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2
Friday,3:24 P.M.
JEFF TALLEY
Two-point-one miles from York Estates, Jeff Talley was parked in an
avocado orchard, talking to his daughter on his cell phone, his command radio tuned to a whisper. He often left his office in the afternoon and came to this orchard, which he had discovered not long after he had taken the job as the chief of Bristo Camino’s
fourteen-member police department. Rows of trees, each tree the same as the last, each a measured distance from the next, standing without motion in the clean desert air like a chorus of silent witnesses. He found peace in the sameness of it.
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His daughter, Amanda, now fourteen, broke that peace.
“Why can’t I bring Derek with me? At least I would have
someone to hang with.”
Her voice reeked of coldness. He had called Amanda because
today was Friday; she would be coming up for the weekend.
“I thought we would go to a movie together.”
“We go to a movie every time I come up there. We can still go to
the movies. We’ll just bring Derek.”
“Maybe another time.”
“When?”
“Maybe next time. I don’t know.”
She made an exaggerated sigh that left him feeling defensive.
“Mandy? It’s okay if you bring friends. But I enjoy our alone
time, too. I want us to talk about things.”
“Mom wants to talk to you.”
“I love you.”
She didn’t answer.
“I love you, Amanda.”
“You always say you want to talk, but then we go sit in a movie
so we can’t talk. Here’s Mom.”
Jane Talley came on the line. They had separated five months
after he resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department, took up
residence on their couch, and stared at the television for twenty hours a
day until neither of them could take it anymore and he had moved out.
That was two years ago.
“Hey, Chief. She’s not in the greatest mood.”
“I know.”
“How you doing?”
Talley thought about it.
“She’s not liking me very much.”
“It’s hard for her right now. She’s fourteen.”
“I know.”
“She’s still trying to understand. Sometimes she’s fine with it,
but other times everything sweeps over her.”
“I try to talk to her.”
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He could hear the frustration in Jane’s voice, and his own.
“Jeffrey, you’ve been trying to talk for two years, but nothing
comes out. Just like that, you left and started a new life and we weren’t
a part of it. Now you have this new life up there and she’s making a new
life down here. You understand that, don’t you?”
Talley didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what to say.
Every day since he moved to Bristo Camino he told himself that he
would ask them to join him but he hadn’t been able to do it. He knew
that Jane had spent the past two years waiting for him. He thought that
if he asked right now she would come to him, but all he managed to do
was stare at the silent, immobile trees.
Finally, Jane had had enough of the silence.
“I don’t want to go on like this anymore, just being separated.
You and Mandy aren’t the only ones who need to make a life.”
“I know. I understand.”
“I’m not asking you to understand. I don’t care if you
understand.”
Her voice came out sharp and hurt, then both of them were
silent. Talley thought of her on the day they were married; against the
white country wedding gown, her skin had been golden.
Jane finally broke the silence, her voice resigned. She would
learn no more today than yesterday; her husband would offer nothing
new. Talley felt embarrassed and guilty.
“Do you want me to drop her at your house or at the office?”
“The house would be fine.”
“Six o’clock?”
“Six. We can have dinner, maybe.”
“I won’t be staying.”
When the phone went dead, Talley put it aside, and thought of
the dream. The dream was always the same, a small clapboard house
surrounded by a full SWAT tactical team, helicopters overhead, media
beyond the cordon. Talley was the primary negotiator, but the night-mare
reality of the dream left him standing in the open without cover or
protection while Jane and Amanda watched him from the cordon.
Talley was in a life-or-death negotiation with an unknown male subject
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who had barricaded himself in the house and was threatening suicide.
Over and over, the man screamed, “I’m going to do it! I’m going to do
it!” Talley talked him back from the brink each time, but, each time,
knew that the man had stepped closer to the edge. It was only a matter
of time. No one had seen this man. No neighbors or family had been
found to provide an ID. The subject would not reveal his name. He was
a voice behind walls to everyone except Talley, who knew with a
numbing dread that the man in the house was himself. He had become the
subject in the house, locked in time and frozen in place, negotiating
with himself to spare his own life.
In those first weeks, Brendan Malik’s eyes watched him from every
shadow. He saw the light in them die over and over, dimming like a
television with its plug pulled, the spark that had been Brendan Malik
growing smaller, falling away until it was gone. After a while, Talley felt
nothing, watching the dying eyes the same way he would watch Wheel
of Fortune: because it was there.
