Hostage

by Robert Crais

  The tactical team supervisor, a veteran sergeant named Carl Hicks, studied the floor plan sketches, and seemed irritated when Talley couldn’t produce actual city floor plans.

  “Do we know where they’re keeping the hostages?”

  “No.”

  “How about the location of the subjects?”

  “The room immediately to our right of the front door is the father’s office. Rooney is usually in there when he talks to me, but I can’t say if he sticks. I know he moves through the house to keep an eye on the perimeter, but he’s buttoned up pretty well. The shades are down over every window except the French doors overlooking the pool in back. They don’t have drapes back there, but he’s got the lights off.”

  Hicks frowned at Martin.

  “Sucks for us, but what can you do? We might be able to get heat images.”

  If they had to breach the house, it was safer for everyone if the breaching team knew the location of everyone in the environment.

  Maddox tipped his chin toward Talley.

  “The Chief here worked Rooney into admitting that all three perps are inside. I might be able to work him for the locations.”

  Martin didn’t look impressed with that.

  “Hicks, float two men around the perimeter to find out exactly what we’re dealing with here. Let’s make sure this place is secure.”

  Talley said, “Captain, be advised that he’s hinky about the perimeter. I pulled back the line to start the negotiation. That was part of the deal.”

  Martin stepped away to stare up the street. Talley couldn’t tell what she might be looking at.

  “I understand that, Chief. Thank you. Now, will you be ready to hand off the phone to Maddox and Ellison as soon as we’re in place?”

  “I’m ready right now.”

  She clicked her tongue curtly, then glanced at Maddox.

  “Sounds good, Maddox. The three of you should get into position at the front of the house.”

  Maddox’s face was tight. Talley thought he was probably irritated with her manner, also.

  “I’d like to spend some time going over the Chief’s prior conversations with these guys.”

  Martin checked her watch, impatient.

  “You can do that while we rotate into the perimeter; I want to get the show on the road. Chief Talley, I have seven minutes after the hour. Do I now have command of the scene?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s yours.”

  Martin checked her watch again. Just to be sure.

  “Then log it. I now have command and control. Sergeant Maddox, get into position. Sergeant Hicks, you’re with me.”

  Martin and Hicks trotted away into the milling SWAT officers.

  Maddox stared after her for a moment, then looked at Talley.

  “She’s wound kinda tight.”

  Talley nodded, but said nothing. He had thought that he would feel relieved when he turned over command of the scene.

  He didn’t.

  THOMAS

  Alone in his dark room, Thomas held his breath, better to hear past the changing whup-whup-whup of the helicopters. He feared that Mars might pretend to leave, then creep back to see if he was trying to get untied. Thomas knew every squeak in the upstairs hall because Jennifer liked to spy on him; one squeaky spot was right outside his door, the other about halfway to Jennifer’s room. So he listened.

  Nothing.

  Thomas was spread-eagle on his lower bunk, face up, his wrists and ankles tied so tightly to the corner bedposts that his feet felt numb. After Mars had finished tying him, he stood by the bed, towering over him like some kind of retard with his slack jaw hanging open like one of those public-bathroom perverts his mother always warned him about every time he went to the mall. Then Mars had taped over his mouth. Thomas was SCARED; sweat gushed from him like he was a lawn sprinkler and he thought he was going to suffocate. He struggled and pulled at the wires that held him, straining to get free until he felt Mars’s breath on his cheek. Then he couldn’t move at all, like his mind and body had disconnected and all he could do was just lie there like a turtle waiting for a car to squash it flat.

  Mars placed a hand on his chest, and now the breath went to his ear. Warm and moist. Then, a whisper.

  “I will eat your heart.”

  Thomas’s body burned from the inside out, a kind of wet heat that grew hotter and hotter. He messed his pants.

  Mars went to the door, shut the lights, and left, pulling the door closed. Thomas waited, counting slowly to one hundred. Then he set about working his way free.

