"John," he said gently, "could you please kneel right here? Yes, that's right. Right there. Not on the rug-on the wood. That's good."
"Please, don't," Danziger said. He knelt, his eyes darting around the room, his face frozen.
"Now, John," Russell said, "you and I are going to give all your colleagues here a lesson they're never going to forget. See, the best lessons, I figure, the teacher learns right along with the students. So even though I'm teaching this lesson, we're all gonna learn something. Everyone but you, John. I'm thinking it's probably too late for you. You're just gonna have to be the demonstration."
"Please," said Danziger. He knelt on the wooden floor, facing us, his torso perfectly erect, his hands bound in front of his flat belly. He could have been in church. His light blue alligator shirt had big dark sweat stains under the arms.
Russell strode up to Danziger at an angle, like a veteran teacher approaching a blackboard. His Glock was in his right hand.
On Danziger's other side stood Travis, also holding his gun.
Danziger's eyes moved frantically. For a brief instant he looked into my eyes.
Russell's voice was calm and quiet. "So, John," he said, "what's a duress code?"
48
We watched in terror.
"A 'duress code'?" Danziger said. "You mean, like a burglar alarm, when-"
"I don't think we're talking about a burglar alarm, are we, John?"
"I told you, I don't know what you're talking about," Danziger said.
"You did, didn't you? So I guess you really can't help me." Russell lifted his pistol and placed it snugly behind Danziger's right ear. He snapped back the slide.
I shouted, "Russell, don't do it!"
Someone-Lummis, maybe?-screamed, "No!"
There was a sudden commotion: Alan Grogan struggling to his feet. "Please!" he called. "I'll talk to you. I'll tell you anything you want."
"Is that Alan?" Russell said without even turning to look.
I watched, riveted and angry, my mind spinning. Russell wouldn't actually pull the trigger. Especially not after the talk we'd had.
But if he really intended to, there was no way to stop him. Not with my hands bound, not sitting this far away. And not with four other armed men nearby.
Grogan zigzagged across the carpet, around the other hostages. He tripped over something but got right back up, with a jock's agility. His face had gone crimson.
"You don't need to do this," Grogan said.
Travis raised his gun and aimed it at Grogan, then the other two did the same.
"Alan," Danziger said, "sit down! You've got nothing to do with this."
Russell turned to Grogan, a cryptic half grin on his face. "You wanted to tell me something? Try and save your friend?"
"Anything you want to know," Grogan said. "Just put the gun down."
"Alan, sit down," Danziger said. "You don't know anything about this."
"I think he wants to help you, John," said Russell. "He doesn't want me to blow your brains out."
"John, just tell him!" Grogan shouted. "Please. It's not worth it. Please."
"It's not worth it, John," Russell said. "Do you know what's going to happen when I pull the trigger?"
"Don't," Danziger whispered. "Please. I'll tell you everything I know about the duress code. Anything you want to-"
"It's not pretty," Russell went on. "It's not like on TV. A nine-millimeter bullet has a muzzle velocity of, like, a thousand feet per second. First thing it does is punch out a round piece of skull, see. Drives the bone fragments right into your brain, okay? Then, at the same time it opens up a nice big cavity in your brain. Like a cave. Builds up pressure inside there. Your brain actually explodes, John."
"Russell," Grogan said, coming closer, "you don't have to do this. He'll tell you everything you want to know, and so will I. No one's going to use any duress code, I promise you. That was just an idea, we talked about it, but it's not going to happen!"
But Russell would not stop his sadistic monologue. "Where I'm aiming, see, the bullet's going to travel right through the brain stem. Kill you instantly. For you, it's lights out. But for everyone else, it's grisly, I gotta tell ya."
Danziger was talking, trying to talk over him. "The duress code is nothing more than a couple of numbers," he said. "You type in a nine before the-"
"They're gonna see blood and tissue," Russell went on, "little gobs of gray matter, spurt out the exit wound. Might even see something called backspatter, contact wound like this. The gray matter shoots out the entrance wound, too. It's not pleasant. Not for me, anyway. I might get some of your brain tissue on my clothes."