Talley resigned from the LAPD, then sat on his couch for almost
a year, first in his home and later in the cheap apartment he had rented
in Silver Lake after Jane threw him out. Talley told himself that he had
left his job and his family because he couldn’t stand having them
witness his own self-destruction, but after a while he grew to believe that
his reasons were simpler, and less noble: He believed that his former
life was killing him, and he was scared. The incorporated township
of Bristo Camino was looking for a chief of police for their fourteen-member
police force, and they were glad to have him. They liked it that
he was SWAT, even though the job was no more demanding than writing
traffic citations and speaking at local schools. He told himself that it
was a good place to heal. Jane had been willing to wait for the healing,
but the healing never quite seemed to happen. Talley believed that it
never would.
Talley started the car and eased off the hard-packed soil of the
orchard onto a gravel road, following it down to the state highway that
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ran the length of the Santa Clarita Valley. When he reached the high-way,
he turned up his radio and heard Sarah Weinman, the BCPD dispatch
officer, shouting frantically over the link.
“. . . Welch is down. We have a man down in York Estates . . .”
Other voices were crackling back at her, Officers Larry Anders
and Kenn Jorgenson talking over each other in a mad rush.
Talley punched the command freq button that linked him to dispatch
on a dedicated frequency.
“Sarah, one. What do you mean, Mike’s down?”
“Chief?”
“What about Mike?”
“He’s been shot. The paramedics from Sierra Rock Fire are on
the way. Jorgy and Larry are rolling from the east.”
In the nine months that Talley had been in Bristo, there had
been only three felonies, two for nonviolent burglaries and once when a
woman had tried to run down her husband with the family car.
“Are you saying that he was intentionally shot?”
“Junior Kim’s been shot, too! Three white males driving a red
Nissan pickup. Mike called in the truck, then called a forty-one four-teen
at one-eight Castle Way in York Estates, and the next thing I know
he said he’d been shot. I haven’t been able to raise him since then.”
Forty-one fourteen. Welch had intended to approach the
residence.
Talley punched the button that turned on his lights and siren.
York Estates was six minutes away.
“What’s the status of Mr. Kim?”
“Unknown at this time.”
“Do we have an ID on the suspects?”
“Not at this time.”
“I’m six out and rolling. Fill me in on the way.”
Talley had spent the last year believing that the day he became a
crisis negotiator for the Los Angeles Police Department had forever
changed his life for the worse.
His life was about to change again.
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| Robert Crais - Hostage |
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JENNIFER
Jennifer had never heard anything as loud as their guns; not the cherry
bombs that Thomas popped in their backyard or the crowd at the Forum when the Lakers slammed home a game-winning dunkenstein.
The gunfire in movies didn’t come close. When Mars and Dennis started shooting, the sound rocked through her head and deafened her.
Jennifer screamed. Dennis slammed the front door, pulled her
backwards to the office, then pushed her down. She grabbed Thomas
and held tight. Her father wrapped them in his arms. Layers of gun
smoke hung in shafts of light that burned through the shutters; the
smell of it stung her nose.
When the shooting was done, Dennis sucked air like a bellows,
stalking back and forth between the entry and office, his face white.
“We’re fucked! That cop is down!”
Mars went to the entry. He didn’t hurry or seem scared; he
strolled.
“Let’s get the car before more of them get here.”
Kevin was on the floor beside her father’s desk, shaking. His
face was milky.
“You shot a cop. You shot a cop, Dennis!”
Dennis grabbed his brother by the shirt.
“Didn’t you hear Mars? He was going for his gun!”
Jennifer heard a siren approaching behind the shouting. Then
Dennis heard it, too, and ran back to the windows.
“Oh, man, they’re coming!”
Jennifer’s father pulled her closer, almost as if he was trying to
squeeze her into himself.
“Take the keys and go. The keys are on the wall by the garage.
It’s a Jaguar. Take it while you still can.”
Dennis stared through the open shutters like prison bars,
watching
the street with fearful expectation. Jennifer wanted them to run, to
go, to get out of her life, but Dennis stood frozen at the windows as if he
was waiting for something.
Mars spoke from the entry, his voice as calm as still water.
“Let’s take the man’s car, Dennis. We have to go.”
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Then the siren suddenly seemed to be in the house, and it was too late. Tires screeched outside. Dennis ran to the front door. The
shooting started again.
