Ed McBain - Widows

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for pale moonlight; someone had knocked out the street lamp. The walkway was covered with gravel.

They'd have preferred sand or snow or even mud; the goddamn gravel went off like firecrackers under their feet. They moved up the walk two abreast, swiftly, silently except for the crunching of the gravel, wincing at each rattle of stone, heading in a straight line for that blue front door. Wade and Carella had just gained the porch steps when the shots came.

They went flying off the steps like startled bats, throwing themselves into the low bushes on either side, one to the left, one to the right, three more shots on the right, the Lone Ranger and Tonto hurling themselves off the path and rolling away onto the patchy lawn, bracing themselves for whatever might come next.

The next shot came almost at once, but this time they saw where it was coming from, a yellow flash in one of the pitch-black windows on the left-hand side of the porch, followed by the immediate roar of a high-powered pistol slamming slugs into the night, and then yellow and bam, and yellow and bam, and four and five - and silence again.

Either Dolly had been wrong about which room she and her pals were renting, or Sonny and Diz had moved downstairs to another room.

That's what they were thinking.

It never crossed their minds that Dolly might have -

"Don't shoot!" she yelled. "They got me in here!"

"Shit," Wade said.

Three minutes into the job and they already had a hostage situation.

The people from the nearby project all came out to watch the Late Night Show. This was either Die Hard or Die Harder on a summer's night at the very top of August. Except that this wasn't a high rise in LA or an airport in DC. What this was here was a shitty little house scheduled for the bulldozer to make room for another project exactly like the one these people lived in. And there weren't thousands of trapped

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airport people involved here or even hundreds of trapped skyscraper people, there were only two punks from the nation's capital - which had the highest per capita murder rate in the entire world - and a sixteen-year-old hostage who happened to be both a Cemetery Row hooker and a certified crackhead. Whose life was at stake. Carella knew that. Dolly Simms hadn't killed his father. Sonny Cole and Diz Whittaker, acting in concert, had done that. But because Dolly was in there now with the two killers - how the hell had she managed to get herself in there, damn it! - the police couldn't just go in and bust up the place.

It was amazing how the crowd grew. This might turn out to be merely Little House on the Prairie, but who could tell? Meanwhile, it was better being out here on the street, where there was at least the semblance of a breeze, than inside a sweltering brick tower eighteen stories high. By one o'clock that morning of the first day of August, the house was surrounded on all four sides and police barricades had been thrown up in a haphazard rectangle in a vain attempt to keep some order among the spectators. Both Emergency Service trucks were on the scene, and there were some three dozen blue-and-white patrol cars arranged like war chariots around the besieged building, with uniformed cops and detectives behind each car. A generator had been set up and spotlights illuminated all four sides of the house, but particularly the front of it, where Inspector Brady's fourth hostage negotiator crouched low behind the bushes lining the porch and tried to talk to either of the two men inside the room. Brady had used up three negotiators so far. The first two had almost had their heads blown off. None of them had dared venture onto the porch.

Dolly Simms sat in one of the windows, staring straight out at the glaring lights.

She was all you could see.

The two men were deep inside the room, far from the window.

Getting them to the window would be the first job.

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It was Dolly who kept telling the negotiators that nobody * better start shooting. She didn't look scared at all. One of the negotiators reported that she seemed stoned - which was not a surprise.

The Preacher was in the streets already, doing what he did best, doing in fact the only thing he knew how to do, which was to agitate people into a frenzy. Pacing behind the barricades, long hair slicked back, gold chains gleaming in the reflected light of the spots, bullhorn in hand, he kept telling the crowd that whenever a white girl yelled rape, then the nearest African-American males were always accused of it ...

"But take a pure innocent young virgin like Tawana Braw-ley, who gets raped by a screaming mob of white men who then scrawl the word nigger ..."

Yuh, yuh, from the handful of men in dark suits and red ties standing behind him.

"... on her body, scrawl this word in excrement on her young violated body, and of course the white system of justice finds these rapists and bigots innocent of any crime and labels young Tawana a liar and a whore!"

The police could hardly hear themselves talking over the blare of the bullhorn.

"Well, brothers and sisters, what we've got in there tonight is a true whore, a bona fide and verified one-hundred-percent white purveyor of flesh who has enticed two young African-American brothers into a situation not of their own making! And that is why we have the whole mighty police force of this great city out here tonight, that is why we have this circus out here tonight, it is to once again persecute and pillory the youth of male black America!"

Young kids bobbed in and out of television-camera range, angling for a shot, big grins on their faces, this was the big chance to be on tee-vee, wow, see myself on the news tomorrow morning. The Preacher had been right in that respect, there was a circus atmosphere out here tonight, but not because anyone wanted to see a pair of killers safely apprehended. Instead, the air was charged with an excitement

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akin to what might have been felt in the Roman arena where nobody had a chance but the lions. Nobody in these mean streets believed that anybody in that building was coming out of there alive, not with the cops lined up out here like an army. Black or white, whoever was in there was already dead meat, that's what all these people in the streets were thinking, whatever their color or religion, whatever their stripe or persuasion. The only pertinent question was when it was going to happen. And so, like Roman spectators waiting for a lion or a tiger to bite off someone's arm or preferably his head, the crowd milled about patiently behind the sawhorses, hoping to be in on the moment of the kill, hoping to see all those fake die hard/die harder fireworks erupting here in real life on their tired tawdry turf. Hardly anybody was listening to The Preacher ranting and raving except the guys in the suits and red ties who stood behind him yuh-yuhing his every word. Everyone's eyes were on the woman crouched in the bushes, talking to the girl with the purple hair who sat in the window with the glare of the spotlights on her.

The problem here was that nobody could establish contact with the takers. There was no telephone in the room, and so the police couldn't ask the phone company to seize the line and give them control of it, which would have allowed them -and them alone - to talk with either Sonny or Diz or whoever was calling the tune in there. The further problem was that this was what the hostage team called a two-and-one, which meant there were two takers and only one hostage, which was a hell of a lot better than a four-and-twelve, but which still meant you were dealing with group dynamics, however small the group. Nobody knew who was in charge inside that house. Dolly had told Wade and Bent that Diz was the brains of the outfit, a supposition belied by his nickname, which they guessed was short for Dizzy. But since neither of the two were willing to talk to anyone, the negotiators had no idea who was running the show. A gun - or perhaps several guns - had so far done all the talking, with shots ringing out from somewhere deep in the room whenever a negotiator so much as lifted his