When Darkness Falls

by James Grippando

  “I really…can’t breathe,” the woman said, groaning.

  Falcon was pacing furiously, not even listening to her.

  Theo said, “You need to loosen the knot around her neck.” Falcon didn’t respond. Theo said, “Hey, did you hear me? She’s going to suffocate.”

  “Quiet! I can’t think!” Falcon had a crazed look in his eyes. The room glowed with each flash of police lights in the parking lot, and it gave his face an angry red sheen.

  “This won’t get you nowhere, man,” said Theo.

  Falcon glared, then turned away and resumed pacing. “Wall ’em up, wall ’em up.”

  “I need some air!” the woman shouted.

  “Take the pillowcase off her head, jerk-off!”

  Falcon wheeled and swung his arm around violently. The butt of his gun made a dull thud as it crashed against Theo’s skull. Theo fell hard to the floor. It was like a one-two knockout punch-the blow from the gun and his head hitting the carpet. “Shut your trap,” he heard Falcon shouting, but sounds and sights were all just a blur. He fought to remain conscious, refusing to close his eyes. He tried to focus on something, anything, to keep his brain functioning. A trickle of blood ran into his left eye, and Theo tried without success to blink it away. His other eye, the one closest to the carpet, was staring at the bathroom door. It was closed. Like the rest of the room, the dark slat at the threshold of the bathroom door brightened with each pulse of colored light from police vehicles in the parking lot. Theo struggled to concentrate. In the intermittent light available, he could see something on the bathroom floor, on the other side of the slat. It was directly in front of the base of the toilet. The lights pulsed again, and he saw something that looked like a shoe. Two shoes, in fact-men’s shoes.

  One of them moved.

  Theo showed no reaction, and he wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. But with each flash of light, he became more certain.

  Someone was in there.

  chapter 22

  W ithin the hour, Jack was on a seaplane headed back to Nassau. The ocean below was as black as the night, making it nearly impossible to distinguish the low-hanging stars from the scattering of lights across the island landscape. Jack was glad that it wasn’t his job to discern up from down. He rode in the copilot’s seat beside Theo’s friend and the owner of the aircraft, Zack Hamilton. A City of Miami police officer was in the row behind them.

  The Bahamas are made up of some 700 islands and 2,400 cays, though only about thirty are inhabited, and two-thirds of a total population of 300,000 lives in Nassau. Jack couldn’t count the number of times that he and Theo had, on a whim, hopped on his motorboat and made the sixty-mile trip from Key Biscayne to the nearest Caribbean refueling station-gasoline for the boat, Mount Gay rum for the boaters-on the island of Bimini. Nassau is farther northwest, but it still seemed as though their seaplane had just leveled off when it was time to begin their descent. Slowly, the seemingly random arrangement of glowing dots ahead organized themselves into long, parallel lines of blue guiding lights.

  “Prepare for landing,” said Zack. He was speaking into the microphone on his headset, his voice tinny but audible over the drone of the twin prop engines.

  “Are you going to put us down on a landing strip?” said Jack.

  “Beats the hell out of the forest.”

  It was the kind of wiseass response that Jack should have expected from one of Theo’s oldest buddies. “I meant as opposed to the water. This is a seaplane.”

  “Runway’s a lot safer at night. But we can do the water, if you really want to.”

  “No, thanks,” was what he said, but he was thinking, Not in this flying death-trap.

  Zack checked his flight instruments as he finished off his last swallow of orange Nehi and sucked the greasy remnants of a party-sized bag of Cheetos from his fingertips. He seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for anything orange and edible, so long as it was artificially colored and of absolutely no nutritional value. It was just one more trait that served to underscore the fact that Jack was unlike Zack in every conceivable way but two: Their first names rhymed, and they were both friends with Theo Knight. A side-by-side comparison of the two men would have yielded unassailable scientific proof that the tiny fraction of DNA that differentiated one human being from the next was unquestionably the most significant fraction of anything in the entire universe. Zack was nearly seven feet tall, and he wore his hair in cornrows that hung down longer than Jack’s arms. His build made Theo look slight. A knee injury in his rookie season had deep-sixed his NBA career, but fortunately, the signing bonus was big enough to set him up in his own business. Flying became his new passion, and Jack had to admire a guy who had managed to turn a fallback career into something he loved. Still, it was hard to imagine that anything less than the power of Theo could have brought Jack and Zack together at two o’clock on a Saturday morning.

  They landed and quickly deplaned onto the runway. With the assistance of local law enforcement, they cleared customs and immigration in expedited fashion. A Bahamian police officer met them in the terminal and took them straight to a squad car parked in a no-parking zone in front of the airport. Jack and Zack rode in the backseat, and the Miami cop took the passenger seat. The car didn’t pull away fast enough to suit Jack.

  “We’re kind of in a hurry,” he said.

  The Bahamian cop glanced in his rearview mirror. He had a round, pudgy face and the eyes of a hound dog, at once dull and expressive, if that was possible. “’Course you is, mon.”

