Good Morning, Killer

by April Smith

  Twenty agonizing minutes later Kelsey called from the office, just as I was curving onto the 405.

  “Look,” she said, “I need to say that I take responsibility for what’s been going on—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, the tension between us—I’m wondering if you’ve been feeling it too—I’ve been sad about it, and I just wanted to say—”

  “Screw that! We are so past that!”

  “Are we, really? Because I need you to know I was never going to testify, no way. You see, I do understand about loyalty, and if they called me, I was going to be a hostile witness and they—”

  “Yes, yes, we are totally cool. I’m sorry, too!” I bellowed over the screaming wind. “I really, really am. Just give me what you’ve got!”

  His mother’s maiden name was Connors. Lilly Connors. The title to the house was in her name. It had taken Rapid Start about a half a second to retrieve it.

  Step by step, I walked Kelsey through the procedure, while simultaneously accelerating the Barracuda over an overpass like a toy race car that defies gravity on the loop-the-loop. By the time I was peeling off at National, she had run an emergency property search and come up with the address in Mar Vista. His mother’s house. Where Ray Brennan had grown up.

  The moment I pulled up, I wanted to bang my head against the dashboard.

  It was a house I had seen before, when Jason and I were on surveillance. I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

  It is like that, often.

  It was the house on the corner, across from the Montessori school, a small stucco bungalow sun-scorched to indiscriminate gray, with a porch supported by thin white posts—a suggestion of a porch really—and rotted concrete steps. A rusted TV aerial was perched on top of a sloping roof. The lawn was dead, the place had looked abandoned, but there was a bright green AstroTurf doormat. I remember thinking when Jason and I were there the first time that something was not right.

  I have noticed when the hairs go up on the back of your neck, and you think something is not right, something is not right.

  There were two windows on the porch side, two on the left where a front bedroom might be. The windows were not boarded up, as I had hastily assumed, but blackened in, with paint.

  I had been looking at Ray Brennan’s darkroom.

  His roving abduction-mobile was parked out front.

  “I see the van. I’m at the address,” lifting the latch on a chain-link gate. “I’m going in.”

  “Wait!” cried Kelsey over the phone in my ear. “Culver City police are responding!”

  “He’s got a girl in there, now.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “They took my gun, remember?”

  I was heading up the weedy path.

  “If he’s into it and you interrupt him, he’ll go into a rage and he’ll—”

  “Where are the cops? The cops aren’t here! He’s doing her, you think I’m going to stand outside and wait? I’m going to distract him,” and cut it off.

  I pulled back the creaking screen door and knocked on the peeling wood until my knuckles hurt, then picked up a piece of cinder block and banged. Finally there were footsteps.

  “Who’s there?”

  I said: “Do you believe the Bible is only a book?”

  “What the hell?”

  The door opened.

  It was Brennan. He was wearing clear oval glasses, a studious look that went with the dimples you could not see in the photographs. His light brown hair was military-short, and he wore a tank top and baggy camouflage shorts and the polished boots. Hunting. Behind the glasses, his lucent eyes went to the curb, where a unit from Culver City police had just pulled up, siren whupping quietly.

  “What’s going on?”

  I did not turn. I tried to maintain eye contact and just stay still until he could be subdued.

  “Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.”

  I heard the latch on the gate unlock behind me.

  “Ray?” someone called.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Culver City police. We just want to talk to you.”

  “Bullshit!” he shouted. “This is CIA harassment!”

  “Now come on Ray, we’re just local police—”

  Then he had me in a headlock, up against his chest, a knife to my throat. I could smell his personal sweat. His forearm was rock hard and gritty, his skin on my skin.

  The uniforms on the pathway froze.

  “I’ll kill the bitch.”

  “Take it easy, Ray.”

  “Try me, assholes.”

  “No problem,” said one of the cops, lifting his hands to show they were empty. “Hear that, buddy? You’re the man.”

  Ray Brennan pulled me inside and kicked the door shut.

  Twenty-five.

  He started yelling his head off and threw me across the floor.

  “Goddamn son of a bitch! Oh, you goddamn bastard!”

  My hip hit first, I tried to roll with it, slammed a shin into the bulging leg of a sofa. The floor was rough old redwood with protruding nail heads here and there. Where my jeans had snagged, blood was darkening the denim; my palms had turned abraded and raw.

  In the small daylight coming through random scratches in the black-painted windows, I could see we were in a tiny living room, empty except for a green fleabag couch. The walls had mostly been stripped, but flayed sheets of wallpaper still curled away from the studs—delicate garlands of flowers on stiff old-fashioned backing. Paint chips had collected near the baseboard. The house smelled cold, as if it had been empty a long time. Our footsteps echoed. There were white beams in the ceiling with rows of hooks—for plants.

  Ray Brennan had dead-bolted the front door and was pacing and cursing, suddenly wheeling and stabbing the knife halfway into an exposed beam.

  “Take it easy.”

  “Shut up, bitch.”

  Slowly, watchfully, I got to my feet. Immediately my hip flexor gave out, causing an excruciating buckle of the leg.

  “If I were you, I’d stay away from the window.”

