Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘And you’re not going to hurt them.’

‘Not if they just sit there. But I’m waiting for you, Grace, so you’d better come.’

‘Give me your number, Lucy, so I can call you and tell you where we are and what we’re doing. So you don’t think we’re not coming.’

Lucy read out the number which Harrigan wrote down.

‘Before we go, Lucy, how did you get my number here?’

‘Graeme gave it to me. He knows all about you, Grace. He showed me your picture. I just want to see if that really is you. I’ll see you soon.’

Grace hung up. The room stayed silent as people glanced at each other and waited for Harrigan to speak.

‘We need a negotiator to talk to her. As well as you, don’t we, Grace? The best we’ve got.’ He looked her in the eye, the memory of earlier conversations between them in both their minds at that moment. ‘We’ve got to try and talk you out of this if we can. We’d better hope we can. You’d better get ready to talk to her. Ian and Trev, in my office now. The rest of you, get yourselves ready to go.’

The crowd broke up.

‘Where are you going, Gracie?’ Ian asked, as Grace headed quickly for the exit.

‘I’m going to wash my face and change my blouse,’ she replied grimly. ‘If I’m going to get shot, I want to be wearing clean clothes.’

Harrigan was suddenly in front of her. People stopped to stare.

‘You do not say that, not for any reason, not even as a joke. Do you hear me? None of you are getting shot and that includes you. You take that back.’

‘It wasn’t a joke, Paul. But I didn’t say it anyway,’ she replied, shaken that he should be so angry about something which, for her, was just a way of coping with events way past the limit.

‘Good.’

He walked away, thinking he was glad that she had listened to him for once; others simply noted that she had called the boss by his first name.

In his office, he asked Ian and Trevor to wait while he made his first phone call. He was putting the essentials in place before he did anything else. Negotiators were all very well but sometimes there was no substitute for a reliable marksman or two.

He also had another job to do before he left along with everyone else. He went to Louise, who he had instructed to stay behind, and asked her to email his son.

‘Just tell him what’s going on,’ he said.

He didn’t want Toby to find out by accident through an Internet browser that the girl he thought he loved had been shot dead by police on a rainy morning in Camperdown.

Lucy listened as the sirens began to grow louder outside. She smiled and aimed her gun more directly at the preacher.

‘Listen to that, Graeme. And it’s all because I’ve got this. Nothing else would make anyone waste their time on me like that.’

He tried to shift forward to speak to her.

‘Don’t move!’ she snapped and he stopped where he was.

‘Lucy, listen to me. There’s nothing you can take out of this. If you put yourself in my hands, perhaps I can bargain for you. We can try and talk this through somehow.’

She smiled at him in reply.

‘No, Graeme. No way. You just sit there. The only thing I want you to do is keep your mouth shut. It’ll be nice not to hear you talk for a change.’

Briefly, the anger in the preacher’s face was greater than his fear.

Suddenly afraid herself, Lucy tightened her hand around her gun.

‘That’s who you are, isn’t it, Graeme,’ she said, ‘playing all those little games. No, not little games, all those big games. You want to know why I’m here? Because I’m going to deal with this in my own way from now on. I’m not hiding my face this time. You set this up.

This time, you can just sit there and be part of it.’

‘Do you want me to go to gaol with you, Lucy? Is that it?’ he said, taking just enough courage to speak.

She laughed. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen yet. I really don’t. It depends on all sorts of things. I’m not expecting that I’m going to walk out of here alive and I don’t care if I don’t. But you just sit there. Don’t talk, don’t say a word. Don’t even think anything. That goes for the rest of you as well.’

The others remained huddled against the wall, too frightened to think of moving. Bronwyn cried silently. The child began to cry softly as well, leaning against his mother, his voice echoing beneath the now quieter sound of the rain on the tin roof. Briefly, Lucy closed her eyes.

‘Keep him quiet,’ she said dangerously, her voice shaking and her hands squeezing on the gun.

The child was hushed. Lucy met Graeme’s eyes and thought, you don’t really give a shit for anyone, do you? No one. You don’t care about me.

I don’t know what you do care about, but it’s no one here. She did not say it. She put her free hand on her phone and waited for the call.

There was no such silence in the street outside, it was filled with activity. In the midst of the multitude of requirements this operation had

— including once again keeping the media at bay — Harrigan was fixed on two simpler items. The first was the line of leadlight windows in the upper storey of the hall that looked out along the laneway. The second was a small group of armed men wearing bulletproof vests over nondescript blue overalls who had finally arrived at the scene. When they drew up in their van, Harrigan resisted the urge to say, thanks for taking your time about it. They seemed to him to move with deliberate slowness.

They carried their high-powered rifles with the ease of practice.

‘Where do you want us? And what do you want us to do?’ the chief overall-wearer asked.

‘There’s two places I need you,’ Harrigan said. ‘We have to negotiate one of them first. But I’ve already started on the other. Just around here.’

He led the man down the narrow laneway where he had two officers on temporary scaffolding, checking the dark blue windows near the back of the building.

‘If we can get that window out without being noticed — which is a pretty big ask, I admit, but I’m going to see what we can do — I want one of you up there and ready to fire. The other place I want you is opposite the front door — in case I can get it open. You can deploy everyone else around the building. I want you to make sure the target does not use her gun. I want her neutralised. The last person who gets hurt is my officer. Is that clear enough?’

‘We can do that,’ came the slow reply. ‘Nice to have a challenge.

We’ll get set up.’

You do that, Harrigan thought as he walked away, don’t rush it too much now.

In the centre of a smaller crowd, Grace was having a sound device adjusted. She stood with the negotiator, a big woman with a little-girl blonde haircut and dressed in brightly coloured clothing too tight for her large frame. Grace spoke to Harrigan as soon as he appeared.

‘I should call her. She’ll be getting very edgy.’

He did not reply. He looked at his watch and then the negotiator.

‘I think we are pushing it,’ she said.

‘You’ve briefed my officer?’

‘I have.’

‘Okay, Grace, you can call her,’ Harrigan said.

Lucy answered the phone at once.

‘You took your fucking time, Grace,’ she said, angrily.

‘I’m here now, Lucy, I’m outside. So what do you want to do now?’

‘I want you to come inside.’

‘How are we going to do that?’

‘I open the door and you walk in.’

‘You open the door?’

‘Maybe not me. I’ll get someone else to do it. I’ve got just the person,’ Lucy said, looking at the child.

‘Lucy, before we do anything, I need to talk to you. Just to sort a few things out.’