  Thomas was good at working his way free. He was also good at sneaking out of his house, which he had done almost every night this summer. He would sneak out after his parents had gone to bed to hook up with Duane Fergus, who lived in a big pink house on King John Place. Sometimes they threw eggs and wads of wet toilet paper at the cars passing on Flanders Road. When that got old, they would sneak across Flanders to a development that was still under construction where teenagers parked to make out. Duane Fergus (who was a year older and claimed to shave) once threw a rock at a brand-new Beemer because (he said) the lucky turd behind the wheel was getting “road head.” They both shit a brick when the car roared to life, bathing them in its lights. They ran so hard back across Flanders that a monster 18-wheeler had almost turned them into blacktop pie.

  Thomas had perfected the art of moving through his home without being seen because he had changed some of the camera angles. Just a bit, just a nudge, so that his mom and dad couldn’t see everything. He knew that most people didn’t live in houses where every room was watched by a closed-circuit television system. His father explained that they had such a system because he handled other people’s financial records and someone might want to steal them. It was a big responsibility, his father had said, and so they had to protect those records as best they could. His father often warned both Thomas and Jennifer to be careful of suspicious characters, and to never discuss the alarms and cameras with their friends. His mother was fond of saying that she thought the whole mess was nonsense and just their father’s big toy. Duane thought they were da bomb.

  The wire holding his left wrist was slack.

  When Mars was tying Thomas’s right wrist to the post, Thomas had scrunched away just enough so that now the cord held a little bit of play. Now he worked harder at it, pulling the knots tighter but creating enough slack to touch the knot that held him to the post. The knot was tight. Thomas dug at it so hard that the pain in his fingertips brought tears, but then the knot loosened. He worked frantically, terrified that Mars or one of the others would throw open the door, but then the knot gave and his left hand was free. The tape hurt coming off his mouth worse than getting a cavity filled. He untied his right hand, then his feet, and then he was free. Like Duane said, you had to risk being street pizza if you wanted to see a guy getting road head.

  Thomas stayed on the bed, listening.

  Nothing.

  I know where Daddy has a gun.

  Thomas felt calm and certain in what he needed to do. He knew exactly what the cameras could see and what they couldn’t. He wanted to go to his bathroom to clean himself, but knew he would be visible on the monitor if he did. He pulled off his pants, used his underwear to clean off the poo as best he could, then balled the underwear and pushed them under the bed. He slipped to the floor and crawled along the wall toward his closet, passing under his desk. Someone had ripped his phone out of the wall, leaving the plug in the socket but tearing free the wires. Turds.

  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the children found a secret door at the rear of their wardrobe that let them escape the real world into the magical land of Narnia. Thomas had his own secret door at the back of his closet: an access hatch to the attic crawl space that ran beneath the steep pitch of the roof. It was his own private clubhouse (his and Duane’s), through which he could move along the eaves to the other access hatches dotted around the house.

  Thomas pulled open the hatch
and wiggled into the crawl space, being careful not to bump the rafters with his head. The heat in the closed space of the attic enveloped him like a gas. He found the flashlight that he kept just inside the hatch, turned it on, then pulled the hatch closed. The crawl space in this part of the house was a long triangular tunnel that followed the back edge of the roof. Where windows were cut into the roof, the triangle became a low rectangle, forcing Thomas to crawl on his belly. He worked his way along until he came to a second access hatch, this one in Jennifer’s closet. He listened until he grew satisfied that the turds weren’t in her room, then he pushed it open, knocking over a tumble of shoes.

  The closet was dark, its door closed.

  He eased his way out over the shoes and through a rack of her dresses, then turned off his flashlight. He listened at the closet door, and again heard nothing. He eased open the door. The lights in Jennifer’s room were off; that was good because he knew that most of her room could be seen on the monitors. He opened the door so slowly that it seemed to take forever to get it open enough for him to stick out his head. The room was lit by pale blue moonlight. He could see Jennifer bound to the chair near the front of the room, her back to him.