  “Oh, shut up. I was raised by nuns, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

  “That’s not why—”

  “Shut up.”

  He was coming fast with fist cocked and I was cornered, just managing to twist away as the blow grazed my shoulder, bouncing my temple against the denuded plaster as I scuttled behind the couch. Now they would find paint chips in my hair, too. Infuriated, Brennan picked up one end of the couch and tossed it.

  If he rapes me, I’ll survive. I’ll let him do it and survive.

  “They have night vision!” I shouted hoarsely. “The police snipers! They can see through the windows!”

  It was a lie (night vision works only at night) and he knew it—“Bullshit!”—but it distracted him enough so I could move farther behind the angled end of the couch and maybe start a dialogue that showed I cared about his welfare.

  “Seriously,” I managed between chattering teeth. “Stay down.”

  He nodded several times as if listening to someone else not in the room—Okay, okay—then squatted low and crab-walked like a Russian dancer to the wall space between the windows. I saw how young and lithe he was, younger than Juliana had described, young as a recruit who signs up to save the world.

  “I know who you are—”

  “Me? I’m Superfuck.”

  A wave of nausea spiraled up my gut. The hip gave out again. I was not certain I could remain standing.

  “… the schedule,” he was saying.

  “Is someone back there? I thought I heard something.”

  A phone began to ring.

  The mistake the Culver City police had made was calling him Ray. You never wanted to call him Ray. You wanted to ooze respect. You called him “sir.”

  “Are you going to answer the phone, sir?”

  “Sit the fuck down.”

  I sank to my haunches and drew up my k
nees. The phone, an ancient black rotary, sat on the floor between us. Its rings were coarse and jangling, as if dragged through the wires from another epoch. I held my breath, as the echo of each became another lost opportunity for connection to the outside.

  Brennan was sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out so I could stare at the lug soles of his boots. He was playing a high-speed game of mumblety-peg, flipping the knife so it landed perfectly, pulling it out and flipping again, making small quick cuts in a circle on the soft redwood planks.

  He had spent a lot of time at this, activating and reactivating his obsessions.

  The ringing stopped.

  My breath was coming fast and shallow. I told myself I was not alone. Culver City had witnessed the abduction and called for SWAT, which would first set a perimeter. They would soon have the house surrounded, although their positions would not be visible all the way around, giving the illusion of escape through the back. The snipers would maintain a low profile on the roofs.

  Meanwhile, Culver City and LAPD would be huddling, trying to figure out what they were looking at. How many hostages? What do we know about this guy? It appeared they had the phone number and were trying to open a negotiation. Let’s hope the Bureau had gotten there by now with a six-hundred-page history of Ray Brennan and his alleged acts. That should tell them his ritual had been interrupted, he was in a panic, and the ringing would only agitate him more.

  As desperately as I concentrated on what they would do, I hoped they were focusing on me. I hoped Galloway, or Rick, or someone was out there saying that despite recent events in her personal life, we have a trained negotiator inside with that piece of shit: we should trust that if she is alive, she will follow procedure, so let’s all play this by the books.

  “How are we doing, sir? Is everything okay?”

  “What do you think?” he asked sardonically.

  “I don’t know, sir. You tell me.”

  “I’m being torn to pieces.”

  “You’re feeling torn apart?”

  “—Yeah, now that you brought the whole miserable world with your stupid religious bullshit—”

  “I’m sorry that happened. Is there anything I can do for you now?”

  “Go away.”

  “Let’s go together.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Let’s walk out of here, right now. Nothing bad has happened yet.”

  He sneered and picked at wood grains with the flashing point of the knife.

  “Is that a KA-BAR knife?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You must be former marine.”

  “I served my country. I love my country.”

  “You love your country,” I mirrored approvingly. “You know what? I love my country, too. My name is Ana. What can I call you?”

  “Me?” He looked incredulous, as if I had asked a different question. “This is my private property. I’m not the one violating someone’s private rights and busting into their own home with a bunch of cops.”

  There was a thump and a crash and breaking glass. Brennan and I both scrambled to our feet. The sound had come from the back of the house.

  He got up on his toes and roared, “Stay away from me!” throat cords straining.

  “It’s not them,” I said calmly. SWAT would not breech, not yet. “It’s not them! Listen.”

  There was no more banging, just guttural inhuman sounds trying to get out of someone’s throat, then silence.

  “Maybe we should check that out.”

  “It’s the other one,” he said.

  “You mean there is somebody else in the house?”

  “There’s a girl. She’s back in the studio. I was going to kill her,” he stated flatly, “but she begged me to let her pray first.”

  “I see. So there’s a girl back there, and she sounds pretty much okay, like nothing bad has happened yet. It doesn’t have to happen, sir—”

  The phone again.

  “—You can make it stop right now.”

  But the phone wouldn’t stop. Brennan had shied away from it sideways, as if he were wired on something. Angel dust? Chain-smoking marijuana for eight days straight?

  “It’s just the phone.”

  Bridget was in one of those rooms, possibly dying on me. The only way I could help her was to keep in control of myself although I could feel the situation breaking loose and fragmenting with the metal-on-metal shriek of a nightmare out-of-control merry-go-round going tilt, beginning to lift up off its rotors.