TALLEY
York Estates was a walled development that had been named for the
legendary walled city of York in England, a village that was protected
from the world by a great stone wall. The developers built twenty-eight
homes on one- to three-acre sites in a pattern of winding streets and
cul-de-sacs with names like Lancelot Lane, Queen Anne Way, and King John Place, then surrounded it by a stone wall that was more
decorative than protective. Talley cut his siren as he entered from the
north, but kept the lights flashing. Jorgenson and Anders were shouting
that they were under fire. Talley heard the pop of a gunshot over the
radio.
When he turned into Castle Way, Talley saw Jorgenson and
Anders crouched behind their car with their weapons out. Two women
were in the open door of the house behind them and a teenaged boy
was standing near the cul-de-sac’s mouth. Talley hit the public address
key on his mike as he sped up the street.
“You people take cover. Get inside your homes!”
Jorgenson and Anders turned to watch him approach. The two
women looked confused and the boy stood without moving. Talley burped his siren, and shouted at them again.
“Get inside now! You people move!”
Talley hit the brakes hard, stopping behind Jorgenson’s unit.
Two shots pinged from the house, one snapping past overhead, the
other thumping dully into Talley’s windshield. He rolled out the door
and pulled himself into a tight ball behind the front wheel, using the
hub as cover. Mike Welch lay crumpled on the front lawn of a large
Tudor home less than forty feet away.
Anders shouted, “Welch is down! They shot him!”
“Are all three subjects inside?”
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| Robert Crais - Hostage |
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“I don’t know! We haven’t seen anyone!”
“Are civilians in the house?”
“I don’t know!”
More sirens were coming from the east. Talley knew that would
be Dreyer and Mikkelson in unit six with the ambulance. The shooting
had stopped, but he could hear shouts and screaming inside the house.
He flattened on the street and called to Welch from under the car.
“Mike! Can you hear me?”
Welch didn’t respond.
Anders shouted, his voice frantic.
“I think he’s dead!”
“Calm down, Larry. I can hear you.”
Talley had to take in the scene and make decisions without
knowing who or what he was dealing with. Welch was in the middle of
the front lawn, unmoving and unprotected. Talley had to act.
“Does this house back up on Flanders Road?”
“Yes, sir. The truck is right on the other side of the wall that runs
behind the house, that red Nissan! It’s the suspects who hit Kim’s.”
The sirens were closer. Talley had to assume that innocents were
inside. He had to assume that Mike Welch was alive. He keyed his
transceiver mike.
“Six, one. Who’s on?”
Dreyer’s voice came back.
“It’s Dreyer, Chief. We’re one minute out.”
“Where’s the ambulance?”
“Right behind us.”
“Okay. You guys set up on Flanders by the truck in case these
guys go back over the wall. Send the ambulance in, but tell them to
wait at Castle and Tower. I’ll bring Welch to them.”
Talley broke the connection, then pushed himself up to a crouch.
“Larry, did you guys fire on the house?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stay down. Don’t fire at the house.”
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Talley climbed back into his car, keeping his head low and the driver’s door open. He backed up, then powered into the yard,
maneuvering to a stop between Welch and the house to use the car as a shield.
Another shot popped the passenger-side window. He rolled out of the
car almost on top of Welch. Talley opened the rear door, then dragged
Welch to the car. It was like lifting two hundred pounds of deadweight,
but Welch moaned. He was alive. Talley propped him upright in the
open door, then lifted for all he was worth to fold Welch onto the
backseat. He slammed the door, then saw Welch’s gun on the grass. He went
back for it. He returned to the car and floored the accelerator,
fishtailing across the slick grass as he cut across the yard and into the street.
He sped back along the cul-de-sac to the corner where the ambulance
was waiting. Two paramedics pulled Welch from the rear and pushed a
compress onto his chest. Talley didn’t ask if Welch would make it. He
knew from experience that they wouldn’t know.
Talley stared down the length of the cul-de-sac and felt himself
tremble. The first flush of panic was passing, and now he had time to
think. Now he had time to acknowledge that what was happening here
was what had cost him so much in Los Angeles. A hostage situation
was developing. His mouth went dry and something sour flushed in his
throat that threatened to make him retch. He keyed the mike again to
call his dispatcher. He had exactly four units on duty and another five
officers off. He would need them all.
“Chief, I pulled Dreyer and Mikkelson off the minimart. We’ve
got no one on the scene now. It’s totally unsecured.”
“Call the CHP and the Sheriffs. Tell them what’s going on and
request a full crisis team. Tell them we’ve got two men down and we
have a possible hostage situation.”