  Traffic was light at this hour, and until they reached the outskirts of Nassau, Jack counted more stray goats and chickens than oncoming automobiles. Twenty minutes later, they arrived at the Greater Bahamian Bank amp; Trust Company. Jack climbed out of the car, and the others followed him up the concrete stairway. The front doors were solid glass, and the inside of the bank was dark, save for the typical security lights that burned after hours. A security guard emerged from the shadows and came to the door. He spoke through an intercom that crackled like a grease fire. “We’re closed.”

  Jack held his tongue, but Zack blurted out exactly what he was thinking. “Don’t you think we know that, Einstein?”

  Jack hoped it had gone unheard. He leaned closer to the speaker box and said, “The manager was supposed to meet us here and let us in.”

  The guard shrugged and said, “Mr. Riley’s not here.”

  Jack gave up on the guard and turned to the local cop. “Where is Riley?”

  The Bahamian flashed those hound-dog eyes again. “He be late.”

  “He can’t be late. When’s he getting here?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon as I call him.”

  “Well then, would you call him, please,” said Jack, his tone more impatient than polite. “Like I told you before, we’re really in a hurry.”

  The Bahamian started slowly back to his car, presumably toward his radio. “’Course you in a hurry, mon. The whole world be hurryin’.”

  Jack felt a throbbing headache coming on. Theo would have known exactly how to deal with these chumps. For a split second, Jack found himself wishing his friend were there, until he quickly realized that if Theo were there, that would have eliminated any need to come in the first place. Jack massaged away the pain between his eyes.

  I’m losing my mind.

  SERGEANT PAULO WAS reacquainting himself with the inside of the police communications vehicle. It was familiar territory to him. He had everything he needed: his favorite chair, his old coffee mug, a bone mike to communicate with his team leaders in the field, and a telephone within easy reach, to speak with Falcon.

  The coordination of efforts between city and county law enforcement was a work in progress, but the key roles had been defined. Like most crisis units, this one included several teams: negotiations, tactical, traffic control, and communications. The lead negotiator was Paulo, whose primary responsibility was to speak directly to
the subject. Sergeant Malloy of MDPD was the secondary negotiator. His job was to assist Paulo and take notes. Intelligence officers from both MDPD and the city would conduct interviews and gather information for the negotiators. A staff psychologist was on hand to evaluate the subject’s responses and recommend negotiating strategies.

  The two departments would share responsibility for traffic control, and the tactical teams also overlapped. Snipers from each department assumed strategic positions on rooftops across the street from the motel. The assault teams stood ready to go. It was agreed, however, that if they were forced to use breachers-specially trained tactical-team members who could blow open doors or windows-MDPD would go in first.

  It was also agreed that Alicia would be Paulo’s eyes.

  “You nervous?” she asked as she poured fresh coffee from a Styrofoam go-cup into his mug. It was just the two of them in the communications van, as Paulo had requested some time alone to organize his thoughts for the initial contact.

  “I have a sinking suspicion that I’m in this for the long haul.”

  “Would you rather it was in the hands of someone like Chavez or Malloy?”

  “Part of me would, yeah.”

  “How can you even think that way?”

  He drank from his cup. “If this goes badly, you know how the headlines will read, don’t you?”

  “‘Blind Guy Blows It’?”

  It was kind of funny, the way his literal mind immediately conjured up the image of “BLIND GUY BLOWS IT” beneath the Miami Tribune masthead. “You always did beat around the bush, didn’t you?”

  “Sorry. But I wouldn’t be so direct if I actually thought you were going to blow it.”

  The side door opened. “Who’s there?” said Paulo.

  She introduced herself as Lovejoy, one of the intelligence officers. “I found the property manager,” she said. “The good news is that there was no one in room one-oh-two when Swyteck’s car crashed into it. But he has some info on the occupants of one-oh-three. I thought you might want to talk to him.”

  “Definitely,” said Paulo. “Is he with you?”

  “Yeah, he’s right here. His name’s Simon Eastwick.”

  “Mr. Eastwick, how are you?”

  The man paused, and Paulo presumed that it was because he had misjudged where he was standing. It sometimes disoriented people when he wasn’t looking straight at them. “I’m fine, thanks,” he said finally.

  “Can you tell me who was in that room before the crash?”

  “Uh, it’s two Latina girls,” said Eastwick.

  “By ‘girls,’ do you mean young women, or, literally, ‘girls’?”

  “I mean they were teenagers. Maybe eighteen or nineteen.”

  “Do they speak English?” said Paulo.

  “One of them speaks very well. The other is so-so.”

  “Do you have their names?”

  “No. They paid day-by-day, cash.”

  “Do you know if they were both inside the room at the time of the crash?”

  “Sorry. Couldn’t tell you that.”

  Paulo said, “How long have they been staying at the motel?”

  “One of them just got here yesterday. The other one, I don’t know. A few days, maybe longer.”

  “Did they have many visitors?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Alicia said, “How about customers?”

  Eastwick was suddenly indignant. “Like I said: I wouldn’t know.”

  “Ah,” said Alicia, “the don’t-ask-don’t-tell motel. Is that it?”

  Eastwick said, “What people do in their private time is their business.”

  “Not if they’re underage,” said Alicia.

  “Like I told you, they looked to be eighteen or nineteen to me. I was just giving them a place to stay.”

