April Smith: Good Morning, Killer

“They wouldn’t let you see your sister?”

He shook his head. Hard-asses. They had probably admonished him for breaking contact. Tried to reestablish the rules. I was hungry and my head was throbbing. In despair, I could only support the choices they had made.

“That’s it, then. They’re not going anywhere. As long as we’re here, they’re here.”

“You told me to tell them what I want.”

“Yes, but you have to give them something in exchange.”

“You see, it’s all a stupid game, like Russia and the United States.”

“What’s going on with Bridget?”

She was awake but not moving. Pink froth gathered at her mouth.

“She’ll be paralyzed for a little bit longer,” he said, kicking her leg. “Then she’ll be fine.”

“The difference between you playing their game or not,” I said quickly, to distract him, “is you on death row, or not.”

Bridget had begun to moan.

“I love my sister.”

“Let me talk to them. I want to tell them what an exceptional job you’ve done in keeping everyone safe.”

He looked up with sad eyes, meant to uncork my sympathy. If you had met Ray Brennan on the street, your heart would have been touched by his core loneliness.

“My sister understands. She forgives my sins.”

“Right,” I stuttered, imagining what role his sister had played — or been forced to play — in this tragic madness. “She knows who you are.” I tried to wet my lips. “You’re a good person who … who … I don’t know, sir, but something happened … Something really bad … But it happens to all of us, in some way. Did you know that?” Big fat tears of humiliation and exhaustion had escaped and were rolling down my face. If I could crawl over to where he was sitting in the other metal chair and embrace him, he would stab me in the heart.

“—It happens to us all.”

“Like you and your boyfriend?”

“Me and Andrew,” I confessed.

“Andrew.” His lips began to quiver as if I had held out a sweet. “You miss him?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t you who did it.”

“No,” I said, and he agreed: it wasn’t him who did things, either.

He watched me, with bright and curious eyes.

“Do you think,” he asked, after a moment, “God forgives everybody?”

I sniffed and wiped my nose on my shoulder.

“Yes,” I said, “yes I do, and I think, sir, that now we’re really friends, okay? Because you and I have been to places none of these other people are going to see … So let’s help each other out, as friends.”

His eyes, behind the oval lenses, still held the question.

“Yes,” I declared with all my soul, “ God forgives you, but you have to ask. You have to show God you’re sorry. I know you’re sorry, so — let’s show him. Let’s walk out of here … like you know your sister would want you to do.” “I have work,” he said uncertainly.

“Let’s help each other out. Let’s go now. God is listening.”

“How long will I be in prison?”

“Um, well, you’ll have to accept some responsibility for your actions, sir, but I know the judge is going to be lenient when he sees how serious you are about making this right.”

Docile and repentant now, he freed my hands and helped me rise stiffly from the chair.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have done that to you. I’m sorry for my crimes.”

“You’re doing the right thing, sir. I’m proud of you, I am. We’re all going to walk out of here. I’m going to call them on the phone and tell them. Then we’re going to walk out the door. There’ll be a couple of guys right outside who will tell us what to do and where to go. Okay? We just do what they tell us. Are you with me?” “Let’s do it,” he said with a lift of the chin.

“Put your weapons down, sir. Place them down on the floor, over there, away from the girl.”

Brennan squatted and laid the KA-BAR knife and pistol on the ground.

“Thank you, sir. Now back away, please.”

He did, and I snatched up the weapons, light-headed and delirious with a sudden total body rush.

“They’ll shoot me.”

“They won’t shoot you because we’re going to do everything slow and easy. How’re you feeling?”

“Weird.”

“That’s okay. It’s all pretty weird when you think about it.”

I tried not to hurry as he shuffled ahead to the front room. When I picked up the heavy receiver of the old black phone the primary negotiator was right on the line.

“Is the suspect armed?”

“Negative. He’s here with me, by the front door. I’m telling him that we appreciate the fact he’s going to surrender,” I said over the phone, “and I told him there will be some people out there by the front door—” Then he turned and sprinted back down the hall.

I screamed, “RAY!” and fired clumsily, and missed.

The front door flew out, ripped off its hinges by a cable that had been strung between the doorknob and the winch of a truck lurching backward on command. I kept out of the way as our tactical SWAT team, like Ninjas from hell in their Danner boots and black Nomex flight suits, and black balaclavas that secret the face, armed with H&K MP5s and Springfield 1911.45s, batons and wicked knives, blew past the uncleared doorways in a hostage rescue speed assault to the hot spot which they knew, from my description, was the studio, in back on the north side. At the same time a second team charged through the brittle blacked-in windows with an implosion of splintered sashes and flying glass, dominating the house from both directions, and the air was filled with concussive flash-bangs set off to disorient the subject, and then screaming— “Drop the knife!” —and he did, a hair’s-breadth nanosecond before he would have been such a pouffy head shot, before the honed edge of the kitchen knife he had pulled from the cooler could kiss Bridget’s throat.

He never did finish his business.

Although the cops wore shirtsleeves and the neighborhood crowd was in Tshirts that mild night, I was so cold my teeth were chattering. They put me in a patrol car with a blanket around my shoulders, where I kept fumbling and dropping the cell phone until a kindly paramedic dialed the number.

“We got him,” I said.

On the other end there was a yelp, and then Lynn Meyer-Murphy burst into sobs.

“Juliana! Juliana!”

The phone clunked down and she seemed to have forgotten about the call altogether as her cries receded to a distant point in the house, and there was ambient noise — a dishwasher, maybe — and I hugged my knees under the blanket and smiled.

“Ana!” It was Juliana’s bright lilt. “You got him? Oh my God !” she squealed as if she had just won a car. “Is he dead?”

“He’s not dead, but he is in custody, and he is not going anywhere for a long, long time. You’re safe now, baby. You’re safe.”

The following day I picked up a message from the dad, Ross Murphy, apologizing for not calling immediately, but he was late getting the news as he was no longer living with the family in the Spanish house on Twenty-second Street. He thanked us and thanked us again for capturing Ray Brennan, said he was proud, just unbelievably fucking proud, to be living in America, and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation deserved all the credit in the world, and then some, and vowed to make that fact publicly known because “Nobody gets it,” although, apparently, now he did. The bewildered hurt in his voice told you that he did.

The sweetness of victory barely lasted twenty-four hours, when Devon County summoned me to his Beverly Hills office to say that I was going to jail because my participation in the takedown of Ray Brennan had been in violation of the bail agreement.