The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  My estimation of him went up a notch. Damn right I would, I thought. Drugging drink or food was something that you didn’t ordinarily do because the hostages might wind up consuming it. But would Auerbach be sharing his beer with a couple of nine-year-olds? I didn’t think so. In any case, it wasn’t an option now.

  “Stanley, listen to me. I want you to know that everything is going to come out all right. You’ve done a great job of keeping things under control in there so far. You haven’t hurt the kids, and that’s going to make it a whole lot easier to wind this up without anybody getting hurt.”

  “Bullshit. You’re going to kill me. I’m going to die right here in this shitty shack. But I’m not going out alone.”

  That was the second time Auerbach had talked about dying, and I didn’t like it. I began to worry that I might have a suicide ritual under way, that what Auerbach might have in mind—maybe consciously, maybe not—was his own death at the hands of the police. And that presented a terrible danger to the girls.

  “Stanley, you couldn’t be more wrong. Believe me, I want you to come out of this in one piece. That’s the only reason I’m here.”

  “Yeah, you, maybe,” Auerbach said grudgingly. “But those damn cops . . .”

  “I can take care of the cops, you don’t have to worry about the cops. But you have to work with me, Stanley, you have to trust me. Believe me, everything’s not as hopeless as it seems. Look, I know the way it feels when you’re down—”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Bryan.”

  “And you’re what again?”

  “I’m a negotiator. I work for the USC Crisis Intervention Center, not the police. I have only one job, and that’s to work with you, to negotiate the best possible—”

  “Yeah, well, listen, Bryan, I don’t want to talk anymore right now. I’m pretty upset.”

  “I can understand that, Stanley, but if you tell me what the problem is, I bet there’s something I can do about it. You’d be amazed—”

  But Auerbach had hung up on me. I took off the headset and rubbed my ear where it had pinched. “I’m worried he might be suicidal,” I said.

  “Good, what can we do to help him along?” Reese answered.

  “Well, I don’t think—”

  “I used to work in a town outside of Oklahoma City. You know what we did when some nut threatened to jump off a freeway overpass during rush hour? You think we stood around futzing with him? We put an inflatable mattress down underneath and pushed him off. Most of the time, they hit the mattress and we hauled their asses off. Sometimes they missed. Either way, traffic got moving again in a hurry.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “Believe me, if we could manage something like that here, I’d go for it. But in this kind of thing we get a big leg up once he decides for good that he wants to live.” I fitted the headset back on. “I’m going to try him again.”

  “Try what?” Reese said with some impatience. “What’s the point? You can’t do anything for the guy. It sounds like you’re just dragging things out.”

  “I am dragging things out, Lieutenant. Time’s on our side here. At this point he’s not rational.”

  “Obviously, but what gives you the idea he’s gonna get rational?”

  “Maybe he won’t, but right now he’s scared too, and all pumped up. Let a few hours pass and that can change, especially if I can keep him on the line and get him to do some venting. He’ll start wanting more stuff too—food, cigarettes, a fan, maybe; it’s going to get hotter in there as the afternoon wears on. That all works in our favor. He’ll get tired, he’ll get sick of just sitting around.”

  “I guess so,” Reese said rolling his head around to limber up his neck. “I know I’m sick of it—and we’ve got air-conditioning.”

  “And there’s one other thing,” I said. “As long as he’s talking, we know he’s not busy harming the kids.”

  “Point taken,” said Reese. “Okay, what’s happening now?” he asked the officer at the tape recorder.

  The officer pressed the headset against his ear and fiddled with a dial. “Not much. He’s mumbling to himself, the kids are sort of sniffling—you know, like how they cry themselves to sleep?”

  Another telephone on the shelf beside the sergeant’s head chirped. He snatched it up and listened for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll pass it on. Listen, tell him to stick around. We might need him later. But have him wait in his car, okay? I don’t want him inside the perimeter, you understand? Under no circumstances is he to get through. Not until I say so.”

