James Grippando - When Darkness Falls

They needed to enlist that man in the bathroom.

Theo whispered, “What’s your name?”

“Natalia.”

“Okay, Natalia. Does your friend in the bathroom have a gun?”

Falcon wheeled and started toward them. She waited until he crossed the room, made the turn again, and resumed pacing in the other direction, his back toward the hostages. Then she leaned closer to Theo and whispered in a voice that quaked, “I sure hope so.”

THE DOOR TO the police command center opened. The footsteps were too heavy to be Alicia’s. Paulo turned at the approaching sound. Blind for over six months, and sometimes he still wheeled to face whatever it was that startled him, as if he could see it. He wondered when that instinct would leave him, if it would ever leave him completely. “Chavez?” said Paulo.

“Yeah, it’s me. Got Daden on the line from Nassau. He needs to talk to you.” He put the cell phone in Paulo’s hand.

Paulo felt a surge of adrenaline. He needed a fresh angle with Falcon, and he hoped that Daden and the Bahamian connection would supply it. “What do you have for me?” he said into the telephone.

Daden’s voice was hurried, excited. “Fingerprint search on the handwritten note we found in the safe deposit box just came back. There was a match.”

“Who is it?”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a name.”

“You just said there was a match.”

“There was.”

“Then who is it?”

“Last week, when the lab pulled that extraneous print from Officer Mendoza’s compact, they entered it into the FBI’s data bank. Well, that’s our match.”

“Wait a second,” said Paulo. “You’re saying that the person who stole Alicia’s purse from that bar in Coral Gables is the same person who took the money from Falcon’s safe deposit box in the Bahamas?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. That’s what the fingerprint tells us.”

Paulo thought for a moment, wondering if there could have been some kind of mistake. He knew better. “Fingerprints don’t lie,” he said.

“No, sir. They sure don’t.”

J ack kept his promise to Sergeant Paulo. He was back in Miami before sunrise-barely.

Seaplanes were meant to land at five a.m. Government Cut, the man-made channel that connected the Port of Miami to the Atlantic, was like a sheet of glass-no chop, no wakes, no beer-chugging morons showing off their brand-new boats and their total ignorance of the rules of right of way. Jack had managed to catch an hour of sleep on the flight from Nassau, not long enough to refresh him but he took what he could get. The landing was so smooth-or perhaps Jack was just so out of it-that he would have kept right on sleeping had Zack not shouted the operative word.

“Fire!”

Jack shot out of his chair like-well, like a man running out of a burning airplane. He caught his bearings, and when he finally managed to focus, he saw Zack smiling back at him. “Was that supposed to be funny?”

“Sorry, dude. I called your name fifteen times, and you just kept snoring.”

Jack could have rattled off a dozen different ways to wake someone from a deep sleep, none of which induced cardiac arrest, but he let it go. Zack was obviously one of those delightful adults who still thought of wedgies and short-sheeting the bed as a barrel of laughs.

Man, do I miss Theo.

A City of Miami squad car was waiting at the dock. Jack got in the backseat, and they rode straight up Biscayne Boulevard, stopped at the traffic-control checkpoint, and then continued north.

A dawn of early-morning shadows crept across the evacuated city streets. The police presence had grown substantially since Jack’s departure, much larger than Jack had expected. Every conceivable side street had been shut down. In addition to the MDPD and the City of Miami police, Florida state troopers had come onto the scene. Snipers were posted on rooftops. Squad cars and SWAT vans filled the parking lot outside the fast-food restaurant that was now the site of a mobile command center. Police air coverage had replaced the media choppers. As night turned into morning, members of the media and a few curious onlookers were beginning to gather at the police barricades on Biscayne Boulevard.

Seeing all this firepower in the morning hours, and seeing the crowd at the barricades, sent a strange image flashing through Jack’s mind. He was reminded of a certain autumn night in northeastern Florida, outside the Florida State Prison. A group of demonstrators-some supporting the death penalty, others against it-had gathered in an all-night vigil. They crowded as near to the prison gate as the state troopers would allow. A cold fog stirred in anticipation of the warm morning air, as if the sliver of sunshine on the horizon signaled much more than just the dawn of another day. Theo Knight was less than an hour away from his date with the electric chair. His head and ankles had already been shaved to ensure a clean contact for the electrodes that would pass twenty-five hundred volts through his body. Jack had said his goodbyes. It was the closest he would ever come to losing Theo-much closer than any lawyer should ever come to burying a client who was innocent. Back then, it was the state doing everything within its power to put Theo Knight to death. Jack’s own father, Governor Harry Swyteck, had even signed the death warrant. Now, years later, and just a few blocks away from the neighborhood in which a fifteen-year-old Theo had been arrested for murder, an army of police officers had been deployed to save Theo’s life. The executioner this time was not Jack’s father but one of Jack’s clients. The guilty executing the innocent. The ironies were piling up too quickly for Jack to absorb. It was like his abuela used to say in yet another one of those Cuban expressions that her culturally challenged grandson could never seem to remember, but it boiled down to this: Life was full of sharp turns in the road.

Jack wondered if his client-his friend-would beat the odds again.

The squad car drove right past the mobile command center. Jack leaned forward and tapped on the steel grate that separated the front from the backseat. “We just passed it.”

“We’re not going there yet,” the cop said.

“Where are we headed?”

He didn’t answer right away. Jack said, “Paulo said he wanted me there ASAP. Where are you taking me?”

“The mayor needs to speak to you.”

“What about?”

The cop didn’t answer. They turned at the corner and pulled into a parking garage. The squad car stopped. The driver got out and opened Jack’s door. Jack climbed out of the backseat. The cop nodded toward a dark blue sedan parked at the end of the row. The click of Jack’s heels echoed off concrete walls as he approached the vehicle. Jack was two steps away when he heard the power locks release. The passenger door opened a little and then swung out all the way, as if pushed from the inside. Jack climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door.

Mayor Raul Mendoza was seated behind the wheel. “Hello, Jack.”

“Mr. Mayor,” he said flatly.

The mayor laid an unlit cigar on the dashboard. The tip had been chewed flat, as the mayor had been sucking tobacco to work off stress. “We didn’t do so well in our phone conversation last week,” said the mayor. “I was hoping that the personal touch might make a difference.”

“That depends on what you want to talk about.”

He paused, seeming to measure his words. “Look, you and I are on the same side here. I think we can agree on a few simple facts. One, this Falcon character is a nutcase who is fully capable of cold-blooded murder. Two, he has your friend. And three, he wants my daughter.”

“Has he asked to speak to her?”