allowed herself to get into a situation like this one. She had told the detectives where they could find Sonny and Diz and so it would have seemed only sensible for her to stay as far away from there as possible.

  But she now revealed to Georgia - who was truly expert at milking cream even from a toad - that she'd begun feeling guilty right after the two black cops left her, and so she'd come back here and told Sonny and Diz what was about to come down, and instead of getting out of there, they gave her some crack to smoke and told her she was their ticket to Jamaica. That was the second bit of important information.

  "So please don't do any shooting," she said, "because they'll kill me, they told me they'd kill me."

  Which is what she'd said many times before to the other three negotiators who'd been pulled out of the ball-game. But now Georgia knew that Dolly herself had caused her present predicament, and the price of her release was a ticket to the Caribbean.

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  "Do they want to go to Jamaica?" she asked, checking it. "Is that it, honey?"

  Accent as gentle and as thick as her name and her native state.

  "Well
, I'm only telling you what they said."

  "That you were their ticket to Jamaica?"

  "Yeah."

  "Gee, I wish I could talk to them personally," Georgia said.

  "Yeah, but they don't wanna."

  '"Cause I'm thinking maybe we can work something out here."

  Like getting you out of there and then blowing these suckers away, Georgia was thinking. To her mind - and she'd been trained by Brady - what they were looking at here was a non-negotiable hostage situation. Sooner or later, somebody was going to order an assault. The computer make on Sonny Cole had come in not ten minutes ago, and it revealed that he'd done time on the West Coast for killing a man during the commission of a grocery-store holdup in Pasadena. So what they had here was not only a man who'd maybe killed a cop's father, but a man who'd been convicted once of having taken a life and who was now armed with a weapon and firing indiscriminately through an open window whenever the spirit moved him.

  Desmond Whittaker was no sweetheart, either. In Louisiana, he'd done five years at hard labor for the crime of manslaughter, which would have been murder under subdivision (1) of Article 30 in the state's Criminal Code, except that it was committed "in sudden passion or heat of blood." How the pair had come together in DC was a mystery. So was how they'd ended up here in this city. But they were both extremely dangerous, and if they showed no signs soon of willingness to enter even the earliest stages of negotiation, then somebody was going to ask for a green light for either a direct assault or the use of chemical agents. A sharpshooter was out of the question; nobody could see where the hell they were in that

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  room. The only target was the girl in the window. And she was the one they wanted to save.

  So Georgia didn't have much hope of success here.

  "Why don't you ask one of them to talk to me directly?" she said.

  "Well, they don't wanna," Dolly said again.

  "Ask them, okay?"

  "They'll shoot me," she said.

  "Just for asking them? No, they wouldn't do that, would they?"

  "Yes, they would," Dolly said. "I think they might."

  No two hostage situations were alike, but a hostage serving as mediator was something Georgia had come across at least a dozen times before. Sometimes the taker even gave one of his hostages safe passage to go outside and talk to the police, with the understanding that if he or she didn't come back, somebody else would be going out of the building - dead. Georgia didn't want that to happen here. The pathetic little creature mediating in the window seemed stoned enough not to realize that there were hordes of policemen out here ready and in fact aching to storm that house and shoot anything in there that moved. But she wasn't so stoned that she couldn't smell the immediate danger behind her in that room, an armed man, or perhaps two armed men, threatening to kill her unless -

  Unless what1?

  "You see," Georgia said, "we're not sure what the problem is here."

  You never denned the problem for them. You let them do that.

  "If we knew what the problem was, I'm sure we could work something out. We'd like to help here, but nobody wants to talk to us."

  You always suggested help. The taker or takers were usually panicked in there. The political terrorists, the trapped criminals, even the psychotics, were usually panicked. If you told them you wanted to help . . .

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  "So why don't you ask them how we can help?" Georgia said.

  "Well..."

  "Go ahead. Just ask them, okay? Maybe we can work this out right away. Give it a try, okay?"

  "Well. . ."

  "Go ahead."

  Dolly turned her head from the window. Georgia couldn't hear what she was saying. Nor could she hear what someone in the room behind her said. She heard only the deep rumble of a masculine voice. Dolly turned back again.

  "He said he ain't got no problem, you got the problem."

  "Who's that? Who told you that?"

  "Diz."

  Okay, Diz was the honcho, Diz was the one they wanted to reach.

  "What does he say our problem is?" Georgia asked. "Maybe we can help him with it."

  Dolly turned away from the window again.

  In the distance, beyond the barricades that defined the outer perimeter, Georgia could hear The Preacher's voice extolling the merits of Tawana Brawley, "a priestess of honor and truth," he was calling her, "in an age of political lies and paramilitary deceit. And we have the same thing here tonight, we have a fierce and mighty demonstration of white police power against two young African-Americans as innocent as were the Scottsboro ..."