  He hung up. “That was one of my guys. The girls’ father is out there being crazy. He says they’re diabetic, and they have to get their insulin shots by bedtime. If they don’t, they could die. That’s what he says, anyway.”

  I sipped the Dr Pepper I’d gotten from the refrigerator. This was bad news. In a situation like this, time was on the side of the negotiator. The more time passed, the more intelligence you could gather, and the more likely that the hostage-taker would get tired and make mistakes. Time constraints worked in nobody’s favor. “Well, bedtime’s still a while off,” I said. “We’ll worry about that later.”

  Reese stared at me. “Yeah, but shouldn’t we tell Auerbach? To get things moving? I don’t think he really wants those kids’ deaths on his conscience.”

  “I don’t think so either, but telling him about the girls’ problem doesn’t resolve his problem, and resolving his problem is the way we get everybody safely out of there and get to go home ourselves.”

  “Well, what the hell is his problem?”

  “I don’t know. Listen, Lieutenant—I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have Houghey sitting out there in his car. He’s not just the father of the girls, he’s the guy who fired Auerbach in the first place and got this whole thing going. Obviously Auerbach isn’t the most stable guy in the world. Seeing Houghey might send him over the edge.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Reese said sharply. “That’s why he’s out there and not in here.” He was beginning to chafe under too much “help” from me.

  “Look, I only mean to suggest that it might be better if you just sent him—”

  “He’s being kept in his car, out of sight, beyond the outer perimeter,” Reese snapped. “They won’t let him out. Does that meet with your approval?”

  I backed off, raising my palms. “Okay, I’ll let you worry about Houghey. Now I think we should try talking to Auerbach again. Okay?”

  Reese nodded, and the call was placed.

  This time it took a few seconds for the phone to be picked up. “Hey, I thought I said I didn’t feel like talking anymore right now.”

  “Well, I know that, Stanley, but we do have this problem on our hands. Do you prefer ‘Stan,’ by the way?”

  “You don’t have any problem. I have a problem.”

  “I know you do. And if you tell me what it is, I’m betting I can figure out some way around it. I’ve done it a lot of times before, Stanley.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “All, right, you tell me, then, Stanley, what—”

  “It’s ‘Stan,’ for Christ’s sake.”

  “You tell me then, Stan, what would it take to solve your problem? Come on, try me.”

  “Well—” Auerbach must have heard something because he turned suddenly wary. “Wait a minute, the cops are listening in on us, right? You’re taking everything down on tape!”

  “Well . . . yes, Stan, that’s true,” I said. “I guess I thought you understood that. But if you want me to, I can—Stan, don’t hang up. . . . Damn.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Reese said, shaking his head in disbelief, “do you have to tell him the truth just because he asks a question?” Now Reese was really irritated, with angry red streaks showing at either side of his nose. “Couldn’t you just say no, we’re not tapping in? What, is it against your ethics to lie to this fucker?”

  I was suddenly tired. It was my second case in a month, and the second in w
hich children were involved—always the most emotionally exhausting cases. I felt drained, unable to muster an answer. No, it wasn’t against my ethics to lie to Auerbach. If I believed it would save the children, I’d happily promise him he was going to get a reward, a medal, and a lifetime job from the governor. But one of the things I’d learned and learned well was that if you lied to a kidnapper about what was going on—even a little, innocent white lie, a lie that benefited everybody—the odds were that it would come back and bite you before it was over. The one thing that worked above all in a negotiator’s favor was trust, and the one thing that would most surely destroy trust was lying. That is to say, being caught in a lie.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” I began wearily, but Auerbach had picked up the phone again. I hit the receive button.

  “Stan, I’m sorry about that misunderstanding. I can have—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Auerbach sounded weary too. “Bryan, I really want to get out of here.”

  “Great, that’s what we all want. How about this? You send the girls to the door and tell them to walk over to where I am, in this truck. You can see the truck, right?”

  Reese, listening on his headset, was opening and closing his fist. “Good, good.”