Danziger was shaking, sobbing silently. Tears were streaming down his face. Sweat had soaked most of his light blue shirt.
"Stop!" he shouted. "I'm telling you! Please!"
"Russell," Cheryl called out, her voice trembling, "do not do this. You do not want to face murder charges. There's no reason to do this. No one's going to try to stop the wire transfer. You're going to get everything you want."
"He's telling you!" cried Grogan. "Listen to him. What else do you want?" He, too, was weeping now.
"Alan, I want you to stay right where you are," Russell said. "Don't come any closer."
"Russell, please listen to me." It was Bo Lampack. He struggled to rise, fell to his knees, then rolled upright. "Help me help you." He stood tentatively, walked toward Russell. "I'm Bo," he said.
"Sit down, Bo," Russell said.
Yet Bo kept approaching. "I want you to know that we're all on the same page. All of us. We all want to resolve this. We all want to give you what you want."
"Don't come any closer, Bo," Russell said, staring him down.
"I'm just saying," Bo went on, coming still closer, "that you should understand that you're completely in control. And we, all of us, have the deepest respect for you. We understand completely that you're a human being with needs just like all of us-"
Russell swiveled, slammed his pistol against Bo's face. Bo screamed and fell over backwards, his face bloodied.
Then Russell placed the Glock back behind Danziger's right ear. "Do you want to tell me what happens after you type in that duress code?" Russell said very softly.
Danziger closed his eyes. "It triggers a silent alarm," he said, his voice trembling. "It tells the bank that the transfer request is being made under compulsion."
"Okay, good," said Russell. "Now, John, tell me something. Is there any other duress code? Besides the nine, I mean."
Danziger mouthed the word No but no sound came out.
"I can't hear you," said Russell.
"No," Danziger gasped.
"No other way for someone to sneak in a duress code?"
"No. Nothing else."
"That's it? No other tricks that you know of? Nothing else your buddies might try to screw this up?" Russell twisted the Glock, swiveling the muzzle on that same spot behind Danziger's right ear.
Danziger's face was contorted and dark red. "I-can't think of anything else," he whispered.
"You'd be the guy who'd know, isn't that right?"
"Yes," Danziger said. "There's no one else who…" His voice was choked by sobs.
"Who what?"
"Who knows the-the systems-"
"So that's it, then?" Russell said. "No other tricks?"
"Nothing. I swear to you."
"Thank you, John," Russell said. "You've been very cooperative."
Danziger gasped for air, nodded. He closed his eyes, looked drained.
"Thank you," he whispered.
You could almost feel everyone breathe a collective sigh of relief. Russell was a sadist, but not a murderer. He had tortured the information he wanted out of Danziger, so there was no need to kill him.
"Oh, thank God," breathed Grogan. Tears were streaming down his face as well.
"No," Russell said softly, "thank you. Good-bye, John."
He squeezed the trigger and the gun jumped in his hand and fi
lled the room with a deafening explosion.
Danziger slumped to one side.
The gunshot seemed to echo for an instant, though it was merely an auditory illusion: My ears rang with a high-pitched, wavering tone. I stared, unable to fully comprehend what I'd just seen.
Then the silence was broken as someone let out a gasp.
People began to scream, others to cry.
Someone vomited.
A large chunk of the right side of Danziger's head was missing.
Russell wiped his left hand over his face to smear off the red spatter. Verne let out a loud whoop and pumped his fist.
"Yeah!" he shouted. "You see that?"
A number of people dove to the floor. Some tried to cover their eyes with their forearms, ducked their heads. Ali buried her head between her legs.
I wanted to shout, but I couldn't. My throat seemed to have closed.
Russell stood up, lowered the Glock to his side, backed up a few steps. Travis stared furiously at his brother.
Over the cacophony, the shouts and the keening, I heard Russell tell his brother, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."
Hank Bodine bellowed, "Goddamn you!"