  “Jen?”

  She lurched in the chair and mumbled. He called to her, his voice low.

  “I’m in your closet. Just relax, okay? If they’re watching, they can see you on the monitors.” She stopped struggling.

  Thomas tried to remember what the camera saw of Jennifer’s room. He and Duane sometimes went into the security room when his parents were away so that Duane could see her naked. He was pretty confident that if he crept out of the closet on his belly, then hugged the wall beneath the windows where the shadows were darkest, he could get pretty close to the chair. If he heard Mars or those other turds coming, he could haul ass back into the crawl space, then go back to his room or run for the garage.

  “Jen, listen up, okay? I’m going to come over there.”

  She shook her head wildly, mumbling frantically into the tape.

  “Be QUIET! I can untie you.”

  He pushed open the closet a few inches wider, then edged forward on his elbows into the shadows. As he passed her desk, he saw that her phone had also been torn from the plug. Turds.

  Thomas worked his way around the perimeter of the room, and soon he was stretched out beside her bed, using deep shadows as cover. He was about four feet from her now, and could see that her mouth was taped. He looked up at the corner of the ceiling where the camera was located. These cameras didn’t hang down visible to anyone in the room; they were what his father called “pinhole cameras,” set in the crawl space behind the wall where they peeked out through tiny holes. He slithered out to the chair and worked his way behind her. He figured that the camera could probably see her from the waist up, but not very well in the darkness. He decided to take a chance. He snaked his hand up behind her, then quickly yanked the tape from her mouth before ducking down to the floor again.

  “Shit! Ow!”

  “Be quiet! Listen!”

  “They’re going to catch you!”

  “Shhhh! Listen!”

  Thomas strained his ears again, concentrating past the helicopters and the sounds of the police outside.

  Nothing.

  “It’s okay, Jen. They didn’t see, and they can’t see me now. Don’t look around. Just listen.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I used the crawl space. Now listen and hold still. I’m going to untie you. They nailed the windows shut, but I think we can use the crawl space to get downstairs. If we sneak to the garage, we can open the garage door and run for it.”

  “No!”

  Thomas worked frantically at the knots binding her. The cords weren’t that tight around her wrists and ankles, but the knots had been pulled hard.

  “Thomas, stop! I mean it! Don’t untie me.”

  “Are you on dope? We might be able to get away!”

  “But Daddy will still be in here! I’m not going to leave him.”

  Thomas settled back on his heels, confused.

  “But, Jen—”

  “No! Thomas, if you can get out, then go, but I’m not leaving without my father.”

  Thomas was so angry he wanted to punch. Here they were, locked in the dark with three psychokillers who probably drank human blood, one maniac who wanted to eat their hearts for sure, and she wouldn’t leave. But then, as Thomas thought about it, he knew she was right. He couldn’t leave their father, either.

  “What are we gonna do, Jen?”

  She didn’t answer for a time.

  “Call the police.”

  “The house is surrounded by police.”

  “Call them anyway! Maybe they have an idea. Maybe if we tell them exactly what’s going on in here it will help them.”

  Thomas glanced toward her desk, recalling the wires ripped from the plug.

  “They broke the phones.”

  Jennifer fell silent again.

  “Then I don’t know. Thomas, you should get out.”

  “No!”

  “I mean it. If you can get to the police, maybe you can help them. You know all about the alarms and the cameras. You know that Daddy is hurt. That asshole, Dennis, lied to them about Daddy. He’s telling them we’re all fine.”

  “Let me untie you. We can hide in the walls.”

  “No! They might hurt Daddy! Listen, if they find out that you’re not in your room, I’m going to tell them that you got out. They won’t know you’re still in the walls. They’ll never even think of that! But if both of us are gone, they’ll take it out on Daddy. They might hurt him!”

  Thomas thought about it.

  “Okay, Jen.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “We’re not going to leave him. I’m going to get us out of here.”

  Jennifer jerked so hard against the cords that she almost tipped over the chair.