  “Then, once they’re safely here—” I went on.

  “No, I can’t do that,” Auerbach said. “If I let them go, what’ll stop the cops from killing me? They could shoot me, they could blow this place to bits. They got rockets and stuff.”

  “Stan, why would they want to do that? You haven’t killed anybody, you’re being cooperative—”

  “You come,” Auerbach said. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  Reese silently shook his head no.

  “Sure, I’ll do that,” I said. “We can walk out together. I’ll come right along with you. First, you let the girls—”

  “No, you come first. We all walk out together.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Forget it then!” Auerbach suddenly shouted. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? The hell with it! The hell with everybody!” In the background, I could hear the girls’ wailing pick up in volume.

  “Wait, wait!” I pleaded. “Don’t hang up! Okay, Stan, I’ll come, that’s the deal. I walk over there—”

  “By yourself.”

  “—by myself. Then you and I and the kids all walk out of there together. But you have to leave the guns in the shack. You can’t come out with the guns. You understand why that is, don’t you?”

  “And you won’t let them touch me?”

  “They’ll have to put handcuffs on you, but no one will hurt you, I promise. And I’ll ride in with you, right in the same car. Is it a deal?”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll be right there. Take it easy now. This is all going to work out okay, Stan.”

  “Okay, hurry up.” Auerbach’s voice was breathy. “If anything happens, the kids are the first to go, I swear it on my mother’s life. And then you.”

  “This is not a good idea,” Reese said as I took off the headset and stood up.

  I wasn’t as confident as I might have been either. The turnaround on Auerbach’s part had been faster than I would have liked, but I didn’t see how I could pass up the opportunity. “I think it’s all right, Lieutenant, but we have to be careful. We don’t want to upset him. No redeployment of your men, no sharpshooters setting up, everybody just stays where they are. All right?”

  Reese sighed and nodded. “I want you to put on a helmet and face piece.”

  “No, it’ll make me look like a cop. The body armor is enough.”

  Reese made a clucking sound, tongue against teeth, and gave in. “Okay, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “You and me both.”

  We shook hands, I took a deep breath, and I stepped slowly down from the truck and edged between two of the cars that formed the inner perimeter. “Good luck, pal,” one of the crouching officers said.

  Feeling very much naked and alone, I stood facing the shack for a moment, looking in spite of myself for the glint of a gun barrel at the door, or the windows, or the spaces between the boards, but there was nothing to see. The shack might have been deserted. I began to walk slowly toward it over the parched, furrowed ground, keeping my hands spread wide.

  “Okay, Stan, I’m on my way,” I called. “Everything’s going to work—”

  “Hey! What’s he doing here?” It was Reese’s voice, coming from behind me. Then, more urgently: “Get that crazy bastard out of there! He’s got a gun! Who let him—?”

  Confused, I spun around to see a lean, distraught, middle-aged figure, his long, thinning gray hair tied into a ponytail, who had made it into the inner perimeter after all. Houghey. He was screaming something toward the shack, his whole body shaking. And he was brandishing a revolver, literally waving it around his head in a circle like the Lone Ranger on his horse.

  “Houghey!” Reese yelled. “Get out of there, lay down, put down the—”

  There was a shot—from the shack, I thought—and then another, from where I couldn’t tell, and then, pop-pop-pop, guns were going off all over the place. Instinctively I dropped flat on my face, hands covering my head, nose pressed into crumbly earth that still smelled of celery.

  I stayed that way until the shooting and the shouting slowed and stopped, and I heard Reese’s voice again, low and phlegmy with emotion. “You stupid, stupid bastard, what have you done?”

  Houghey was on his knees in the dust, pressing both hands against his bloody shirt front just below the right collar. There was blood on his thigh too. His eyes were unfocused. He looked as if he were trying to figure out what was happening. Reese loomed over him, like God himself about to pronounce judgment. Other policemen stood uneasily nearby, darting glances at the shack.

