JoAnn Ross - No Regrets

Alex knew all too well that when a guy took his kids hostage, his real agenda was to get back at his wife for some grievance, either real or imagined. Killing the kids was a surefire way to hurt a spouse, but Alex wasn’t going to allow any children to die tonight.

“Time’s on our side,” he reminded everyone. “If we get tired, we go home and they send in another fifty cops to take our place. And fifty more. Then fifty more after that. Hell, we can keep rotating cops until doomsday. We can outlast the son of a bitch.”

They’d already cut off the power and water to the McBride house. Intimidation tactics, certainly. The entire idea of hostage negotiation was to control the hostage-taker’s environment.

* * *

“I’m going to kill the fuckin’ bitch,” Rory McBride insisted yet again. It was the fourth time Alex had spoken with him on the phone since the standoff had begun. The previous three times the conversation had ended with McBride hanging up.

“That’s what you keep saying,” Alex agreed mildly. “But you know, Rory, I don’t think you want to do that. Not really.”

“What I want is a goddamn drink. And some cigarettes.”

“Can’t give you any alcohol, Rory. It’s against the rules, remember?” They’d been through this earlier, when he’d threatened to blow out his wife’s brains if the cops didn’t get him a bottle of Jim Beam. “But I suppose I could send a pack of cigarettes in.”

There was a long silence. Then a curse. “Okay. Make ’em Camels. Filterless.”

“Sorry, but that’s not quite the way it works.” The way it worked was that the cops took everything away. Then negotiated things back, one item at a time. “Tell you what I’ll do, Rory. Since I’m feeling generous tonight, and I’d like to get this over with so we can all get some sleep, I’ll trade you two packs of Camels for those little girls.”

Rory McBride’s answer was a ripe curse. When the sound of a receiver being slammed down reverberated in his ear, Alex muttered his own curse.

Deciding to give McBride a few minutes to calm down, Alex studied the sketch of the interior of the house that had been drawn by a woman down the street who was friends with Mrs. McBride. The front door opened right onto the living room, which in turn opened to the kitchen, which meant that sitting on the couch, McBride would have a view of both the front and side doors.

It wasn’t the kind of house you could easily slip a gunman into. Which meant that they’d just have to wait. For as long as it took.

* * *

In that fleeting flash of time after she watched her daddy pull the trigger of the ugly black gun, Molly waited for the roar, stiffened in preparation for the expected pain. And even as she wondered how badly it would hurt to die, she worried how her little sisters would survive without her.

She heard the click of the trigger being pulled, her mama’s shriek, Lena’s scream. Then she heard her

daddy’s harsh, cigarette-roughened laugh.

“You flinched,” he said, his grin showing that he’d enjoyed his cruel trick immensely. “Guess you’re not so tough after all, little girl.”

Leftover fear mingled with fury as her heart continued to pound in her ears. She heard Lena sob something about an accident, felt the moisture running down her own bare legs and realized her sister was not the only one who’d wet herself.

“You had no right to do that, Rory McBride, you sadistic son of a bitch,” Karla yelled. “Molly’s never done anything to you.”

“If you hadn’t gotten knocked up with that snotty little brat in the first place, I could’ve played pro ball. I was state high school All-Star first baseman for three straight years,” he reminded her. And himself. Sometimes those glory days seemed very far away.

“I didn’t get pregnant all by myself, hotshot,” Karla flared. “You were the one who was always tryin’ to get beneath my skirt.”

“A guy didn’t have to try all that hard,” he countered on a snort. “Hell, you were pulling your panties down three minutes after I met you.”

It was an old argument. Molly had heard it so many times, she could recite the lines from memory. She leaned her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew you were a slut. She mentally said the words along with her daddy. If I hadn’t been so drunk that day you told me you were pregnant, I would’ve figured out that it probably wasn’t even my kid.

Molly was already thinking ahead to her mother’s line that if she hadn’t been so stoned, she never would have married such a miserable loser, and, just to set the record straight, there weren’t any goddamn baseball teams in the country that would have signed a player with two bad knees, when a sound like a gunshot rang out.

Molly’s eyes flew open. She saw her mama’s hand still resting on her daddy’s cheek and watched as a muscle jerked violently beneath Karla’s scarlet-tipped fingers.

Rory slapped her back, a hard, backhanded blow that sent her peroxide-blond head reeling. Then he smiled evilly at his two older daughters.

“I’m going to kill your mama now.” He put the gun to Karla’s temple and pulled the trigger. This time there was a roar, followed by a blinding spray of blood.

As Molly and Lena watched in horror, their daddy stuck the barrel of the revolver against the roof of his mouth.

The thunderous bang reverberated through Molly’s head, followed by the crashing sound of wood splintering as the front door was kicked in.

Alex took in the murder scene—the woman sprawled on the floor, the man draped over her, the blood and pieces of brain tissue darkening the wall behind them.

On a raggedy brown couch facing the door, two little girls sat side by side, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, their eyes wide, their complexions as pale as wraiths’. Nearby, a pink-cheeked toddler sat in the center of a stained rug and screeched.

“Aw, hell.”

Alex dragged his palms down his face, and as the rest of the city celebrated the season of peace and joy, he found himself wishing that he’d listened to his mother and gone to law school.

Part One

Chapter One

December 24, 1986

Later, Molly McBride would look back on this night and wonder if the disappearance of the baby Jesus hadn’t been a sign. A portent that her life was about to dramatically and inexorably change.

At the moment, however, attempting to get to work on time, she had no time to ponder the existence of signs or omens. During the half-block walk between her bus stop and the hospital, she’d been approached by three panhandlers.

“‘Give to him who begs from you. He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none, and he who has food must do likewise.’”

A cloud of foul breath strong enough to down a mastodon wafted between Molly and an emaciated man, but she did not back away. The quiz, administered by the former Jesuit seminarian, was a daily event. And as much as she worried about the man she only knew as Thomas—Doubting Thomas, he’d informed her one day—Molly had come to enjoy them.

“Those are easy, Thomas. The first is from Matthew, the second Luke.”

She cheerfully handed over the cheese sandwich she’d made that morning. “Now I have one for you.”

He bowed and gave her a go-ahead sign as, with yellowed teeth, he began tearing the wrapping off the sandwich.

“‘God created us without us but he did not will to save us without us.’” She waited, not willing to admit that she’d spent hours looking up that obscure quote.

Thomas wolfed down nearly a quarter of the sandwich, rewrapped the remainder and stuck it in his pocket. Then he rocked back on the run-down heels of his cowboy boots and clucked his tongue.