“All boys like comic books!” Jake forcefully turned her, and eased her back into the truck. “That boy has a gun, Judianne. Now git!”
Judianne started up the truck. “I guess I better tell you,” she said softly to Jake, “WCAD has reports on this situation every fifteen minutes.” Jake looked up and saw Danny Curtis, the WCAD reporter, coming out of the gym. Radio? Jake had thought a report in tomorrow’s Courier would be his only problem. A cloud cover made the sky so dark the morning felt like evening.
Judianne drove out the drive far enough to be out of sight, parked on the shoulder and walked back to the cafeteria. She’d bet dollars to donuts this was not the “hostage situation” the radio was promoting. The hunger for disaster in this town was just creepy, and the men were totally predictable. The more talk about shooters and hostages, the further the solution would slip out of Jake’s control.
The younger of the deputies, Curly, was unrolling yellow crime scene tape along the tree line back of the cafeteria. “Hi, Curly,” she called. “Jake wants me to see if I can negotiate.”
The deputy frowned. Judianne smiled. “I know this kid,” she said. The deputy nodded. Judianne slipped in the kitchen door. She stood quietly and listened—silence except for the hum of the refrigerators. The kitchen, still full of breakfast things and disinfectant smell, felt eerie with none of the hair-netted ladies in it. She slid into a narrow space between a refrigerator and the wall. “Hey, Darrell,” she called, not too loud.
“Lena?” The muffled voice came from behind a door at the end of the kitchen.
“No, it’s Judianne, the reading lady.” She waited, but there wasn’t another sound. On the door an open padlock hung on its hasp, so she guessed the door didn’t lock from inside. Jake would want to know that. “I checked the drugstore for that Marvel Comic you like, ‘Moon Knight.’ Is that the one?” She waited, holding her breath.
Finally a soft, “Yeah. But I’ve got a gun now. Don’t come in.”
“Are you all by yourself in there?”
“None of your business.”
Out in the yard, members of The Living God Church had started to arrive. Cars were parked at hurried angles along the shoulder of the road and the yellow crime scene tape was already tattered and pasted to the driveway.
“No, I don’t know where the bathrooms are!” Jake yelled at a young guy. “This isn’t a sporting event!” Jesus! What this was, was a nightmare. Reverend Pikestaff had evidently told his flock to meet at the flagpole, where the church members were becoming a huddled shifting bunch, those on the cafeteria side peeling off to hide behind the others, carrying the group past the flagpole and down the other side of the slope. Some had begun to pray on their own.
Jake knew he’d better take care of business pretty damn quick, but as he started toward the kitchen door a wild voice shrieked. “That’s my grandbaby in there!” Jake darted back to the front to see a blond, heavy-set woman running across the yard. “Tiffani Casey. My granddaughter. She’s the hostage!” The woman steadied herself on Jake’s arm. “Somebody said she’s in there. I want to go in there for her. Let me take her place. Oh, please, God. Let me be the hostage.”
“How’d she get on to the grounds in the first place?”
“Her Daddy takes her to school after leaving off the milk and eggs for the kitchen here. Sometimes she walks from here.”
“Who’s her Daddy and where is he?”
“Bobby Casey from the dairy. Works afternoons at K-Mart. He doesn’t even know she’s missing.”
Jake put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about your granddaughter. If it works out you can go in and take her place, I’ll let you. But right now, we don’t know if Tiffani’s really in there. Brian!” he called, “If you could take this good woman and get her a drink of water and stay in touch, I’ll let you all know.”
Overhead the whap, whap, whap of a helicopter filled the dark sky. Television. Shit!
The pantry shelves were heavy with institutional-size cans of vegetables and boxes of generic corn flakes and pasta. Darrell said, “This here’s Raynelle.”
“Pleased to meetcha, Raynelle. My name’s Judianne.”
“Likewise,” Raynelle said and leaned forward to extend a limp hand from the back corner, where she was lounging on a hundred-pound sack of potatoes, a pack of paper napkins for a pillow. Her hair was lank with dirt and grease, and her fingernails were gnawed and black around the edges. She didn’t bother to put out the joint she was smoking. Darrell, a small guy, sat in the other corner on a huge can of lima beans. He was holding a large handgun. After introducing his hostage, he fidgeted.
