April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

He had spent a lot of time at this, activating and reactivating his obsessions.

The ringing stopped.

My breath was coming fast and shallow. I told myself I was not alone. Culver City had witnessed the abduction and called for SWAT, which would first set a perimeter. They would soon have the house surrounded, although their positions would not be visible all the way around, giving the illusion of escape through the back. The snipers would maintain a low profile on the roofs.

Meanwhile, Culver City and LAPD would be huddling, trying to figure out what they were looking at. How many hostages? What do we know about this guy? It appeared they had the phone number and were trying to open a negotiation. Let’s hope the Bureau had gotten there by now with a six-hundred-page history of Ray Brennan and his alleged acts. That should tell them his ritual had been interrupted, he was in a panic, and the ringing would only agitate him more.

As desperately as I concentrated on what they would do, I hoped they were focusing on me. I hoped Galloway, or Rick, or someone was out there saying that despite recent events in her personal life, we have a trained negotiator inside with that piece of shit: we should trust that if she is alive, she will follow procedure, so let’s all play this by the books.

“How are we doing, sir? Is everything okay?”

“What do you think?” he asked sardonically.

“I don’t know, sir. You tell me.”

“I’m being torn to pieces.”

“You’re feeling torn apart?”

“—Yeah, now that you brought the whole miserable world with your stupid religious bullshit—”

“I’m sorry that happened. Is there anything I can do for you now?”

“Go away.”

“Let’s go together.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“Let’s walk out of here, right now. Nothing bad has happened yet.”

He sneered and picked at wood grains with the flashing point of the knife.

“Is that a KA-BAR knife?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You must be former marine.”

“I served my country. I love my country.”

“You love your country,” I mirrored approvingly. “You know what? I love my country, too. My name is Ana. What can I call you?”

“Me?” He looked incredulous, as if I had asked a different question. “This is my private property. I’m not the one violating someone’s private rights and busting into their own home with a bunch of cops.” There was a thump and a crash and breaking glass. Brennan and I both scrambled to our feet. The sound had come from the back of the house.

He got up on his toes and roared, “Stay away from me!” throat cords straining.

“It’s not them,” I said calmly. SWAT would not breech, not yet. “It’s not them! Listen.”

There was no more banging, just guttural inhuman sounds trying to get out of someone’s throat, then silence.

“Maybe we should check that out.”

“It’s the other one,” he said.

“You mean there is somebody else in the house?”

“There’s a girl. She’s back in the studio. I was going to kill her,” he stated flatly, “but she begged me to let her pray first.”

“I see. So there’s a girl back there, and she sounds pretty much okay, like nothing bad has happened yet. It doesn’t have to happen, sir—”

The phone again.

“—You can make it stop right now.”

But the phone wouldn’t stop. Brennan had shied away from it sideways, as if he were wired on something. Angel dust? Chain-smoking marijuana for eight days straight?

“It’s just the phone.”

Bridget was in one of those rooms, possibly dying on me. The only way I could help her was to keep in control of myself although I could feel the situation breaking loose and fragmenting with the metal-on-metal shriek of a nightmare out-of-control merry-go-round going tilt, beginning to lift up off its rotors.

“It’s just the phone,” I repeated. “You can answer it or not. You have the choice.”

Give it up! I thought-beamed to the negotiators outside. Brennan was in a state of acute stress, frozen still like a terrified animal.

My eye was on my leather purse, which had been thrown into a corner. Inside the purse was the cell phone. I took an unauthorized step toward the bag.

He lunged, I twisted, but he grabbed me around the waist. We wrestled into the hallway until he threw me down in a narrow kitchen — open cupboard doors and shelves littered with dry blown leaves and pebbles and white enameled cabinets streaked with rust. Again my head slammed. He got his hands around my throat. I surprised him with a quick release, knocking his arms apart, but did not kick or grab because I did not want him to feel attacked; he would overpower me in an instant with a mindless homicidal fury.

“No sir, don’t do it, I’m with the FBI.”

I scrambled toward the front room, he dug his fingers into my back, my waistband, I rolled and broke the hold, but then my strength was ebbing, something I had not imagined in fantasies of kung fuing through the air.

“I’m a federal agent, I can help you—”

I kept up evasive action as best I could, trying to get to the purse, writhing away by inches, dragged back, trying to get him to hear me.

“Sir! Don’t mess! I’m a federal agent, you’ll get the death penalty, I’m a federal agent —”

I must have said it, choked it, twenty times even as he climbed on top of me and put his thumbs on my eyes in some bullshit marine move, and I slammed his inner elbows so his torso fell on mine, his spit all over my face, and he reared up again and I saw myself dead on the floor in that putrefying kitchen with cockroaches swarming the drain, and my mind kept repeating, It’s only pain, and, The wisdom to know, the wisdom to know —until suddenly he stopped and said, “It’s no good.” Oh God, what was this? Was I saved because Ray Brennan could not get an erection? Could that be true? The same thing that happened with Juliana in the van? Saved? By some crazy, unbelievable irony? Saved, by impotence ?

It wasn’t that. It was crazier: “I just can’t hurt you if you’re going to fight.”

I waited, thoughts pinwheeling, breathing the breath of this stranger.

“Then can we … get up, please?”

He shifted off me and I hand-over-handed my way up the cabinets and would have vomited in the sink if it weren’t for the cockroaches.

I had reason to believe he had hit his upper limit and would now press the reset button and regain control. I knew a lot about Ray Brennan. Had this been an UNSUB I would have lost my urine when he pulled me through the door, but this was old home week, reuniting with the crazy brother whose psychotic breaks and hospitalizations you know so well. I just can’t hurt you. Unless you are drugged unconscious, or playing dead, like a doll … or really dead.

Juliana said: “He banged my head as if I were a doll.”

Sometime in there the phone had stopped ringing.

“This is what is going to happen,” I said in the stillness. “Sir? Do you hear my voice?”

He had retrieved the knife from where it was sticking upright in the floor.

And I had my leather bag.

“The negotiator wants to talk to you. That’s why they’re calling. His job is to get you out of here in one piece.”

I did not mention Bridget. This was Ray Brennan’s moment in the sun.

“They want to talk to you, sir. They know I’m in here. I’m one of them, and you know, because you’re former military, that we take care of our own. It comes down to this: if I’m not alive, you’re not alive.” Brennan had stopped his slow advance, knife in hand, and shook his head, as if shaking off a dream.