by Robert Crais
Jennifer said, “May I help you?”
The first one pointed at Thomas.
“Mars, get the troll.”
The biggest one ran at Thomas, as the first one charged into the kitchen.
Jennifer screamed just as the first boy covered her mouth so tightly that she thought her face would break. Thomas tried to shout, but the bigger boy mashed his face into the carpet.
The third one was younger. He hung back near the door, crying, talking in a loud stage whisper, trying to keep his voice down.
“Dennis, let’s go! This is crazy!”
“Shut up, Kevin! We’re here. Deal with it.”
The one holding her, the one she now knew as Dennis, bent her backward over the counter, mashing the sandwiches. His hips ground against hers, pinning her. His breath smelled of hamburgers and cigarettes.
“Stop kicking! I’m not going to hurt you!”
She tried to bite his hand. He pushed her head farther back until her neck felt like it would snap.
“I said stop it. Relax, and I’ll let you go.”
Jennifer fought harder until she saw the gun. The bigger boy was holding a black pistol to Thomas’s head.
Jennifer stopped fighting.
“I’m going to take my hand away, but you better not yell. You understand that?”
Jennifer couldn’t stop watching the gun.
“Close the door, Kevin.”
She heard the door close.
Dennis took away his hand, but kept it close, ready to clamp her mouth again. His voice was a whisper.
“Who else is here?”
“My father.”
“Is there anyone else?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“In his office.”
“Is there a car?”
Her voice failed. All she could do was nod.
“Don’t yell. If you yell, I’ll kill you. Do you understand that?”
She nodded.
“Where’s his office?”
She pointed toward the entry.
Dennis laced his fingers through her hair and pushed her toward the hall. He followed so closely that his body brushed hers, reminding her that she was wearing only shorts and a bikini top. She felt naked and exposed.
Her father’s office was off the entry hall behind wide double doors. They didn’t bother to knock or say anything. Dennis pulled open the door, and the big one, Mars, carried in Thomas, the gun still at his head. Dennis pushed her onto the floor, then ran straight across the room, pointing his gun at her father.
“Don’t say a goddamned word! Don’t fucking move!”
Her father was working at his computer with a sloppy stack of printouts all around. He was a slender man with a receding hairline and glasses. He blinked over the tops of the glasses as if he didn’t quite understand what he was seeing. He probably thought they were friends of hers, playing a joke. But then she saw that he knew it was real.
“What are you doing?”
Dennis aimed his gun with both hands, shouting louder.
“Don’t you fucking move, goddamnit! Keep your ass in that chair! Let me see your hands!”
What her father said then made no sense to her.
He said, “Who sent you?”
Dennis shoved Kevin with his free hand.
“Kevin, close the windows! Stop being a turd!”
Kevin went to the windows and closed the shutters. He was crying worse than Thomas.
Dennis waved his gun at Mars.
“Keep him covered, dude. Watch the girl.”
Mars pushed Thomas onto the floor with Jennifer, then aimed at her father. Dennis put his own gun in the waistband of his pants, then snatched a lamp from the corner of her father’s desk. He jerked the plug from the wall, then the electrical cord from the lamp.
“Don’t go psycho and everything will be fine. Do you hear that? I’m gonna take your car. I’m gonna tie you up so you can’t call the cops, and I’m gonna take your car. I don’t want to hurt you, I just want the car. Gimme the keys.”
Her father looked confused.
“What are you talking about? Why did you come here?”
“I want the fucking car, you asshole! I’m stealing your car! Now, where are the keys?”
“That’s what you want, the car?”
“Am I talking fucking Russian here or what? DO YOU HAVE A CAR?”
Her father raised his hands, placating.
“In the garage. Take it and leave. The keys are on the wall by the garage door. By the kitchen. Take it.”
“Kevin, go get the keys, then come help tie these bastards up so we can get outta here.”
Kevin, still by the windows, said, “There’s a cop coming.”
Jennifer saw the police car through the gaps in the shutters.
A policeman got out. He looked around as if he was getting his bearings, then came toward their house.
Dennis grabbed her hair again.
“Don’t fucking say a word. Not one fucking word.”
“Please don’t hurt my children.”
“Shut up. Mars, you be ready! Mars!”
Jennifer watched the policeman come up the walk. He disappeared past the edge of the window, then their doorbell rang.
Kevin scuttled to his older brother, gripping his arm.
“He knows we’re here, Dennis! He must’ve seen me closing the shutters!
“Shut up!”
The doorbell rang again.
Jennifer felt Dennis’s sweat drip onto her shoulder and wanted to scream. Her father stared at her, his eyes locked onto hers, slowly shaking his head. She didn’t know if he was telling her not to scream, or not to move, or even if he realized that he was doing it.
The policeman walked past the windows toward the side of the house.
“He knows we’re here, Dennis! He’s looking for a way in!”
“He doesn’t know shit! He’s just looking.”
Kevin was frantic, and now Jennifer could hear the fear in Dennis’s voice, too.