“Listen Darrell, the Sheriff’s here,” Judianne began. “That’s good news because he’s a good guy, and he’ll make it easy for you to just give me the gun and get on to class.”
“How do we know this Sheriff is a good guy?” Raynelle asked casually. “How can we know he won’t just clap us both in the pokey?”
“Gee, Raynelle. I’m getting the idea that you are not exactly the hostage here.”
“Yes, she is!” Darrell said. “I forced her in here at gunpoint.”
“Uh huh. And where’d you find such a handy hostage?”
“Darrell and I go way back,” Raynelle volunteered and took another puff. “We were in foster care together last year until we got caught kissing. Just kissing, can you believe it? And bam! We both got shifted.”
“We were lying down kissing,” Darrell said. “On your bed.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
An exhaust fan up near the ceiling rattled but barely stirred the air in the pantry. “Look, you two. The clock’s ticking. We need to wrap this up before others get involved. Now, the best thing would be for you to hand me the gun. Is it loaded?”
Darrell looked at the gun. “I think so. It’s real heavy.”
“Lemme see.” Judianne stepped forward and reached for the gun, but Darrell pulled back and pointed it at her. “Point that thing at the floor!”
“No!” Darrell was shaking.
Judianne backed to the door and felt behind herself for the knob. “Tell you what, let me go talk to the Sheriff, and see if I can’t make a deal.”
“No way,” Raynelle said. “If you leave here, the old sheriff will blow us up. Throw in tear gas at the very least. Huh uh,” she said shaking her head. “You’re staying right here.”
Darrell steadied the gun and concentrated his face, squinting at her. Judianne took a deep breath of the stale air. No one said anything more. Raynelle lay back gazing at the ceiling, taking an occasional pull off the roach, but otherwise looking totally languid, like she was sunbathing. The minutes piled up, and the gun twitched in Darrell’s hand but he didn’t take his eyes off Judianne. Where was attention deficit when you needed it? Judianne sat down cross-legged and leaned her back against the door. The clatter of the fan kept her from being able to hear what was going on outside. If she yelled, could Jake hear her? Where the hell was Jake, anyway? Why wasn’t he banging on the door, putting on the pressure, playing the bad cop? Surely, by now, he knew she was in here.
“How come you to show up here at the Center, Raynelle?” Judianne asked.
“I just dropped by to see my old friend Darrel.” Raynelle had the rough, darkened skin of the homeless. She could be sixteen or thirty-five. She could have hitched here yesterday and stayed in a field last night. Maybe she traded sex to some guy for the weed.
Darrell had leaned his elbows on his knees, his arms undoubtedly about to give out with the weight of the gun. He craned his neck and circled his head like he was working out the kinks. Finally, he lay the gun in his lap and let himself slump on the can of lima beans. She hadn’t told Jake, but this Darrell was the kind of hard luck case that always set her motherliness ablaze. She’d wanted to bring him home with her last week. She could teach him to read, for sure. And then, as she told all the kids, once you can read, the sky’s the limit.
“I didn’t mean to shoot that old wom
an,” he said.
“Who did you mean to shoot?”
“Nobody! I ain’t a killer.”
“I know that, Darrell.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s in your palm.”
“My what?”
“Last week when you came in to read for me, and I saw all that spaghetti sauce on your hands. Remember me looking at your palm, right here. Remember?”
“I don’t believe in that crap.”
“There sure as hell weren’t any killer lines.”
“Do you really know the sheriff?”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
Raynelle perked up. “You’re shitting me. How old are you?”
“This is the reading lady,” Darrell said. “She’s like a teacher.”
“You look like a kid.”
“I know. Everybody says that. Listen, Darrell, the sheriff and Mayor Mashburn have the idea you’re holding Raynelle hostage.”
“I am.”
“What I’m saying is that this is a very dangerous situation. Okay? So the three of us need to go out together.”
“Naw,” Raynelle said, as she took a last puff and flipped the almost invisible leavings onto the floor. “We’re just going to wait for the old gal to come back.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“It wasn’t nothing but a flesh wound. She didn’t even want to go to the hospital. But the nurse made her go ’cause she’s so old and has a bad heart.”
