Tillman and Jeremiah stood on the fringe of the living room, each of them weighing this hypothetical.
“He’s right,” Wren said, surprised to hear her voice enter into this discussion. “You’ll stay out of it.” She nodded at Tillman and then turned to Jeremiah. “And you should be fine, too.”
“What about you?” Jeremiah asked her.
Wren shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
Jeremiah made as if to protest, but the words didn’t come out. He only scratched at his cheek and looked to Tillman, who stared forward at the phone in her hand. Her father was snoring from down the hall. Finally, Tillman nodded and handed him his phone. She withdrew her cigarettes and wordlessly climbed out onto the fire escape, leaving Wren alone with Jeremiah and Marcus, who stood quietly behind Wren’s chair, eyes fixed on the satellite image of the parking garage as a god, removed from the world and its chaos, surely saw it.
Jeremiah dialed a number on his phone. He held the mute mass of circuits and plastic in his hand, his thumb hesitating over the screen. “Here we go.”
Wren wiped away a tear that fell unexpectedly down her cheek. She laughed. “Jesus, I’m terrified.”
She felt Jeremiah’s hand reach forward and grip her shoulder. “It’s OK to be a little scared. I’m scared, too,” he said, the phone ringing in his ear. “Just also be brave.” And then Wren heard a voice over the phone. “This is Detective Jeremiah Combs,” Jeremiah said, disappearing back into the living room. “I need to speak to Chief Stetson immediately.”
Wren closed the laptop in front of her, felt its dying warmth in her fingertips. She listened as its electric whir died into a static silence. And only then did she wonder what would come next. She saw that Marcus had sat down at the kitchen table. His arms were crossed against his chest, and he was staring absently at a stain on the tablecloth. The energy that still remained in the room, a lasting echo of revelation, seemed to have no impact on him.
“Mr. Waters?” Wren asked. “It’s going to be OK, I think.”
He didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her.
“The police might be able to rescue the hostages,” she said louder. “They still have time to save Paulina, Miss May, and Peter. It’s going to be OK.”
He smiled feebly.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just can’t help but feel like this is my fault.” He sighed into his hands, rubbing his eyes. “Walter and Penny—it was my book that got them killed. It must have been. And now Miss May and Peter.” He cleared his throat. “I should have known. I really should have known.” He shook his head and sat upright. “But this is no time for self-pity. That can come later. Thank you for what you did here, Wren. I can’t thank you enough.”
Before she could tell him that he shouldn’t thank her, that she’d done it not for him and maybe even not for the hostages themselves, but instead for herself as a sort of penance she couldn’t quite define, Jeremiah reentered the kitchen.
“Stetson is sending the force,” Jeremiah said. “I’m going down to meet him.” He peered through the window that Tillman had crawled out of. He pressed his face against the glass, and then opened the window. He stuck his head outside, looking in either direction. He turned back into the kitchen, slack-jawed, hurriedly looking around the room as though he had missed something, had lost something, had forgotten something.
“What?” Wren asked.
“Where’s Tilly?” he said.
“She’s not out there?” Marcus asked.
“No,” he said, but as he said this he seemed to realize, and his whole body seemed to respond. He turned around wildly, grabbed his keys from the table, and darted to the front door. “She’s going to get herself killed,” he mumbled to himself as he shut it behind him.
In the ensuing silence, Marcus said, “What the hell have I done?” His eyes were bleary, glossed, vacant.
“Mr. Waters,” Wren began, but the thought felt finished. She only wanted him to know she was here. Someone else was here. It felt like the least she could do, and it was.
“Why didn’t the gunman destroy Peter’s phone if he has him?” Marcus asked her. “He destroyed the other phones. That’s what you said. Why not Peter’s?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he forgot to take Peter’s cell phone. Maybe Peter has it hidden somewhere on him? Maybe he dropped it? There could be a lot of reasons. I’m sorry, Mr. Waters. But I don’t think that any of this is really your fault. It’s like you said to me—”
Marcus stood up from the table. Wren heard the shimmer of his keys in his pockets as he pulled them out, making his way to the front door.
