by Dana Marton
She ducked down outside the front door, opened it a crack, held her badge up so whoever was inside could see.
“I’m Bree Tridle, deputy sheriff. I’m here to give you whatever it is you need.”
“Too late,” came the response from inside—an older male, judging by the tone. He sounded raspy, maybe a smoker.
She didn’t recognize the voice, and couldn’t see inside very well through the UV-protection film that covered the glass. All she could make out were shapes.
“How about I come in so we can talk about this?”
“No.”
“I can help.”
“Can you help me get justice?”
Oh, damn. One of those. Why couldn’t it have been over something easy, like money? Justice was a very subjective thing.
“Is killing innocent people justice? Women and children in there?” She could make out two smaller shapes, she thought. Might be kids clinging to their mother.
A moment of silence passed. “Why should I care about them? Nobody cares about me.”
“I do. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Let them go. We’ll trade. Me and whatever I can do to help, for them. I’m a cop. I signed up for this. Those people in there didn’t. One injustice won’t erase another.” Whatever it was he thought had been done to him.
More silence stretched between them.
“Those people can’t do anything. They can’t order anyone to do anything. They have no contacts. No power. I do. I’m the deputy sheriff.”
“No trade.” His voice shook a little this time. He was getting frustrated.
Okay, no time to waste.
“Then just let me come in. You’ll have one more hostage.”
And, after an interminable moment, the man said, “Fine.” He cleared his throat. “You come in, hands in the air. Leave your gun outside. I see a weapon and we all go to Jesus today.”
“Forget her,” Jamie called out a foot behind her, scaring the living daylights out of her. How on earth had he snuck up on her? “You don’t want a woman in there who’ll faint in panic at the first thing that goes wrong. I’m coming in to help. Unarmed.”
She shot him a death glare and whispered, “Go away.” She could have killed him. They were in the middle of a hostage situation. This was no time for meddling.
“Who the hell are you?” the man inside wanted to know.
“Jamie Cassidy. I work for the United States Government. I can get you things you’ll never get from a small-town deputy.”
Oh, no, he didn’t. Did he just disparage both her sex and her position within the space of a minute? She sent him a Texas death glare.
“Both of you, inside!” the man ordered. “Hands high above your heads.”
She turned back to the bank, pulled her weapon from the holster and dropped it on the ground, pushed the door open wide enough to step inside and tried to kick Jamie backward but missed. “We’re so going to talk about this,” she said under her breath, in a hiss.
He pushed in after her anyway.
In the middle of the main area of the bank, in front of the teller booths, an old man sat in a wheelchair, holding a panicked woman in her twenties in front of him, a handgun pointed at her.
Her eyes wide, her face pale, she looked to Jamie instead of Bree. “Help me!” Her high-pitched voice echoed under the extrahigh, ornately decorated ceiling.
The old man shook her to quiet her. “Untuck your shirts, pull them up and turn around in a slow circle,” he ordered in his raspy voice.
Behind him, about a dozen civilians lay face down on the pink marble floor, hands over their heads. Bree sincerely hoped none of them carried concealed weapons and had a mind to start trouble. An amateur shootout was the last thing she needed.
Then again, if someone did have a weapon, they would have probably done something by now.
“Everything is going to be okay,” she said to the man with the gun, as much to as the hostages, as she reached for the hem of her shirt.
Jamie did the same, showing off the fact that he’d come in unarmed.
“You should let these people go,” Bree said as she tugged her shirt back down. “Whatever complaint you have, I’m sure it has nothing to do with anybody here.”
The man watched her for a long moment, exhaustion and desperation in his eyes. He might have thought about what he was going to do here today, but reality was always different. She hoped he was beginning to see at last that this wasn’t his best idea.
“Listen. Why don’t we just end this now, peacefully, before anybody makes any mistakes? Everybody’s scared and tense. But honestly, nobody’s hurt.” She flashed an encouraging smile. “This is a damn good place to quit.”
“You go over there.” The man gestured toward the corner with his head, appearing not the least touched by her plea and sound reasoning.
She did as she was asked, and so did Jamie. They slid to the floor next to each other, kept their backs to the wall. The old man in the middle swung the gun to point it at Bree, but he still hung on to the young woman with his other hand, ignoring her whimpering.
Bree stayed as relaxed as she could under the circumstances and prayed that Jamie would put aside his macho commando instincts for a minute, stay still and not do anything stupid.
Don’t escalate. She glanced at him, trying to send him the telepathic message, hoping he got something from the look in her eyes before she turned back to the man in the wheelchair.
“I’m Bree Tridle, as I said, and this is Jamie Cassidy,” she added, very nicely. “Would you mind if I asked your name?”
“Antonio Rivera.”
She drew a slow breath. Like Angel Rivera? What were the chances it was a coincidence? Very slim.
“You took my son away from me,” he yelled at her weakly. “You shot him.”
Connection confirmed. Now what? How could she use this to her advantage?
“Only just barely,” she said. “Flesh wound. And he shot at me first. He’ll be fine.” She widened her smile and did her level best to look positive.