“Where’d you get all this information, Raynelle?”
The girl sniffed and raised her hand as though to take a puff, then seeing she didn’t have one, she lowered it.
“She’ll tell Mr. Baird it was an accident,” Darrell said. “She said she’d be right back.”
“How’d you get in here, anyway?” Raynelle asked Judianne.
“It’s a small town.”
“It looks big through the fence,” Darrell said.
“Well it’s spread out. You could say that Cadillac is wide but not deep.”
“You living with the sheriff?”
“Nope.”
“You ever been married?”
“Once.”
“That’s what I want, to be married. My mom was too stupid to ever get anybody to marry her. She was just giving it away for free.” Raynelle’s lip twisted and one eye flickered like she might cry, but she got control of that real quick with a toss of her head. “Tell the old sheriff to put a ring on your finger or zip it up.”
Darrell took a loud breath. “Down in Custer County, if they catch you with a gun, they try you as an adult and send you to a real prison. Little guys like me get raped every day. Every day.”
“So let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to you.”
“I’d rather die right here.”
“For God’s sake, you don’t have to die or be raped. Just give me the gun.”
Raynelle rose up on one elbow. “Lay off him, Judianne, he’s learning to be a man.”
“No, he’s not.”
“To get what men want, and we all know what men want, a guy’s got to step up, got to prove he’s a man. Right Darrell?” Raynelle lay back again, her legs straddling the potatoes, her back arched. “Right, Darrell?”
“I’m not going to talk to any sheriff!” he said.
Judianne leaned forward and glared at him. “Listen to me, you! You are a hard luck kid! I was a hard luck kid, too. And not too smart. I messed up my life good. Bad marriage to a jerk lawyer. Now I’m telling you, if you are lucky enough to get Jake Hale on your side, you better trust him.”
“You and the sheriff aren’t gonna have any brats, are ya?” Raynelle asked.
Judianne paused. Was there anything for sure she knew about her life? “Don’t know,” she said. She was forty and had laid off the pill ever since she’d started going with Jake in the spring. He said that was okay with him, and they both knew they were too old to be handing off to fate this way but that’s what they’d been doing. She thought about this now as she watched the gun twitch in Darrell’s hand, and she steadied herself, trying to count the days since her last period. How was Jake going to take this news?
“This is Mira Bartok, reporting from the Juvenile Detention Center in Cadillac with more on the Hostage Crisis.” Jake jerked his head to see a television reporter, flooded with lights, project into her microphone.
After failing to persuade Pikestaff to get his people out of here and then using what he knew was undue force to turn away a hot dog vendor, Jake passed through the glare of the TV lights into the near darkness of the cloudy day to return to the kitchen door to see Fred there with Tiffani Casey’s grandmother, her head on the deputy’s shoulder.
“Get her away from here.”
“You told me to guard this door. Then you told me to guard her.”
“Where’s Curly?”
“Putting the damned scene tape back up. Mr. Baird is helping him.”
Jake took out his cell phone and dialed. While he listened to it ringing, a man in his late fifties stepped up, heavy rifle at his side, chest out, crew cut standing at attention.
“Sheriff Hale. Help has arrived.”
“Don’t you see that yellow tape? Get back over there!”
“I’m here to help.”
“I’m on the phone.” Jake ground his teeth. He always tried to be a patient man, but Godamighty! Hot dogs, television, Christians!
“It looks like you’re on hold,” said the guy with the crew cut.
“I’m not on hold,” Jake said. “It’s ringing.”
“I have two more sharp shooters with me. I figure we put one on top of the administration building, one on the cafeteria, and me over on that berm,” Crew Cut said. He nodded back to the rise on the edge of the playing field.
Jake lowered his phone. “Who the hell are you?”
“Alvin Debbs. You’ve seen me. I’m a citizen of Cadillac.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen you, but under what authority are you bringing in armed men to what is already a very dangerous situation?”
“Do you have any idea what could happen here?” Debbs lifted his chin like he was talking to a moral inferior. “Do you remember what happened in Atlanta, that judge shot in his own courtroom, a deputy killed, a getaway right out in public.”