“He saw me at the window! He knows someone’s here! Let’s give up.”
“Shut up!”
Dennis went to the window. He peered through the shutters, then suddenly rushed back to Jennifer and grabbed her by the hair again.
“Get up.”
MIKE WELCH
Officer Mike Welch didn’t know that everyone in the house was currently clustered less than twenty feet away, watching him through the gaps in the shutters. He had not seen Kevin Rooney or anyone else when he’d pulled up. He’d been too busy parking the car.
As near as Welch could figure, the people from the red Nissan had jumped the wall into these people’s backyard. He suspected that the three suspects were blocks away by now, but he hoped that someone in this house or the other houses on this cul-de-sac had seen them and could provide a direction of flight.
When no one answered the door, Welch went to the side gate and called out. When no one responded, he returned to the front door and rang the bell for the third and final time. He was turning away to try the neighbor when the heavy front door opened and a pretty teenaged girl looked out. She was pale. Her eyes were rimmed red.
Welch gave his best professional smile.
“Miss, I’m Officer Mike Welch. Did you happen to see three young men running through the area?”
“No.”
Her voice was so soft he could barely hear her. Welch noted that she appeared upset, and wondered about that.
“It would’ve been five or ten minutes ago. Something like that. I have reason to believe that they jumped the wall into your backyard.”
“No.”
The red-rimmed eyes filled. Welch watched her eyes blur, watched twin tears roll in slow motion down her cheeks, and knew that they were in the house with her. They were probably standing right on the other side of the door. Mike Welch’s heart began to pound. His fingers tingled.
“Okay, miss, like I said, I was just checking
. You have a good day.”
He quietly unsnapped the release on his holster and rested his hand on his gun. He shifted his eyes pointedly to the door, then mouthed a silent question, asking if anyone was there. She did not have time to respond.
Inside, someone that Mike Welch could not see shouted, “He’s going for his gun!”
Loud explosions blew through the door and window. Something hit Mike Welch in the chest, knocking him backward. His Kevlar vest stopped the first bullet, but another punched into his belly below the vest, and a third slipped over the top of his vest to lodge high in his chest. He tried to keep his feet under him, but they fell away. The girl screamed, and someone else inside the house screamed, too.
Mike Welch found himself flat on his back in the front yard. He sat up, then realized that he’d been shot and fell over again. He heard more shots, but he couldn’t get up or duck or run for cover. He pulled his gun and fired toward the house without thinking who he might be hitting. His only thought was to survive.
He heard more shots, and screaming, but then he could no longer hold his gun. It was all he could do to key his shoulder mike.
“Officer down. Officer down. Jesus, I’ve been shot.”
“Say again? Mike? Mike, what’s going on?”
Mike Welch stared at the sky, but could not answer.
2
• • •
Friday, 3:24 P.M.
JEFF TALLEY
Two-point-one miles from York Estates, Jeff Talley was parked in an avocado orchard, talking to his daughter on his cell phone, his command radio tuned to a whisper. He often left his office in the afternoon and came to this orchard, which he had discovered not long after he had taken the job as the chief of Bristo Camino’s fourteen-member police department. Rows of trees, each tree the same as the last, each a measured distance from the next, standing without motion in the clean desert air like a chorus of silent witnesses. He found peace in the sameness of it.
His daughter, Amanda, now fourteen, broke that peace.
“Why can’t I bring Derek with me? At least I would have someone to hang with.”
Her voice reeked of coldness. He had called Amanda because today was Friday; she would be coming up for the weekend.
“I thought we would go to a movie together.”
“We go to a movie every time I come up there. We can still go to the movies. We’ll just bring Derek.”
“Maybe another time.”
“When?”
“Maybe next time. I don’t know.”
She made an exaggerated sigh that left him feeling defensive.
“Mandy? It’s okay if you bring friends. But I enjoy our alone time, too. I want us to talk about things.”
“Mom wants to talk to you.”
“I love you.”
She didn’t answer.
“I love you, Amanda.”
“You always say you want to talk, but then we go sit in a movie so we can’t talk. Here’s Mom.”
Jane Talley came on the line. They had separated five months after he resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department, took up residence on their couch, and stared at the television for twenty hours a day until neither of them could take it anymore and he had moved out. That was two years ago.
“Hey, Chief. She’s not in the greatest mood.”
“I know.”
“How you doing?”
Talley thought about it.
“She’s not liking me very much.”
“It’s hard for her right now. She’s fourteen.”
“I know.”
“She’s still trying to understand. Sometimes she’s fine with it, but other times everything sweeps over her.”
“I try to talk to her.”
He could hear the frustration in Jane’s voice, and his own.
“Jeffrey, you’ve been trying to talk for two years, but nothing comes out. Just like that, you left and started a new life and we weren’t a part of it. Now you have this new life up there and she’s making a new life down here. You understand that, don’t you?”
