James Grippando - When Darkness Falls

He wondered, too, about the metal beads in the bag.

Twelve hours. That was Theo’s best guess as to the duration of this standoff so far. He wondered how long the cops would let it go before sending in SWAT and breaking down the door. A day? Two? He seemed to recall that the FBI’s infamous siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco had dragged on for nearly two months. Things were always more complicated when dealing with a crazy man. Falcon was beginning to make David Koresh seem sane.

“I want out of here,” said the weatherman. It was a whimper, just above a whisper. His face was pinched, and his eyes were closed tightly, as if he were trying to wish away the misery. The guy was on the verge of losing it.

“Quiet!” said Falcon. “Or you’re next on the grill.”

The grill? Theo wondered. What did he think they were now, hot dogs and hamburgers?

“It’s too hot in here!” shouted Natalia. She and her injured friend were still inside the bathroom with the door closed. “Please, open the door.”

Falcon didn’t move.

Theo felt for the girls. It was boiling hot in the main room. Opening the front door had brought a three-minute blast of fresh air, but that was gone already, and they were again breathing the same air over and over. A triangle of sweat pasted Theo’s shirt to his back, and after his quick bathroom break, he could only imagine what it must be like for those two girls trapped inside the tiny bathroom with a toilet that didn’t flush. Theo said, “You need to open the bathroom door.”

Falcon was staring at the paper bag, silent.

“Hey, genius. They could suffocate in there.”

Falcon’s gaze remained locked on the paper bag, as if he were in a trance.

Natalia shouted, “She’s getting worse. Open the door!”

Falcon didn’t flinch. Theo was about to shout and tell him to snap out of it when, finally, Falcon rose and started toward the bag.

Falcon said, “You just won’t listen, will you?”

Theo wondered if Falcon was talking to him, but he didn’t think so. Falcon seemed to be drifting into another one of those delusional episodes of his.

“You hear me, Swyteck?” said Falcon. “I told you to ask Paulo what I want. Why don’t you listen to me?”

He waited a few moments, and finally he answered his own question, speaking as if he were Jack. “I’m listening, Falcon. I just don’t want to play any more guessing games.”

Another sudden change of expression, and Falcon was himself again. “You’ll play whatever game I want you to play. Tell me, Swyteck. It’s not a secret. What do I want? What do I really want?”

He mulled it over, now playing Jack. “To speak to Alicia Mendoza?”

“Nah, that’s old news. This bullshit has gone on way too long. You can’t solve things that easy. Not this late in the game.”

Another role change. “Then just tell me what you want.”

He was suddenly Falcon again, leaning closer to the bag, as if to stress the importance of his point. “Okay, here’s what I want: I want to hear Alicia beg to talk to me.”

Falcon chuckled in reply, the way Jack might. “That’s not going to happen, pal.”

“Oh, yes, it will, Swyteck. Before long, she’ll want to talk to me so bad it hurts. She’ll want it so bad that she won’t ever forget who Falcon is. And when we’re done, she’ll thank me. She really will. She’ll thank me.”

It was strange to watch a man carry on a conversation so convincingly, as if Jack were in the room, but it suddenly occurred to Theo that Falcon wasn’t delusional. This time, he was crazy like a fox. Falcon had figured it out before Theo. There was a microphone in the bag, and from the look in Falcon’s eye, Theo could tell that he was about to tear the bag apart and destroy it. Before that happened, Theo wanted to convey one last bit of information to Jack. “Hey, Falcon.”

He looked in Theo’s general direction, but he was still too busy keeping up both ends of his conversation with Jack to focus on Theo.

Theo said, “The girl in the bathtub really needs a doctor.”

Falcon didn’t answer.

“Did you hear me?” said Theo, speaking in a voice that was loud enough to be picked up by the listening device. “I said, the girl in the bathroom is hurt and really needs a doctor.”

Falcon picked up the paper bag and dumped the food, drinks, and metal beads onto the floor. He took the beads and laid them in the corner beside his generator. Then, slowly, he tore the grocery bag at the corners and laid the brown paper flat on the floor like a doormat. He began walking on it, ever so carefully, like a man fearful of stepping on a landmine.

“A doctor, huh?” he said with his second step. “You say the girl needs a doctor?” Another step. “That’s really too bad. Because the doctor is nowhere to be found.”

He took two more steps, inching closer to the crisscrossing seams of the bag’s double bottom. “But if you find him,” he said, raising his foot, as if poised to kill a cockroach, “if you do manage to talk to that chickenshit doctor, you be sure to ask about la bruja.”

He brought his foot down with full force, and the smashing of the tiny microphone between the seams made a small pop that could be heard across the room. “The witch,” he added, but only for Theo’s benefit.

I n a reflective moment outside his mobile command center, Vince allowed himself to wonder what he was missing.

Vince didn’t think of himself as an existentialist, but, ironically, his blindness almost forced him to step outside his own body and see himself. Sometimes he saw a happy Vince adapting to a world that didn’t depend on sight. He knew the smell of Alicia’s perfume and how it faded as the day wore on. He could hear footsteps around him and even differentiate between the heavy plod of SWAT members and the lighter step of Alicia as she walked away, toward the restaurant, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He could feel the breeze on his face and smell the Laundromat down the street. He heard helicopters overhead, the buzz of traffic a block away as it was being rerouted around the barricades on Biscayne Boulevard. With a little extra concentration, he could suddenly distinguish buses from trucks, trucks from cars, little cars from gas-guzzlers. Nearby, a pigeon cooed, then another, and it sounded as though they were scrapping over a piece of bread or perhaps a bagel that someone had dropped in the parking lot. A car door slammed. Men were talking in the distance. No, not just men-there was a woman, too, though Vince couldn’t make out the words. In some ways, he was more aware of his surroundings, or at least of certain details of his surroundings, than many sighted persons.

Other times, however, he looked at himself and saw a foolish Vince who blithely skated by in a world that acted upon him and described itself to him through sound, smell, taste, and touch. The foolish Vince failed to realize that he lived his life largely in a reactive posture, failed to appreciate that things still existed even if they concealed themselves and did not call out to him for recognition.

He wondered where the patches of silence lay in this assignment, and he wondered what secrets they held.

“Paulo,” said Sergeant Chavez.

Vince turned at the voice and faced the SWAT leader. “Yeah?”

“Chief Renfro’s on the line. Wants us to conference. Come on, in the SWAT van.” He took Vince by the arm and tried to steer him toward the van. Vince resisted, not because he didn’t want to go but because Chavez was apparently of the mind that blind folks should wear a brass ring in the nose so they could be led around like stray calves. “My hand at your elbow will work just fine,” said Vince.