Talley’s eyes filled when he realized that he had used that word.
Hostage.
He remembered Welch’s gun. He sniffed the muzzle, then
checked the magazine. Welch had returned fire, which meant that he
might have wounded someone in the house. Maybe even an innocent.
He shut his eyes hard and keyed the mike again.
“Tell them to hurry.”
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JENNIFER
Jennifer whispered, “Daddy.”
Her father held her head, whispered back.
“Shh.”
They snuggled closer. Jennifer thought her father might be
trying to pull them through the floor, that if he could just make the three
of them small enough they would disappear. She watched Mars peering
through the shutters, his wide back hunched like an enormous swollen
toad. When Mars glanced back at them, he looked high.
Kevin threw a TV Guide at him.
“What’s wrong with you? Why’d you start shooting?”
“To keep them away.”
“We could’ve gotten out the back!”
Dennis jerked Kevin toward the entry.
“Get it together, Kev. They found the truck. They’re already
behind us.”
“This is bullshit, Dennis! We should give up!”
Jennifer wanted them to run. She wanted them to get away, if
that’s what it took; she wanted them out.
The words boiled out of her before she could stop them.
“We don’t want you here!”
Her father squeezed her, his voice soft.
“Be quiet.”
Jennifer couldn’t stop.
“You have no right to be here! No one invited you!”
Her father pulled her closer.
Dennis jabbed a finger at her.
“Shut up, bitch!”
He turned and shoved his brother into the wall so hard that
Jennifer flinched.
“Stop it, Kevin! Go through the house and lock all the windows.
Lock the doors, then watch the backyard. They’re gonna come over that
wall just like we did.”
Kevin seemed confused.
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“Why don’t we just give up, Dennis? We’re caught.”
“It’s going to be dark in a few hours. Things will change when it
gets dark. Go do it, Kev. We’re going to get out of this. We will.”
Jennifer felt her father sigh before he spoke. He slowly pushed
to his knees.
“None of you are going to get out of this.”
Dennis said, “Shut the fuck up. Go on, Kevin. Watch the back.”
Kevin disappeared toward the rear through the entry.
Her father stood. Both Dennis and Mars aimed their guns at him.
Jennifer pulled at his legs.
“Daddy! Don’t!”
Her father raised his hands.
“It’s okay, sweetie. I’m not going to do anything. I just want to go
to my desk.”
Dennis extended his gun.
“Are you fuckin’ nuts?! You’re not going anywhere!”
“Just take it easy, son.”
“Daddy, don’t!”
Her father seemed to be moving in a dream. She wanted to stop
him, but she couldn’t. She wanted to say something, but nothing came
out. He walked stiffly, as if he was prepared to take a punch. It was as
if this man in the dream wasn’t her father, but someone she had never
before seen.
He went behind his desk, carefully placing two computer disks in
a black leather disk case as he spoke. Dennis followed along beside him,
shouting for him to stop, shouting that he shouldn’t take another step,
and pointing the gun at his head. Dennis looked as scared as she felt.
“I’m warning you, goddamnit!”
“I’m going to open my desk.”
“I’ll fuckin’ kill you!”
“Daddy, please!!!”
Jennifer’s father held up a single finger as if to show them that
one tiny finger could do them no harm, then used it to slide open the
drawer. He nodded toward the drawer, as if to show Dennis that nothing
would hurt him. Her father took out a thick booklet.
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“This is a list of every criminal lawyer in California. If you give
up right now, I’ll help you get the best lawyer in the state.”
Dennis slapped the book aside.
“Fuck you! We just killed a cop! We killed that Chinaman! We’ll
get the fuckin’ death penalty!”
“I’m telling you that you won’t, not if you let me help you. But if
you stay in this house, I can promise you this: You’ll die.”
“Shut up!”
Dennis swung his gun hard and hit her father in the temple with
a wet thud. He fell sideways like a sack that had been dropped to the
floor.
“No!”
Jennifer lunged forward. She pushed Dennis before she realized
what she was doing.
“Leave him alone!”
She shoved Dennis back, then dropped to her knees beside her
father. The gun had cut an ugly gouge behind his right eye at the hair-line.
The gouge pulsed blood, and was already swelling.
“Daddy? Daddy, wake up!”
He didn’t respond.
“Daddy, please!”
Her father’s eyes danced insanely beneath the lids as his body
trembled.
“Daddy!”
Tears blurred her eyes as unseen hands lifted her away.
The nightmare had begun.
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