  Dolly turned back to the window.

  "He says the problem is getting a chopper to the airport and a jet to Jamaica, that's the problem."

  "Is that what he wants? Look, can't he come to the window? He's got the gun, I'm unarmed, nobody's going to hurt him if he comes to the window. Ask him to come to the window, okay?"

  Georgia was truly unarmed. She was wearing light body armor, but that was a nine-millimeter gun in there. Red cotton

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  T-shirt. Blue jacket with the word police on it in white letters across the back. Walkie-talkie hanging on her belt.

  "Dolly?"

  "Mm?"

  "Ask him, okay, honey? Nobody's gonna hurt him, I promise him."

  Dolly turned away again. The deep rumble of the voice inside again. She turned back to the window.

  "He says you're full of shit, they killed a man," Dolly said.

  "That was then, this is now. Let's see if we can work out the problem we got now, okay? Just ask him to ..."

  He appeared at the window suddenly, huge and black in the glare of the spotlights. It was like that scene in Jaws where Roy Scheider was throwing the bait off the back of the boat and the great white suddenly came up with his jaws wide, it was as heart-stopping as that. Georgia ducked. She had spotted an AK-47 in his hand.

  "Who're you?" he said.

  "My name's Georgia Mobry," she said, "I'm a Police Department negotiator. Who are you?"

  Negotiator was the word you used. You were here to deal, get the people out before anybody got hurt. You never used the word hostage to define the people any taker had in there with him. You never used the word surrender, either. You asked a taker to send the people out, come on out yourself, let us help you, nobody's gonna hurt you, soothing words, neutral words. Hostage was a word that gave the taker even bigger ideas, made him think he was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Surrender was an insulting kill word that only triggered further defiance.

  "I'm Diz Whittaker," he said, "an' there's nothin' to negotiate here. Georgia, huh?"

  She was looking up toward the window, eyes barely showing above the deck. She saw a big muscular man with a close-shaved skull, wearing a white T-shirt, that was all she could see of him in the window frame. AK-47 in his right hand. Just the sight of that gun always sent a shiver up her spine. The

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  illegal, Chinese-made assault rifle - a replica of the gun used by the Viet Cong - was a semi-automatic, which meant that it required a separate pull of the trigger for each shot. But it could fire up to seventy-five shots without reloading, and its curved clip gave it the lethal look of a weapon of war, no matter how many claims the National Rifle Association made for its legitimate use as a hunting rifle.

  "Stan' up, Georgia," he said.

  She didn't like the way he was saying her name. Almost a snarl. Georgia. Like she was Georgia the whole damn state instead of Georgia the person. Made her nervous the way he was saying the name.

  "I don't want to get hurt," she said.

  "Lemmee see you, Georgia." Snarling it again. "You fum Georgia? That where you fum?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Stan' up lemmee see you, Georgia."

  "First promise me you won't hurt me."

  "You strapped?"

  "Nossir."

  "How do I know that?"

  "Because I'm telling you. And I don't lie."
/>   "Be the firs' cop / ever met dinn lie like a thief," he said. "Stan' up an' lemmee see you ain't strapped."

  "I can't do that, Mr Whittaker. Not till you promise ..."

  "Don't give me no Mr Whittaker shit," he said. "How much you know about me, Georgia?"

  "My superior told me who you and your friend are, I know a little bit about both of you. I can't help you without knowing something about..."

  "What'd your boss tell you exactly, Georgia?"

  You always told them you weren't in this alone, you didn't have sole authority to do whatever it was they wanted you to do, you had to check first with your superior, or your boss, or your people, whatever you chose to call the person above you. You wanted them to believe you were their partner in working this out. You and them against this vague controller offstage,

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  this unseen person who had the power to say yea or nay to their requests. Most people had bosses. Even criminals understood how bosses worked.

  "He said you'd done some time."

  "Uh-huh."

  "You and your friend both."

  "Uh-huh. He tell you Sonny killed that man in the bak'ry shop?"

  "He said that's what they're thinking, yeah."

  "An' I was with him, he tell you that, Georgia?"

  "Yes."

  "Makes me a 'complice, doan it?"

  "It looks that way. But why don't we talk about the problem we have right now, Mr Whittaker? I'd like to help you, but unless we . . ."

  He suddenly opened fire.

  The semi-automatic weapon trimmed the bushes over her head as effectively as a hedge-clipper might have. She hugged the ground and prayed he wouldn't fire through the wooden deck of the porch because then one of those high-powered slugs might somehow find her; eyes closed, she hugged the ground and prayed for the first time since she was fifteen, the bullets raging over her head.

  The firing stopped.

  She waited.