“He’ll be in jail. His brother is already in jail. What do I have left?”
She had no idea. No wife, she guessed, and scrambled to come up with something.
“Bank’s taking the house,” the man went on, his face darkening. He adjusted his grip on the gun.
“I’m sorry. Maybe I can work something out with the manager. Do you know Cindy Myers? She sure has a lot of pull at this place. She’s very nice, actually. She has two boys, too. Younger than yours. We went to high school together. She’ll help you if she can. She’s very good that way.”
The old man spat on the polished marble floor. “You’re just saying that so I let everyone go. I ain’t stupid.”
“You’re holding an entire bank hostage. I know you can figure things out,” she said to placate him, while she tried to see what kind of bomb he had.
She spied half a dozen sticks of dynamite. They weren’t difficult to come by, unfortunately. Ranchers used them for all kinds of things, including clearing large boulders from their fields.
However, she couldn’t see what kind of setup he had under the duct tape that ran around his chest, holding everything in place. She had no idea what he was using for the trigger mechanism, and no idea what to do even if she could spot it, honestly.
She glanced at Jamie, hoping he was catching more than she was, maybe even working on a plan. They sure could have used one of those. She had no idea whether the SWAT team had arrived yet or when they were coming.
The young woman Antonio held was trembling.
“And what’s your name?” Bree asked. Making Antonio realize that she was a real person with a name, somebody’s daughter, might help somewhat.
“Melanie.”
“Do you have anybody from your family here?” Bree pushed further.
Melanie shook her head and began to cry.
“Shut up,” Antonio barked at them.
She couldn’t do that, Bree thought, s
o she took a gamble. “What happened to your legs?”
He might get mad, or he might start talking. Either way, it would gain her time until reinforcements got there.
“What’s it to you?” He glared at her, but then he said, “Wire mill.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.” She acknowledged him and his troubles. “But you came through it. You’ll come through this. Your sons will get out of prison. I’ll help you find housing if we can’t talk sense into the bank. There’s always help available.”
“I don’t want help,” he said darkly. “I just want this to be over with.”
The way he said that, the tone of his voice, the bleak look in his eyes, troubled her. Because she knew he meant it. His coming here had never been about getting the bank to change their minds. This was suicide, pure and simple. He just didn’t want to go alone.
She drew a slow breath, trying desperately to think of a way out of this, something, anything she could say or do so the standoff didn’t end with a bunch of mangled bodies.
“Do you want to speak to Angel? I could probably get him on the phone.” She had Agent Herrera’s number. “You tell him to cooperate. I’ll do anything I can so that he gets a fair deal. Maybe even a reduced sentence.”
“Too late.” His voice was cold with determination, as bleak as his face.
Melanie sobbed out loud. Some of the hostages squeezed their eyes shut; others stared wide-eyed. A middle-age man was hyperventilating. There was a new kind of tension in the air and they all knew it.
At least there weren’t any kids in the bank. She’d been mistaken about that, thank heavens.
But they were out of time.
Jamie shifted next to her.
No, no, no. Her gaze went to him.
He probably had a hidden backup weapon somewhere on him. He would go for it, then Antonio would set off the bomb, for sure, and they would all die.
* * *
EVERYTHING HE WAS pushed him to attack. He’d been trained to charge forward and take down the enemy. He was a warrior. He’d been trained to fight with guns and explosives. His brain and body were weapons.
Jamie shifted again, looking for an angle, a split-second opportunity.
But if he tackled Antonio, the man would set off the bomb. Bree and Jamie were sitting the closest. They’d be toast, for sure. He wasn’t as worried about himself, especially if he thought a move like that might save the hostages, but he wasn’t willing to risk harm coming to Bree.
“Let me tell you something,” he began, and couldn’t believe he was talking. It didn’t feel even half-right. He was a soldier. He’d been rough and tough pretty much from the beginning and, all right, fine, he might even have been overcompensating a little since he’d been cleared for active duty again.
He didn’t have a softer side. For him, to show softness meant to show weakness, which was the dead-last thing he wanted to show, wanted to be.
And yet when Bree’s life was at stake...
His usual M.O. of pushing harder wasn’t going to work here.
“None of us are here because we want to be,” he said. “I’m guessing you’d be doing something a little more fun if you had other choices.”
The man glared at him.
Not exactly progress but, hey, they were still alive.
“Between the three of us, we should be able to figure a way out of this,” he said, even as part of him was still looking for the man’s weak spot, a way to rush him.
* * *
SHE SAW HOW he was looking at Antonio Rivera. Bree was pretty sure Jamie would attack, and soon. She wanted to warn him not to, but he wouldn’t look at her, and she couldn’t say anything out loud for fear of setting off Antonio.
But instead of making his move, Jamie kept talking, his voice low and calm. “I know what you mean. I’ve been where you are now. Hell of a place.”
Other than his words, there was dead silence in the bank, the hostages pretty much knowing this was a Hail Mary effort.
Antonio shot him an angry look. “You haven’t. So shut up.”
“All right. I’ll shut up.” He raised his hands into the air, then pushed to his feet slowly. “But let me show you something.”