Talley didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what to say. Every day since he moved to Bristo Camino he told himself that he would ask them to join him but he hadn’t been able to do it. He knew that Jane had spent the past two years waiting for him. He thought that if he asked right now she would come to him, but all he managed to do was stare at the silent, immobile trees.
Finally, Jane had had enough of the silence.
“I don’t want to go on like this anymore, just being separated. You and Mandy aren’t the only ones who need to make a life.”
“I know. I understand.”
“I’m not asking you to understand. I don’t care if you understand.”
Her voice came out sharp and hurt, then both of them were silent. Talley thought of her on the day they were married; against the white country wedding gown, her skin had been golden.
Jane finally broke the silence, her voice resigned. She would learn no more today than yesterday; her husband would offer nothing new. Talley felt embarrassed and guilty.
“Do you want me to drop her at your house or at the office?”
“The house would be fine.”
“Six o’clock?”
“Six. We can have dinner, maybe.”
“I won’t be staying.”
When the phone went dead, Talley put it aside, and thought of the dream. The dream was always the same, a small clapboard house surrounded by a full SWAT tactical team, helicopters overhead, media beyond the cordon. Talley was the primary negotiator, but the nightmare reality of the dream left him standing in the open without cover or protection while Jane and Amanda watched him from the cordon. Talley was in a life-or-death negotiation with an unknown male subject who had barricaded himself in the house and was threatening suicide. Over and over, the man screamed, “I’m going to do it! I’m going to do it!” Talley talked him back from the brink each time, but, each time, knew that the man had stepped closer to the edge. It was only a matter of time. No one had seen this man. No neighbors or family had been found to provide an ID. The subject would not reveal his name. He was a voice behind walls to everyone except Talley, who knew with a numbing dread that the man in the house was himself. He had become the subject in the house, locked in time and frozen in place, negotiating with himself to spare his own life.
In those first weeks, Brendan Malik’s eyes watched him from every shadow. He saw the light in them die over and over, dimming like a television with its plug pulled, the spark that had been Brendan Malik growing smaller, falling away until it was gone. After a while, Talley felt nothing, watching the dying eyes the same way he would watch Wheel of Fortune: because it was there.
Talley resigned from the LAPD, then sat on his couch for almost a year, first in his home and later in the cheap apartment he had rented in Silver Lake after Jane threw him out. Talley told himself that he had left his job and his family because he couldn’t stand having them witness his own self-destruction, but after a while he grew to believe that his reasons were simpler, and less noble: He believed that his former life was killing him, and he was scared. The incorporated township of Bristo Camino was looking for a chief of police for their fourteen-member police force, and they were glad to have him. They liked it that he was SWAT, even though the job was no more demanding than writing traffic citations and speaking at local schools. He told himself that it was a good place to heal. Jane had been willing to wait for the healing, but the healing never quite seemed to happen. Talley believed that it never would.
Talley started the car and eased off the hard-packed soil of the orchard onto a gravel road, following it down to the state highway that ran the length of the Santa Clarita Valley. When he reached the highway, he turned up his radio and heard Sarah Weinman, the BCPD dispatch officer, shouting frantically over the link.
“… Welch is down. We have a man down in York Estates …”
Other voices were crackling back at her, O
fficers Larry Anders and Kenn Jorgenson talking over each other in a mad rush.
Talley punched the command freq button that linked him to dispatch on a dedicated frequency.
“Sarah, one. What do you mean, Mike’s down?”
“Chief?”
“What about Mike?”
“He’s been shot. The paramedics from Sierra Rock Fire are on the way. Jorgy and Larry are rolling from the east.”
In the nine months that Talley had been in Bristo, there had been only three felonies, two for nonviolent burglaries and once when a woman had tried to run down her husband with the family car.
“Are you saying that he was intentionally shot?”
“Junior Kim’s been shot, too! Three white males driving a red Nissan pickup. Mike called in the truck, then called a forty-one fourteen at one-eight Castle Way in York Estates, and the next thing I know he said he’d been shot. I haven’t been able to raise him since then.”
Forty-one fourteen. Welch had intended to approach the residence.
Talley punched the button that turned on his lights and siren. York Estates was six minutes away.
“What’s the status of Mr. Kim?”
“Unknown at this time.”
“Do we have an ID on the suspects?”
“Not at this time.”
“I’m six out and rolling. Fill me in on the way.”
Talley had spent the last year believing that the day he became a crisis negotiator for the Los Angeles Police Department had forever changed his life for the worse.
His life was about to change again.
JENNIFER
Jennifer had never heard anything as loud as their guns; not the cherry bombs that Thomas popped in their backyard or the crowd at the Forum when the Lakers slammed home a game-winning dunkenstein. The gunfire in movies didn’t come close. When Mars and Dennis started shooting, the sound rocked through her head and deafened her.
Jennifer screamed. Dennis slammed the front door, pulled her backward to the office, then pushed her down. She grabbed Thomas and held tight. Her father wrapped them in his arms. Layers of gun smoke hung in shafts of light that burned through the shutters; the smell of it stung her nose.