In all the chaos, my eyes were drawn to Grogan. He was on his feet, stumbling forward to Danziger's body. His face was red and crumpled, and he was crying, his head shaking. He knelt next to Danziger's body, reached with his unsteady fettered hands to lift his friend's ruined head, trying to cradle it.
His mouth was moving as if to speak, but no words came out, just deep gasps, like hiccups. Blood oozed between his fingers.
A slick of blood and something viscous had pooled on the floor next to Danziger.
Then Grogan leaned over and kissed the dead man's lips, and suddenly everybody understood.
I couldn't see Grogan's face. I could only see his shoulders heaving.
He lowered Danziger's head gently to the floor and knelt there for several seconds as if praying. Slowly he rose to his feet as a terrible anguished scream welled up from his throat, and he staggered toward Russell, his face contorted with rage and grief.
"You goddamned son of a bitch!" he shouted, spittle flying.
He lunged at Russell, jabbing his tethered hands at Russell's face as if to throttle him. "God damn you to hell, you goddamned son of a bitch!"
"Alan?" Russell said in a matter-of-fact voice as he stepped to one side, out of the way.
"Why?" Grogan gasped. "Why in God's name-?"
"You, too," Russell said, and he fired one more time.
PART THREE
49
Pee Wee Farrentino's delicate, feminine face had become monstrous: a welter of angry red cross-hatched scars. Ugly, just the way he wanted.
But it hadn't stopped Glover's midnight visits. Neither had my meeting with Dr. Jerome Marcus, the Assistant Clinical Director of Glenview, who'd followed the bureaucratic imperative not to rock the boat. He buried his report. He wanted a larger office.
Pee Wee's eyes had gone dead. He'd given up.
One morning, he wasn't at inspection. The morning guard, Caffrey, went to his room and found him.
He'd torn strips from his bedsheets and fashioned a noose, lashed it to the old iron radiator, managed to twist his body into the right position to strangle himself. Only Pee Wee could have done something that clever.
Caffrey, stricken, described it to us: We weren't allowed to look.
The bad wolf took me over. I felt myself propelled into a dark tunnel, no way out but forward, no turning back.
During outdoor exercise period, I made the first move. I lunged at Glover, wrested the baton out of his hands, my strength almost superhuman. The high-octane fuel of rage.
As he tried to grab it back, I slammed it against the back of his knees. Just as he'd done to me so many times.
He lurched, sprawled to the ground, roared that I was going straight to the hole. He yelled for Caffrey.
But Caffrey stood and watched.
Glover-cowering, his lip split, his eyes leaking blood-hollered for Estevez.
I slammed my fists into his face, one two one two, until I felt hard bone go soft.
One two one two.
I'd made myself Raymond Farrentino's protector, and I'd failed, and this was the only thing I could do.
He roared, an enraged beast, throwing his fists at me blindly, trying to block my punches. He caught me on the side of my face with a right hook so hard it should have knocked me over. But it didn't. I was in the zone. My rage was both a force field and anesthetic. His head jerked from side to side to dodge the blows. He snarled, his teeth bloody.
Even in my madness, my temporary insanity, I knew that beating Glover to a bloody pulp would solve nothing. It would only get me in the most serious trouble. But it felt too good to stop.
I kneed him in the stomach, and his eyes rolled up into his head for an instant. He sagged, and I slammed a fist into the underside of his jaw, heard something snap. He swayed backwards, tipped over, his head smashing into the ground.
Then something remarkable happened. Estevez, then Alvaro and a few of the bigger kids, began swarming around Glover and me. Some had homemade brass knuckles or sharpened mattress coils: an homage to Pee Wee.
We could all see the fear in his pale dull eyes. A spell had been broken. Only later did I wonder how many of them had also been Glover's victims.
As the others pummeled him with their fists and slashed with their mattress coils, knocking me aside, guards began streaming out of D Unit and the adjoining cottages, batons and Mace at the ready.
They began pulling the kids off Glover, stopping them from crossing the line, going one step too far.