“Where are you going?”
But she already knew, and she was already following him.
39 UNDERGROUND
TILLMAN STOOD ACROSS THE STREET from the Armada parking garage, taking in her surroundings without moving her head. Shadow figures in her periphery, each a living and moving threat. But she stood still, waiting. For what, she wasn’t sure. A gunshot, an invitation, a voice descending from the heavens? She realized she had a cigarette, unlit, dangling in her fingers like an insect in a web, and she put it behind her ear for comfort. Something familiar, something external, something she could touch with her fingers and know was there.
She heard sirens nearing. Jeremiah must have called. But she knew that, even after they arrived, they would need time to coordinate with SWAT, and SWAT would need time to formulate a plan of entrance. They would waste precious minutes plotting. But she hadn’t come here to plot. Every second that passed was a second lost to something eternal. She was here, and no one else was. Midnight was fast approaching. She was here.
Down the street, several blocks, a traffic jam. She could hear the call-and-response of car horns and she could make out the glassy outlines of vehicles. She saw, too, police lights spinning, and she knew that what she was seeing was the expanding edge of the protest against the police still occurring. Tear gas rose into the sky like a feathering flower in midbloom. It seemed more distant than it was. A whole other world just several streets over.
She crossed the street, long strides, entering the parking garage, side-stepping the automated lever. Once inside, she reached back and withdrew from her waistband her nine-millimeter, warmed by her skin. Held at the ready, sweeping every unlit corner and around each pillar, it felt less like a mechanical weapon than a natural extension of herself. Metal flesh and blood and bone.
There was a ramp leading up and a ramp leading down, presenting her with a binary choice. Ascension or descension. She didn’t need to stop and think. Evil occurs underground. So she descended into the concrete belly of the structure.
She moved quickly, lengthening each step, using the few cars around her for occasional cover in case she was being watched, targeted. As the parked cars thinned out, she stayed close to the concrete edge and half ran with her cell phone’s flashlight pressed against the butt of the gun, its electric beam illuminating the dark. She leapt over concrete barriers, letting herself roll over and drop to the next floor down, tumbling several feet through the void and landing hard on her hands and knees. She felt her ankle sprain, but the pain came as a slow and unsubstantial afterthought. As she descended, the dark grew darker, totalizing, a physical presence she felt against her skin. Her cell phone’s flashlight reached about ten feet and no farther. It wasn’t enough.
Minutes dripping to midnight.
Each descending floor she was sure must be the last, the bottom-most stratum. And each time she turned the corner, the paved ground curved and led to yet another floor. With each floor, her footsteps seemed to shake the concrete walls. The air grew cooler, thinner. Or maybe it was just her trying to breathe quietly, to lessen her presence in the space.
She came to a stop in front of a concrete wall, the end of the descent, slick with dripping water. She touched it, not sure why. The water was cold against her fingers. A pipe leak, maybe. She guessed that she must have been at least five
or six stories underground. More than enough to muffle the sound of a gunshot, or for that matter, three gunshots.
She scanned the surface of the wall with the flashlight. And there it was, almost directly in front of her. A metal door covered in a film of burnt-fire rust. It was cracked open, and she saw the beam of her flashlight pass through before she could think to cast it away. But it was too late. If he was inside, he knew she was here. He would be ready for her.
Good, she thought as she aimed her pistol at the door and kicked it wide open.
40 PARK
BY THE TIME MARCUS turned onto the street, there were already patrol cars cordoning off the block. Officers stood in the narrow spaces between the vehicles, wearing full tactical gear, keeping at bay a crowd comprised mostly of those en route to the protests, craning their heads at the symphony of SWAT vehicles clustered halfway down the block.
Marcus did a three-point turn at the blockade, and Wren half hoped he was turning around to take her to the station, where she knew she would end up anyway. But instead, he parked his car along the street in a tow-away zone.