  In exchange for a cut of their business? That was what Paulo wanted to say, but it wouldn’t do any good to get the property manager’s back against the wall and shut down his cooperation. “Is there anything else you can tell us about these girls, Mr. Eastwick?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “I’d like you to sit down with the tactical team, explain every conceivable point of access to that room. Could you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  Eastwick started toward the door, but Paulo stopped him. “One other thing. These girls, as you call them. Is there any possibility that they would keep a gun in their room?”

  The man considered it for a moment. “I’d say that’s a very definite possibility.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Eastwick. That’s some very helpful information.”

  EVERYTHING LOOKS DIFFERENT at three a.m., and the inside of the Greater Bahamian Bank amp; Trust Company was no exception. The lobby was completely still, and the palpable silence made Jack aware of the sound of his own footsteps, the gum in Zack’s mouth, and the loose coins in the security guard’s pocket.

  After three radio calls, Otis Riley, the bank manager, had finally shown up. He was a short man with a dark island complexion that radiated good health, but Jack could still see the sleep in his eyes. Riley offered very few words as he took them down a hallway and then to a set of locked doors that opened to the safe deposit box room. “I believe that Mr. Swyteck and I can take it from here,” he told the group.

  Zack, the security guard, and the Bahamian police officer did not object. The Miami cop said, “I need to stay with Swyteck.”

  “Why?” said Jack.

  “Because I was told not to let you out of my sight.”

  “What do you think I’m going to do, shove a stack of twenties in my pocket?”

  The cop was stone-faced.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” said Jack.

  The cop said, “It’s my job to make sure that the exact amount of money that comes out of that box goes directly into police hands back in Miami. That’s the only way the feds will allow that much cash to cross an international border.”

  “All right,” said Riley. “Come with us, then.” Riley used his access card to unlock the door, and the three men entered the safe deposit box room. The manager went into the office and returned with the key to box 266 in hand. “Do you have your key, Mr. Swyteck?”

  Jack nodded. Riley went to the box and inserted the bank’s key. The lock clicked when he turned it. Jack inserted his key, and there was another click. Jack pulled the handle, and the box opened like a drawer. It was halfway open when his heart sank. He opened it all the way and found himself speechless.

  “It’s empty,” said Riley.

  “What happened to all the money?” said Jack.

  “We have never had a mishap in our eleven-year existence,” said Riley, as if a decade plus one were more than enough to establish a tradition of excellence in the world of offshore banking. “I’m certain that every last bill can be accounted for.”

  “Has someone accessed the box since I was here last?” said Jack.

  “I’ll check the records straight away,” said Riley.

  “That may not be necessary,” said Jack. “There’s a note.”

  The cop said, “Don’t touch it.”

  Jack wasn’t about to smudge it with his own fingerprints. The scrap of paper was the size of a business card, and a handwritten message was scrawled across the front. With the tip of his pen, Jack slid the note from the back of the drawer to the front, close enough for him to read it aloud. “Donde están los Desaparecidos?”

  “Is that Spanish?” said Riley.

  “Yes,” said Jack.

  The men were silent, as if trying to decipher it. “What does it mean?” said Riley.

  The cop said, “It translates to ‘Where are the Disappeared?’”

  “That’s the easy part,” said Jack. “But if you want to know what it means…”

  “Yes?” said Riley.

  Jack stole another glance at the note. “I don’t have a clue.”

  chapter 23

  A licia was asleep in the backseat o
f her car when her cell phone rang. Vince had warned her that the Falcon and Theo show might well have the legs of a PBS telethon, so she grabbed the opportunity for a quick catnap. Her car was parked right beside the command center, in case she was needed. The missed call went to her voice mail, but she recognized the number on her call-history display. She hit speed dial, and her father answered on the first ring.

  “Alicia, where are you?”

  “I’m at a mobile command center. There’s a hostage situation on Biscayne.”

  “I know. Chief Renfro called me, and I just turned on the news. Why are you there?”

  “Because I might be able to help.”

  “Please don’t talk to that psycho. He’s killed one cop already, shot another.”

  Alicia checked her face in the rearview mirror. Once upon a time, she could have curled up in the backseat, slept off a night of two-for-one cosmopolitans, and made it to her eight a.m. accounting class with no makeup and a smile on her face. Those days were gone. “I’m not in any danger. I’m way outside the line of fire.”

  “Good. Just don’t go anywhere near that building. Please, promise me you won’t go there.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Don’t even talk to him on the phone.”

  “He hasn’t asked to talk to me.”

  “He will. He asked to talk to you when he was on that bridge, and he’ll ask again.”

  “If he does, I’ll do what the negotiators think I should do.”

  “No. Listen to your father. Do not talk to him. Do you hear me?”

  “Papi, calm down, all right?”

  “I am calm. Just promise me you won’t talk to him.”

  “Okay, I won’t talk to him. I promise. Unless the negotiator thinks it would help.”

  “By ‘negotiator,’ do you mean Paulo?”

  “Yes.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Alicia. The last time that man was in a true hostage crisis, a five-year-old girl was nearly killed, and he ended up blind.”