  “It’s just the phone,” I repeated. “You can answer it or not. You have the choice.”

  Give it up! I thought-beamed to the negotiators outside. Brennan was in a state of acute stress, frozen still like a terrified animal.

  My eye was on my leather purse, which had been thrown into a corner. Inside the purse was the cell phone. I took an unauthorized step toward the bag.

  He lunged, I twisted, but he grabbed me around the waist. We wrestled into the hallway until he threw me down in a narrow kitchen—open cupboard doors and shelves littered with dry blown leaves and pebbles and white enameled cabinets streaked with rust. Again my head slammed. He got his hands around my throat. I surprised him with a quick release, knocking his arms apart, but did not kick or grab because I did not want him to feel attacked; he would overpower me in an instant with a mindless homicidal fury.

  “No sir, don’t do it, I’m with the FBI.”

  I scrambled toward the front room, he dug his fingers into my back, my waistband, I rolled and broke the hold, but then my strength was ebbing, something I had not imagined in fantasies of kung fuing through the air.

  “I’m a federal agent, I can help you—”

  I kept up evasive action as best I could, trying to get to the purse, writhing away by inches, dragged back, trying to get him to hear me.

  “Sir! Don’t mess! I’m a federal agent, you’ll get the death penalty, I’m a federal agent—”

  I must have said it, choked it, twenty times even as he climbed on top of me and put his thumbs on my eyes in some bullshit marine move, and I slammed his inner elbows so his torso fell on mine, his spit all over my face, and he reared up again and I saw myself dead on the floor in that putrefying kitchen with cockroaches swarming the drain, and my mind kept repeating, It’s only pain, and, The wisdom to know, the wisdom to know—until suddenly he stopped and said, “It’s no good.”

  Oh God, what was this? Was I saved because Ray Brennan could not get an erection? Could that be true? The same thing that happened with Juliana in the van? Saved? By some crazy, unbelievable irony? Saved, by impotence?

  It wasn’t that. It was crazier: “I just can’t hurt you if you’re going to fight.”

  I waited, thoughts pinwheeling, breathing the breath of this stranger.

  “Then can we … get up, please?”

  He shifted off me and I hand-over-handed my way up the cabinets and would have vomited in the sink if it weren’t for the cockroaches.

  I had reason to believe he had hit his upper limit and would now press the reset button and regain control. I knew a lot about Ray Brennan. Had this been an UNSUB I would have lost my urine when he pulled me through the door, but this was old home week, reuniting with the crazy brother whose psychotic breaks and hospitalizations you know so well. I just can’t hurt you. Unless you are drugged unconscious, or playing dead, like a doll … or really dead.

  Juliana said: “He banged my head as if I were a doll.”

  Sometime in there the phone had stopped ringing.

  “This is what is going to happen,” I said in the stillness. “Sir? Do you hear my voice?”

  He had retrieved the knife from where it was sticking upright in the floor.

  And I had my leather bag.

  “The negotiator wants to talk to you. That’s why they’re calling. His job is to get you out of here in one piece.”

  I did not mention Bridget. This was Ray Brennan’s moment in the sun.

  “They
want to talk to you, sir. They know I’m in here. I’m one of them, and you know, because you’re former military, that we take care of our own. It comes down to this: if I’m not alive, you’re not alive.”

  Brennan had stopped his slow advance, knife in hand, and shook his head, as if shaking off a dream.

  “Run that by me again? You’re telling me you’re not one of those nuts who tries to get you to believe in Jesus?”

  He had taken a while to dial it in, but that was fine; I had managed to reach unobtrusively into the bag and hit 911.

  “I talk to God,” he was saying, “so I don’t need your crap.”

  “I don’t sell Bibles. I’m a federal agent.”

  The phone inside the bag was lit. The screen was active. I was betting the farm that a well-trained emergency operator had picked it up and stayed on the line and that we now had an open channel to 911. Someone would be listening and relaying information to the team of negotiators, ten or twelve of them sitting in a squad car or having commandeered a neighbor’s kitchen table, roughing out their situation board, putting together a picture they could convey to SWAT.

  “If you’re from the FBI, where’s your gun?”

  “I’m not armed. Obviously.”

  “Your badge.”

  “Don’t have it.”

  “And I’m Warren Beatty.”

  “They took away my credentials.”

  “I’m supposed to believe you?”

  “Look—okay—” I used the old negotiator’s line: “Do you want me to lie to you, or do you want me to tell you the truth?”

  “Hell, I can’t tell one from the other at this point,” and broke into a grin that was free of anger or guile.

  “The truth is, I shot my boyfriend.”

  He laughed, and I saw the appealing, easygoing world traveler Juliana had met on the bench.

  “No shit?”

  I smiled and spread my hands. “I’m not jiving you, man.”

  “Was he screwing another woman?”

  “Basically.”

  Brennan shook his head. “What’d you shoot him with?”

  “A thirty-two.”

  “That don’t do nothing. You should’ve called me.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “You didn’t kill him?”