“Yeah, Debbs, I remember. This is not Atlanta. We do not have a rapist going on trial here.”
“You have a shooter who is surrounded by an unarmed crowd,” Debbs said. “A desperate gunman who has already killed someone.”
“No one has been killed.”
“But if the law-abiding public had been armed in Atlanta, any one of them could have picked off that bastard before he ever got down the courthouse steps.”
Jake pressed the phone to his ear and turned away, holding his hand over his other ear. “I could have saved those lives,” Debbs said, his strident voice growing louder. “Maybe drawn my pistol right there in the courtroom the moment he tried to disarm the escorting deputy.”
Jake whirled around and spoke through gritted teeth. “The deputy wasn’t supposed to be armed. It was a breakdown in protocol right there. If the police had followed the rules, that rapist never would have gotten a gun.”
“Sheriff Hale,” Debbs voice sounded almost gentle, “I hope you aren’t depending on protocol to solve this crisis? You are short-handed. You need us.”
Jake stepped forward, and Debbs took a step back.
“Is that one of your men I see up on top of the administration building? You get him down and all three of you take your guns home. I’ll put you and your buddies in jail if you don’t get the hell out of here.”
“This gun is registered and their guns are registered, and we have a right to be any place we choose.” Debbs about-faced and left, maintaining more dignity than Jake felt he’d been able to hang onto. He closed his phone. The grandmother was gone.
Fred shrugged. “Tiffani, the granddaughter, showed up. I guess she was just skipping school. You try
ing to reach Judianne?”
“Why would I be calling her in the middle of all this?”
“Because she’s in there.” Fred was silent for a second as he and Jake stared at each other. “Curly said you told Judianne to go in there and negotiate?”
Jake grabbed Fred by the collar. “Shit for brains!”
“I’m sorry,” Fred squeaked.
“We don’t know what kind of kid that is. He could be a psychopath for all we know. A rapist.” Fred’s pale freckled face grew dark. Jake let him go and wiped his hand down his own face to dry the sweat. He took his gun out of the holster and ducked into the kitchen.
Judianne had been braiding her own hair to help wait out the minutes. She checked her Timex. “You know, it was a good idea to wait for Lena to get here and straighten everything out, but they just may keep her overnight. Or, knowing Cadillac General, she could still be in the waiting room. I agreed to wait another ten minutes for her to come back. But once time is up, you’re going to give me the gun, right? And I’m going to take it out to Jake. Raynelle, you’d better go with me so Jake and the mayor will know you’re okay.
Jake could see the pantry door straight ahead. He listened. He thought he picked up a faint smell of marijuana and felt an ounce of relief. How bad could this be? Keeping out of sight, he sidestepped along the front cafeteria wall, and, standing behind a curtain, checked things in the yard. From his years of counting crowds at football games he would put this bunch right about seven hundred. In a semi-circle behind the yellow tape, as far as he could see from side to side, people covered the yard and the field.
Jake held his breath and listened. In the gravel on the flat roof overhead, he heard footsteps and knew it was Reverend Pikestaff going up on the mountain to lead his flock, but he was surprised to hear the voice come over a bullhorn: “Let us pray.”
As the television lights bathed them, the crowd bowed their heads and raised their arms to Heaven. Reverend Pikestaff’s voice was deep and full for such a slight man, and his phrases rang out from Jake’s boyhood. “Rain down your everlasting mercy.”
And why the hell shouldn’t they pray. He’d completely lost control of this catastrophe. The deep voice of the preacher reminded him of his father’s friends—a solid rank of manhood that had awaited him while he grew up. But where were they today when he needed them? Dead or senile. Only Sloane Willard had survived with his brain and conscience intact. And now he was gone. Pikestaff was a leader. He’d built a gigantic church out there on the highway with closed circuit television to handle the overflow crowds, but he wasn’t a guy—not one to cover your back. The other minister, the one in gym shorts, was a solid man, but he had left half an hour ago to escort a fainting girl to the hospital. What a waste. Jake knew what had to be done, but he was not a weighty man like his father, a man others obeyed.
Cadillac, Oklahoma Page 17