  I looked too. Auerbach was hanging weirdly from a window, caught only by the crook of one knee, with his head and shoulders on the ground, as if he’d tried to leap through it backward, the way a high-jumper rolls over the bar. There was blood all over him. The shotgun lay a few inches from his right hand. There was no sound from behind him in the shack.

  Reese and I ran toward the shack at the same time, Reese a few feet behind, so that I was the one who found the two small, blood-soaked bodies crumpled in a corner, tied by their ankles to the radiator, with their arms around each other.

  Chapter 4

  Who killed whom and exactly when was never satisfactorily established—there had been too many .40-caliber slugs flying around—but it made little difference to me. I knew who was ultimately responsible. Against my own better judgment, I’d given in; I hadn’t insisted that Houghey be made to leave. I’d had the ability to have him removed, and I hadn’t done it. I’d made a terrible mistake, and two innocent, beautiful little twin girls, their father’s and mother’s darlings, were dead.

  Not only did that terrible affair kill LAPD’s experimental program using civilian negotiators, it damn near killed me. The very next night the panic attacks started up again, and all the rest of it soon followed. It was as if a dam had burst, and all the long-stopped-up poisons had come boiling up out of my brain, along with this awful new thing. My hostage-negotiation career was over, and I came perilously close to breaking down altogether.

  One shaky year later, no longer as unflinchingly self-confident as I’d been, but with a clearer idea of my capabilities and my limitations, I’d moved out of California and accepted the fellowship at the institute, where I have toiled in welcome obscurity ever since, writing my training programs and policy guidelines and occasionally consulting with corporate clients. The part-time faculty position with the University of Washington came along shortly after.

  That was when Lori and I met and got married too, with full disclosure on my part as to what it was going to be like living with me. How many times since then had I startled her from a sound sleep with howls straight out of hell? Dozens, surely. Hundreds, probably. And how many times had she let even a gli
mmer of irritation show? Maybe twice in all that time, and then only when it had happened two or three nights in a row, and she was as haggard and unsettled from it as I was.

  It wasn’t all one way, of course. Lori is the most consistently positive, upbeat person I know, but like anyone else she has her low moments (not many), and when they happened I was there for her. But, God knows, she gave more than she took. Still, we were a good team, each coming through for the other when needed, and as much in love as ever. Ten years now, and still I couldn’t believe my luck in snaring this beautiful, sexy, witty woman all for myself. Just looking at that heart-shaped face in the morning, that easy-to-bring-forth smile, was enough to set me up for the whole day. And, although it was hard to comprehend why, I didn’t have a doubt in the world that she was just as happy about it all as I was.

  Except on one score. Lori was a natural-born world traveler. If she could, she’d have spent half her life tooling around Europe, or New Zealand, or the South Pacific. But with me for a husband, that wasn’t to be, not unless she chose to do it without me, which indeed she’d done now and then: with a friend, with her sister, with colleagues on scuba-diving jaunts to various remote outer reefs and inner lagoons. I missed her like crazy when she was gone, but I had no real objection (how could I?), and until lately such trips had sufficed. But she hadn’t been on one for a couple of years now, and recently I’d sensed a growing restiveness—not a dissatisfaction, I wouldn’t go as far as that—but a gentle regret, a wish that things were different. Last year I’d turned down a chance for us to go to a weeklong conference in Buenos Aires. The year before that it was Sydney. And she hadn’t said a word.

  But last night, on the drive home, she’d finally let it come out. Or almost: “I don’t want to go by myself. I want to go with my husband. . . . I want the fun of . . . of . . .”

  It had squeezed my heart then, and it squeezed it again to think of it now. How difficult could that Iceland assignment be? The worst of it would be the two flights, but I intended to sleep through them. If necessary, I’d take tranqs for a couple of days before each one so I didn’t get worked up worrying about them. It obviously meant a lot to her, and it had been a long time since I’d given something like that a shot. Who knows, maybe I was ready. And if not, well, the meds were always there if I needed them, although the worry of getting hooked was always at the back of my mind.