“I doubt the parking police are in force tonight,” he said.
Marcus got out of the car and she followed, struggling to keep up with his surprisingly long and fluid strides. His leather bag bounced against his hip with each step, the brass buckle clicking like a metronome.
She realized he was headed directly toward the blockade. His head bent toward the militarized officers on the perimeter, submachine guns strapped to their chests like infants. But this didn’t seem to bother Marcus Waters, who only quickened his step the closer they came. He pushed through the crowd of onlookers who regarded him, noting his sense of belonging to whatever was taking place beyond their field of vision, and so they duly parted to make way for him to pass among them.
And as the two of them came closer to the police line, close enough to hear the officers shouting people back, hands on their weapons, Wren began to feel more than a little sick. Like a mouse who’d been dangling over a snake’s cage only to be lowered in reach of its waiting jaws. She worried they would shoot her on sight, which, intellectually, she knew was very improbable, but whatever horrific instinct her body was responding to told her it was an inevitability. And so she minimized the space her body occupied, making herself a smaller target.
“Sir, you have to get back,” shouted an officer.
Wren realized he was speaking to Marcus, who was standing in front of the blockade. Marcus said something back, but Wren couldn’t hear him beneath the sirens, the chatter of an excited crowd throwing about their theories of whatever was happening down the street.
“You need to take a step back,” the officer shouted back at Marcus, shoving him backward with an open palm.
Marcus stared down at the officer’s hand on his chest and he pushed it away. The officer gripped his weapon tighter.
Now Marcus spoke loud enough that not only could Wren hear him, but she figured the rest of the crowd, if not the entire block, could hear him as well. “Where is Detective Combs?”
“Sir, I’m telling you one last time, you need to step back.”
“I need to speak to Detective Combs. My name is Marcus Waters.”
A hush came over the crowd, so sudden it made Wren dizzy.
There was a flash of recognition on the officer’s face, which up until now had remained impassive. The officer stepped away, spoke into his radio. He held his ear when it crackled with a response. He nodded.
“Follow me, Mr. Waters,” said the officer, who stepped aside wide enough for Marcus to pass between the vehicles behind him.
“She’s coming, too.” Marcus pointed at Wren, who wished like hell he hadn’t.
The crowd turned its collective focus her way, and whatever panic she had been feeling up until now seemed childish compared to this. She wished she could atomize at will—her molecular elements drifting a thousand different directions on this blustery night.
The officer reached out and grabbed her by the elbow, pulling her forward. He kept his hand there as he walked them down the vacated block toward the ring of armored vehicles, flashing lights.
There was a helicopter passing far overhead with a dragonfly’s hum of propellers. As they approached the cluster of vehicles and uniforms, Wren saw someone coming to meet them in a sort of hurried half run, backlit by the police lights. As he neared, she saw that it was Jeremiah. He dismissed the escorting officer, who began walking back to the blockade.
“I tried to follow her,” Jeremiah said. He was out of breath, sweating through his shirt. “I tried to follow her down there, but the police were already here. They wouldn’t let me through. I don’t know what to do, Marcus.”
“Does Stetson know she’s down there?” Marcus asked.
He nodded. “They’re trying to figure something out. But she only made it more complicated, running down there like that.”
“And you’re absolutely positive she went down there?”
Jeremiah nodded. “If you knew her like I do, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
“What’s their plan?” Marcus asked, gesturing at the SWAT vans.
“I don’t know.” Jeremiah shrugged, and Wren saw his fear in the way his eyes danced in their sockets, as though if they were to linger too long, they would behold something unimaginable. “They don’t want to send anyone in there until they know where to look. They’re worried the gunman might have a bomb or something. But they’re drawing up a plan now.” He looked at his watch. “Jesus, I sure as fuck hope they’re drawing up a fucking plan.”