  “You leave that gun alone! They’ll kill you!”

  “Not if I have the gun! We can hold them off long enough to let in the police, that’s all we have to do.”

  She twisted hard in the chair, trying to see him.

  “Thomas, don’t you dare! They’re adults! They’re criminals and they’ve got guns, too!”

  “Don’t talk so loud or they’ll hear you!”

  “I don’t care! It’s better than you getting killed!”

  Thomas reached up, pulled the tape back over her mouth, and rubbed it hard so that it would stick. Jennifer squirmed, trying to shout through the tape. Thomas hated the thought of leaving her tied, but she just didn’t see that he had no other choice.

  “I’m sorry, Jen. I’ll untie you when I get back. Then we can get Daddy out of here. You’ll see. I won’t let them hurt us.”

  Jennifer was still struggling as Thomas worked his way back through the shadows. When he reached the closet he could still hear her trying to shout through the tape. She was shouting the same thing over and over. He could understand her, even though her words were muffled.

  They’re going to kill you.

  They’re going to kill you.

  Thomas slipped back into the crawl space, working his way carefully through the dark.

  DENNIS

  The little bathroom off the garage was as dark as a cave when Dennis showed them the window, telling Mars and Kevin that they could work their way into the neighbor’s yard and then around the side of that house to slip past the cops. Mars seemed thoughtful, but Dennis couldn’t be sure with all the dark shadows.

  “This could work.”

  “Fuckin’ A, it could work.”

  “But you never know what the police are doing or where they might be. We have to give them something to think about besides us.”

  “They’ll be watching this house. They got nothing else to do.”

  Kevin said, “I don’t like any of it. We should give up.”

  “Shut up.”

  Mars went into the garage and stood by the Ra
nge Rover. Dennis was scared that Mars would suggest killing the kid again.

  “C’mon, Mars, we’ve got to get goin’ here. We don’t have all the time in the world.”

  Mars turned back to him, his face lit by the dim light from the kitchen.

  “If you want to get away, we should burn the house.”

  Dennis started to say no, but then he stopped. He had been thinking of putting the kids in the Jaguar and opening the garage door with the remote as a diversion, but a fire made better sense. The cops would shit their pants if the house started to burn.

  “That’s not a bad idea. We could start a fire on the other side of the house.”

  Kevin raised his hands.

  “You guys are crazy. That adds arson to the charges against us.”

  “It makes sense, Kevin. All the cops will be watching the fire. They won’t be looking at the neighbor’s yard.”

  “But what about these people?”

  Kevin was talking about the Smiths.

  Dennis was about to answer when Mars did it again. His voice was quiet and empty.

  “They’ll burn.”

  The back of Dennis’s neck tingled as if Mars had raked a nail across a blackboard.

  “Jesus, Mars, nobody has to burn. We can put’m here in the garage before we take off. We’ll figure somethin’ out.”

  They decided to use gasoline to start the fire. Dennis found a two-gallon plastic gas can that the family probably kept for emergencies, but it was almost empty. Mars used the plastic air hose from the family’s aquarium to siphon gas from the Jaguar. He filled the two-gallon can, then a large plastic bucket that was stained by detergent. They were carrying the gasoline into the house when they heard the helicopters again change pitch and more cars pull into the cul-de-sac.

  Dennis stopped with the bucket, listening, when suddenly the front of the house was bathed in light, framing the huge garage door and spilling into the bathroom window even through the oleanders.

  “What the fuck?! What’s going on?”

  They hurried to the front of the house, gasoline splashing from the bucket.

  “Kevin! Watch the French doors!”

  Dennis and Mars left the gasoline in the entry, then ran into the office where Walter Smith still twitched on the couch. Spears of light cut through the shutters, painting them with zebra stripes. Dennis opened the shutters and saw that two more police cars filled the street. All four cars had trained their spotlights on the house and a great pool of light from the helicopters burned brilliantly on the front yard. More cars arrived.