She held her breath, along with the rest of the hostages.
Antonio moved his gun to point at Jamie’s chest.
Slowly, carefully, Jamie reached to his belt, unbuckled it, then unbuttoned and unzipped his pants and let them drop to his ankles.
Antonio stared, along with pretty much everybody.
Jamie’s shirt came down to the edge of his boxer shorts, but left the end of his stumps in open view, the skin puckered, white and red scars crisscrossing his skin. For the first time, she got a good look at the straps that held his prosthetics in place.
A couple of women gasped.
She very nearly did, too. Seeing both the living parts and the metal somehow made the sight starker than when she’d rolled up his pant legs before and had seen only the prosthetics. Those were somehow sterile, removed, cold metal. But his scars, the terrible destruction of his living flesh... She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“I didn’t want to live,” Jamie said in a low voice. “At the field hospital, I begged them to let me die. When they didn’t, I promised myself I’d take care of it as soon as I recovered enough and had the strength.”
Antonio listened.
“You get to this dark place,” Jamie went on. “And it’s bad. When you’re there, it doesn’t seem possible that things will ever get better again. It’s like the life outside, the things other people do and see, that’s not real. You almost don’t even see it.”
The hostages watched him silently, barely daring even to breathe.
“Like when you’re over there, in the mountains for years on end, people shooting at you, you killing, blood every day. Every day one of your buddies gets blown to pieces. And it seems like that’s the only world. Like back here, this was just a dream, the houses and the family and the rain, the banks and the malls and teenagers who go shopping. It’s a dream or a fantasy. It doesn’t exist. Not to you.”
Antonio still pointed the gun at him, but his arm sagged a little.
“Thing is—” Jamie bent slowly and pulled his pants up, buckled his belt “—the other world...it’s there. It’s real. And the people in it hurt when you leave them.”
“Ain’t nobody will hurt for me,” Antonio said, but his voice wasn’t as hard as before.
“Your sons will,” Bree put in, talking around the lump in her throat, thinking about Jamie’s seven brothers and the sister he would have left behind if he’d been a weaker man and taken the easy way out. “They cared enough about you to take care of you. They’ll hurt.”
She drew a slow breath. “And all the families of all the people in here. They are going to hurt and they are going to grieve. People in here have fathers and mothers and kids. They didn’t get to say goodbye. Don’t make them go through this.”
Then everything happened at the same time. Antonio shoved the young woman away from him so he had use of both hands.
Jamie dove for him, but he was too late.
Chapter Twelve
The man blew his own head off a split second before Jamie reached him. As the hostages screamed, all he could do was secure the bomb.
He ignored the blood and gore and the crying and focused on the mechanism. No timer. He looked over the manual control with a flip switch—clearly a home-made job, but with enough of a punch to take out most of the building.
Thing was, as primitively as it was put together, he couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t go off if someone tried to move Antonio. Or if the man’s lifeless body slid out of the wheelchair. So he kept working on it as a SWAT team rushed in and spread through the bank, a dozen men dressed in black, holding assault rifles, shouting.
“Everybody down! Everybody down!”
Some of the hostages had leaped to their feet when Antonio had discharged his gun but n
ow flattened themselves to the marble floor once again.
Bree stayed where she was, her hands in the air. “It’s okay. Everything’s under control. I’m the deputy sheriff. My badge is in my left back pocket.”
One of the men checked it for her. “She’s okay.”
She lowered her hands. “This is Jamie Cassidy. CBP consultant, explosives specialist. He came in with me.”
“Status?” the team leader asked.
“One perpetrator. Antonio Rivera. Self-terminated.”
“The bomb is still active,” Jamie put in as one of the SWAT members rushed over to him, probably their bomb expert. “Simple trigger mechanism. It’s a pretty shoddy job. You need to get these people out of here.”
The guy checked out the sticks of dynamite and twisted jumble of wires as the rest of his team jumped into action, helping the hostages up and rushing them toward the exit.
“Want to take over?” Jamie offered.
The guy shook his head. “You’ve got your hand on the wire. Go ahead.”
That was pretty much standard operating procedure. The chances of success went up exponentially if the man who started a disarming op was the one who finished it. It wasn’t something easily handed over midrace.
He focused on the wires, tracing each to their connections, careful not to set off the trigger. The SWAT guy held Antonio in place, making sure the body wouldn’t flop.
“All right. Okay. Almost there.”
Then, finally, the last wire was detached.
By that time, there were only three people inside: Bree, Jamie and the man helping him. The SWAT team had cleared the building.
“Well done,” the bomb expert said, putting the explosives into the safe box someone had dropped off at some point. “I’ll take it from here.” He walked away with his precarious charge in his arms.
For the moment, until someone came for the body, Jamie and Bree were alone. They walked away from Antonio, but didn’t step outside. Press waited out there, cameras flashing, the news team recording everything. The last thing he needed was his picture on TV. He was an undercover operative.
Bree’s eyes were haunted, her face grim as she glanced back at the prone body. “He didn’t have to die.”