Marcus nodded, stared at the parking garage. A halogen light hung over the street corner: PARK. Wren had passed this very building on the L countless times, but now it seemed alive, waiting, hulking into its shoulders, waiting to swallow the street.
“Where’s Stetson?” Marcus asked, still looking out at the building.
“Why?”
“I need to talk with him.”
“He’s pretty busy right now, Marcus. I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”
“I think I know who the gunman is, Jeremiah. I need to talk to Stetson right now.”
Jeremiah stared back at Marcus, nodding. “Wait here.” He sprinted off in the direction of a particularly massive armored Humvee, painted onyx black. The CPD insignia, painted onto the open passenger door, behind which a throng of men gathered, heads bowed into a huddle. Jeremiah broke through the huddle. Wren saw him corner Police Chief Stetson—who appeared to be chastising him—but Jeremiah silenced him. The two men spoke briefly before Jeremiah turned and ran back to Marcus and Wren.
“He wants to talk to you,” Jeremiah told Marcus.
Marcus nodded and walked in that direction, leaving Wren out in the open with Jeremiah, who seemed fixed where he stood. He turned to face the building, scratching at his sweaty neck with his fingernails and breathing in loud, short bursts through his nose.
“She is going to be OK,” Wren said, surprised to hear herself interject her voice into this space, this time. “I really think she’s going to be OK.”
“Yeah,” he said in a faraway voice.
“She seems really strong,” Wren added. She immediately felt stupid for offering a platitude at a time like this. But she meant it. If only words could carry the weight of their meaning.
“Tilly is strong,” Jeremiah said. “She is certainly that.”
Wren saw Marcus pull Stetson aside. They spoke near the back of the Humvee. Marcus seemed to be punctuating his words with his hands like the conductor of an orchestra controlling the tempo.
“Problem is, though,” Jeremiah said, and by the way he spoke into the passing wind, Wren understood he was speaking more to himself than to her, just to voice whatever frantic thoughts were battling in his head, “she knows she’s strong. That’s why she ran off here in the first place. It was a stupid thing to do, putting herself at risk. And now that she’s down there, if she does something stupid…” But he let the thought go unvoi
ced, lost to the wind that passed down the street like some earthly whisper. “Jesus. If she does something.”
After a few moments, someone called out for Jeremiah. He shook himself out of whatever trance he’d fallen into and strode off toward the cars. Wren remained standing there, wondering if she ought to simply join the police. Save herself time and take a seat in one of the cruisers. And from there, patiently await whatever uncertain future she had summoned.
A minute later, Wren turned to see Marcus walking back toward her.
“What did you tell him?” Wren asked.
Marcus didn’t answer. He looked out over the street at the police blockade, where it appeared that the crowd had doubled in size. Camera phones flashed like supernovas.
Wren turned back to the parking garage. Spotlights flashed across its concrete walls. It was a theater. Final act closing, the moment before the curtains open to reveal the smiling cast of characters, holding hands and bowing to the faceless crowd.
A collection of officers began pushing the crowd back. One of them broke formation and came to collect Marcus and Wren, ushering them to the sidewalk. Beyond what Wren assumed to be the radius of a potential bomb blast.
From behind one of the SWAT vans came a rumble of boots against the pavement, the clatter of magazines bolted into weapons. A procession of fifteen or so armored officers collected behind a police van in front of the garage, and the leader among them knelt in the center of their circled bodies, laying out their plan of action.
“I don’t know if you’re the praying sort,” Marcus said to Wren. “But if you are, now would be the time.”
“I don’t pray.”
“Yeah. Neither do I.”
“Then maybe we just hope?”
“Sure. Let’s do that.”
41 HOSTAGE
TILLMAN HALF EXPECTED, after kicking in the door, for it to reveal nothingness, an absence of everything. Some void of space and time, a final dead end. But instead she found a room. It was startlingly familiar, and it didn’t take long to realize why. This was it; this was where the videos were filmed. Here she was, inside the real space she had only ever studied on a screen, and it felt no more real to her now than it did then.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 35