A lockdown was ordered. Anyone who didn't return to his room at once would be placed in the Special Handling Unit. The word got around quickly that the punishment would be severe: transfer to what they called gladiator school-a maximum-security penitentiary for violent offenders, even worse than Glenview.
I was sent to solitary, informed that I would be brought up on charges of assault and battery. I'd be tried as an adult. Instead of getting out when I was seventeen, I wouldn't see the outside world until long after my twenty-first birthday-if, that is, I even survived.
And that was when a second remarkable thing happened: a posthumous gift from Pee Wee, his final clever move.
The lockdown wasn't even an hour old when someone found the note he'd left for me.
A few nights, pinned against the wall of his room, he'd found himself staring at the red pinpoint of light on the surveillance camera. Glover sometimes forgot to turn it off.
For Pee Wee it was simple to break into the D Unit command center, where the tapes were recorded and stored, where there was equipment to make copies. He'd sent tapes to the Division of Youth Services, the local newspapers, the local TV station. Smuggling out had been even easier, for him, than smuggling in.
That evening, I stood on my bed and watched through the tiny square of wire-reinforced glass as two police cruisers and one TV van pulled up the long driveway. Twenty minutes later, a couple of handcuffed figures emerged in the glare of the xenon arc TV spotlights. One was a gray-haired man with rimless glasses and a perfectly pressed shirt. The other was Glover, almost unrecognizable, unable to walk. He was carried by three policemen.
50
Wayne came in with a mop and a bucket full of suds. The two frightened cleaning girls-Bulgarians who'd come here for the summer to work-dutifully mopped up the blood. Russell had ordered them to the front, and Travis had untied their restraints, and at first they'd stood there shaking and weeping, probably thinking that they were next. Russell pointed out a dark red blood splatter on the rug and told them to clean that up, too. As if he didn't want to leave the place a mess when all this was over.
By now the hostages had settled down into a dazed, terror-stricken stupor, almost a trance state. No one spoke. No one even whispered. Ali was crying softly, and Cheryl stared grimly into space.
"What
do you want us to do with the bodies?" Wayne asked in an unexpectedly soft voice, as he and Travis lifted Grogan.
"Take 'em out in the woods," Russell said. "Maybe the grizzlies will eat 'em."
Travis glanced furiously at his brother but said nothing.
Russell reached down, took Danziger's arms, and tried to pull the body up-I guess he was going to attempt a sort of fireman's carry-but then suddenly let go. Danziger's body slid to the floor while Russell wiped his hands on his pant legs: There was blood everywhere.
Then he grabbed Danziger's ankles and dragged him across the floor.
It left a long red smear.
At the threshold of the room he stopped. "Was my lesson clear enough?" he said.
No one answered.
Only one of the kidnappers remained in the room now: Buck, the one with the black hair and goatee. He sat slumped in his chair, looking pensive. His.44 Magnum lay on his right thigh, his right hand on top of it.
The manager was crying silently. He was lost in grief and shock, along with so many others in the room.
Cheryl was the first to speak. "Someone told him," she whispered.
Silence.
"Was it you, Kevin?" she asked softly.
"How dare you-" Bross erupted, spittle flying.
"He could have gotten it out of Danziger himself," I said. "That's the point of all these 'interviews'-playing us off against each other."
Lummis was gasping for breath, wincing, his face deep red.
"Hugo, for God's sake, what is it?" said Barlow.
"I'll be-fine," Lummis gasped. "Just-need to-to try to calm down."
Buck looked up, stared for a few seconds, then seemed to lose interest. Muffled, angry voices came from the next room: Russell and his brother, I guessed, arguing in the screened porch.
I cleared my throat, and the manager looked up at me with redrimmed eyes.
"We need to get help," I said.
He blinked away tears but said nothing.
It was obvious, to me at least, that cooperating with Russell and his guys would only get us killed. We had to contact someone, anyone, in the outside world. Even if no one else would do anything, at least I would.
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